Prophets and the Present

PROPHETS AND THE PRESENT

By issuing warnings based on vulnerability—that is, subtractive prophecy—we are closer to the original role of the prophet: to warn, not necessarily to predict, and to predict calamities if people don’t listen.

The classical role of the prophet, at least in the Levantine sense, is not to look into the future but to talk about the present. He tells people what to do, or, rather, in my opinion, the more robust what not to do. In the Near Eastern monotheistic traditions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the major role of the prophets is the protection of monotheism from its idolatrous and pagan enemies that may bring calamities on the straying population. The prophet is someone who is in communication with the unique God, or at least can read his mind—and, what is key, issues warnings to His subjects. The Semitic nby, expressed as Nevi or nebi (in the original Hebrew), the same with minor differences in pronunciation in Aramaic (nabi’y) and Arabic (nabi), is principally someone connecting with God, expressing what is on God’s mind—the meaning of nab’ in Arabic is “news” (the original Semitic root in Acadian, nabu, meant “to call”). The initial Greek translation, pro-phetes, meant “spokesman,” which is retained in Islam, as a dual role for Mohammed the Prophet is that of the Messenger (rasoul)—there were some small ranking differences between the roles of spokesman (nabi) and messenger (rasoul). The job of mere forecasting is rather limited to seers, or the variety of people involved in divination such as the “astrologers” so dismissed by the Koran and the Old Testament. Again, the Canaanites had been too promiscuous in their theologies and various approaches to handling the future, and the prophet is precisely someone who deals only with the One God, not with the future like a mere Baalite.

Nor has the vocation of Levantine prophet been a particularly desirable professional occupation. As I said at the beginning of the chapter, acceptance was far from guaranteed: Jesus, mentioning the fate of Elijah (who warned against Baal, then ironically had to go find solace in Sidon, where Baal was worshipped), announced that no one becomes a prophet in his own land. And the prophetic mission was not necessarily voluntary. Consider Jeremiah’s life, laden with jeremiads (lamentations), as his unpleasant warnings about destruction and captivity (and their causes) did not make him particularly popular and he was the personification of the notion of “shoot the messenger” and the expression veritas odium parit— truth brings hatred. Jeremiah was beaten, punished, persecuted, and the victim of numerous plots, which involved his own brothers. Apocryphal and imaginative accounts even have him stoned to death in Egypt.

Further north of the Semites, in the Greek tradition, we find the same focus on messages, warnings about the present, and the same punishment inflicted on those able to understand things others don’t. For example, Cassandra gets the gift of prophecy, along with the curse of not being believed, when the temple snakes cleaned her ears so she could hear some special messages. Tiresias was made blind and transformed into a woman for revealing the secrets of the gods—but, as a consolation, Athena licked his ears so he could understand secrets in the songs of birds.

Recall the inability we saw in Chapter 2 to learn from past behavior. The problem with lack of recursion in learning—lack of second-order thinking—is as follows. If those delivering some messages deemed valuable for the long term have been persecuted in past history, one would expect that there would be a correcting mechanism, that intelligent people would end up learning from such historical experience so those delivering new messages would be greeted with the new understanding in mind. But nothing of the sort takes place.

This lack of recursive thinking applies not just to prophecy, but to other human activities as well: if you believe that what will work and do well is going to be a new idea that others did not think of, what we commonly call “innovation,” then you would expect people to pick up on it and have a clearer eye for new ideas without too much reference to the perception of others. But they don’t: something deemed “original” tends to be modeled on something that was new at the time but is no longer new, so being an Einstein for many scientists means solving a similar problem to the one Einstein solved when at the time Einstein was not solving a standard problem at all. The very idea of being an Einstein in physics is no longer original. I’ve detected in the area of risk management the similar error, made by scientists trying to be new in a standard way. People in risk management only consider risky things that have hurt them in the past (given their focus on “evidence”), not realizing that, in the past, before these events took place, these occurrences that hurt them severely were completely without precedent, escaping standards. And my personal efforts to make them step outside their shoes to consider these second-order considerations have failed—as have my efforts to make them aware of the notion of fragility.