Subscribe | UPI Odd Newsletter Subscribe NEW YORK, Dec. 3 (UPI) -- Driving into Boston recently to attend a conference on "Changing and Unchanging Values in the World of the Future," I noticed a billboard advertising not the latest consumer gadget but a sage observation attributed to Winston Churchill: "The farther backward you can look," it said in large black letters, "the farther forward you are likely to see." It seemed more than a coincidence that the conference I was attending was at the new Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University. Had some representative of that institution contrived to place Churchill's fortifying admonition at the city gates? Advertisement I was disappointed to learn that the message had been arranged not by the Pardee Center but some other civic-minded entity or individual. Nevertheless, if Churchill's observation is not the motto of the Pardee Center, perhaps it should be. Advertisement The past does not provide a window overlooking the future, exactly; nothing short of clairvoyance can promise that. Nor is it even quite true, as George Santayana famously remarked that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." History is not a form of prophylaxis. But knowledge of history does acquaint us with the permanent moral and political alternatives that mankind confronts in its journey through time. It reminds us, for example, how regularly tyranny masquerades as virtue, how inhumanity is apt to cloak itself in the rhetoric of righteousness. Above all, perhaps, knowledge of history can serve to temper our presumption. As I reflected on the Churchill's observation and the subject of the conference I was headed toward, I was struck anew by the large quota of optimism that language budgets into our lives. There is a sense, I suppose, in which the fact that it was felt necessary to establish a center for study the "longer-range future" betrays a certain anxiety. A carefree future needn't be studied, merely enjoyed. Still, in the larger sense it can be said that any institution that presupposes "the longer-range future" is an institution conceived in hope and consecrated to a cheerful view of mankind's destiny. Advertisement And it is worth noting how regularly, in ways small and large, such hopefulness insinuates itself into our plans and projects. Consider only that marvelous phrase "the foreseeable future." With what cheery abandon we employ it! Yet what a nugget of optimism those three words encompass. How much of the future, really, do we foresee? A week? A day? A minute? "In a minute," as T. S. Eliot said in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "there is time/ For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse." So much of life is a juggling with probabilities, a conjuring with uncertainties, that we often forget upon what stupendous acts of faith even the prudent conduct of life depends. Had I been asked, on Sept. 10 of this year, whether New York's twin towers would continue standing for "the foreseeable future," I should have answered, "Yes." And so, in one sense, they did. Only my foresight was not penetrating enough, not far-seeing enough, to accommodate that most pedestrian of eventualities: an event. An event is as common as dirt; it is also as novel as tomorrow's dawn. "There is nothing," the French writer Charles Péguy noted in the early years of the 20th century, "so unforeseen as an event." Advertisement The particular event Péguy had in mind was the Dreyfus Affair. Who could have predicted that the fate of an obscure Jewish army captain falsely accused of spying would have such momentous consequences? And yet this unforeseen event, as Proust observed in his great novel, suddenly, catastrophically "divided France from top to bottom." We plan, stockpile, second-guess, buy insurance, make allowances, assess risks, play the odds, envision contingencies, calculate interest, tabulate returns, save for a rainy day ... and still we are constantly surprised. In a thoughtful essay called "What is Freedom?" the philosopher Hannah Arendt noted the extent to which habit -- what she disparages with the name "automatism" -- rules life. We are creatures of habit, schedules, and conventions. And yet we are also creatures who continually depart from the script. Human beings do not simply behave in response to stimuli. We act -- which means that our lives, though orchestrated largely by routine, are at the same time everywhere edged with the prospect of novelty. "Every act," Arendt wrote, "seen from the perspective not of the agent but of the process in whose framework it occurs and whose automatism it interrupts, is a 'miracle' -- that is, something which could not be expected ... it is in the very nature of every new beginning that it breaks into the world as an 'infinite improbability,' and yet it is precisely this infinitely improbable which actually constitutes the very texture of everything we call real." Advertisement Every moment of every day presents us with the potential for what Arendt calls the "miracle" of human action, so familiar and yet ultimately unfathomable. We find phrases like "the foreseeable future" indispensable because the rescue us from the burden of uncertainty. They declare the extent of our confidence, the reach of our competence. But they also serve to remind us that our competence is revocable without notice. Which is to say that our foresight is always an adventure, practiced at the pleasure of the unpredictable. This is something that P. G. Wodehouse, a philosopher of a somewhat merrier stamp than Hannah Arendt, put with his customary grace when his character Psmith observed that, "in this life ... we must always distinguish between the Unlikely and the Impossible." On Sept. 10 it was unlikely that a small band of murderous fanatics should destroy the twin towers and fundamentally alter the political landscape of the world. It was not, alas, impossible. The eruption of the unlikely is an affront to our complacency, an insult to our pride. We tend to react by subsequently endowing the unlikely with a pedigree of explanation. This reassures us by neutralizing novelty, extracting the element of the unexpected from what actually happened. Advertisement I think again of Churchill. Summarizing the qualities that a budding politician should possess, he adduced both "The ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, next year" -- and "the ability afterwards to explain why it didn't happen." Today, the events of Sept. 11 seem almost inevitable. Reasons have been furnished for every detail. Plausible itineraries have been repeated until they seem like predictions. All of those reasons and explanations were available on Sept. 10. A look at the literature shows that some had been propounded for years. But they lacked the traction that events give to hindsight. They were not part of the foreseeable future until that future, unforeseen, overtook us. -- (Roger Kimball is managing editor of the New Criterion.)
