From Essays After Montaigne
'Soothsayers see much: bird-prophets foresee as much: much is foretold by Oracles; much by prophecies; much by portentuous signes,' and others, upon which antiquitie grounded most of their enterprises, as well publike as private: our religion hath abolished them. And albeit there remaine yet amongst us some meanes of divination in the starres, in spirits; in shapes of the body in dreames, and elsewhere a notable example of the mad and fond curiositie of our nature, ammusing it selfe to preoccupate future things, as if it had not enough to doe to digest the present.
And those which take this word in a contrary sense are in the wrong: 'This consequence is so reciprocall as if there be any divination, there are Gods: and if there be Gods, there is divination.' Much more wisely Pacuvius.
Who understand what language birds expresse,
By their owne than beasts-livers knowing lesse,
They may be heard, not hearkned to, I guesse.
Neither Christianity nor any other religion has effectively abolished prognostication, just as no religion has managed to abolish the broader phenomenon of superstition. In fact, the prevalence of superstition in our society appears to be wholly unaffected by any development in theology, philosophy, or science, whether we are speaking of calling Miss Cleo, seeking the aid of patron saints, developing conspiracy theories, or playing the lottery. These activities and many, many others are expressions of a deep human need for meaning, for a supreme Author (benevolent if possible) developing a coherent narrative arc for our lives. I believe that at some elemental level, most people would prefer the comfort of that Author, despite the diminished free will and personal agency that would imply.
But whereas most other superstition amounts to discerning or influencing the Writer's intentions (or those of his minions or functionaries), prognostication more directly addresses the fact of His existence and methods. If our lives are indeed written in a great book, perhaps we can skip forward a few pages to see what's coming, and if we can see what's coming, then it must be noted somewhere for us to read. (I can't help wondering if the Abrahamic religions would have been found so compelling if they hadn't included--along with their explanations of origins and their moral prescriptions--prophecies of what is to come, if they had been shaped as more open-ended tales, with expositions, but no climaxes or denouements.) But the idea of the Great Writer and His Book doesn't allow for the far richer concept of a God that cannot be anthropomorphized, one where God truly transcends time, rather than playing across it. This transcendant vision may well be beyond us as time-bound creatures. We seek to conquer time by manipulating it, rather than trying to render it irrelevant by abiding in the eternal present that's outside of time.
Nowhere is our troubled relationship with the present and future more ironically apparent than in the world of information technology--an industry (whose patron saint is Isidore of Seville) in which "consulting" often means predictions by consultants who have not managed to digest the present; and where nothing quite works now, but new versions are on the way (probably best exemplified by Microsoft, which adds new--generally useless--features far more quickly than it fixes existing bugs). And I, as a full-fledged member of this community, am as illogical in my sense of progress as anyone. From the day that I upgraded all of the working computers in my office from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 simply because it was newer (and spent the next few weeks trying to get everything to work as well as it had), I was addicted to the illusion of technical progress.
I used Linux because one day it would be better than Windows. As soon as I reached the point where I could do what I wanted with Linux, I scrapped my PC and got an iBook, because someday OS X would be better than Linux. I used Mozilla while it was still alpha software because eventually it would be better than Netscape and Internet Explorer. As soon as Mozilla reached version 1.0, I switched to Chimera on my Macintosh and Phoenix on Windows. Now that Chimera is becoming stable, I've switched to Safari. Through all of this, I've had the next best thing, but I've never had anything that completely worked in the present. Trivial though this example may be, I can think of no better allegory for the anxiety of continually unsatisfied desire that is born of the inability to abide in the present.
9:25:11 AM 
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