Forecasts and predictions can seem very frivolous on the surface, but they are very serious things and may have something to do with the evolution of human consciousness.
We are pattern seeking beings. We are constantly assessing risk, making forecasts about whether one meal or another will be more satisfying, determining how to best spend our money and free time. These decisions are all elements of risk assessment and the result of pattern recognition. And we make most of these decisions intuitively.
Roughly a third of the way through his essay, Montaigne throws on the table the possibility that our belief or disbelief in divination – the concept that we can make forecasts based on some kind of natural pattern, such as the stars in the sky – is the same as having a belief in a god (or series of gods.) He quotes Cicero:
‘Ista sic reciprocantur, ut et, si divinatio sit, dii sint: et si dii sint, sit divinatio.’ [If there is divination there are gods, and conversely, if there are gods there is divination.]
Montaigne frames this quote by saying that those who agree with Cicero are wrong. But notice that Cicero’s quote is not about a monotheistic God, but rather the pantheistic Roman gods. While a reader would naturally believe that Montaigne is staking a claim that a belief in God does not require a belief in divination – and therefore Montaigne’s disbelief doesn’t disqualify his belief – he is making a different, narrower claim that divination and belief in the old patheon of gods is not inextricable. Just another thing to keep stored away as we continue to examine the esoteric elements of Montaigne’s texts.
I’ve noted before Montaigne’s interesting, very contemporary belief in presence, and he applies that stance here to argue that all forms of divination and forecast push us towards the kind of future mindset he warned against in that earlier essay:
There remain among us it is true some means of divination by the heavens, by spirits, by bodily features, by dreams and so on: that is a remarkable example of the mad curiosity of our nature which wastes time trying to seize hold of the future as though it were not enough to have to deal with the present.
I will return later to the matter of curiosity, a subject where I have a complete disagreement with Montaigne. But notice here how radical Montaigne’s position is – even our act of dreaming, something completely out of our conscious control, is deemed an act of time wasting and an attempt to steal the present by pushing us to the future. Montaigne, not knowing what an unconscious is, has already decided it’s our enemy.
He makes his positive claim more explicitly here:
That man will be happy and master of himself who every day declares, ‘I have lived. Tomorrow let Father Jove fill the heavens with dark clouds or with purest light’… Let your mind rejoice in the present: let it loathe to trouble about what lies in the future.
There is some wisdom here – we cannot dwell on the aspects of lives out of our control – but there’s also a touch of insanity. Paying no attention to the weather forecasts can get you killed, just ask anyone who stayed put during a deadly hurricane or didn’t adquately prepare for a Buffalo blizzard. Not paying attention to all forms of prediction, even those that reveal themselves from within, is also a form of divination. It’s a radical belief that life is entirely contingent and that most of the important information available to us is in a continuous present.
And if you think I’m being to harsh on Montaigne, he then makes explicit his belief in radical contingency:
I would rather order my affairs by casting dice, by lots, than by such fanciful nonsense. And truly all States have always attributed considerable authority to them.
Now, it’s true that Montaigne is literally speaking against applying forms of divination here – such as seeing patterns of birds as omens of future harm or good fortune — not all predictions. But the strong stances he makes against all types of future-facing thought and forecasts invite strong extrapolations.
Even though I think Montaigne is being extreme here, I do have an emotional bias towards his perspective that I will address in a later essay—I strongly dislike indecision and think many people would be better off just rolling the dice on their choices in life and figuring out how to live with the consequences rather than living in the suspended animation of indecision. Perhaps I’m wishing I took some of these random courses in my life. Given Montaigne’s extremism here, it also wouldn’t surprise me if he was aware of and a supporter of the Taoist I Ching.
Personally, I enjoy using an I Ching app to make forecasts about difficult issues I am facing, in part because it really doesn’t make predictions, it just finds another clever way to apply the same basic Taoist teaching to every predicament.
Every I Ching divination is different and its interpretation depends on what question you pose to it. I could give an example now, but by the time I posed it, the example would already be outdated, so there’s no need.
Despite his more radical moments, Montaigne lands on slightly less radical ground at the end – admitting that there are elements of mad or divine inspiration in life and we must remain open to them:
Everyone can sense in himself some ghost of such agitations, of a prompt, vehement, fortuitous opinion. It is open to me to allow them some authority, to me who allow little enough to human wisdom. And I have had some – equally weak in reason yet violent in persuasion or dissuasion but which were more common in the case of Socrates — by which I have allowed myself to be carried away so usefully and so successfully, that they could have been judged to contain something of divine inspiration.
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