Divining the Future

If someone had told me last summer that I would be so worried about Israel that I would wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, I would have scoffed. Yet, we are all living exactly that nightmare.  

“It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” That adage is attributed to everyone from baseball’s greatest sage, Yogi Berra, to Nobel Prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr.  Regardless of who actually said it, it is spot on.

Still, we feel compelled to divine what is coming next.  Business leaders speak about seeing around corners; hockey players about skating not to where the puck is, but to where it is going. And politicians assure us that if we place our faith in them, they will lead us to salvation, rather than off a cliff.  

Most of us rely on the guidance of “experts” to foresee the days ahead, and those so-called experts aren’t shy. Watch the Sunday morning talk shows or read the op-ed section and you will encounter pundits predicting the outcome of the upcoming presidential election with a confidence that is belied by their past records. The same is true for economists telling us when a recession will come. Trust me, I’m an economist. Or better yet, don’t. The “experts” seem as sure of themselves as when they said that Hillary was a shoo-in, or that the sole way to bring down inflation was to slow the economy and increase unemployment. 

If only we had the farsightedness of our biblical heroes. When Pharoah dreamt that seven healthy cows grazing by the Nile were devoured by seven gaunt ones, and that seven healthy ears of grain were swallowed by seven diseased ones, his advisors were mystified. But not Joseph, who correctly foresaw seven years of bountiful harvests to be followed by seven years of famine. Think of it – Joseph knew not just what was going to happen over the next 12 months, he could see 14 years ahead! And then there was Abram in Genesis 15, who learned from G-d that his descendants would be enslaved for four centuries before claiming the land of Israel. How many of us can guess what tomorrow might bring, much less 400 years?

I would happily settle for being able to see through the end of 2024. Will President Biden be reelected? Will Israel be at peace?

Some cherish surprises; others would prefer not to hear bad news. I asked that if Israel were one day no longer a Jewish state, would they want to learn that now?  Except for one Israeli friend, the rest would rather live out their days in blissful ignorance.

Might it be better to never know the future? I posed that question to a number of friends, and many said yes. Some cherish surprises; others would prefer not to hear bad news. Most poignantly, I asked that if Israel were one day no longer a Jewish state, would they want to learn that now? Except for one Israeli friend, the rest would rather live out their days in blissful ignorance.

Of course, the answer could be different if we were able to act on that knowledge. What will come doesn’t just happen to us; we often determine it. If, for example, learning about a potential life-altering medical condition leads you to adopt a healthier lifestyle or to have a surgical intervention, we would certainly want that information. So visualizing a challenging future could be an effective impetus to action.

But that doesn’t change the fact that it is no easy task to anticipate what is to come. When I was a Ph.D. student I took a class with Lawrence Klein, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on predicting economic trends. One day he mused that the secret to successful forecasting is either to keep your time frame very short, assuming that tomorrow will look much like today, or to go very long, far enough in the future that when your bad predictions come to roost, you are but a distant memory.  

I have taken that lesson to heart and am confident in the following:  Congress will be gridlocked over the coming weeks; and, G-d willing, a quarter century from now Israel will be a secure and prosperous Jewish homeland, that is a beloved member of the global community.

Morton Schapiro is the former president of Williams College and Northwestern University.  His most recent book (with Gary Saul Morson) is “Minds Wide Shut:  How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us.”