During an idle afternoon recently I played with simplistic possible models of the spread of Corona virus. Just today I came across an ABC article exploring in detail the actual model of the spread as well as its predictive value:
They said:
I also listened to an expert discuss the model as he conveyed to us the sensitivity of the model to initial conditions. So, if 8 out of ten stay at home for 13 weeks, we will overcome the virus. If we drop to just 7 out of ten, the exponential curve ignites again. He was offering hope based on a model which shows an extraordinary responsiveness to small changes. “Sensitivity to initial conditions” is a term used in Chaos Theory. Systems that are near to collapse can keep on going as they are until a tiny perturbation collapses the entire system (the butterfly effect). This is a condition of high unpredictability and thus uncertainty. Look for politicians trying to sound hopeful and clear-headed while, at the same time, their rhetoric undermines all certainty and hope. One example: “You must stay at home unless you need to go out”!
In this environment of unpredictability, fear and panic get a hold, as we are beginning to see. Already a narrative of who to jettison to save the economy has entered the national discourse (trial balloon?) Our entire culture is based on the stabilising function of a predictable future. Science is desperately trying to predict something, anything at all that might constitute a return to “normal”, as we can see. As this fails, as it is now doing, science loses its reason for being.
Who can we turn to then?
What about prophecy? The distinction between prophecy and prediction has been blurred to the vanishing point now but prophecy has a venerable history stretching back into antiquity. In my essay, Prophecy or Prediction, I make a necessary distinction between the two. I’ll just add a bit here.
At the turn of the twentieth century Europe was awash in prophecies of doom. Then the Great War erupted in 1914 and, looking back, people understood these prophecies of doom as predictive of this war.
They are wrong. Prophecy does not predict literally!
Prophecy is the result of a human being opening up to the “activity” of invisible processes that logically precede existence and are beginning to emerge into actuality. The prophet simply “speaks” these movements into language and from there a descent begins into concrete actuality, the final material form of which we simply do not know in advance. So the prophets of the early twentieth century were announcing a shift in the nature of reality, (and our way of being) which always has the nasty consequence of destroying given stable cultural structures (such as those of the metaphysical world and, prior to that, the “enchanted world” or pagan world).
Whether or not we get through this Corona virus episode is irrelevant to the greater transformation in reality, that has always already taken place in the background and is now on its way into existence. Markers of this historical process include the emergence of nihilism, modernism, post-modernism, post-humanism, Liquid Modernity, New Materialism… With these visible social makers we try to catch up culturally with the already-happened movements of the invisible background. And this movement, in which one way of being gives way to another, is unstoppable. It has already happened. So structures will continue to collapse.
Don’t base the future on hope. Synchronise with the uncertainty instead.