Anticipation
It’s the middle of the morning, and my attention is wandering, distracted by the thought I might have a toasted cinnamon and raisin bagel with my lunch today. Is this just an idle dream, or is it a prediction? According to the Cambridge Dictionary (I am trying to reduce my reliance on the OED, the one produced by the other lot!), a prediction is “a statement about what you think will happen in the future”. Good definition, because I don’t know what will happen at lunchtime. Indeed, as I frequently remind myself, and all the students I must drive crazy, no-one knows what will happen in the future until it happens. The future is unknowable.
Perhaps the issue isn’t about prediction but about anticipation. Back to the dictionary, where I find anticipation is “a feeling of excitement about something that is going to happen in the future”. Anticipation doesn’t mean we know an event is going to take place, but rather it is about an emotional expectation as to what that event will be like. Even as I’m typing, I can already sense the taste of that toasted, buttered bagel. Hey, I should stop typing and get on with it!
Stepping back from toasting my bagel, now I’m wondering how I think about the future. I am a great one for having plans, structuring my work: does this mean I see myself like a business? I can’t deny I like having a timetable, a sense of purpose, and a set of tasks I want to accomplish. I think it might be more than just a sense of purpose. Rather what I know I need is a degree of certainty: these are activities I plan to be undertaking today, this week, or this month, and I am going to do these things because there are outcomes I have in mind. Adopting this perspective reassures me: like a business, I have objectives, directions to follow for the future.
Is it that simple? Whenever I am talking to a group about the future, whether that group be managers, students or simply friends in a discussion group, I face the same challenge: we don’t know what’s next, and yet we need to have the confidence of feeling certain. Indeed, as soon as I start mumbling something about the impossibility of knowing what will take place, I am bombarded with objections: we know the sun will rise in the morning, we know we are meeting on Tuesday, and so it goes on. But aren’t these expectations? Back to the dictionary. An expectation is “ what you believe or hope will happen in the future”.
Is this just playing with words? No, because these terms – prediction, anticipation, expectation – sit at the centre of one unarguable fact (dare I use that word!), which is that our plans depend on being clear about the future, but the future remains forever unknowable and uncertain. At one level this is familiar territory. In business, companies are constantly planning for the future. One such method is preparing a budget, and some people also use budgets to organise their personal expenditure. There is a sense of comfort when we have settled on next year’s budget. It looks solid, carefully examined and justified, with detailed ancillary calculations to support each line. As the year unfolds, actual income and expenditure deviates from the budget, as it necessarily must, and meetings are held to explain variations, as if they represent some kind of failure. But a budget is nothing more than a set of smart guestimates, and variations don’t need to be ‘explained’: they were inevitable. Rather they need to be thought about and analysed, to see what they reveal about how activities and the environment have changed (or deviated).
I could have made the same comments about business plans. They, too, are merely carefully articulated guesses. Like budgets, plans rest on assumptions, and the most important of these assumptions are those that presume to know what the future will be like, but didn’t I just claim the future is unknowable? So we assume, setting out what we think will happen, depending on the best approximations we can make. Then we act, put into place activities that are based on what seems likely. When executives jump up and down complaining that plans or budgets were wrong, they’ve missed the point: the plans or budgets weren’t in error, but rather the necessary assumptions that underpinned them turned out to be mistaken. The task is not to assign blame, but to ask what happened, and why were the assumptions out of kilter with what eventually happened. This is what will (almost) always happen, although sometimes, by chance, we get it ‘right’ and what we included in our plans eventuates.
Smart businesspeople know all this. They realise that changes are likely to take place that upset the best plans and projections. They use techniques like scenario analysis to image possible futures, and work out sets of contingency plans, each addressing how to respond if this or that alternative future direction begins to emerge. Like scientific predictions, they realise their expectations are always provisional, the best that can be done based on current knowledge, aware the future will prove what was expected today was no more than a guess about tomorrow.
If businesspeople like to assume the reality of budgets and plans, sweeping uncertainly under the carpet, scientists are the same. Often their predictions seem far more robust, and allow research and development to proceed without too many concerns about shaky assumptions or errors. Despite this, scientific prediction is comprised of statements about what is believed will happen in the future, based on current, well accepted theories. As in other dimensions of our lives, some scientific predictions are not borne out in practice. Over time enough niggling variations appear, offering evidence that presages an oncoming revolution in thinking, at a time when the theories once held dear will be replaced by a new set, offering a better match with all our observations. But scientific advance is still tentative and provisional, the next framework merely a better guess as to what makes sense of the totality of data we’ve collected. If observations are ‘facts’, then there are no facts about the future, because we can’t observe it!
I’d like to return to that word ‘anticipation’. When I was thinking about that toasted bagel, I was anticipating the taste, the moment of eating. Mmm! But my anticipation was based on my expectation that I would be eating a bagel, and even when I expected that moment would take place. If I think of myself as a business, I have a target, I have a plan, I have a timetable. Is that all there is to it? Peter Sheldrake the business. Should I be developing a mission statement, a vision for my future, and have a series of objectives in the longer term, mid-term and short-term?
Rather than dwelling on this odd image of me as a business, let’s take adopt another perspective. We can’t observe the past from today, but we can look over the records of previous observations. What is intriguing as we do this is that what was ‘seen’ and the explanations offered for what was observed have changed over the centuries. This is about frames of reference, whether we are exploring scientific paradigms, or prevailing understandings of the way things are. Our ‘ways of seeing’ as John Berger aptly puts it, are shaped by both intellectual traditions and emotional responses. We make sense through feelings as much as by rational, logical thinking.
As in some many other areas, Plato had a clear perspective on this. Rationality required holding feelings at bay. He conceived of a world where society’s guardians were philosophers, living almost independently of any passions, but rather devoted to analysis and logic. They were able to rule precisely because they would not be swayed by emotions and desires, the motivating factors that characterise all the others in his ‘republic’. He took that approach to its logical conclusion, and made it clear his ‘philosopher kings’ would rule without any opportunity to gain wealth or other mundane benefits. Ascetic rulers? That idea didn’t catch on!
Plato’s cool, calm way of thinking about rulers makes an obvious contrast to Machiavelli. Machiavelli was an empiricist, and his views about society drew on observations about rulers and politics, both in records from the past and from contemporary events. Like Plato, he was interested in whether people were driven by logic of emotion, but he drew conclusions from what he saw, not from a philosophical perspective. In his classic work, The Prince, he observed: “From this arises the question whether it is better to be loved more than feared, or feared more than loved. The reply is, that one ought to be both feared and loved, but as it is difficult for the two to go together, it is much safer to be feared than loved, if one of the two has to be wanting. For it may be said of men in general that they are ungrateful, voluble, dissemblers, anxious to avoid danger, and covetous of gain; as long as you benefit them, they are entirely yours; they offer you their blood, their goods, their life, and their children, as I have before said, when the necessity is remote; but when it approaches, they revolt.” Ever politically incorrect, he knew the future was unpredictable, and observed, “I conclude, therefore that, fortune being changeful and mankind steadfast in their ways, so long as the two are in agreement men are successful, but unsuccessful when they fall out. For my part I consider that it is better to be adventurous than cautious, because fortune is a woman, and if you wish to keep her under it is necessary to beat and ill-use her; and it is seen that she allows herself to be mastered by the adventurous rather than by those who go to work more coldly. She is, therefore, always, woman-like, a lover of young men, because they are less cautious, more violent, and with more audacity command her.” Thanks, Niccolò!
What very different images of how we deal with the future. Plato with his cool and calm analytical approach, Machiavelli with his wild passions, and the 20th Century manager industriously planning his business success. Each of these views of the future share two characteristics. First, each proceeds by an analogy: the future is understandable by logic; it is unpredictable because it is in the hands of lust for power and uncertain emotions; it is a matter of carefully thought out plans. At the same time, none of these ways of thinking about the future are truly predictive, as they don’t tell us what the future will be, but rather what will influence the future as it pans out. Moreover, all these views come from earlier writers. Today, it seems we have taken a further step, as a consequence of accepting the belief we live in a scientifically predictictable world. Ignoring my caveat about provisional understanding based on science, the more popular and pervasive view is that we know what is going to happen. What was it that someone in the audience said to me? “We know the sun will rise tomorrow”, and they could have added “and we know at what time”. And it did rise the next day, and it was at that time. It’s a view that reduces humans to acting as functionaries in a complex yet deterministic system, beyond our control, where we are no more than parts of a predictive machine. [i]
Holding that view is unsurprising, as for most practical purposes predictions based on scientific theories are accurate and robust enough as to be like facts. The behaviour of material objects, even ones as big as planets, can be described with considerable precision, and their future behaviour is confidently stated. It is easy, and convenient, to leave on one side the fact that scientists know the limits of their predictions based on their awareness of the constraints on their ability to described natural phenomena exactly. We know where the moon will be at 1 am tomorrow see from Bendigo in Australia with much greater accuracy than ever before, but still, frustratingly, not perfectly, it’s position is still minutely uncertain, even if the uncertainly is down to a matter of inches rather than miles.
Let’s face it. We are hung up on the future, on what will happen, especially to ourselves. From a very young age, we know one thing very clearly: our time is limited. To understand our mortality puts a strange premium on anticipation. We want to know how long to go before our time is up, but at the same time we don’t want to anticipate that moment. Science can seem unrelenting, but there are other perspectives. I recently read a wonderful essay about Daoism. David Chai wanted to help us understand several issues, and especially a perspective on time:
“Our linear way of thinking is hence shattered when we encounter a situation wherein time can’t be counted or visualised. This cosmological time is more genuine than human-measured time insofar as it dissolves the need for a carefully delineated temporal order to which we can attach the names past, present and future. To be clear, cosmological time is not an altogether different kind of time. Rather, it’s a new way to experience time, a way of seeing through the convention of human naming that forces our limited perspectives on to the natural world. There’s a story in the Zhuangzi about the death of Zhuangzi’s wife. When asked by a friend why he stopped grieving her, Zhuangzi replied:
I looked back to her beginning and the time before she was born. Not only the time before she was born, but the time before she had a body. Not only the time before she had a body, but the time before she had a spirit. In the midst of the jumble of wonder and mystery, a change took place and she had a spirit. Another change and she had a body. Another change and she was born. Now there’s been another change and she’s dead. It’s just like the progression of the four seasons: spring, summer, fall, winter.
There has never been a time when Zhuangzi’s wife didn’t exist. Even though her corporeal presence has come and gone, what makes her existence (and non-existence) possible is the Dao. The Dao doesn’t create things ex nihilo but uses the nothingness that’s its own resting to create a clearing into which things can emerge. This is why Daoism frequently speaks of voids, hollows, clearings, stillnesses, quietudes and so forth. The Dao is inseparable from things, including the Universe, and Daoism says that human beings becloud their awareness of the Dao by pursuing things that are unnecessary to life, such as fame, wealth and avoiding death. If life and death are simply two perspectives of time, what better way to conjoin them than to do away with human-measured time?” [ii]
Forgive a long quote, but I find his views provocative and insightful. Time for us to stop being held captive to ‘clockwork’ time? Time for us to put anticipation back in its place, and devote more of our lives to being alive and enjoying being here and now? There’s time enough for that.
[i] The problem with prediction, Joseph Fridman, Aeon, January 2021
[ii] There has never been a time when this article didn’t exist, David Chai, Psyche, February 2021
