POETRY AND FORECASTING / GEOPOLITICAL FUTURES

Poetry and Forecasting

Thoughts in and around geopolitics.

By: George Friedman

Earlier this week, I wrote an analysis about China’s strategy, the kind of piece that is what is expected in this industry. 

I end the week with thoughts that are explicitly geopolitical but are foundational to writing.

Geopolitics is about nations and strategy. 

My approach is to use geopolitics to forecast events. 

But underlying this is a view of the world that may seem out of place in the world of power politics: the consideration of our relationship to the future and the language that must be used to think of the future. 

The consideration of the future is what I do, but sometimes it can be done only from a different perspective – sometimes even from a different language.

All of my work, my passion, is to know the future, the one thing that the gods have been said to deny us. 

That my life’s work is pure hubris is true. 

Hubris is defined as excessive pride. 

In my case it is not pride in what I have done, but rather pride in thinking that it is possible to do it, to know what will happen by knowing how things work.

We expect scientists to know how things work, and we include in scientists social scientists, with whom I am grouped, and which I deplore. 

The work of social scientists is to make great things small, and beautiful things banal. 

I try to avoid that trap by thinking of the world as vast and overwhelming, and trying to glimpse its directions. 

But to forecast is to be poetic, for poets have done some of the finest forecasting, having seen the world not only clearly but in proportion – which is much harder to do.

Heinrich Heine was a German-Jewish poet who wrote in the mid-19th century. 

Of Germany’s future, he wrote:

"Thought precedes action as lightning precedes thunder. German thunder is of true Germanic character; it is not very nimble, but rumbles along ponderously. Yet, it will come and when you hear a crashing such as never before has been heard in the world's history, then you know that the German thunderbolt has fallen at last. At that uproar the eagles of the air will drop dead, and lions in the remotest deserts of Africa will hide in their royal dens. A play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll."

Nazi Germany’s thunderbolt shook the world, and Heine sensed this was coming a century before the sound could be heard. 

How could Heine have done this? 

What did he know that others didn’t? 

He knew the German soul, its energy, rage and self-certainty that made Germany what it was. 

He read what Germans wrote and he believed them, while others patronizingly brushed them aside. 

He also knew that humans do not believe what they see when it seems incredible. And Heine knew that the most common thing is the most incredible thing. 

When I look back on my life, I understand that the enemy of truth is the certainty that what is now will also be later, and all that contradicts it is a fool’s prattle.

Rudyard Kipling also foretold the fate of his own country, and the reason for its fate.

"Far-called, our navies melt away;

On dune and headland sinks the fire:

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,

Lest we forget – lest we forget!"

Britain was built on its navy. 

It was an island that lived or died by the sea. 

He saw that the navy would disappear, and while the island might survive, its glory would disappear. 

It once ruled the world and now it hopes that Scotland will retain union. 

Kipling warned of a nation drunk with power whose wild tongues congratulate themselves instead of seeing themselves in the hands of God and not of kings. 

Kipling loved England with a passion, but he had been out in the colonies and had seen the self-glorification that was gnawing at the foundations of the empire. 

Those colonies are no longer British, and Britain’s navy is a shadow of itself. 

Kipling forecast it because as a poet he could see the British soul far more clearly than others could. 

He could sing the song of the recessional as a warning and a certainty.

Both saw greatness in the souls of their countries, and both dreaded what it portended. 

Greatness brings pride, pride brings catastrophe, and the proud don’t listen.

Sometimes the warning is given in general. 

Sometimes a reader is invited to believe the words written speak specifically to them. 

Nathaniel Hawthorne, the American author, wrote:

“It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom. Each, in its utmost development, supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for the food of his affections and spiritual life upon another; each leaves the passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of his object.”

He is the quintessential American thinker, and in recent months I have come to depend more on his guidance on love and hate and our public life. 

We cannot live without love, and we cannot live without hate. 

Each is tied to the other. 

It is comforting that he makes no forecast. 

He is not Heine or Kipling. 

He is an American, comfortable with the linkage of the extreme, and I think he sees it as the engine of the country.

My work is based on what must be done and what can’t be done. 

But the hardest part of my work is to understand the soul, and how it forces things to be done. 

In the past few months, I have been drawn to the problem of the soul more than before, to understand why Kipling felt pride and Heine felt philosophy could guide you. 

Hawthorne makes it clear that the soul, at least the soul of Americans, is at war with itself, which paradoxically stabilizes them. 

German and English smugness destroys them.

It is possible to forecast and absurd to think otherwise. 

Each of us chooses a path that we think will bring us somewhere. 

We know what we will do, but the world and our own virtue determine how it comes out. 

Millions of people are together more predictable than one. 

If we could listen to a Heine, a Kipling or a Hawthorne it would be easier. 

But we don’t listen and we don’t believe that it can be understood. 

And we find poetry alien.

There is, however, one forecast that is certain, courtesy of Homer:

"Any moment might be our last. 

Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed. 

You will never be lovelier than you are now. 

We will never be here again."

That doesn’t seem to be connected to submarines or the South China Sea or the war in Yemen or inflation, but it is. 

Once that is understood, the rest seems to follow.