Humans have been obsessed, from the beginning, with the future. As the only animal conscious of the future, its inscrutibility quickly became a frustrating obsession. One wikipedia page lists 372 forms of divination. Some of the earliest far Eastern writing we have is from divination using bones with wishes or questions written on them. How natural is it, then, to imagine that there is someone on the other end to tell us the answers, or some people gifted intrinsically or through some divine possession or shamanic training to foretell the future? My newspaper still publishes the daily horoscope, a sadly watered-down echo of these most fervent longings to peer into the unknowable.
It has been a fixation in drama, from Oedipus to Harry Potter. The Greeks went to Delphi and received dramatically cryptic answers, which could be famously misinterpreted. Oedipus fell into this trap, fulfilling precisely what he had strained every nerve to prevent. When used in fiction, prophecies are relentlessly fulfilled, since otherwise, why bring them up? Like for the more generic foreshadowing technique, the magic only works when the portents are true, and the characters, while twisting every which way to evade or fulfill them, find in the end that fate has spoken with one voice out of the timeless dimension.
The Harry Potter series makes generous use of prophecy, both in its main plot lines, where Harry is marked in advance in various ways for his extraordinary fate, including the special symbol tattooed on his face, and in one particular episode, where the characters fight it out in a hall of phophetic orbs, climax of the fifth book. The bible, of course would hardly be the book it is without a flood of prophecies. The new testament was in large part composed around the supposed fulfillment of various prophecies made in the old, with some squeezing and patching required. The king of the Jews who came to save the world bears hardly any resemblence to what the old prophets were expecting! Yet, mysteriously and gloriously, the fulfillment came about in the least expected way, etc... Then the New Testament closes with another round of even more feverish prophecies, in the form of revelations where the mundane world will finally receive its just deserts and be swept away in favor of a new and perfect dispensation.
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| Stonehenge, in part an astronomical prediction machine. |
Obviously, it is empowering to feel even a little in control of fate, a little gifted with insight into the future. Why else are countless people betting on sporting events? Why else make such a fetish of astronomy and the prediction of what can minimally be predicted- the steady progress of the days and seasons? It is endlessly maddening to know that the future is coming, but know so little about it. But the tide has turned a bit over the last few centuries as a new mode of thought came to the fore- science. The successful analysis and prediction of Halley's comet showed on a poplular level the power of Newton's system and its ability to predict the future. Now we can predict the weather with startling accuracy, at least a week or so in advance, and can likewise predict the climate decades into the future, somewhat to our horror. Yet there is so much that still eludes prediction. Even in the physical world, earthquakes remain a frustrating challenge, apparently fundamentally unpredictable. And despite the "end of history", human affairs remain not just unpredictable, but irrational, as our current political regime so amply demonstrates.
In its humbler incarnations, prophecy is merely evidence of intelligence- a keen imagination or intuition that is able to discern where things are going sooner than the next person. This is where sports betting and stock picking get their acolytes. But beyond that it is clearly a fictional device- one that we love in its fateful foreshadowings and tragic struggles, but one that has never risen above that level to divine inspiration, reading the mind of god. Naturally, that is because such a thing does not exist. We are trapped within the plodding arrow of time, as we are under the spatial light-speed limit, as we are under our own mastery of fate, such as it is, having no other to turn to.
- Like we need more billionaires running things, and preaching about the national debt.
- Wealth is the problem, far more than income.
- And we have the candidates to solve it.
- George Will does something good.
- Protect your and your country's health- leave facebook.
- Treason and corruption, continued.
- Income tax rates have no effect on economic growth.
- But what do economists know, anyway?
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