Table Of ContentSEEING INTO THE FUTURE
S E E I N G I N TO
T H E F U T U R E
A Short History of
Prediction
MARTIN VAN CREVELD
REAKTION BOOKS
For Erich and Anneke Vad
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
Unit 32, Waterside
44–48 Wharf Road
London n1 7ux, uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2020
Copyright © Martin van Creveld 2020
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the
prior permission of the publishers
Printed and bound in India
by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
isbn 978 1 78914 229 7
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 7
PART I: A MYSTERIOUS JOURNEY
1 A VILLAIN OF A MAGICIAN 18
2 IN THE NAME OF THE LORD 30
3 ORACLES, PYTHIAS AND SIBYLS 54
4 A DREAM TO REMEMBER 61
5 CONSULTING THE DEAD 78
PART II: BE SOBER AND REASONABLE
6 SEARCHING THE HEAVENS 98
7 CLEAR AND MANIFEST 113
8 ON BIRDS, LIVERS AND SACRIFICES 122
9 THE MAGIC OF NUMBERS 129
10 DECODING THE BIBLE 145
PART III: ENTER MODERNITY
11 FROM PATTERNS TO CYCLES 158
12 WITH HEGEL ON THE BRAIN 173
13 ASK, AND YOU’LL BE ANSWERED 191
14 THE MOST POWERFUL TOOLS 199
15 WAR GAMES HERE, WAR GAMES THERE 207
PART IV: THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
16 LOOKING BACKWARDS 222
17 WHY IS PREDICTION SO DIFFICULT? 232
18 IS OUR GAME IMPROVING? 247
19 A WORLD WITHOUT UNCERTAINTY? 250
REFERENCES 255
FURTHER READING 282
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 283
INDEX 284
INTRODUCTION
Do you want to make God laugh? Tell him your plans.
Woody Allen
T
he idea of doing this book was born somewhere in mid-
2017. Its parent was Homo Deus, the second of three
volumes written by my former student, the famous Yuval
Noah Harari. As I went along, a single thought kept entering my
mind: how can he, as well as many others who have engaged
on a similar endeavour, know what the future will bring? How
about Ray Kurzweil, Stephen Hawking, H. G. Wells, Jules Verne?
And how about Nostradamus, Hildegard of Bingen, the Roman
augurs, the Greek Pythia, the Hebrew prophets, the ‘Chaldean’
astrologers? What were their underlying assumptions, what kind
of reasoning did they apply, and what methods did they use? The
more I thought about these questions, the more difficult they
appeared. If I dared tackle them, then this was precisely because
I saw them as a terrific challenge.
The role that the willingness and ability to look into the
future plays in human life, both individual and collective, can
hardly be exaggerated. Call it anticipation, call it vision, call
it foresight, call it forecasting or call it prediction: without it,
human life as we know it is utterly impossible. Goals cannot be
established, nor efforts towards realizing them launched; nor the
consequences of reaching, or not reaching, those goals be con-
sidered. Neither can threats and dangers be identified and either
met head on or avoided. All this is as true today as it was when
we first became human. Presumably it will remain true as long
7
seeing into the future
as human we remain. Briefly, but for foresight and the attempt
to exercise it, much – perhaps most – of what we understand
as thought would be impossible. ‘Blind we walk, till the unseen
flame has trapped our footsteps,’ said the chorus in Sophocles’
Antigone.1
Some philosophers and scientists go further still. To them,
the ability to anticipate the future, meaning something that does
not yet exist, and to act accordingly does not belong to us humans
alone. Instead they see it as an essential, perhaps the essential,
characteristic of that mysterious and hard-to-define phenom-
enon, ‘life’.2 After all, ours is the age of so-called posthumanism.
And one key pillar of posthumanism is a renewed emphasis on
our evolutionary ancestors and the things we have in common
with them; this specifically includes the belief that our brains
are nothing more than ‘linearly scaled-up’ versions of primate
ones,3 which in turn are nothing more than ‘linearly scaled-up’
versions of vertebrate ones. And so on and on, all the way back
to the ‘protop lasmal primordial atomic globules’ of Gilbert and
Sullivan fame. As a result, all sorts of qualities that until recently
used to be considered exclusively human are now seen as being
shared, at least to some extent, by many other animals as well. So
with empathy, so with altruism, so with reason. And so, surpris-
ing as it may sound, with morality and what many believe to be
morality’s origin, religious feeling. Some vague form of the last-
named, the greatest living expert on bonobos has been telling us,
can be found among those animals.4
And as with those qualities, so with foresight. Starting at
least as long ago as ancient Greece, all over the world folklore
credits various animals with the ability to foresee important
events, including the weather, sinking ships, earthquakes and
other dangers that may threaten their lives to one extent or
another. Scientific opinion on whether such is in fact the case
remains divided.5 However, the ability of some animals, notably
squirrels and magpies, to exercise foresight by caching food and
8
Introduction
retrieving it later on has been well established. Experiments con-
ducted by ichthyologists show that fishes are also able to look into
the future. At least, to some extent, under some circumstances
and for some purposes. Certain kinds of fishes, somehow aware
that the seaside ponds in which they live are about to dry up, leap
to nearby ones (how they know about those ponds and how to
reach them is another mystery, but one that does not concern us
here). Others wait their turn to do this or that, thus presumably
showing that they have some idea that such a thing as the future
exists and of what it will bring.6
Still the question remains. Hats off to Paul the Octopus, who,
living in his tank at Oberhausen, Germany, and no doubt look-
ing deep into the future, correctly predicted the outcome of so
many football matches. But does it really make sense to attribute
foresight to – and put ourselves on the level of – a mollusc, which
strictly speaking does not even have a brain? And how about those
simplest forms of life, germs and viruses? Do they too have visions
concerning the shape of things to come and adjust their behav-
iour accordingly? Or are they simply blobs of protein that react
to the stimuli to which they are subjected, such as heat, pres-
sure, moisture, acidity and the like? True, every single vertebrate
animal that has been tested was found to have the ability to link
some signals to the events they portend. The animals in question
could also foresee the consequences of their own actions a few
minutes, or at least seconds, ahead.7 But an ape that sets out to
discover what will happen in the future in the way shamans or
prophets, astrologers or futurologists make it their business to
do, remains to be seen.
For years now, tens of thousands of scientists around the
world have been doing all sorts of things to brains, both human
and non-human, in an effort to show that they are ‘nothing more’
than electrochemical machines. And tens of thousands of com-
puter engineers, coming from the opposite direction, have been
trying to build machines that can ‘think’ as well as, or better than,
9
