Advent & the Prognosticators
Mr. Matthew Giambrone
“Until the day when God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words,—‘Wait and hope.’”
Alexandre Dumas
A friend wrote to inquire whether I think our national supplies of food and other critical resources will hold up. My confident answer: “I don’t know.” I’m prone to offer the same response to questions regarding a new pandemic, housing prices, the future of Israel, and World War III. I am not a very good prognosticator.
As we exit another strange year and try to peer over the horizon into the next, such questions, and various attempted answers, abound. Presumably “I don’t know” was not the answer my friend was looking for. “There is ample food in the country, our distribution infrastructure is the best in the world, and any minor concerns will be resolved in less than a month.” That’s something he could take some comfort in. Or “The supply chain’s downward spiral has passed the mathematical point of no return; given expanding war in Europe, things will collapse entirely by Q4 of next year, leading to mass panic and regional starvation.” Well, less comforting, but at least he wouldn’t need to remain in suspense. But “I don’t know”?
It is, counterintuitively, the answer that is most helpful. Or at least most hopeful.
We always want to know what’s going to happen. And when we want something, we can generally find someone willing to sell it to us. The armies of prognosticators populating news shows and podcasts will confidently predict anything that you care to have confidently predicted. They make a living at it, and we fund that living by spending dollars or watching ads. These professionals speak with certainty about upcoming death tolls, gold prices, inflation rates, sports scores, supply chain recovery or collapse, and nuclear holocaust. And they get particularly active around the end of the year. It seems to be one of our steadiest New Year’s traditions. Curiously, I don’t recall anyone in the final hours of the previous decade having mentioned the fact that within three months a virus would cause the world to shut down.
Consider a short mental experiment. Suppose we decide to shift gears for Hearth & Field: today we’ll send everyone on our mailing list a prediction about whether a particular stock will go up or down tomorrow. To half of the list we predict up, to the other half we predict down. If you were on the “up” half, and if it goes up, then the following week we’ll send you another prediction; the “down” half of the list won’t hear from us again. The second email will follow the same pattern — half the list gets one prediction, and half gets the opposite, and we subsequently abandon the half that got the wrong one. We keep doing this for a while; no more reflections on gardens or poultry or supply chains, just a steady stream of stock picks. Over time, our list keeps shrinking by half, but after let’s say ten weeks, a small number of folks remain, and they have received ten perfect predictions in a row. Suppose you’re one of them — Hearth & Field must seem brilliant. And valuable. It is right about then that we stop offering our newsletters for free and make the eleventh prediction available for a sizable fee.
As business models go, it is not the most scrupulous, but it makes a point. Even absent an intentional con game, this hypothetical algorithm (articulated by the mathematician John Allen Paulos) illustrates how any prognosticator can look good if he makes lots of predictions and people don’t notice the wrong ones. You’ll find the news segments always introduce their savvy guest as having predicted thus and such half-dozen things correctly, but they don’t seem to remember to list the failures.
Given a whole industry of prognosticators on a twenty-four-seven news cycle, endlessly predicting contradictory things, some folks will necessarily end up being right for long stretches. If you flip enough coins, one of them will come up heads a goodly number of times in a row. The same coin, on its next flip, has an exactly fifty percent chance of coming up heads. Which is approximately as helpful as our best prognosticator.
Given a whole industry of prognosticators on a twenty-four-seven news cycle, endlessly predicting contradictory things, some folks will necessarily end up being right for long stretches. If you flip enough coins, one of them will come up heads a goodly number of times in a row.
And despite it all, as I mentioned, when we first entered the bizarre decade that we are now passing through, no one whatsoever predicted the whole world was about to close up shop for an unscheduled lockdown. Modernity tends to see things in binary that aren’t binary (and vice versa) and assembles its prediction games accordingly. But Covid broke the binary. It was like the coin landing on its edge, or maybe like the coin exploding on impact. In that way, Covid was a great reminder (which we have too quickly forgotten). The truly unexpected events tend to be the ones that shape history. And you cannot foretell them just by playing both sides of the expectable.
In any case, the long and the short is that we simply have no clue about the future. It is not helpful to pretend otherwise: false confidence is far more dangerous than honest ignorance. False confidence can lead us to be very particularly prepared for a very particular future and very ill prepared for an infinitude of others. More importantly, God does not seem to want us fixated on the future. He prefers us trustingly, confidently present in the present. And that is the whole framework for this thing, this virtue, called hope. If we could conjure the future there would be no place in the present for such a virtue.
Hope does not, of course, preclude taking measures to be ready for what may come; rather the opposite: hope holds that something will come that is worth being ready for. Should some of us choose to have nothing but the sandals on our feet because we are trusting entirely in Providence, that is probably a very good thing. But if we chose to have nothing but the sandals on our feet because we are trusting entirely on a web retailer to replace them with a new pair of Nikes, or if we have nothing in the pantry because we are trusting entirely on just-in-time provisions from an iffy supply chain, that is another matter.
That sort of behavior does not suggest we live in the present with our hope in the Lord; it suggests that we live in a pre-supposed future — a future of steady supply chains and global peace and slave-market sneakers— and that our hope is in the Amazon delivery truck. It is better to admit ignorance and to be ready in reasonable ways, particularly the reasonable ways in which our grandparents used to be ready, back before people thought they didn’t need to be. In rich times and in poor times, in war and in peace, with or without a functioning supply chain, it is always a smart and happy and securing thing to have food in the pantry and seeds for the spring. Now is surely as good a time as there’s ever been to tend to that.
But hope does preclude obsessing about the future and constantly mentally transplanting ourselves there. The future is and should be a mysterious land — a land forbidden to us. We can only venture there as trespassers, and then only in the dark. As these days of December go by, turn off the noise and the news and the new year predictions. Let the hours pass peacefully, quietly, set within the days that actually contain them. We can be completely certain of just one thing: they lead on to a birth that bestows hope upon the universe. It is the birth of the only one who is really worth hoping for or hoping in: God become man. It is the truly unexpected event shaping all of history — but now, with utmost confidence, we can expect it. And that is what Advent is about. Advent reveals to us all that we really ought to know and feel and proclaim about our future. Beyond that, none of us are very good prognosticators.
