Predictions and Observations

I’m no prophet, at least not in the traditional sense. Over the years I’ve offered a few predictions and one or two have actually materialized. The others...well, we can ignore them. 

I think I made my first successful prediction back in 1973 when I taught computer science at the U.S Naval Academy. Fresh out of graduate school, and teaching an advanced programming course, I took my small class of midshipmen on a tour of the Academy’s computer center. Typically in those days the mainframe computer and most of its peripheral equipment filled a large room. At the tour’s conclusion it was apparent my students were suitably impressed. It was then I made my prediction, telling them that in my lifetime — at the time I was just shy of 30 — we would be “using computers the size of a cigar box that will be more powerful than everything in this computer center.” Most of my young students were not farsighted enough to agree with me. Today they’re all retired from the Navy and Marine Corps and using laptops and iPads to exchange videos with their grandchildren. Heck, even my latest iPhone, with Internet access, WiFi, Bluetooth, and apps from Alexa to Zoom, has more computing power and capability than that GE-Honeywell mainframe computer that filled our computer center back in the 70s.

Of course, my little prediction was really pretty much a sure thing given the increased pace of technological growth we have experienced in recent decades. But I’ve come across other predictions that are far more amazing. For example, almost 70 years ago Mark R. Sullivan made a remarkable prediction describing what he believed the telephone of the future would be like. At the time Sullivan was president and director of Pacific Telephone and Telegraph. Here’s his prediction, published in the Tacoma News Tribune on April 11, 1953:

“Just what form the future telephone will take is, of course, pure speculation. Here is my prophecy: In its final development, the telephone will be carried about by the individual, perhaps as we carry a watch today. It probably will require no dial or equivalent, and I think the users will be able to see each other, if they want, as they talk. Who knows but what it may actually translate from one language to another?”

Pretty accurate “speculation” by Mr. Sullivan...and in 1953! It’s reminiscent of Dick Tracy’s two-way wrist radio introduced into the comic strip by Chester Gould in 1946 and later upgraded to a TV-capable device in 1964. But technological predictions are probably among the easiest to make so long as your assumptions don’t violate the laws of physics.

 

It’s much more challenging to foresee societal and political change, which is why those who do so really impress me. Just read what Russell Kirk (1918-1994) wrote almost 30 years ago in a University Bookman article, “Testimony to a Humane Social Order”:

“Like the Celts of the Twilight, it seems, the Agrarians have gone forth often to battle, but never to victory. America’s farm population now totals perhaps two percent of the national population. Centralization of power in Washington continues apace. Nationwide television broadcasters rapidly efface any remnants of regional cultures. In many other ways, society becomes dully uniform and thoroughly urbanized. While we talk windily still of free enterprise, the industrial and commercial conglomerates move toward oligopoly and on a tremendous scale. Leviathan, the monstrous society, swallows its myriads.”

What Kirk wrote was really less a prediction than a statement describing how the quest for power leads to an inevitable growth and corruption of government and big business that ultimately destroy freedom. What he saw in the early 1990s has become only more evident today.

I've encountered similar, although more distant, descriptions of our changing world. The great theologian, Romano Guardini (1885-1968), saw the rising of atheistic communism as the greatest threat to the religious life. In a wonderful little book, first published in 1923, just a few years after the Russian Revolution, Guardini wrote:

"It is no accident that the worldview which sees in the machine [technology] the symbol of fulfilled culture -- namely materialistic communism -- is trying systematically to destroy the religious life. It proceeds on the premise that science and technology are the only foundations of existence and that they demand such a level of empirical concentration that everything religious has to be harmful" [Letters from Lake Como, p.111].

We hear much the same today from the socialists and technocrats in our midst. In the preface to the fifth edition of Guardini's book (1994), Catholic philosopher, Louis Dupre, described our response to the rapid cultural changes inflicted on modern man, and summed up Gaurdini's view that too often we grasp the new blindly without any real understanding: 

"A cultural ride at top speed has left us breathless with no time for reflection. In a period of frantic change, no thinkers vanish more rapidly than those of the recent past. New ideas arise and we simply put aside that which came before assuming the new ideas will better deal with the present. Although few will admit it, we fear the ideas of the past, not so much of the distant past, but the past we experienced and remembered" [Letters from Lake Como, xiii].

And then there's Friedrich Nietzsche (1884-1900). I first read Nietzsche when I was a college student and marveled at his writing ability. He was certainly the best writer among the philosophers of his time. I suspect this is why he became so popular among the youth who read him. But I was also certain that some degree of insanity plagued him throughout his life and not just in his final years. Before his mental illness took firm hold, the German philosopher, in his philosophical novel, Also Sprach Zarathustra, wrote:

"Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man."

Our world today certainly has its share of these last men, those who seem completely unaware of their sinfulness.

I recently read that more than 30% of young adults claim no religious affiliation. This seems to bother a lot of folks who think the Church is going to crumble into dust when all us believers have died off. Perhaps the will help change a few minds.

In a recent post I mentioned the autobiography of the British writer, Maurice Baring (1874-1945). When describing his days at Cambridge University, he referred to an influential group of young intellectuals, the Society of the Apostles. There was, of course, nothing apostolic about them, and Baring related how they challenged him in 1894:

"One day, one of these intellectuals explained to me that I ought not go to Chapel, as it was setting a bad example. Christianity was exploded, a thing of the past; nobody believed in it really among the young and the advanced, but for the sake of the old-fashioned and the unregenerate I was bidden to set an example of sincerity and courage, and soon the world would follow suit. I remember thinking that although I was much younger in years than these intellectuals, and far inferior in knowledge, brains, and wits, no match for them in argument or in achievement, I was nonetheless far older than they were in a particular kind of experience -- the experience that has nothing to do either with the mind, or with knowledge, and that is independent of age, but takes place in the heart, and in which a child may be sometimes more rich than a grown-up person" [The Puppet Show of Memory, p. 145].

This is why I don't worry about, and certainly don't fear what the future has in store for us.  But I will make one prediction: that Joe Biden will not be president after two years in office.

As we have heard throughout Advent and will continue to hear throughout the Christmas Season: Emmanuel -- God is With Us.