Monday, October 29, 2007

predictions, shmredictions

We give to much credit to predictions. Tocqueville has a single paragraph predicting that the two great powers in the future would be Russia and the United States. And he was right! For a while, at least. But people used this trivial sliver of his work to bolster his authority.

Similarly, Marx and Malthus made some terribly wrong predictions, which has undermined their authority among a lot of people. In the case of Marx, I am tempted to say, good. Anyway, other thinkers have pulled out the more valuable ideas. Malthus's mistakes certainly led to a lot of insights by later demographers and economists.

So predictions don't matter that much. The search for authority is a distraction from taking ideas seriously. Still, this is a good shocker from the Marquis de Custine:

"If ever they should succeed in creating a real revolution among the Russian people, massacre would be performed with the regularity that marks the evolutions of a regiment. Villages would change into barracks, and organized murder would stalk forth armed from the cottages, form in line, and advance in order…"

The Empire of the Tsar, p. 293.

3 comments:

  1. Of course one has to decide what is a revolution---but I suppose most would agree that would happened in Russia in 1917 was a revolution by almost all standards. If so, it certainly resulted in what was prophesized. How many died from starvation, murder, executions, etc. etc. we most likely will never know accurately; but there seems little question that it was 20-40 million---I'd say that prediction was right on.
    glenn

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  2. The context is the brutal suppression of a serf revolt somewhere in the Crimea, of which Custine hears rumors. Custine is not such a perceptive observer most of the time, but he sure gets this one right.

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  3. Every time I teach (biological) evolutionary thought basics, I debate how much of Malthus to include. If I restrict myself to those (currently seen as) correct ideas which clearly influenced Wallace and Darwin, I feel that I am cheating my students out of a fuller view of history. If I wander into the territory of human population predictions many students leave with the one idea that "Malthus was wrong." I have a tough time convincing students that inaccurate specific predictions are not necessarily an indicator that the underlying ideas should be ignored (but then I recently had a student inform me on a quiz that the big difference between fungi and animals is that Kingdom Animalia is 97% animals, so I'm not sure I could succeed in teaching the differences between important ideas and correct predictions).

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