Of Graphs and Chicken Entrails

As part of the research for a paper I'm trying to write, I have re-read several books by Eric Hoffer, the "Longshoreman Philosopher." Hoffer was a self-educated man who, after recovering from eight years of blindness brought on by a childhood injury, read everything he could get his hands on, then began to write his own works. I've often cited his book The True Believer, a brilliant study of the psychology and motivation of individuals who become fanatics and join mass movements; at the moment, I'm reading another of his works, Reflections on the Human Condition.

Hoffer's books are easy to read, being mainly collections of aphorisms generally a page or less in length, but packed with insight and wisdom that keep you thinking long after you've closed the cover. Reading Reflections on the Human Condition yesterday, I came across this interesting observation:

"It is a paradox that in our time of rapid, drastic change, when the future is in our midst, devouring the present before our eyes, we have never been less certain what is ahead of us. Our need for predicatability is far more urgent than in times past, and we are addicted to forecasters and pollsters. Even when the forecasts are wrong we go on asking for them. We watch our experts read their graphs the way the ancients watched their soothsayers read the entrails of a chicken."

Hoffer wrote this in 1973, but it applies today more than ever. Political candidates slavishly depend on their pollsters to see which way the winds of public opinion are blowing. Government and academic "experts" frantically try to predict the future of the Iraqi disaster to see what can be salvaged from the wreckage of the well-intentioned, but abysmally considered adventure. Duelling scientists and economists try to out-shout each other about the dangers (or not) of global warming. We're choking in data, but starved for knowledge.

Yogi Berra (another underappreciated philosopher) once said, "The future ain't what it used to be," and he was right. We are less able to predict the future than ever before. We look to the future less with traditionally American hope and optimism than with dread and resignation.

The future appears to be written less in graphs and charts than in entrails - not of chickens, but of the victims of intolerance, terrorism, and war.

It would be nice if we could just go back to the graphs.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo