Don't Let David Brooks Get You Down

Consider the track record before you give credence to any forecast

David Brooks has a long article in The New York Times today which will probably depress you. So I’m here to cheer you up.

The world, according to Brooks, is going to hell in a hand basket. Or to be more precise, “globalization is over.” The long knitting together of nations in peaceful trade and democracy and Western values is coming to an end. The world will slowly divide into two or three blocs. “Economic rivalries have now merged with political, moral and other rivalries into one global contest for dominance,” Brooks writes. “Globalization has been replaced by something that looks a lot like global culture war.” Thus, our future will look much like our past, with the world facing “a long struggle between diametrically opposed political systems.”

So far, so New York Times. Then Brooks does something a little unusual. He expresses humility.

I’ve lost confidence in our ability to predict where history is headed and in the idea that as nations “modernize” they develop along some predictable line. I guess it’s time to open our minds up to the possibility that the future may be very different from anything we expected.

Where to begin….

Most of the article reads as an analysis of the present, but it implicitly says that present trendlines will be maintained. That’s how Brooks gets to that “long struggle” we face. The long struggle in the future. Which sounds an awful lot like a prediction about where history is headed — the sort of thing Brooks says he has lost confidence in.

So what Brooks and The Times are offering their readers today is a famous pundit’s grand-scale forecast of humanity’s future with an asterisk and fine print about how famous pundits can’t really predict the grand-scale future.

Now, as the author of a book whose principal thesis is, in so many words, “famous pundits can’t really predict the grand-scale future,” I am delighted to see Brooks say we should “open our minds to the possibility that the future may be very different than anything we expected.” But I am less delighted by the “I guess it’s time” that precedes that statement. Both theory and the experience of two centuries established long ago that grand-scale, long-term, fate-of-the-world forecasting is a fool’s errand. If Brooks didn’t notice, he must have been wilfully blind. Which is understandable given how lucrative grand-scale punditry has been for him.

However, he did come to the right conclusion about unpredictability. It’s right there in print. So should I be a little more charitable?

Sadly, no. Because he hasn’t actually come to the right conclusion. This essay is him doing the very thing he says can’t be done. If he ever stops playing the far-sighted visionary, I’ll applaud. And I’ll positively stand up and cheer if he goes through his old files and shows how, over and over, he made sweeping predictions that not only got the future dead wrong — how is democracy’s march of triumph coming along? — but inspired idiotic decisions like the invasion of Iraq that contributed mightily to the miserable status quo he now bemoans. I doubt very much, however, that I’ll ever have occasion to rise to my feet.

And there’s some dark irony in the elbow to the ribs Brooks gives the poor old British journalist Norman Angell.

Looking back, we probably put too much emphasis on the power of material forces like economics and technology to drive human events and bring us all together. This is not the first time this has happened. In the early 20th century, Norman Angell wrote a now notorious book called “The Great Illusion” that argued that the industrialized nations of his time were too economically interdependent to go to war with one another. Instead, two world wars followed.

That is not what Norman Angell wrote. Angell wrote that thanks to the interconnections between nations, it was no longer profitable for nations to go to war with their neighbours and plunder them. Whether they still would go to war was another matter. What Brooks repeated is a garbled and dumbed-down version of Angell’s thesis that some pre-First World War commentators took Angell to be saying — and that Barbara Tuchman immortalized by including in The Guns of August, the 1962 classic about the origins of the First World War. But even before the war, Angell was vehement on this point. “War is, unhappily, quite possible, and, in the prevailing condition of ignorance of certain politico-economic facts, even likely,” he wrote in a letter to the Daily Mail in 1911. And here’s another letter to a newspaper in 1913:

You are good enough to say that I am ‘one of the very few advocates of peace at any price who is not altogether an ass.’ And yet you state that I have been on a mission ‘to persuade the German people that war in the 20th century is impossible.’ If I had ever tried to teach anybody such sorry rubbish I should be altogether an unmitigated ass. Personally, not only do I regard war as possible, but extremely likely. What I have been preaching in Germany is that it is impossible for Germany to benefit by war, especially a war against us; and that, of course, is quite a different matter.

David Brooks slamming Norman Angell for making a bad prediction is like Napoleon calling Lord Byron a militarist.

Now that I’ve defended the honour of Norman Angell, I can finally get to the cheering up I promised.

It’s simple. Brooks looks around and sees certain unpleasant realities here in the present, he looks forward and imagines where those trends will take us, and it isn’t good. But implicit in the exercise is the belief that present trends must continue. Why must they? It takes only a little imagination to see how history could go off in quite different directions. So why won’t it?

In the early 1970s, the economist Robert Heilbroner published An Inquiry Into The Human Prospect, that looked at current realities — population explosion, pollution, resource depletion, rising authoritarianism — and peered into the future. “There is a question in the air, more sensed than seen, like the invisible approach of a distant storm, a question I would hesitate to ask aloud did I not believe it existed unvoiced in the minds of many: ‘Is there hope for man?’” Heilbroner’s unequivocal answer: hell no.

The outlook for man, I believe, is painful, difficult, perhaps desperate, and the hope that can be held out for his future prospects seems to be very slim indeed. Thus, to anticipate the conclusions of our inquiry, the answer as to whether we can conceive of the future other than as a continuation of the darkness, cruelty, and disorder of the past seems to me to be no; and to the question of whether worse impends, yes.

Not many years after Heilbroner published that book, most of the grim trends he foresaw getting steadily worse turned in the other direction. His forecast proved comprehensively wrong.

For two centuries, very smart people have been surveying the state of the world’s affairs and making grand-scale predictions about humanity’s fate. I have a bookcase stuffed with these old forecasts. With few exceptions, they simply take current trends and extend them into the future. And without any exception that I know of, they are all varying degrees of wrong.

Now, if this were one of those rare moments in history when conditions are golden and pundits foresee nothing ahead but clear skies and a smooth upward trajectory — if this were 1998 or 1928, in other words — that fact would be a little chilling. But we’re very much not in one of those rare moments. This is a grim patch we’re in and the wise Solons like David Brooks who peer into the future scowl and mutter dark words.

In such times it is consoling to remind ourselves that wise Solons like David Brooks have no more ability to foresee the grand-scale future than a magic 8-ball.

Feel better?