Scruton and the Preacher on foretelling the future
/The first book I recall reading by Sir Roger Scruton was The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope—a title and theme that are right up my alley. In the introduction of the book he explains his purpose:
My concern . . . is with certain fallacies that seem to justify hope, or at least to make disappointment bearable. My examples come from many areas, but they share a common characteristic, which is that they show, at the heart of the unscrupulous optimist’s vision, a mistake that is so blindingly obvious that only someone in the grip of self-deception could have overlooked it. It is against this self-deception that pessimism is directed. A study of the uses of pessimism will reveal a most interesting feature of human nature, which is that obvious errors are the hardest to rectify. They may involve mistakes of reasoning; but their causes lie deeper than reason, in emotional needs that will defend themselves with every weapon to hand rather than relinquish the comfort of their easily-won illusions.
He begins the next paragraph with this devastating line:
“The belief that human beings can either foresee the future or control it to their own advantage ought not to have survived an attentive reading of the Iliad, still less of the Old Testament.”
That particular line—and especially its allusion to the Old Testament—came back to me yesterday morning during church, when, as I leafed through one of my oldest Bibles, I came across the following verse from Ecclesiastes (which, me being the pessimist that I am, is one of my favorite books of the Bible, along with Job and Jonah). Some version of myself in years past had underlined it in heavy black ink.
“A fool also is full of words: a man cannot tell what shall be; and what shall be after him, who can tell him?”
A lesson that, per Scruton’s observation above, should be obvious from even a cursory familiarity with history or literature. But as the Preacher reminds us near the beginning of his book, “There is no remembrance of former things,” and, lest we get on our high horse, presentists that we are, “neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.”
The reminder we may need most in our technocratic and unscrupulously optimistic age.
