When escalated to the extreme, the progressive conclusion is that history can teach us nothing. Innovation is by its very nature unprecedented, and insofar as it manifests improvement, it humbles its precursors. The past is the rude domicile of ignorant barbarity. Insofar as the present still bears its traces, as shameful stigmata, they are mere remains that still have to be overcome. At the limit, the concept of Singularity — a horizon at which all anticipatory knowledge is annulled — seals the progressive intuition.

In its abstract theoretical core, at least, Greer’s Druidic counter-history is radically reactionary (far more unambiguously so than NRx). Its model of time is entirely cyclical, such that past and future are perfectly neutral between ascent and decline. Every attempt to install a gradient of improvement in the dimension of historical time is broken upon the great wheels, which balance every rise with a fall, dissolving innovation in precedent. Novelty is hubristic illusion (an exaggerated correction, in the opinion of this blog).

In his most recent post Greer introduces an intriguing complication:

Arnold Toynbee, whose magisterial writings on history have been a recurring source of inspiration for this blog, has pointed out an intriguing difference between the way civilizations rise and the way they fall. On the way up, he noted, each civilization tends to diverge not merely from its neighbors but from all other civilizations throughout history. […] Once the peak is past and the long road down begins, though, that pattern of divergence shifts into reverse, slowly at first, and then with increasing speed. A curious sort of homogenization takes place: distinctive features are lost, and common patterns emerge in their place. That doesn’t happen all at once, and different cultural forms lose their distinctive outlines at different rates, but the further down the trajectory of decline and fall a civilization proceeds, the more it resembles every other civilization in decline.

The dissymmetry calls out for philosophical investigation, since it suggests a line of synthetic diagonalization between precedent and innovation, cyclicity and escape (which is to say, the NRx or cybergothic line). It would be to stray too far from Greer to follow that now.

Straightforwardly, the claim being made is that forecasting strengthens on the down-slope of civilization. The more a social order fails, the more it sheds its originality, and thus the more accessible it becomes to accurate diagnosis on the basis of historical example. As collapse deepens, it converges with a template, bound ever tighter to a model by its morbidity. Across the peak, an age of prophecy begins — or returns.

The dark irony is delicious almost beyond endurance. The Universal, long proclaimed as the capstone of progress, is realized only as a nadir. The equality of all civilizations is asserted, in reality, as a direct measure of their proximity to death. Among the spreading ruins, the mad echoes of similarity resound deafeningly, as the blasted Cathedral plummets towards its Idea — eternal return of the same.

This type of forecast, were it reliable, would be of inestimable value. To some considerable degree it is simply inescapable, since there must always be default expectations (of the kind occasionally formalized as Bayesian priors). When specific probability-weighted predictions are not made, future-sensitive agents do not fall back upon poised skepticism — such Pyrrhonism is a philosophico-mystical attainment of extreme rarity. Instead, presumed outcomes are projected out of sheer inertia, whether as perpetuation of the status quo, or the mechanical extrapolation of existing trends. It takes only a moment of reflection to recognize that such tacit forecasts are at least as precarious as their more elaborate alternatives. Their only recommendation is an irrational mental economy, which would find in the least-effort of cognition some analogy with the superficially equivalent (but in this case informative) principle in nature.

Large-scale forecasting cannot be eschewed, but there are obvious reasons why it cannot be greatly trusted. It has no definite methods (relying for its credibility on hazy reputational capital). Its objects are complex, chaotic, and — once again — poorly defined. It has a restricted time frame, appropriate to gradually emerging developments constrained (to some degree) by historical precedent, but necessarily inadequate to radical innovation and to sudden, rapidly evolving events. The combination of these various blindnesses with a high-impact chance event produces the nightmare of the forecasters — (Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s) black swan.

Consider one possible event that does not make it onto Roubini’s new list: The collapse of the Saudi regime. Shifting energy economics, ‘Arab Spring’ -style insurrectionary chaos, US strategic withdrawal, Sunni-Shi’a conflict, and an impending succession crisis are among the clear stress-factors, and several more could easily be added — most prominently the ambient influence of Internet-dynamized corrosive modernism, which not only creates direct legitimation problems, but also energizes an (at least) equally disruptive traditionalist backlash. Unquestionably, some uncontrollable cross-excitation of these developments could escalate to criticality with shocking speed. The probability of such an outcome is impossible to fix.

How catastrophic would the fall of the Saudis be? The least disastrous scenarios sleaze smoothly into a variety of utopian fantasies, from democratic liberation, through Salafist atavism, to Shi’ite millenarian imperialism. Since any process of change which tended momentarily to promise the fulfillment of any such vision would almost certainly evolve quickly in an exceptionally calamitous direction, we are probably safe in assuming that the best case outcome would be remarkably bad.

The collapse of the House of Saud would simultaneously and fundamentally destabilize world energy markets and the Islamic umma. Control of the Holy Places would become a matter of immediate contestation, as would a quarter of the world’s petroleum reserves. The type of interim regime most likely to effectively secure one would be especially likely to compromise security of the other. A relatively competent military government would outrage religious sensibilities (of several different kinds), while an intense theocracy would be greeted internationally as a revolutionary threat to the reliable administration of hydrocarbon production. It is not intellectually challenging to envisage a situation in which religious, military, and economic chaos erupt in concert, on an apocalyptic scale.

In case I am misunderstood, this is not a forecast. It is an anti-forecast, directed randomly at Roubini, but more generally at the very idea of any confident enumeration of significant world risks. In the spirit of Taleb, it is intended to communicate an abstract potential for blind-siding disaster, of arbitrary magnitude.

The most reliable heuristic: plan for the unknown as such. (More on that to come.)

There they have already made themselves ‘at home’ — along with much else related to the general phenomenon of prediction (which is strictly indistinguishable from time travel, when incisively understood). Present knowledge of the future is an action of the future upon the present, but all that can wait, since — of course — it doesn’t need to.

For now, the Prophecy: 2014 is the year in which Neoreaction tears itself apart. This is not at all to say, the year in which it dies. On the contrary, it will end the year strengthened in ways it has not to this point envisaged, having carved out vast tracts of clarity, hardened itself through close intellectual combat, refined its methods of de-synthesis (or catabolism), and — most importantly of all — made schism an internal dynamic principle. What integrates Neoreaction by the end of the year will no longer be elective tenets (reflecting the more-or-less precarious ideological preferences of individuals) but conflict-toughened structures of objective micro-cultural cohesion, selected and sculpted by many months of ferocious storms.

The approximate contours of these impending ruptures will provide the content for the first 2014 Prognoses post (which is already overdue). In anticipation, it need only be noted: the Dark Enlightenment finds nothing external to itself that is hard enough to sharpen its claws. It has feasted on soft, fat, bleating lambs long enough. Thus the introverted ripping begins …

ADDED: Rigorous evidence for time travel still thin.