James 24:7

First a personal story…

Several years ago my wife and I were walking through the woods in the hills of East Tennessee.  Although we were surrounded by a veritable Garden of Eden, I was obsessing about the doom of our financial life because our daughter was about to enter college. 

As a recovering alcoholic friend of mine puts it: “I was seeing myself buried in the wreckage of my own future”.  I could not imagine how we were going to pay her tuition; I saw us living in the poor house within the next five years.  (Has anyone ever really seen “the poor house?”)

As I was yammering on about my worries, I heard a rustling and pounding sound coming from the bushes to my right.  I stiffened and prepared for a “haint” attack.  (The woods in Tennessee are full of “haints”.)   All of a sudden this Far Side kid on roller blades tumbled out of the brush and took off wheel-running down the path away from us.

Right then and there I had an epiphany:  if I could not have predicted a Far Side-kid-on-roller-blades-attack even five seconds before it happened, how could I be so certain that within five years my wife and I would smother under a pile of debt?

I came to realize that the future is a blank movie screen and we- as producers, directors, writers, and projectionists of our own horror shows- are solely responsible for the movie we watch.

That “aha” experience in the hills of Tennessee came to mind as I read Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.  According to Taleb, a Black Swan is an unexpected event that carries an extreme impact that we later explain in such a way as to make it seem that we saw it coming (or would have had we had more information).  

The analogy of the Black Swan is derived from the long held belief that all swans were white because no one had ever seen a black one.  (They do exist and, boy, were people surprised when they found one!) 

Philosophically, the Black Swans are produced by our tendency to predict the future on the basis of the past.  Yesterday was pretty much like the day before and today is pretty much like yesterday so I predict that tomorrow will be pretty much like today.  (You would think that people who die would know better than that.  Hmmm…I’ve lived to this point…who’s to say I won’t live forever?  I bet everybody who has died was surprised when it happened!  “What the hay?”)

Flash to this scenario: You are Human Resources Director of a company where an employee just went postal.  When you hired him you just knew, as every HR professional knows, that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.  When you interviewed the guy who went postal you noted that he had a fairly unexceptional work history.  Always on time.  Always head down.  Always hard working.  How were you to know he would explode in a rage and kill everyone within sight of his cubicle?

My daughter worked with a simple and sweet woman who, as it turned out, had murdered her landlord and stashed her body under her water bed.  She had been sleeping on top of her for a year!  Of course, my daughter was surprised by that turn of events.  “She was so…normal.”  (On top of that, the woman’s arrest threw the whole Secret Santa thing her office had going into a tizzy.)

Who knew?  How could you have known?

According to Taleb, we humans are more ignorant than we know.  We commit all kinds of errors in reasoning in part because life is just easier that way- until it’s not.  We pay large sums of money to people because they wear dark suits (even on casual Friday) and hold themselves out as expert in predicting the future.  (e.g. fund managers)  We think the world makes sense because we tell ourselves stories that bring order to our lives. 

Taleb argues that most of the major, earth-shattering changes that we have experienced, whether for good or ill, are a result of Black Swans- unexpected, high impact events that are only given meaning and sense after the fact.

Think 9/11.  Think about most major discoveries like penicillin.  Think about how many major inventions are used in ways that the inventor never intended or imagined.  Think about how science progresses in leaps.  Think about how good we are at predicting the outcomes of battles and how crummy we are at predicting the outcomes of wars.

Black Swans do not only make a huge difference at the macro level.  Think about how many unforeseen, high impact events have shaped your personal life.  That night I went out with my dorm neighbor 34 years ago…I had no idea he would introduce me to the woman who would become my wife!  When I moved to Atlanta 8 years ago, I had no idea I would meet a virus that would infect my heart and leave me with a piece of high tech equipment implanted in my chest to ward off potentially fatal heart arrhythmias. 

Of course, looking back…it all makes sense.  This led to that and that led to the other and now…just look at the symmetry and order. 

We even evoke the hand of God and forget that maybe sometimes God uses a bit of chaos to get to the next level of order.  (Why are we more prone to see God as producing order only?)

We make sense of the future by looking back on it.     

Back to Taleb’s book….I learned something new or was thrust into another mind expanding “aha” with every turning of a page.  The book is not an easy read and, to be honest, the author does sort of tie his premise to a chair and beat it to death with a rubber hose.  He is sometimes overly sarcastic and doesn’t seem to realize that a couple of jokes at the expense of the French are enough. 

However, this is thought-provoking stuff.  Anyone who is interested in better understanding why the modern era is giving way to the whatever-this-is-that-is-slouching-toward-Bethlehem-waiting-to-be-born-era will find plenty to occupy your thoughts here.  Back in the halcyon days of modernism we thought we could get our categories straight and analyze our risks going forward using our best forecasting models.   But now, thanks to erudite thinkers like Taleb we are seeing that the future only finds order as it recedes in our rear-view mirrors.

Or to put it as the apostle Paul put it: “We walk by faith, not by sight.” 

Or as Thomas Merton put it (and I paraphrase) we move into the darkness of faith more so than the light.