Astrology in Encarta Encyclopedia

July 16, 2003

|| Jaya Jagannath ||

Dear Jyotisha,

Here I am posting the information on Astrology as mentioned in the Encarta Encyclopedia.... There are plenty of misinformation. I hope that, the time shall surely change in our favour.

Best Wishes

Sarajit Poddar

SJC- Asia

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Encarta Historical Essays reflect the knowledge and insight of leading historians. This collection of essays is assembled to support the National Standards for World History. In this essay, Peter N. Stearns of Carnegie Mellon University argues that the ability to accurately predict the future depends on how well we understand the past.

Predicting the Future: How History Counts

By Peter N. Stearns

Humans have long been interested in predicting the future. It is impossible to know when groups of people became aware that what happens in the future is likely to differ from what is happening at the present moment, but realize this they did. Over the years, societies have developed various ways to try to divine the future. Some groups attempted to acquire insight into events through magic or contact with the supernatural. To do this, they might have read portents in the entrails of animals or in tea leaves. In ancient Rome, generals used these methods to calculate their likely success in upcoming battles. Reliance on patterns of stars as a means of predicting personal futures also developed early on. Astrology, the study of how events on earth correspond to the positions and movements of astronomical bodies, was a key science in classical China, Greece, and Rome, and in the Islamic Middle East. Although astrology and astronomy went their separate ways during the 1500s, as late as the 17th century many Europeans consulted astrologers to calculate the fate of an imminent wedding or a sign of illness. For many years, scientists have rejected the principles of astrology. Even so, millions of people continue to believe in or practice it.

Well before the considerable decline of beliefs in magic by the 18th century, however, human societies had also developed ways to think about the future in clearer relation to historical time. That is, they became aware that their societies had pasts, and they tried to relate those pasts to the future. Most of the forecasts we deal with today, such as those that inform military or business policy, actively use history because the forecasters assume a connection among past, present, and future events. As we will see, the types of connections on which predictions are based, as well as the success rate of those predictions, vary hugely. However, the need to assess predictions applies regardless.

Three major types of predictive modes, or history-to-future thinking, exist. The first mode to arise, and one that is still widely used today, is based on assumptions about the recurrence of historical events and patterns. Analysts who employ this predictive mode assume that certain types of past developments will happen again, and that by understanding history, they can better handle future recurrences. This thinking lies behind the familiar phrase, “Those who do not know the past are condemned to repeat it.” The second predictive mode to develop, and by far the most dramatic, involves assumptions about a phenomenon called historical disruption. In this mode, prediction highlights the belief that some force is about to radically change the course of history, and therefore, the future. The third predictive mode, not necessarily the newest but certainly the one developed most systematically during the past century, involves looking to recent history for the trends that are likely to continue in the future. Although this is the most conservative approach to using history to predict the future, it is often the most accurate. However, each of these attempts to use history as a basis for predicting the future is inherently flawed. Therefore, they do not provide entirely accurate descriptions of the future. Perhaps this is why some people continue to prefer fortune-tellers and astrological charts to predictions based on historical events.

Predictive Mode I: Cycles and Analogies

Probably the first systematic use of historical knowledge to predict the future assumed that human history moved in cycles, that is, that what had happened before would later recur. Many Chinese historians adopted this cyclical view, which seemed to describe the experience of the imperial dynasties: A new dynasty would come into power, flower, and then decline, and the cycle would begin again with the next dynasty. The Confucian thinker Mencius, who lived from about 371 to 289 bc, argued that every 500 years, a “true king” would arise in China. Other societies speculated about historical cycles, though some based their calculations more on the properties of numbers than on real understanding of the past. This was true of the Maya belief in cosmic cycles. The Maya completely trusted the gods’ control of certain units of time and of all of the people’s activity during those times.

The intellectual tradition that developed in Western Europe during and after the Renaissance rarely included study of formal cycles. Christian predictions, as we will see, tended to emphasize a sudden and dramatic shift from the past to a very different future, rather than a recurrence of past events. However, many intellectuals did believe that particular patterns of events might recur, and they believed that one could use historical analogies to get a sense of future developments. Historical analogy remains a vital tool in predicting the future, whether in personal life or in wider political or military realms.

Analogy works like this: a person faced with a particular situation wants to know what will happen next, although he or she recognizes that the future is hard to predict. So the person recalls a past situation or pattern roughly similar to what he or she is newly experiencing, hoping that this will give some approximate idea of how the current situation will play out in the future. Analogical thinking can be used to make predictions in countless personal situations. Most obviously, if we have had some striking success or failure in the past and a new situation seems to be developing in a similar fashion—representing an analogy, in other words—then we are likely to assume that we can safely repeat, or must avoid, the past action in order to succeed.

Government leaders often use analogy to set policy. In hosts of conflicts after World War II, including Korea and Vietnam, American policymakers assumed that they could not back down in face of a presumed Communist threat. This assumption was based on what happened after Britain and France’s failed attempt in 1938 to appease Germany. (Appeasement is the concession to demands of rival states in order to avoid war.) To stop Hitler’s ambitions and avoid further conflict after the devastation of World War I, war-weary Britain and France agreed in the Munich Pact that Sudetenland, a region of Czechoslovakia, could be ceded to Germany. Rather than curb Hitler’s ambition, the Munich Pact merely resulted in Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the declaration of World War II. The lesson, or analogy, of Munich became a dominant model of what could happen in the future unless threatened countries adopted different intervention strategies. During the 1970s, many American policymakers, concerned about Middle Eastern limits on oil supply, sought an analogy for facing shortages of a vital material that would guide their thinking about future policy. For a time, many found a suitable analogy in the World War II development of synthetic rubber, which replaced sources of natural rubber blocked by the Japanese. Here, as well as with the Munich Pact example, policymakers assumed that they could envision the future by analogizing a current situation with a known past—in this case, developing a synthetic substitute for oil. However, oil flow resumed and the analogy was dropped. More recently still, analogies related to Nazi slaughter of Jews may have helped motivate or justify the 1999 NATO intervention in Yugoslavia’s ethnic cleansing practices.

Analogical thinking about the future strongly guided the historical tradition that developed during the European Renaissance, which revived patterns that had first emerged in ancient Greece and Rome. For example, accounts of how earlier generals and political leaders coped successfully with roughly similar problems in the past were used to advise leaders about military or political uncertainties to come. During this time Machiavelli (1469-1527), a leading Italian political thinker, argued that a prince confronted with unrest in his state could shape the future by looking at decisive actions taken by earlier Roman or Italian princes. The situations would be sufficiently similar, the thinking went, that the future results of policy could be safely predicted. Well into the 20th century, elite educators in Europe and the United States assumed that studying historical cases, particularly those from the classical past, would provide valid guidance for future strategy—not prediction exactly, but rather a sense of what would work effectively amid uncertainty. Even today, the study of battle histories forms an important part of the training of military leaders.

Looser kinds of analogical thinking affect more general forecasts. At various points during the 20th century, worried intellectuals wondered if Western society was collapsing, much as the Roman Empire had by the 5th century. They attributed the Roman collapse to barbarian pressure from outside; moral decay of the upper class, which turned from the pursuit of the public good to the pursuit of pleasure; and corrupt urban masses kept in line by government handouts and entertainment. Recognizing these factors in modern times, the intellectuals worried that the results would be the same. During the 1920s Oswald Spengler pointed out these parallels in his book The Decline of the West (1918-1922), winning wide attention amid the gloom of this period in Europe:

The Roman Imperium collapsed, and thus only two of the three empires [China and India] continued, and still continue, as desirable spoil for a succession of different powers. Today it is the ‘red-haired barbarian’ of the West who is playing before the highly civilized eyes of Brahman and Mandar, in the role once played by Mongul and Manchu, playing it neither better nor worse than they, and certain like them to be superseded in due course by other actors.

In sum, a key way that analysts and policymakers think about the future involves the idea of recurrence—using the past as a predictive guide. Few people today believe that formal historical cycles exist, but almost everyone uses analogy in all sorts of forecasting situations, large and small. Knowing that we do this, and understanding how our analogies are based on assumptions we make about recurring historical patterns, is a vital step in deciding whether this predictive mode is particularly fruitful. Many historians argue that it is not.

Predictive Mode II: Historical Disruption

A second use of history to envision the future is quite different from its use in analogical thought. In the predictive mode that looks for historical disruptions, analysts assume that human history has gone along a fairly well-defined path for quite a while but that some force is about to move it in a dramatically different direction. In this case, the past becomes not a guide to the future, but rather a measurement of how striking the change is. One can look at the historical disruption predictive mode from two standpoints, the religious and the secular.

Religious Interpretations of the Dramatic Disruption Formula

The religions that developed in the Middle East before and after the 1st century ad set an intellectual basis for thinking about the future in terms of dramatic disruption. However, prophets were often imprecise in their predictions. The Hebrew religion was the first to take this approach, developing the assumption that at some future point a messiah would come. By introducing the kingdom of God to earth, this messiah would change the whole framework of human existence. The Jewish faith combined painstaking interest in history with the assumption that the established pattern would sometime be drastically altered by intervention from on high.

Islam incorporated the same kind of expectation about future change when it assumed that a Last Day, or day of judgment, would come. The Koran stipulated that this event would usher in a period of 50,000 years during which people would be sorted according to their assignments to heaven or to hell, “till the judgment among men is finished.”

Christianity also predicted a divinely guided transformation in which human history would end. The book of Mark, in the New Testament, conveyed this forecast from Christ: “But in those days…the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light…And then shall they see the Son of man coming in the clouds with great power and glory” (Mark 13:24-26). The Book of Revelation, written about ad 95, forecast a 1,000-year reign of Christ, followed by Satan’s return and a period of terrible trial, which was then followed by the final resurrection of those who were to be saved (see Revelation 21:4-10). Christianity thus set up an assumption of human history’s end, and a version of apocalyptic or millennial future change. Early Christian leaders assumed that Christ would soon return; however, this expectation gradually faded, leaving views of the future more amorphous.

During the early Middle Ages (400 to 1000 AD), many Christian intellectuals were content to write year-by-year records of the history they witnessed, without much attention to the future one way or the other. However, this straightforward pattern of recording history began to change during the 12th and 13th centuries. With this change a much clearer strand of Christian thinking about dramatic futures took shape. What the change required, along with the Biblical framework, was a firmer sense of time, in the sense both of history and of numerology. European interest in mathematics awakened, thanks to exposure to Arab learning and recovered materials from ancient Greece. Chroniclers began to list the number of people in armies, while Italian cities took statistical inventories. Further evidence of this awakening numerical sense is demonstrated in one astronomer’s recording of the duration of a 1239 eclipse in terms of “the time taken to walk 250 paces.” Joined with this new numerical sense was a more precise grasp of the calendar. The Catholic Church hailed the arrival of the 14th century with a papal jubilee, the first time in history such a calendar-based event was celebrated.

At the same time, a vivid Christian apocalyptic subculture was emerging. Within this subculture, people assumed divine intervention would interrupt the normal course of history. This intervention would shape a future fraught with dire political and natural catastrophes, though ultimately crowned by the definitive reign of God. A number of 12th-century theologians had already begun to speculate about the reign of the Antichrist, or enemy of Christ, which the book of Matthew said would occur before the Judgment Day. Joachim of Fiore, born about 1130, became the first clearly apocalyptic prophet when he developed a theory of historical ages based on the steady unfolding of the Trinity. Joachim saw the implications of calendar divisions and used them as a basis for looking into the future, setting about forty generations for each age. Based on this reasoning, Joachim expected the arrival of the Antichrist and an end to the normal patterns of human history to occur probably between 1256 and 1260.

This tradition of apocalyptic forecasting then flourished for several centuries, with Nostradamus emerging in the 16th century as the most ambitious single prophet of modern times. A French doctor, Nostradamus began issuing books of prophecy in the 1550s. He foretold an array of impending disasters stretching from the immediate future to the year 2000. He warned of wars, of the murder of kings, of great fires, and of huge naval battles. Later observers have cited these descriptions as predictions of developments as diverse as the Great Fire of London in 1666, the American and French revolutions (1775-1783 and 1789-1799), Hitler’s attack on Poland in 1939, and World War II (1939-1945). Nostradamus’ assertion that “the great man will be struck down in the day by a thunderbolt, at a young age” has been interpreted as a prediction of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Like Joachim, Nostradamus predicted the arrival of the Antichrist. However, he predicted it would occur much later—around 1999—along with new plagues and famines. Nostradamus’ prediction for 1999 is quoted in James Randi’s book, The Mask of Nostradamus (1990).

The year 1999, seven months. From the sky will come a great King of Terror: To bring back to life the great King of the Mongols, Before and after Mars [god of war] to reign by good luck.

This apocalyptic subculture became less prominent by the 17th century, as scientific thinking pushed ideas of apocalypse to the background. But beneath the facade of intellectualism, Christian ideas about historical disruption by God persisted. A host of small Protestant groups predicted an imminent end to human history. Apocalyptic prophecies surrounded Martin Luther in Germany, and then the English Civil Wars of the 17th century. Many millennialists, people who predicted a 1,000-year period during which holiness would prevail on earth, migrated to the United States seeking greater religious toleration. The emerging nation became the world’s premier haven for apocalyptic thinking. It was in the 1790s, for example, that Mother Ann Lee, the founder of the Shakers, came to the United States from England. There, people had looked down on her views about an imminent second coming of Christ. “I knew that God had a chosen people in America,” she wrote. During the 18th century, many Americans indulged in prophecies of the apocalypse, reacting to fears of Native American attacks or even earthquakes. Jonathan Edwards, a leading American theologian during that time, indulged in the hallowed pastime of playing with Biblical numbers to show that the world was in its final stages.

Mainstream American Protestantism became more conservative during the 19th century, but religious prophesizing continued on its fringes. In upstate New York during the 1830s, William Miller attracted as many as 50,000 followers for his prediction that the world would end in 1843. Disappointed that Miller’s prediction was wrong, the sect regrouped as the Seventh-day Adventists. Later, members predicted that government growth, slavery, or what they saw as pervasive sin were signs that the Biblical final age had arrived. During the 1850s, John Darby predicted a period called the tribulation, in which the Antichrist would rule for seven years. According to Darby, the tribulation would be preceded by a rapture, in which all believers would rise to meet Christ in the air. During the 1880s, James Brooks gained wide publicity by making a similar prediction. Brooks preached about a period of unprecedented wickedness followed by Christ’s return. World War I, the Russian Revolution, and later the Cold War have since been interpreted as signs of an imminent historical disruption, inspired and ultimately guided by God.

This kind of apocalyptic prophesizing persists today. In 1997, for example, the sighting of the Hale-Bopp comet was treated by most Americans as an interesting natural phenomenon. However, it was interpreted by members of a San Diego sect as a sign of the world’s end and their own imminent salvation. To prepare for this event, they all committed suicide. By 1998, a new crop of Christian and New Age apocalyptic predictions had emerged in anticipation of the year 2000. That year, a newspaper called Millennial News greeted readers with stories of Biblical experts’ consensus that the final stage of history was at hand. Meanwhile, certain television prophets contended that the 1990s constituted “the most important decade in the history of the world.” They predicted a world dictatorship that would lead directly to the Antichrist, followed by God’s 1,000-year reign and then a return of chaos. Their theories were based on both numbers analysis—6,000 years had passed since creation, one millennium for each day of creation—and current events—perceived rampant immorality, plagues, the European Union, and the rise of China. Many people seemed to agree with this prediction, including some individuals troubled by the Y2K crisis in which computers would need to be adjusted to account for the date 2000 or potentially wreak havoc on information systems worldwide.

Secular Interpretations of the Dramatic Disruption Formula

Since the 18th century, secular versions of the dramatic disruption formula have become a much more common form of prophecy among modern people. Elements of the formula’s basic structure resemble characteristics of the religious version: a basic force will transform the standard process of historical evolution into a new age. However, secularists believed that an earthly force, not God, would direct the change. Although the new secular prophets believed signs of the change already existed, they rarely played with numerical formulas. Like the religious prophets, they believed change would be extreme and would emphasize either horrendous or beneficent transformations.

With scientific achievements blossoming and a general view of earthly progress gaining ground, Antoine-Nicolas Condorcet, a figure in the late French Enlightenment, wrote an essay called “Historical Outline of the Progress of the Human Mind” (1794). In the essay, Condorcet forecast the establishment of a virtually perfect human society. Condorcet wrote the essay while fleeing from French revolutionary officials who sought his death, testifying to a new kind of faith in a dramatic worldly future. Condorcet viewed history as a record of steady progress, which by this point had reached a state whereknowledge and, through evolution, the human body were ready to make a leap into a final age of bliss. He states his view in his essay:

We shall find in the experience of the past, in the observation of the progress that the sciences and civilization have already made, in the analysis of the progress of the human mind and of the development of its faculties, the strongest reasons for believing that nature has set no limit to the realization of our hopes.… The time will therefore come when the sun will shine only on free men who know no other master but their reason; when tyrants and slaves, priests and their stupid or hypocritical instruments will exist only in works of history and on the stage; and when we shall think of them only to pity their victims and their dupes; to maintain ourselves in a state of vigilance by thinking on their excesses, and to learn how to recognize and so to destroy, by force of reason, the first seeds of tyranny and superstition, should they ever dare to reappear among us.

Building on this general vision, a host of 19th-century prophets predicted a dramatically improved future, in which characteristic problems of earlier and even present human history would be transcended. Utopian socialists thought that education and example could end ages of human exploitation and selfishness and introduce a future of perfect equality and communal harmony. Karl Marx, on the other hand, saw the laws of history leading to a final proletarian revolution. This revolution would dramatically end class warfare and injustice, which had dominated human history since its beginning. It would also usher in a classless, stateless utopia in which recurrent catastrophe and change would end. In 1888 the American novelist Edward Bellamy wrote the bestseller Looking Backward, which he set in the year 2000. In the novel, the United States has become a socialist utopia in which equality and humane treatment has replaced the evils of capitalism. In this scenario too, history has been transformed.

While some of these secular prophets, like Condorcet and particularly Marx, had an explanation for why history would end, in many other secular forecasts the mechanisms that would transform the future were a bit vague. The hand of God responsible for drastic change in religious prophesies had not clearly been replaced in the secular version. But during the 1860s a line of prediction that identified a powerful causal force began to take shape, and that force was technology. It was at this point that the French author Jules Verne began to develop the science fiction genre, with titles like From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864). Verne’s writings essentially predicted airplanes, submarines, space satellites and missiles, and television. As Verne foretold these technological developments, he sketched a picture of a transformed humanity with capacities and concerns far different from those that previously had framed human history. Science fiction writers have been amplifying this picture of the future ever since, some optimistically as Verne had, others with dire warnings. As technology replaced divine intervention as the catalyst for drastic change, two assumptions emerged: first, that massive additional technological change is imminent, and second, that it will dominate predictions of the human future. Technology, in other words, reshapes human history and ushers in a dramatic new age. This vision is depicted in Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon and a Tour of the Moon:

Now when they observed the earth through the lower window, it looked like nothing more than a dark spot, drowned in the solar rays. No more crescent, no more cloudy light! The next day, at midnight, the earth would be new, at the very moment when the moon would be full. Above, the orb of night was nearing the line followed by the projectile, so as to meet it at the given hour. All around the black vault was studded with brilliant points, which seemed to move slowly; but, at the great distance they were from them, their relative size did not seem to change. The sun and stars appeared exactly as they do to us upon earth. As to the moon, she was considerably larger; but the travelers’ glasses, not very powerful, did not allow them as yet to make any useful observations upon her surface, or conversations all about the moon.… Besides, the excitement of the three travelers increased as they grew near the end of their journey. They expected unforeseen incidents, and new phenomena; and nothing would have astonished them in the frame of mind they then were in. Their over-excited imagination went faster than the projectile, whose speed was evidently diminishing, though insensibly to themselves. But the moon grew larger to their eyes, and they fancied if they stretched out their hands they could seize it.

While this generally optimistic strand of dramatic-disruption forecasting persisted during the 20th century and in fact reached new heights during the 1970s and 1980s, other predictions took another tone as they reflected a century that seemed to invite pessimism. The rise of modern armies and strong governments created a new, darker mode of dramatic forecasting, first in World War I and then through the emergence of unprecedented dictatorships in Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany. This mode was based on worries that political force had achieved overriding importance in society and was backed by technologically enhanced mind control and numbing, hedonistic indulgence. Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World (1932), and George Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-four (1949) described societies dominated by faceless, authoritarian bureaucracies and populated by humans who were constantly monitored and manipulated, essentially reduced to robot status. In each novel, efforts to regain human spontaneity and joy were ruthlessly repressed. In both of these novels, technology is the catalyst for dramatic future change. The character of O’Brien in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four says:

The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we will destroy—everything.…There will be no loyalty, except loyalty to the party. There will be no love, except the love of big brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed.…If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.

Another possible catalyst for drastic change vied with technology during the 1960s and briefly won wide attention: the population bomb. In this scenario, the cause of a dramatically altered future was not God, or technology, or revolution, but rather an uncontrolled birth rate. Demographers, particularly those in the United States, painted a vision in which world population growth, if unchecked, would lead to unprecedented disaster. People in crowded countries would force their way into the less crowded, richer lands. Countries would fight bitter wars over scarce resources. Food supplies would fail to keep pace with population, and environmental deterioration would add to the problem. As the number of people on Earth stripped the planet of its available resources, an unprecedented change of historical patterns would take place. While the specific population bomb forecast was short-lived, it did lead many Americans to reduce the size of their families, ending the heady years of the post-World War II baby boom. And its influence continues: some of the more dramatic environmentalist arguments of the 1980s and 1990s have employed elements of the population bomb prophecy.

In the most recent, widely articulated version of the disruptive forecast, the catalyst is again technology. These forecasts are buoyed by the recent developments in robotics, computerization, and genetic engineering. During the 1970s and 1980s, a host of academic and popular prophets predicted that the expansion of new technology would herald the arrival of a postindustrial society in which fundamental features of human life and organization would be radically altered. While some postindustrial prophets warned of problems to come, the bulk of this forecasting was resolutely optimistic: the future would be dramatically different from the historical past, and the transforming power of technology would improve it immeasurably.

Time spent working would decline, and human beings would find new personal satisfaction in leisure activities, such as electronic games, perhaps. As people could again work at home, the role of cities would change. Cities would cease being production centers and would survive only as entertainment complexes. Social structure would be transformed as well; the key to power would be control of information rather than ownership of land or capital. New technologies that empowered individuals would reverse previous trends of organization: people could work according to their own personal schedules, and products would be tailored to individual taste. A few critics of this type of forecast wondered if it applied to the whole world rather than merely the wealthiest countries. But a few forecasters argued that dissemination of technology could propel even poor societies into postindustrialism.

Alvin Toffler’s interpretation of the postindustrial revolution world is portrayed in The Third Wave (1974):

So profoundly revolutionary is this new civilization that it challenges all our old assumptions. Old ways of thinking, old formulas, dogmas, and ideologies, no matter how cherished or how useful in the past, no longer fit the facts. The world that is fast emerging from the clash of new values and technologies, new geopolitical relationships, new life-styles and modes of communication, demands wholly new ideas and analogies, classifications, and concepts. We cannot cram the embryonic world of tomorrow into yesterday’s conventional cubbyholes. Nor are the orthodox attitudes or moods appropriate. This Third Wave of historical change represents not a straight-line extension of industrial society but a radical shift of direction, often a negation, of what went before. It adds up to nothing less than a complete transformation at least as revolutionary in our day as industrial civilization was three hundred years ago. Furthermore, what is happening is not just a technological revolution but the coming of a whole new civilization in the fullest sense of that term.

Interestingly, while faith in technology remained high during the 1990s, no new prophets emerged to propose another compelling futuristic vision. Except for the religious millennialists, the late 1990s did not produce a new wave of dramatic-disruption theories.

Predictive Mode III: Trend Extrapolation

The two predictive modes discussed previously used history either as a source for recurring analogies or as a foil for dramatically altered futures. Another mode uses history in yet a different way. As its name suggests, trend extrapolation uses history to identify trends. While trend extrapolation was practiced to some extent previously, it has gained wide currency in recent decades. Reasons for this are twofold. The first is the explosion of expert knowledge—including knowledge about history. The second is growing demand by government and business leaders—especially stockbrokers—for best-possible forecasts of what the future will bring. In fact, some agencies, such as the American Social Security Administration, require that 50-year forecasts be used as guidelines for setting funding policies. These forecasts are always based on extrapolation of current relevant trends.

Trend-based forecasting has two parts. First, the analyst must identify important current trends in a particular society. Second, and more important, he or she must determine the causes of these trends and probable reasons for their persistence. Not all trends, after all, are durable, making it crucial that analysts assess the causes of trends.

The safest short-term forecasts, and some of the predictions most familiar to us, are based, in fact, on extrapolation or projection. An example of this type of forecast is the prediction that the average age of populations in the United States and Japan will increase over the next several decades. This assumption is based on knowledge of an already low birthrate and increasing life expectancy. It holds that the average age in both countries, already unusually high by historical standards, will be even higher by the year 2020. Thus, whereas today in the U.S. there are three workers for every one person over 65, in 2020 there will be only two workers for every one person over 65. Some stabilization may occur thereafter, but current trends suggest that aging will continue more slowly as the birthrate stagnates and as adult life expectancy rises gradually. This forecast assumes, of course, that present trends will not be disrupted by some new surge in the birthrate, by a higher death rate among adults in late middle age, or by new immigration patterns that alter the current demographic structure.

The same kind of trend analysis could take this prediction a bit further into the future. Such a prediction might hold that by the mid-21st century, most societies will begin to encounter the aging of their populations experienced by the West in the 1920s and at the end of the baby boom and, more recently, experienced by Japan. Current trends that support this prediction are the rapid per capita birthrate decline (despite continuing population growth resulting from previously high birthrates), the eventual stabilization of the population, and increased life expectancy). So, by trend extrapolation, one might argue that the 21st century could very well shape up as the geriatric century, or century of old age. Indeed, a fair portion of public policy during the century may well be shaped by the growing elderly segment as older people adjust to their new roles and as society reacts to the group’s unprecedented large numbers.

Trend assessment can cast a long shadow, particularly if it is combined with examples or analogies from relevant past history. During the mid-1990s, many investment bankers argued that for the next 50 to 100 years, the rapid economic growth areas of the world would be East Asia, east central Europe, and Latin America, plus possibly South Africa and perhaps even Russia. This projection was based on recent trends, such as the fast growth in the Pacific Rim and in Latin America. The gross national products of key Latin American countries are expected to grow 7 to 8 percent each year in the near future, and China has already been generating 10 percent growth. In making their forecast, the investment bankers combined these trends with the more general historically grounded assumption that younger industrial areas grow particularly fast, compared both to mature industrial areas and to nonindustrial areas. The historical bases of this assumption are Japan from 1920 to 1960 and the United States from 1870 to 1930.

These recent predictions did not consider every possibility, however. They assumed that there would be no new factors, such as a major war. In addition, they did not consider changes that could be brought about by the unanticipated realization of potential in Africa, South Asia, or elsewhere, changes that could very well echo those that occurred in Latin America after the 1930s. Finally, the predictions did not anticipate the more recent financial problems of the Pacific Rim. Even so, whatever the ultimate accuracy of the investment bankers’ forecasts, they demonstrate how much information can be gleaned from trend extrapolation when it is supplemented by historical background that suggests solid causation. The projections seem plausible, at least for the next several decades; however, the temptation to extend them farther, possibly to cover a full century, may well demonstrate their limitations. Even so, discussions of trends constantly lure us in ambitious directions because they originate in clear, verifiable data.

Trend projection routinely shows up in job forecasts. Occupations for which workers are needed during the present decade are touted as the source of peak opportunities in the next. Based on this type of trend forecasting, occupational analysts predict that film projectionists will lose work to automation and jobs for actors and amusement park attendants will soar. Medical practitioners of all sorts will be in new demand. Paralegals and software innovators will have their pick of jobs, as will security guards. And so the forecasts roll on, telling us that what is now happening will happen even more intensely over the next short term.

And while trend analysis yields forecasts that are quite useful and studied, as in the case of job forecasts, it also may result in forecasts that many policymakers wish to ignore. For example, it seems safe to argue that over the next 20 years, more and more countries will acquire nuclear weapons. The trend has already begun—witness Pakistan’s demonstration of nuclear weapons in 1998. The causes for this trend are solidly in place: technological and scientific capacity continues to increase steadily, more and more regional powers want to demonstrate their strength, and great-power influence is declining—and the great powers sabotage their case for nuclear limitation by refusing to abandon their own arsenals. By 2020, many countries, not just a few, will have become nuclear nations. Given this prediction, one would think current policymakers would want to prepare for this future, rather than ignore it. The big question that arises out of this situation, of course, depends not on trends but rather on historical analogy: in the past, once a country acquired weapons, it normally used them. Will this pattern recur, or can we alter this historical precedent?

Although trend analysis has been used successfully in specific areas such as aging or weaponry, it can also be used to create sweeping generalities. Many authorities believe that societies around the world are modernizing in some predictable directions, so that, unless some unforeseen catastrophe occurs, they will become increasingly similar. In the course of this modernization, industrial production will spread; families will increasingly consist only of parents and children and reflect lower birthrates; education will become more widespread, leading to growing familiarity with science; gender inequalities will diminish; and consumer culture will capture ever more attention. Experts argue that these trends are already visible in most societies, and they predict the trends will continue to spread. Some experts would use recent expansions of democracy on most continents, from Paraguay to South America and from Taiwan to Poland, to support their argument that democratic political systems are also a wave of the future. As we can see, while trend analysis is not generally used to make such sweeping predictions as those made with dramatic disruption formula, its implications can be wide ranging.

Why We Cannot Know the Future

With the three major prediction forms at our disposal, all of them plausible and widely used, why does the future continue to elude us? Why are so many predictions wrong? Many seem plausible at the time they are made—even the 1940s forecast that by the 1970s everyone would be riding around in helicopters rather than cars and the predictions during the 1970s that communes would replace individual families and youth would become a revolutionary force. Why are we still wrong?

In the first place, the three predictive modes clash with each other. A forecast based on the assumption that current selective trends will intensify in the future will, by its nature, be different from a prediction based on the theory of dramatic disruption. In addition, both of these predictive modes tend to downplay the use of historical cycles or recurrence. To understand the inherent differences of the dramatic disruption and trend forecasting modes, and how no one single mode can accurately predict the future, consider two possible predictions about the year 2020. Will this be an age dramatically transformed by further computerization and robotics? Or will the processes of aging dominate it more, as retired people come to make up a greater percentage of the population? Both characteristics might apply, perhaps, but few forecasters manage to put together a picture with this kind of complexity. Technology proponents tend to ignore the effects of the aging population, and trend watchers might overlook technology’s potential for creating a dramatic disruption. Thus, we do not really have models rich enough to capture what is likely to happen.

Further, each prediction mode has its own characteristic vulnerability, based on its very use of history. For example, analogies based on the idea of recurrence assume that historical events or patterns will be sufficiently alike over time to allow comparable actions with comparable effects. But many historians believe that real comparability is quite rare, revealing the inherent limitations of analogy. When a university president makes an analogy such as “computers will do for education what the steam engine did for manufacturing,” are the cases close enough to have much real meaning beyond the obvious allusion to dramatic change? In an extreme case, pursuing analogy can lead to disaster, as it did when France, during the 1930s, mistakenly assumed that World War II would be like World War I and built an elaborate fortification line along its northern border to prevent German invasion. France was at an immense disadvantage when the World War II Germans, with their new technology, simply swept around the line.

Use of the dramatic disruption theory to predict the future obviously depends on faith—in God, or technology, or some sweeping political cause. Because of this, predictions based on it cannot be disproved save by the passage of time. Most of the disruptive forecasts have not come fully true yet. The year 1984, for example, passed with little resemblance to what Orwell had predicted in his novel. A key weakness in the dramatic disruption mode is the assumption that one factor will shape the future. Actual human history has shown that major societal changes are usually caused by several factors, and they embrace considerable continuity as well. As we can see, reliance on a single dramatic event as an impetus of future change is unrealistic because the approach is often too simplistic given society’s various complexities.

Trend analysis, the most conservative predictive mode, on the other hand, is vulnerable to unexpected variables. For example, any number of events could disrupt the trend of an aging population. New costly insurance policies might deny medical care to the elderly and therefore curb adult longevity. New immigration policies could bring young people in from other countries and alter the age balance of the population. Or birth rates might unexpectedly increase, as in the surprise baby boom of the 1940s. The theory that societies will become similar through modernization is compelling but does not consider unexpected variables in religious developments, such as the rise of Islamic and Hindu fundamentalism in the Americas.

In conclusion, in spite of our best efforts to make predictions by using historical analogy, studying historical cycles or trends, or identifying catalysts of dramatic disruptive change, we cannot know what the future holds. We can, however, enjoy speculating about it, and study why some predictions are more plausible than others. History will remain a key basis for this assessment. We will sort out predictions by how, and how well, they use history. In spite of our acknowledgment that one cannot know for sure what the future holds, in all probability, we can predict that forecasts about the future will continue to be based on the past.

About the author: Peter N. Stearns is the Heinz Professor of History and Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the author of Millennium II, Century XXI: A Retrospective on the Future among numerous other publications.© 1993-2003 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

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