Scribblings

You Can’t Predict the Future

Raymond Aron was a French political theorist, sociologist, historian, and journalist who died in 1983. He was an integral part of the French “intellectual milieu” in the years after WWII, often taking issue with Sartre and others on the Left over their support, overt or covert, for Soviet Russia. The best-known of his many books is The Opium of the Intellectuals, derived from a comment by Simone Weil

“Marxism is undoubtedly a religion, in the lowest sense of the word. Like every inferior form of the religious life, it has been continually used, to borrow the apt phrase of Marx himself, as an opiate for the people.”

The Opium of the Intellectuals was first published in 1955. I am currently in the midst of rereading it. I first did so many years ago, and it helped shape my thinking about the destructive effects of Marxism and Communism on the cause of social progress. I’ll write about this some other time, but today’s Scribbling is about our inability to predict the future, even the near future.

In The Opium of the Intellectuals, Aron writes as if Soviet Communism, to which he was very much opposed and rightly so, was forever to be a permanent fixture in the world. We know that this was not to be the case. It collapsed in 1989.

What caught my attention was this passage:

“In Europe, up to the 1950s, our diplomacy was to put a brake on the recovery of Western Germany, which was inevitable and foreseeable from the moment Russia undertook the Sovietisation of Eastern Europe, instead of taking advantage of the circumstances to bring about a reconciliation. With the Schumann Plan, our diplomacy jumped to the other extreme. There was the grandiose scheme for a West European Federation including Germany, Italy and Benelux. How was it to be accomplished without sacrificing the French Union?”

The “French Union” was the equivalent of the British Commonwealth, a collection of former French colonies, and before anyone corrects me, yes, I know, in the 1950s the British still clung on to their Empire, even if most of Ireland had long gone, and India more recently. Not to mention the US 250 years ago this year. Bloody battles were still to come to dismantle the rest of the Empire. At the time he was writing, France had already lost Vietnam, with the Americans about to be involved in that quagmire, and the Algerian war of independence was soon to erupt with consequences for French politics to this day. The right-wing party of the Le Pens has its roots in the Algerian war and the decision of De Gaulle to let Algeria go its own way. “Betrayal” of Algeria is still a running sore for parts of the French right.

Today, we know the “West European Federation” proposed by Schumann as the European Union, which, for all its faults and they are many, is one of the most successful political and economic projects in European history. But note Aron’s dismissal of the project as “grandiose”.

A man as insightful as Aron failed to see this coming when he wrote in 1955, whatever may have been his subsequent views. The future is never preordained. It sneaks up on us and takes us by surprise. This can be as true in our personal lives as in the wilder world. We lose a partner; we met a partner. We turn up at work one day to find that our job is no more. We hope to find a new job; maybe we will, maybe we won’t.

Of course, the French did not spend too much time worrying about the French Union, but along with West Germany, took the lead in building the European Economic Community. The British fretted about their Empire, then went and lost it, and spent the years from 1960 to 1973 trying to get into the EEC. Then they left after the 2016 Brexit vote, and now the UK does not know what it wants to do when it comes to the European Union. It is wandering in the wilderness of its own indecision.

As we look across the political landscape today, we see the wreckage of futures that did not go according to plan.

As I write this, Andy Burnham, who has already become leader of the UK’s Labour Party, will tomorrow become prime minister. Until recently, he was the mayor of Manchester. Who could have foretold this when Keir Starmer led the Labour Party to a thumping majority in a general election just two years ago? Did anyone predict that Starmer would last just two years as prime minister? Not that I remember reading, and I read a lot. Can anyone put their hand on their heart and tell us how well Burham will do? No, they can’t. By tomorrow evening, Monday, he will already have made enemies within the Labour Party when he announces the members of his cabinet. There will not be a place for everyone, and some will be bitterly disappointed with the places they are offered. Others, who were not expecting a place, will be angry that their faction lost out.

In politics, you only have one golden moment, the afterglow of winning an election. Once you start making choices, the sun darkens, and you have no idea how the days and weeks ahead will work out.

Vladimir Putin knows all about the future not going to plan. He thought a quick strike would see Ukraine crumble within a week or so in the face of the great Russian army. Four years later, the war still goes on, and new drone technology has allowed the Ukrainians to strike deep into the heart of Russia, hitting energy infrastructure and other targets. Can anyone say how this war might end? Not with any certainty, they can.

US President Donald Trump also thought he could run a quick war, along with Israel, against Iran. Iran would crumble as the US bombed it from the air, first having taken out its leaders in a targeted strike. It has not happened. Four months later, the war still rages despite various attempts to negotiate some form of settlement. Not only has Iran not crumbled, even if today it is probably an economic basket case, but it has also discovered the leverage of the Strait of Hormuz, which allows it to choke the world’s oil supply, for now at least. Why just for now? Because those hit by Iran’s closing of the Strait will find ways around it, which may take time, such as building new pipelines and as new energy technologies such as wind and solar reduce fossil fuel dependency. Sometimes political or industrial leverage can be fleeting.

Who can predict how the Midterm elections in the US will work out? Could the Democrats take control of the House and the Senate? Could President Trump attempt to undermine the outcome of the elections? There will be opinion polls aplenty predicting this and that, but who knows? If the Democrats were to win both houses, what would that mean for the last two years of Trump’s term of office? What could it mean for the 2028 Presidential election? Unknown unknowns. It was forever so.

Will Artificial Intelligence (AI) change the world? Is it all it is made out to be? Or will it end up just being another tool that people can use to help them in their work? Personally, I lean to the latter view while recognising that AI can be a generator of information, but that information still needs human intelligence to give it order, structure and meaning. But I could be wrong. But then again, I could be right. Who knows?

Twenty years ago, who would have predicted that China would be the global superpower it is today? Sure, because of its size, it was always going to be important once it left behind the nonsense that was Maoism. But would it just be a “factory” to which American companies outsourced work and to which Germany sold cars? Who predicted that today it would be at the leading edge of technology developments and on the verge of decimating the German car industry? Certainly not the German car industry or German politicians.

I don’t think we can predict the future. But we can try to shape it. But to shape the future, we need to be clear about our own political and moral values. Raymond Aron was clear about his values. Western civilisation, for all its faults, was preferable to Russian Communism. He was right. Sartre was wrong.