An acquaintance who had read my book “Bold and Gentle” inquired how I had decided on the biggest challenges my kids would face in the next 50 years. “How do you anticipate the future when there are so many uncertainties about so many factors?” he asked.
Apart from revelation given to us, you can’t predict the future, but you can anticipate it and prepare for possibilities.
There are a few principles:
Studying historical patterns helps us anticipate the future because people are still people. Individuals and mobs have only so many motivations, therefore behaviors will repeat. There will always be malevolent individuals with a will to amoral power. There will always be some sheeple. Individuals can be unpredictable over short time periods, but large groups of people are quite predictable over longer time periods.
You can count on hard trends. A hard trend is something which will generally be true over time. We can reasonably expect that compute power increases while the costs decrease. We can reasonably expect that medical advances will reduce deaths from heart disease, cancer, and neurological decay. We can reasonably expect that people will prefer faster service at a lower cost. We can reasonably predict that any new technology has rabid early adopters, consensus adopters, and stubborn laggards. You can’t always guess the precise timing implications of a hard trend, but it still has predictive power.
You can expect that a few key decisions and singular events will have disproportionate effect. This is the “sandpile instability” reality. Grains of sand accumulate in a pile and fingers of instability develop. One of those fingers will collapse at an unpredictable time – affecting the larger pile. (This is described well in Mark Buchanan’s book “Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen.”) One assassination triggers WW1 because fingers of instability had developed over decades. Multiple recessions have occurred after economic bubbles grew unstable and popped. Sand piles cannot grow forever without shifting to release unsustainable tensions.
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It’s instructive to evaluate God’s rules for the nation of Israel as taking the tension out of instabilities before they became disastrous.
For example, God forbid Israel from entering alliances with other nations. This kept them from being drawn into wars that were not their direct concern. This insulated them from interconnected political instability.
They were to give the land a Sabbath rest every seven years. This minimized the problems of chronic soil depletion.
All debts were to be forgiven every seven years. This prevented massive debt buildup and avoided the inevitable problems of economic collapse. Forgiving debts took economic tension out of the system.
Indentured servants had to be freed after seven years. This mercy minimized the likelihood of creating a permanent underclass of citizens. Certain social tensions and resentments would not accumulate.
I’m not advocating we adopt these laws today. There is no indication in the New Testament that these specific laws would carry over to the Christian church, and indeed, the NT fosters even higher principles. I’m simply pointing out the “self-repair” wisdom embedded in the laws for an agrarian society surrounded by violent nations.
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Anticipating the future is a responsibility. We can forecast different scenarios and consider how we could respond – and be less surprised as events unfold. We can also forecast possible future states to decide which actions and what systems will be most effective and helpful for more people over longer times.
“The mind is strong against things it has prepared for.” (Seneca) Cultivate your imagination to anticipate the future.
