A very famous British comedian and actor, Ricky Gervais, recently asked his audience, “If a visitor came to see you from 2045, and you were allowed to ask them just one question, what would it be?” The answers were very varied, of course; many said they wanted to know the date of their own death, that of their loved ones, a birth, a professional success. I’ll leave you to imagine your own.
Few responded to what came to mind: “What avoidable disasters will not have been averted between 2024 and 2045?”
Based on this answer, I would have tried to influence them so that they didn’t happen. In other words, I won’t just take note of an inevitable future, I’ll do everything I can to change it. And if this visitor from the future were to tell me that I can’t do anything to change it, since he’s coming to see me once the events have taken place, I’d still refuse to settle for stoically preparing myself to live with this inevitability.
This question ties in with millennia of fatalism, found in most religions and mythologies, for which the human being cannot escape the destiny assigned to him by a God or divinities; like Oedipus knowing the crimes he is going to commit and trying in vain to escape them. Even if, in some cosmogonies, the gods appear to be mere spectators of human folly, and in others, each individual can influence the nature of his or her successive reincarnations, humans have only very recently escaped the straitjacket of determinism, fatalism and the injunctions of divine grace. It was undoubtedly with the great revolution initiated by Judaism, followed by Protestantism and then the Age of Enlightenment, that mankind began to reject the idea that destiny should be chosen for them by others, whether gods or humans.
Today, a new revolution is underway: not only is man theoretically free to act as he pleases, within the limits of his means, but he can also predict what awaits him, long before it happens to him. In particular, he will soon be able to predict the illnesses he might suffer from, long before the slightest symptom appears, the crimes he might fall victim to or commit, and the works he might produce if he gets it right.
This prediction could lead to a return to fatalism or, on the contrary, to extended freedom:
On the one hand, science could install a predictive dictatorship, pushing everyone to accept a life of resignation-reclamation, in the most extreme form. On the other hand, science could be seen as a means of conquering new freedoms: “Since I know what awaits me, it’s up to me to do everything I can to avoid the worst.
In the first case, we would be entering a society of resignation. In the second, a society of prevention. The former would be the ultimate form of dictatorship, in which everyone submits to their fate because it is dictated to them. The second would be a new form of democracy, in which everyone acts to thwart the pitfalls of the future.
If this predictive capacity had existed, for example, from 2020 onwards, many catastrophes and crimes would have been avoided; many health problems would have been solved. And politics would have been much more sophisticated: instead of moving forward in the dark, it would have debated the best ways to avoid the worst predictions and accelerate the best.
The unfortunate thing for politicians is that this predictive capacity existed long before 2020. And it hasn’t been taken seriously: many of us have been sounding the alarm on many subjects for years:
If we had heeded these warnings, we could certainly have avoided leaving a French department ravaged by a hurricane, by building for years in hardstandings. We could have prevented the rise of extreme parties, with much greater tax justice, enabling us to fund many more public services. We could have prevented industrial decline, by valuing work much more highly and putting the country on a wartime economic footing. We could have avoided leaving Europe defenseless in the face of Russia, by launching European funding for European defense industries a long time ago. We could have prevented the collapse of young French people’s mathematical skills by following successful models in Finland and Singapore. We could have halted the insane growth of public debt by respecting the rules we’ve set ourselves, and by refusing a demagogic, socially unjust and deadly “whatever it takes” approach.
Prevent rather than suffer. This should be the obsession of all politicians, at least those who dream of being statesmen.
Les Moires ( A Golden Thread, 1885)