The world abounds in Tom Macaulays
During a debate in the House of Lords on Nov. 5, 2002, one Lord Chalfont said the following:
I have heard some very strange statements tonight … I can only say that, in listening to some of the contributions, I have been reminded of the statesman who once said, “I wish I could be as certain of anything as he is of everything.”
I have seen the statement that Lord Chalfont quotes attributed to Churchill. I have also seen it spoken of as referring to Churchill. But my friend Dave Lull, affectionately known as the Omnipresent Wisconsin Librarian (OWL), did some checking for me and found the quote attributed in an edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations to the English statesman William Windham, though in a slightly changed form: “I wish I were as sure of anything as Macaulay is of everything.” Dave noted, however, that the quote had also been attributed to another English statesman, Lord Melbourne, again in a slightly different form: “I wish I was as cocksure of anything as Tom Macaulay is of everything.”
I wrote back to Dave suggesting that he may have unearthed an error in Bartlett’s: William Windham died in 1810, when the future historian Thomas Babbington Macaulay was but 10 years old. Within minutes the intrepid OWL had tracked down a reference in the OED, citing the Nov. 30, 1889 issue of the Spectator: “It was Lord Melbourne … who said, ‘I wish I was as cock-sure of anything as Tom Macaulay is cock-sure of everything’.”
All of this demonstrates how a clever remark can take on a life of its own, though I think it is safe now to attribute this one to Lord Melbourne. It is also safe to say that it is worth remembering, because the world abounds in Tom Macaulays. In fact, there’s probably a bit of Macaulay in all of us.
After all, we humans seem to have a craving for certainty, often in direct proportion to its unattainability. How else explain our preoccupation with the future, something we can guess at all we want but cannot actually know at all? As Niels Bohr put it, “Predicting is difficult. Especially the future.”
Yet we do it all the time. Pundits make careers out of it. Of course, what such prognostication really consists of, as the late Michael Crichton pointed out, is turning the present tense into a sort of future indefinite. If, Crichton suggested, you had been asked in 1910 to write about what life would be like in 2000, you would have taken a look around, seen all the wagons and buggies cluttering the streets and wondered what the hell was going to be done about the ever-increasing amounts of horseshit. A decade later that problem would be on its way to disappearing.
I learned about the perils of prophecy the hard way: by making a spectacularly wrong prediction. Some 40-odd years ago I was charged with finding a printer for a magazine that was starting up. So I paid a visit to a leading print establishment and considered the options, among which was computer-generated type. It was about as impressive as mimeographing. Among other things, paragraphs couldn’t be justified. Whereupon I delivered myself of a solemn pronunciamento: “Not in my lifetime would computer type replace hot type.” Well, we all know how accurate that turned out to be.
I have since grown rather fond of uncertainty, and I realize, now that I have been thinking about it, that it is not a craving for certainty that characterizes human beings, but a fear of its opposite. We want to be as sure as we can that the next move we make is the right one. Oddly, the best way to be sure of that is to pay careful attention to what is going on right now. Yet it is precisely our attempts to divine the future that get in the way of knowing the present as well as we might.
Last week I made mention of Alan Watts and his autobiography, In My Own Way. On the next-to-last page of that book, Watts says something that has some bearing on this:
… if you just listen, relating yourself to the world entirely through the sense of hearing, you will find yourself in a universe where reality — pure sound — comes immediately out of silence and emptiness, echoing away as memory in the labyrinths of the brain. In this universe everything flows backward from the present and vanishes, like the wake of a ship; the present comes out of nothing, and you cannot hear any self that is listening.
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I greatly enjoyed your post. The proposition that the future is by its very nature unknowable would seem to be axiomatic, but that doesn’t prevent people from making tremendously self-assured and usually utterly wrong predictions, anyway. It’s one thing to make such predictions about, let’s say, this year’s Oscar’s or next year’s pennant race, where there’s plenty of information to go on, but I really dislike those who attempt to predict the far future. Yes, even scientists can be spectacularly wrong: Look, for example, at the case of Paul Ehrlich, who has made some of the most wrongheaded predictions (invariably doom-laden) about the future of the human race, stating, for example, that he would “take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000” and that “in the 1970s and 1980s . . . hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” When I hear some of the more dire predictions of the global-warming hysterics, like those who say that humankind will very shortly be reduced to a few huddled survivors perched in some cabin on the last patch of ice on the North Pole, I think about Ehrlich, and the unknowability of the future, and relax a little bit.