But, the determined worrier may ask, what if current trends don’t persist? What if catastrophe strikes?
Judging by what’s on offer in bookstores and newspaper commentary pages, it will strike. Energy depletion, climate chaos, and mass starvation are popular themes. So are nuclear terrorism and annihilating plagues. Catastrophist writing is very much in vogue, and it can be terribly depressing. “Even after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001,” wrote James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency, “America is still sleepwalking into the future. We have walked out of our burning house and we are now heading off the edge of a cliff.” Perhaps this will be—to use the title of a book by British astronomer and president of the Royal Society Martin Rees—Our Final Hour.
Armageddon is in the air. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road—a novel about a father and son wandering through a future America devastated by an unknown catastrophe—was released in 2006. A year later came Jim Crace’s The Pesthouse, a novel about two people wandering through a future America slightly less devastated by an unknown catastrophe. When two renowned authors working in isolation come up with near-identical plots, they are tapping into the zeitgeist, and it is grim, indeed.
Even Thomas Friedman—the New York Times columnist who made his name as a techno-optimist—occasionally slips into fearful pessimism. In September 2003, Friedman wrote, he took his daughter to college with the sense that “I was dropping my daughter off into a world that was so much more dangerous than the world she was born into. I felt like I could still promise my daughter her bedroom back, but I could not promise her the world, not in the carefree way that I had explored it when I was her age.”
Friedman’s story neatly captures a common belief. The past wasn’t perfect, but at least we knew where we stood. Now when we look into the future, all we see is a black void of uncertainty in which so many ways things could go horribly wrong. This world we live in really is a more dangerous place.
Oddly, though, when we look into the past that we think was not so frightening, we find a lot of people who felt about their time as we do about ours. It “was like the end of the world,” wrote the German poet Heinrich Heine in 1832. Heine was in Paris and cholera was sweeping across France. In a matter of hours, perfectly healthy people would collapse, shrivel like raisins in the sun, and die. Refugees fled their homes only to be attacked by terrified strangers desperate to keep the plague away. Cholera was new to Europe and no one knew how it was spread or how to treat the victims. The terror they felt as it swept the land is unimaginable. Literally so: We know, looking back, that this was not the end of the world—when we imagine nineteenth-century Paris, we tend to think of the Moulin Rouge, not plague—and that knowledge removes the uncertainty that was the defining feature of the experience for Heine and the others who lived through it.
Simply put, history is an optical illusion: The past always appears more certain than it was, and that makes the future feel more uncertain—and therefore frightening—than ever. The roots of this illusion lie in what psychologists call “hindsight bias.”
In a classic series of studies in the early 1970s, Baruch Fischhoff gave Israeli university students detailed descriptions of events leading up to an 1814 war between Great Britain and the Gurkas of Nepal. The description also included military factors that weighed on the outcome of the conflict, such as the small number of Gurka soldiers and the rough terrain the British weren’t used to. One thing missing was the war’s outcome. Instead, one group of students was told there were four possible results—British victory, Gurka victory, stalemate with no peace settlement, and stalemate with settlement. Now, they were asked, how likely was it that the war would end in each of these outcomes?
A second group of students was divided into four sections. Each section was given the same list of four outcomes. But the first section was told that the war actually did end in a British victory (which it did, incidentally). The second section was told it concluded in a Gurka victory. The third section was told it ended in a stalemate with no settlement, and the fourth was told it was a stalemate with a settlement. Now, they were asked, how likely were each of the four outcomes?
Knowing what happened—or at least believing you know—changed everything. Students who weren’t told how the war ended gave an average rating of 33.8 percent to the probability of a British victory. Among students who were told the war ended in a British victory, the chance of that happening was judged to be 57.2 percent. So knowing how the war ended caused people’s estimate of the probability to jump from one-third to better than one-half.
Fischhoff ran three other versions of the experiment and consistently got the same results. Then he did the whole thing over again, but with one change: Those who were told the war’s outcome were also asked not to let their knowledge of the outcome influence their judgment. It still did.
Fischhoff came up with an ingenious twist on his research in 1972, after Richard Nixon announced he would make an historic to China and the U.S.S.R. Prior to the trip, students were told that certain things could happen during Nixon’s travels: He may meet personally with Mao; he may visit Lenin’s tomb; and so on. They were asked how likely each of those events was. Fischhoff filed that information away and waited. Months after Nixon’s trip, he went back to each student and asked them about each event. Do you think it occurred? And do you recall how likely you thought it was to occur? “Results showed that subjects remembered having given higher probabilities than they actually had to events believed to have occurred,” Fischhoff wrote, “and lower probabilities to events that hadn’t occurred.”
The effect of hindsight bias is to drain the uncertainty out of history. Not only do we know what happened in the past, we feel that what happened was likely to happen. What’s more, we think it was predictable. In fact, we knew it all along.
So here we are, standing in the present, peering into the frighteningly uncertain future and imagining all the awful things that could possibly happen. And when we look back? It looks so much more settled, so much more predictable. It doesn’t look anything like this. Oh yes, these are very scary times.
This is all an illusion. Consider the daughter that Thomas Friedman dropped off at college in 2003—into a world “so much more dangerous than the world she was born into.” That daughter was born in 1985. Was the world of 2003 “so much more dangerous” than the world of 1985? Thanks to the foibles of the human mind, it can easily seem that way.
But in 1985, the Soviet Union and the United States possessed sufficient nuclear weaponry to kill half the human race and reduce the rest to scavengers scuttling amid the ruins. These weapons were pointed at each other. They could be launched at any moment. Annihilation would come with nothing more than a few minutes’ notice and, in 1985, it increasingly looked like it would. The Cold War had been getting hotter since the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan. Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, and we know now that Gorbachev and Reagan later met and steadily reduced tensions, that the Cold War ended peacefully, and the Soviet Union dissolved within a few years. But in 1985, that was all in the black void of the future. In 1985, what actually happened would have seemed wildly improbable—which is why almost no one predicted anything like it. But nuclear war? That looked terrifyingly likely.