When we change calendars, we like to imagine that we change our fortunes as well. The imagination might be unfounded; but it is always consoling.
At around this time every year, geomancers and fortune-tellers are overworked. Those who believe their fortunes change with the changing of the year go to see them, demanding to know what is in store.
Knowing what is in store, believers think, will enable them to shape their fates. They imagine the cosmos as some sort of obstacle course, with contending forces of good and evil, gravitational pulls and the flows of chi, through which all of us navigate as we go through life.
There are rituals to the new year relating to this: the amassing of round objects in the home before the years part, the noise-making to drive away evil spirits, the choice of colors to wear, and so on. Much of the last day of each year is spent obsessively observing the rituals that will ensure us an edge in the turns of fortune.
This is probably all superstition. But it is also popular culture. No matter the casualty count, firecrackers and New Year’s Eve are inseparable.
The temptation of taming the fates is irresistible. Better to perform the weird rituals than court misfortune.
I have never, for a moment, thought that planets shape individual destinies. But I sit up and listen intently each time geomancers guest on television and tell us what sort of disasters the next year might bring or what sort of leaders will be swept to power by the happenstance of elections. I do so because they hold so much power over the popular imagination the prophesies they make could be self-fulfilling.
Like everybody else, social scientists are enamored with the possibility of seeing the future. Predictive value is the goal of all social analysis. It is the science in social science — although very little in terms of actual prediction has really been achieved using all the tools of social science.
This is why social scientists are never as interesting as geomancers. We cannot compete with their pretense to knowing what will happen. Our language is encumbered by too much qualification and an extremely dense discourse on the limits of methodology.
We readily admit to margins of error; fortune-tellers never do. We cannot answer such dreadfully important questions like: will I find the love of my life this year? Or, how many more ships will sink over the next 12 months?
In fact, social science must admit that its utopia is unachievable. We can never really predict. Human will is always more stubborn than whatever the alignment of the stars might dictate.
Human action cannot be reduced to the law-like repetitiveness of inanimate objects: water will boil at precisely 100 degrees centigrade and everything will be drawn towards the core of the earth. These things are certain. But I never know what sort of question my grandson will pop at me the next moment.
We are servants to the principles of normal science, especially the principle of uncertainty: the past is never proof for what happens next. The fact that the sun rose from the east in past few billion instances is no proof it will do so again tomorrow. We can only say that there is great likelihood it will.
Then there is the principle of unintended consequences: that thing about the best-laid plans of mice and men….
Still, science allows us to cause certain things to happen. If we mix a specified assortment of chemicals in specified quantities, we could cause an explosion. If we work a certain number of factors correctly, we might determine the outcome of an election.
As regards large events coming in the foreseeable future, the best we can really do is to issue a forecast. That is different from a prediction.
Forecasting is really, in the social sciences, an exercise in working the law of large numbers. In ordinary language, we call that statistics. If we throw a dice and six turned up the past dozen times, the probability of the same happening again diminishes exponentially in the succeeding throws of the dice.
Still, forecasting the weather, for all the times it failed us in the past, is still more reliable than forecasting social events. For all the sophistication of modern financial engineering and economic science, for instance, no one predicted the financial meltdown that haunted the world since 2008. This is because, despite the powers of the calculus, we cannot really predict the individual decisions made by hundreds of millions of significant decision-makers in a large event such as a global recession.
In the last few days of the year immediately past, I have been trying to read through Carl Sagan’s The Varieties of Scientific Experience. Sagan, one of the greatest scientific minds was invited to deliver a series of lectures on “natural theology” at the University of Glasgow over two decades ago. The book is a transcript of those lectures.
While astrologers hogged the popular media during this time, I decided to read an astronomer. Well, more precisely, an astrophysicist.
This is almost an act of penance, a ritual to guard against hubris. The universe is so large and we are so small, it is a crime to indulge in anthrocentrism: the attitude that everything out there exists for us or about us. That attitude is the stuff of all superstition.
Reading Sagan helps restore the intellectual humility that should be the basic stuff of all science. When we begin from understanding that what we know is a tiny fraction of what we do not know, then we protect ourselves as a flu shot does from the danger of fanaticism. From the standpoint of scientific humility, we can better appreciate how tenuous every forecast really is.