June 8, 2007
The Partly Cloudy Crystal Ball Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 02:15 PM EST Dean Martin’s favorite hangover cure was simple: “Stay drunk.” In similar fashion, the best way to reduce the stress of moving is never to unpack. I should know that by now, because office changes have been lamentably frequent at American Heritage in recent years. Still, there are benefits to opening up your archives every now and then. Recently, in the course of moving to a new office two doors down the hall, I found myself sorting through boxes and bags and piles of assorted stuff that I had saved for one reason or another. Amid the dusty Pez dispensers, cryptic smudged notes about long-forgotten projects, and spare floppy disks saved against a possible shortage, I found scores of photocopied pages from newspapers, magazines, and books that had struck me as worth saving. Many of these pages contain predictions, which automatically become interesting once they reach a certain age, whether they’re right or wrong. Some are amusing, like this, from the Washington Post shortly after the 1946 elections: “One of Massachusetts’ most eligible bachelors--handsome, 6-foot John F. (Jack) Kennedy--will be one of the youngest members of the new Congress. But the social lions of the Washington ‘Cocktail Circuit’ may be in for a disappointment, for the serious-minded 29-year-old son of the former Ambassador has little time for anything but work.” All work and no play would have made Jack a dull boy, so he seems to have found time to do a bit of dating. Others are more grim, like this, from Harper’s Weekly in 1899, during the anti-Semitic Dreyfus affair in France: “It is immensely to the credit of our present civilization that such an atrocity cannot be committed by any people with impunity. The world did not care, a few centuries ago, what any particular country did with its Jews. Now no nation can deny to one Jew even, the means of justice, and escape the condemnation of her sisters, so sensitive is the world-mind, and so closely knit have humanity become.” Some prophecies are harder to evaluate. Consider this editorial from the New York Times on December 31, 1899, looking back over the previous century and making predictions for the one ahead: “Through agitation and conflict European nations are working toward an ultimate harmony of interests and purposes, and bringing awakened Asia into the sweeping current of progress. Light has been let into the ‘Dark Continent’ beyond the ancient borders and is rapidly spreading. America is facing westward and beginning to take its part in carrying the regenerating forces of popular government to the uttermost parts of the earth. Notwithstanding the bloody conflicts through which some of the steps of progress must still be made, the ‘vision of the world’ grows clearer toward the time when ‘The war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furled / In the parliament of man, the federation of the world / There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe / And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.’” (The quote is from Tennyson, “Locksley Hall,” 1842.) Whoever wrote that editorial should make up horoscopes, because it’s ambiguous enough to fit just about any outcome. The world will experience more fighting, it says, but eventually war will become obsolete. That’s pretty much what happened in Western Europe in the 20th century, though I suspect that they spilled more blood getting there, and that the rest of the world has been much slower to get with the program, than the editorialist would have thought. A quarter-century later, following the industrial-scale slaughter of World War I and the false hope of its aftermath, Aldous Huxley wrote in Along the Road (1925): “A drive from the Belgian frontier to the Mediterranean puts life and meaning into those statistics from which we learn, academically and in theory, that France is under-populated. Long stretches of open road extend between town and town . . . even the villages are few and far between . . . Driving through the fertile plains of Central France, one can turn one’s eyes over the fields and scarcely see a house. And then, what forests still grow on French soil!” Meanwhile, Huxley continues, “every three years a million brand new Teutons peer across the Rhine, a million Italians are wondering where they are going to find room, in their narrow country, to live. And there are no more Frenchmen. Twenty years hence, what will happen? The French Government offers prizes to those who produce large families. In vain; everybody knows all about birth control and even in the least educated classes there are no prejudices and a great deal of thrift. Hordes of blackamoors are drilled and armed; but blackamoors can be but a poor defence, in the long run, against European philoprogenitiveness. Sooner or later, this half-empty land will be colonized. It may be done peacefully, it may be done with violence; let us hope peacefully, with the consent and at the invitation of the French themselves. Already the French import, temporarily, I forget how many foreign labourers every year. In time, no doubt, the foreigners will begin to settle: the Italians in the south, the Germans in the east, the Belgians in the north, perhaps even a few English in the west. Frenchmen may not like the plan; but until all nations agree to practise birth control to exactly the same extent, it is the best that can be devised.” Like the Times editorialist, Huxley got enough right to avoid looking foolish, but not enough to qualify as a prophet. Within Huxley’s twenty-year time frame, France was indeed “colonized” by its friends from across the Rhine, and today, as predicted, citizens from all over Europe live and work in France (and vice versa). But birth control has overcome philoprogenitiveness all across the continent, and in France the population shortage has been made up by admitting large numbers of the “blackamoors” Huxley derided, along with their Muslim cousins from North Africa, leading to social strains he never envisioned. Moreover, the great majority of these immigrants have settled not in la France profonde but in the cities. All this ties in with what Fred Smoler wrote about in his review of Max Boot’s latest book. In the late 19th and early 20th century, all the world’s problems seemed to be caused by nations acting badly, and the only hope for a solution was to make them behave better and then spread their good habits to the heathen. Even the Harper’s Weekly writer saw anti-Semitism as something that was committed by nations and would be eradicated by them. There is much truth in this. The pacification of large parts of the world has, indeed, come about largely through international agreements and global bodies. Yet trends that the Times writer and Huxley could not foresee--terrorism, widespread birth control in Europe, mass migration--have occurred through the individual choices of millions of people, usually against the wishes of governments, and often through allegiances based not on geography or nationhood but on religion, ancestry, ideology, and shared hatreds. Even when you know a change is coming, though, it’s hard to tell how it will affect the world in the long run. Will the Internet turn us into a single worldwide community, with everybody giggling at the same cheesy videos? Or will it splinter us further, creating transnational enthusiast groups whose members never have to talk to anyone else? It’s hard to say. I could conclude with a long-range prediction, secure in the knowledge that I will be dead by its effective date, except there’s no telling how long we’ll all live with modern medicine. So instead I will take the advice of George Eliot, who wrote in Middlemarch: “Among all forms of error, prophecy is the most gratuitous.”
|
