PREDICTING THE UNKNOWN

A Sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear

Sunday, January 2, 2005

All Souls Unitarian Church

Indianapolis, Indiana

We began this week with one of the most shocking and disturbing news items in recent memory. A great and devastating tsunami, a powerful tidal wave, pounded the shores of South Asia, destroying everything in its wake, killing unsuspecting people and laying waste to their towns and homes. The death toll is expected to exceed 150,000, a number that seems beyond our ability to comprehend.

There is one simple aspect of this great catastrophe that I want to look at in the context of my comments this morning. I do so at some risk, because I know there are so many dimensions to this event that beg us to consider in the context of religious thinking: questions about the seeming injustice of the universe itself, questions about the imperative for human compassion toward untold tragedy, questions about how any God could allow such suffering, and so forth.

I designed this sermon before the event of last weekend in Asia, but there is one simple aspect of that story that struck me as I prepared my thoughts for this morning, and that is the aspect of total surprise that accompanied it. What happened was entirely unexpected. The people were given no warning. Nothing had been predicted or even anticipated, and even if our technological instruments had been sufficient to forecast a potential earthquake beneath the ocean floor that might unleash a cataclysmic tidal wave, there was no way of giving adequate warning to the vast populations around the shorelines of the countries affected.

What happened last weekend came as a complete surprise. To me that was one of the most compelling and overbearing aspects to the story. It is a truth of life that we can never know for certain what the future holds. We can never know how tomorrow will affect us. What will happen in the future always, always, contains an aspect that is profoundly unpredictable. The tragic story we have followed this week takes this truth of life and writes it in bold capital letters across our calendar: “TOMORROW IS UNKNOWN.” “TOMORROW IS UNPREDICTABLE.”

Most of us are drawn, at various times, to the thought of making predictions about what is going to happen in the future. Predicting the future has become one of the great parlor games of contemporary society. Many of us love to peek into what the world is going to be like tomorrow. But the fact is that tomorrow will inevitably surprise us – sometime pleasantly, sometimes painfully – for tomorrow by definition cannot be known.

This activity of trying to predict the future seems to be especially popular at New Year time, when we are anticipating the future. “What will 2005 bring us?” we wonder. There are professions created to answer our questions – whether from scientists called “futurists” or from psychics of the paranormal. Whatever the predictions may be, the one thing that can be certain is that the future will surprise us. The future is, by definition, unknown.

Consider, for example, this past year, 2004. Certain headlines could not have been predicted. We may have guessed that there would be another attempt at a major terrorist attack somewhere, but it wasn’t expected or predicted to happen at train stations in Spain. We didn’t know in 2003 that same-sex marriage would be a major legal battle in 2004, addressed by state Supreme Courts and legislatures, and become an issue in the Presidential election with calls for a Constitutional amendment. When last year began, we didn’t know that by the end of the year, the natural death of Yasser Arafat would radically alter the shape of the longstanding Israeli-Palestinian crisis in the Middle East. We knew that in Iraq there would be ongoing violent resistance by insurgents, but none of us expected the shocking news and photographs coming from the American-run prison of Abu Graib, and the effect that would have on America’s reputation around the world.

We are used to stories of hurricanes in Florida from time to time, but the presence of three in a row took us all by surprise. Who would have guessed that the Superbowl half-time show with Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake would become an on-going front page story shaking the authorities of the FCC, inspiring debate about morality in society, and causing television networks to change their way of broadcasting. In 2003, no one predicted that in 2004 Yusaf Islam, the pop-singer previously known as Cat Stevens, would be captured as a suspected terrorist sympathizer and deported. Anyone predicting that the Boston Red Sox would win the World Series in 2004 might have been laughed off the roster of futurists and psychics.

Speaking of psychic predictions, here are a few made for the year 2004 that didn’t happen: Osama bin Ladin would die of kidney disease, a live dinosaur would be captured, Colin Powell would switch parties and defeat George Bush for President, and scientists would successfully bring the first-ever male pregnancy to term.

Speaking of predictions and surprises, sometimes the problem is just that we are not good at reading the signs of the future. This year, for example, we read the conclusions of the so-called “September 11 Commission.” What happened to the United States on September 11, 2001 was a shock to everyone, something that seemed entirely unexpected. Yet a thorough study of the events leading up to that day revealed that most of the evidence that was needed to predict the event was there to be seen. Still, even the experts were unable, perhaps to some degree unwilling, to accurately read the signs. Even with proper data, it is common for fallible human beings to fail to see into the future, restricted as we are with blinders and prejudices and human tendencies toward denial.

The scientific world tends to lean more toward what they call “forecasts” rather than predictions, and they tend to be longer term than just next year. Unless changes are made, for example, we are told that the world will experience a shortage of worms that will affect the international fishing industry. Human eating habits are changing, some scientists observe, and distinctions between breakfast lunch, and dinner will become blurred as people eat at varieties of portions at almost any time of day. It is true that more work is becoming automated by machine and computer. But one consequence of that trend, say some future gazers, is that tomorrow’s workplace will come more to value specifically human skills that are non-technical, such as caring, inspiration, imagination, and friendliness, rather than technical know-how skills.

It is the business of the future, though, to be unpredictable, because it is the nature of the future to surprise us, whether pleasantly or painfully. History is littered with stories of predictions that didn’t anticipate the future as it came to be:

T In 1880, Alexander Graham Bell predicted with pride that “One day there will be a telephone in every major city in the U.S.”

T In 1899, Charles Duell of the U.S. Patent Office proposed closing that agency because, “Everything that can be invented has been invented.”

T In 1929, the U.S. Labor Department reported that “1930 will be a splendid employment year.” That same year, Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics at Yale, said, “Stocks have reached a permanently high plateau.”

T In 1943, Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, said, “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”

T In 1968, Business Week magazine predicted that “With over 50 foreign cars already on sale here, the Japanese auto industry isn’t likely to carve out a big slice of the U.S. market.”

T In 1974, Margaret Thatcher of England said this: “It will be years – not in my lifetime – before a woman will become Prime Minister.”

It is the business of the future to be unknown and surprising. It is not just in the world and society that the future is full of mystery, but also, and in many ways more importantly, in our own personal lives that we experience the unknown in our future.

When I was a twenty-year-old college student, I would have scoffed at anyone who predicted I’d become a Unitarian minister. When I was thirty years old and living in Washington, D.C., I couldn’t imagine ever living on the West Coast. When I was forty and a long-term resident of Washington State, it never crossed my mind that I would ever return to my live in my home state of Indiana. And here I am. Surprises have filled my life in terms of family circumstances and religious convictions and life interests.

Life unfolds by surprises. I’m sure everyone here could come up with their own lists of futures we didn’t expect – whether family situations or work or personal convictions. Every year when All Souls comes out with its new Directory of members and friends, I notice the changes in life that so many people experienced that had not been expected. The Directory shows that some people move out of town for a variety of reasons; others move within the city. Deaths reflect many changes in our Directory, many of which were not anticipated when the previous Directory had been published. New children are born. Marriages bring names together. Some marriages end, and the names separate. In most cases, the changes in the new Directory illustrate how the future is unknown, because most changes would not have been predicted the year before.

My interest this morning concerns what we do with this fact that the future is unknown and surprising. Do we panic? Do we surrender to fate? Does the uncertainty of the future cause us to tremble with anxiety?

I suggest we celebrate that life is open-ended. It seems to me that an entirely predictable world would be an entirely boring one. And frightening. If there were nothing we could do to change the course of our destiny, then what reason would we have for engaging in the world, improving ourselves, and contributing toward a better tomorrow?

We sometimes think it might be different if we can just know what tomorrow can be. What if, for example, back at the formation of this nation, the founders could peek into the future and see the consequences of allowing for the institution of slavery. If a crystal ball could show them that it would lead to a bloody civil war, followed by more than a century of civil strife and national angst, would they have re-considered what they were to adopt?

Probably so. But life doesn’t work like that. There is no reliable crystal ball. Few were able to envision the consequences of that mistaken decision. But what accompanied that mistake was an even deeper quest for justice. Generations of Americans have been forced to look more deeply into their own hearts and weigh the fruits of such wrongs, and commit themselves more deeply toward issues of justice.

The fact is that there are no reliable crystal balls. The fact is that the only thing reliably predictable about the future is that it is unknown to us. If we take this fact seriously, I believe there are several lessons that can be helpful to us in facing the future.

The first lesson is the imperative to keep an open mind. An open-ended future requires of us an open mind. What we believe today may be re-shaped and revised by events and insights tomorrow. An open mind is one that is ready for tomorrow to be different, and prepared to deal with the changes that come.

An open mind is one that is not stuck on old thoughts, but anticipates changes of views. In a book on aging in America, Betty Friedan observed how older people are better able to cope with changes if they keep an open mind, if they anticipate new possibilities in life rather than expecting tomorrow to be simply a continuation of yesterday. She wrote this:

“If we never transcend the boxes of our youth, never reconcile ourselves to the reality of where we are now, never let ourselves know that it is no longer important to attain goals that we set or accepted earlier in life, never explore new possibilities, we will never get to that new place.”

So whether in terms of our own personal lives, or in terms of the world we live in, what we anticipate about the future will probably be very different from what actually happens. Our ability to deal with that difference is directly proportional, I believe, with our ability to keep our mind open to new perspectives.

What if I were to make this prediction: that by June of 2005, we will have contact with intelligent beings from another galaxy in our solar system. Don’t imagine that I am actually making such a prediction, but simply offering a “what if.” It is not an entirely outrageous thought, though I admit somewhat outrageous. If there is in fact some intelligent life out there midst the billions of planets beyond our galaxy, it is probably inevitable that someday contact will happen. Suppose it happened this year.

How would that event change our way of thinking? Would we devote ourselves to intergalactic cooperation to an extent the puts our petty nationalistic squabbles in a different perspective? Would such contact give such a boost to our technological understandings that life as we know it would undergo a monumental transformation?

I don’t know. But it is worth considering that events change our world and our understanding of the world. It happened with the American revolution. It happened with the industrial revolution. It happened with the World Wars. It is happening now with the expansion of technology, such as the Internet. The world of tomorrow will reconstruct our understanding of the world today.

(I don’t know how many of you may know that there are times when I, in fact, make some accurate predictions about the future. I’ll share one with you now. Feel free to test me on it. I predict that this sermon will end in less than five minutes.)

But back to the lessons of predictions. Another lesson from the fact that the future is unknown is that some quality of faith in that future is required from us. If we knew exactly what tomorrow was going to be, we would have no reason for having faith in it. By “faith” I don’t necessarily mean some of the traditional religious faith traditions, though I don’t eliminate it either.

What I mean in this context by “faith” is that we have trust and confidence that tomorrow will be meaningful to us personally and an improvement over today. If we have faith that the future represents some kind of progress for us and for our world, then our efforts today will be more easily justified.

The “faith” I speak of is similar to that identified by Einstein when he wrote of the faith relied on by science in its quest for understanding:

Without the faith that it is possible to render reality understandable, without the faith in an inner harmony of the world, there could be no science. This faith is and will always be the basic motivation behind every creative scientific idea. All our endeavors, all the dramatic conflicts between old and new ideas are supported by the eternal desire for knowledge, the unshakable faith in cosmic harmony which becomes stronger the more difficulties loom before us.

A third lesson from the fact that our future is unpredictable is closely related to faith. It is that confidence that we can help in shaping that future. The future is not out of our hands. This lesson lies deep in our own Unitarian tradition that early on rejected the religious doctrines of predestination and original sin. From the beginning, Unitarians have affirmed faith that human beings are endowed with the inherent ability to change the world and to change themselves.

Part of the reason that the future is unpredictable, part of the reason that the future is unknown, is that we can and do have a role in shaping the future, in shaping our own future and destiny.

And then I offer one more lesson coming from the fact of the unknown future. If the future is open for shaping, as I believe it is, then we have a moral imperative to improve our own lives and the lives around us, because if we fail to make improvements, things will likely get worse rather than better. (This, by the way, may be one of the rationales for making “New Year resolutions.” Without effort to improve our lot, life will wind down to something inferior to that which we presently enjoy.)

The ancient tradition of making predictions in some ways comes from the Old Testament stories of prophets. But the biblical prophetic tradition was something far different from the sense of modern day prophets who are simply fortune-tellers. The meaning of “prophet” in the Old Testament was quite different. In the biblical tradition, the "prophet" is the person who warns society that it is doing something wrong. The prophet is a social critic. The prophet tells society: "you must change your ways." And implicit in the prophet's critique is always, always, the implied or stated, "unless you change your ways....something bad will befall you!"

Martin Luther King, for example, is often cited as a modern-day “prophet.” That label doesn’t refer to his ability to forecast the future. He was a prophet, in the Old Testament meaning, because he told us of the consequences of continuing society’s racist policies. Unless we establish racial justice and freedom, he told us, our society will not be free as we proclaim it to be.

This notion of prophecy can be personal as well as political. We each know of behaviors that we want to change in ourselves, and we know the consequences of not changing that behavior. If the future is unknown, as I believe it is, we have the capacity to make it different, and better, than the present. We also, I believe, have the moral imperative to do so.

We have started a whole new year this week. I appreciate new years for they afford us an opportunity to review our lives and project where our lives are headed. What cannot be denied is that our lives are headed somewhere. Examining the direction, and redirecting with resolve, is tremendously important. Resolutions can help us to refocus.

I'll close with these words of Alfred Cole:

"Listen to the salutation of the New Year! In it are the echoes of days gone by, the bitterness and sweetness of hours that have flown, the pain and weariness and the outstretched hands of friends. In it is the promise of new beginnings, new adventurings, and high hopes for a more peaceful world.

"In the New year we encounter the lure of the unknown. In it we find the faith that in the days ahead we may walk a little straighter, and make the little corner of the world we are privileged to fill, a little better.