Science v sorcery: the risky business of predicting the future

It will be 40 years this August since false religious prophet and American cult leader Charles Manson and his followers went on a murder spree in California in a perverted interpretation of the Book of Revelation. Humans throughout history have had an obsession with fortune-telling.

As human beings we have an innate curiosity as to what our future holds. Some seek out psychics; others find guidance in the Bible, Koran, and so on. As I am not a theologian, I will not go into too much detail about the Revelation chapter of the Christian Bible, other than to say it predicts a final showdown at Armageddon, a hill in modern day Israel.

For American mass murderer and cult leader Charles Manson the place for the final showdown was in Los Angeles, California, USA. On August 9, 1969 he and his followers, called The Family, unleashed a short reign of terror in the hope of sparking Helter Skelter, Manson’s evil, racist “prophecy” and a perversion of Revelation.

Helter Skelter, named after a song by 1960s British pop band The Beatles, was a race war between white and black Americans. Manson’s intention was to become a pop star, and like a modern day pied piper, his music would draw young white women away from black men. Manson’s reasoning was that black men, long oppressed by a racist society, were too preoccupied from launching violent revolution because of the sex. If denied, they would then turn their frustration on white society. White society would then retaliate. Out of a sense of guilt, liberal whites and conservative white would subsequently turn on each other, and anyone left standing would be finished off by the Black Panthers, a militant group.

Manson and his followers would ride out the race storm in an underground city in the Californian desert. After the killings stopped, black Americans, not knowing how to a run a civilisation, according to Manson, would then hand over power to him. He would breed a new white race.

When Manson’s music career did not take off, he instructed his followers to kick-start Helter Skelter by going into Los Angeles’s wealthy white neighbourhoods and killing people, and making it appear it was the work of blacks. One of those brutally murdered was pregnant Hollywood actress Sharon Tate, the wife of film director Roman Polanski.

All of us have at one stage read an article or seen a television documentary about 16th century Frenchman Michel Notradame (Nostradamus), who supposedly predicted future events but had to disguise his writings in a cryptic manner to avoid being burnt at the stake as a sorcerer.

Critics say Nostradamus’ predictions have been worded in such a way that they can be interpreted to fit any scenario or simply misused to comply with the latest political trend. Others just call his writings rubbish.

Here’s an example, published in The Complete Prophecies of Nostradamus, edited by Ned Halley, 1999.

A burning flame will appear in the night sky
Near both the source and the estuary of the Rhone
Famine, swords: help will come late
Persia turns and invades Macedonia.

Halley’s interpretation:

No doubt about the last line Persia, now Iran, reverses history by avenging its destruction by the Macedonian giant of history. Alexander the Great burnt Persepolis in a drunken fit in 330BC. Macedonia is now an unstable former republic of the Yugoslav federation. Nostradamus predicts that the country will submit itself to the Muslim faith, and that conflicts elsewhere in Europe will deny aid against the invader.

In 2001, an ethnic Albanian separatist insurgency was launched within Macedonia. But this was quickly hosed down by the west, in particular NATO. The Albanians are Sunni Muslims and the Macedonians Orthodox Christians. But the conflict was primarily ethnic driven, with religion not a motivating factor. Likewise, during the other wars in the former Yugoslavia starting in 1991, Orthodox Serbs were pitted against Catholic Croats as well as Muslim Bosnians. No great showdown between the West and Islam occurred.

In another Nostradamus prophecy, this time Halley in his interpretation throws in a bit of Tony Blair (the then British Prime Minister) and Slobodan Milosevic (the Serbian leader) bashing for good measure:

The terrible plague at Perinthus and Nicopolis
Will strike both the peninsular and Macedonia
It will devastate Thessaly and Amphipolis
An unknown evil, refusal by Anthony.

Halley’s take:

This quatrain has immediate significance in the light of Serbian nationalist ambitions in the Balkans. All the places mentioned are either in Greece or in the former Yugoslavian republic of Macedonia. A key player on the NATO side is British Prime Minister Anthony Blair. Could world peace hinge on his refusal in line 4?

Old Slobo never got that far south with his ambitions. Both Anthony “Tony” (Blair) and Bill (Clinton) did not refuse to act. They sent in the NATO troops into the predominately Albanian province of Kosovo, fighting to break away from Milosevic’s Serbia.

Nostradamus had an obsession with doomsday, the apocalypse, the End Time, Armageddon or a final confrontation between the Christian West and Islam and the primary fault line being the volatile Balkan region of Europe. Why this obsession? The fortune-telling or event prediction business is fraught with many dangers even for those who use a scientific method as opposed to gazing into a crystal ball or a cup with tea leaves.

Who could forget American academic, Francis Fukiyama’s preposterous claim that with the end of the Cold War and collapse of communism we had reached the End of History …

There are some wise and sane thinkers out there who believe that a “showdown” is looming between the West and radical Islam. Should we just ignore this warning? Is it a case of Islamophobia?

Or should we be able to differentiate between “good West, bad West; good Islam, bad Islam” rather than just painting one side as evil? Moreover, if you talk up a final showdown do you get a self-fulfilling prophecy?

One scholar who wrote about a showdown, using logic and science instead of sorcery, was the American Samuel Huntington (1927-2008). The celebrated academic, in response to Fukuyama’s End of History, came up with Clash of Civilizations, which is summed thus:

It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.

The criticisms of Huntington include an oversimplification of Western and Islamic Civilisations. Some Muslim groups such as Albanians, Turks, Bosnians and Kurds do not conform to what the West perceives as the stereotypical Muslim society. Turkey prides itself on being fiercely secular. However, supporters of Huntington cite the bombing by radical Islamic group al-Qaida of New York’s World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001 as the start of the Clash between the West and radical Islam. A year later, in an Australian off-shoot of the Clash we had terrorist Indonesian Islamic group Jemaah Islamiyah bomb the Indonesia holiday island of Bali, killing more than 200 westerners and locals, including 88 Australians.

Will there be a final showdown, as many have predicted in the past, or are we allowing our fears and passions because of the uncertain times we live in to dictate our thinking and behaviour?