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• Peter Struck

  Looking Ahead…

  Tags:

  Ancient Greece,

  anthropology,

  classical civilizations,

  fortune,

  Iraq War,

  Peter Struck

  In Classical Greece and Rome, anyone contemplating a wedding, a trip, or a business deal would have availed himself of the advice of a specialist in reading the inclinations of the gods. Ancient diviners found signs of their attitudes in oracles, omens, dreams, livers, sneezes, smoke, lightning, overheard words, the wind, or just about anything else that moved. Indeed, there were charlatans about, but most people still found these services, on balance, to be useful in matters great and small. The divine will was simply a part of the ancient atmosphere and before doing something of consequence, it made sense to try to take measure of the prevailing winds.

  I am writing a book on these divinatory techniques, and it is surprising to see just how many contemporary heirs one finds to the readers of twitching entrails and screeching birds. One can, of course, draw lines from classical prophets to modern forecasters—of the weather, the markets, or affairs of the heart. Nowadays, financial fortunes are made and lost based on the utterances of a seventy-nine-year-old oracle in Omaha. But these dismal sciences, where the confidence game of expectations raises barriers to disbelief, are only one kind of parallel.

  A more interesting one surfaces in an article in The New York Times, one in a series on recent discoveries regarding how the brain works. The Army has funded studies of the talents of particular soldiers who show preternatural abilities to see hidden improvised explosive devices (IEDs). These figures, with names like "Hound Dog," supersede a sophisticated network of machines that see and sniff and turn out to be measurably better than their peers at sensing danger. Some of what improves their abilities, of course, simply comes from prolonged experience. However, even when that is factored out, scientists still find a remainder—a predisposition to see trouble where others don’t. When the soldiers are asked to describe how they knew something was out of order, they call it a hunch, or a gut feeling.

  Two millennia ago, the arena in which the seer’s gifts was most valued also turned out to be the battlefield. Every general kept a retinue of diviners, who were, as a way of putting it, good at reading their guts. According to the standard Greek military handbook by the first century tactician Onasander, a general should not initiate any movement of troops or attack until after taking omens to determine the optimum time. This meant sacrificing herds of unsuspecting goats nearly continuously until the entrails gave a favorable reading. The diviner meditated on the pulsating innards to come up with a judgment, often in the heat of the moment, regarding the likely success of a proposed maneuver.

  When ancient scientists set out to explain how this twitchy kind of knowledge worked, they talked about super-sensitive individuals, closer to the gods, whose bodies had become instruments for reading vibrations of distant events. The contemporary cognitive scientists cited by The Times prefer a language made famous by Malcolm Gladwell in Blink, citing variances in subjects’ visual imagery processing and the quickness and vigor of the autonomic nervous system.

  Yet prognostication hovers at the edge of respectability, then as much as now, and each era has its own way of making it presentable. The Greeks and Romans handed over people who were good at divination to a college of priests, while we prefer to hook them up to wires and make maps of the electricity in their brains. Such knowledge-laundering schemes provide the salutary benefit of weeding out the wheat from the chaff and of guarding against con artists. On that score, one wonders if we have made any improvement at all.
  

  October 20, 2009
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