SMOKERS’ CORNER: UNPRECEDENTED TIMES |
The belief that history is a critical guide for predicting the future is facing a severe test. The enduring idea is best encapsulated by former British prime minister Winston Churchill’s 1944 observation: “The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.”
The Renaissance period thinker Niccolò Machiavelli argued that the people’s fundamental desires and behaviours remain unchanged across epochs, which is why a close study of past events can aid one to predict future political and social dynamics. The 19th century German ideologist Karl Marx famously noted that history repeats itself, “first as tragedy, then as farce.” The 20th century Spanish philosopher George Santayana warned that those who cannot remember mistakes of the past are condemned to repeat them.
While this concept remains a popular belief, its relevance as a reliable predictive tool has begun to struggle. This is driven by unprecedented shifts in geopolitics, technology and ecology, which are introducing challenges without direct historical parallels. For over a decade, many experts and political commentators have found their predictions consistently wrong. A major contributing factor is their heavy reliance on historical parallels to understand current events — a methodology that is proving insufficient for the new realities of the 21st century.
A powerful early example of this failure actually stretches back to the 1979 Iranian Revolution. The US failed to predict the revolution because CIA analysts could not accurately gauge the political traction of the religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini. The CIA’s analytical framework was largely based on studies of left wing revolutions, and those rooted in secular and nationalist movements since the French Revolution. The CIA lacked experts on the then-unique power of a new kind of radical religious movement that was emerging in Iran.
From Iran in 1979 to America in 2016 and Pakistan........