Predicting the Present

It is inevitable that we look at history with contemporary eyes. We explore current ideas and obsessions in the events of the past. Each generation writes a different history.

In doing this we often discover people and ideas which appear strangely prescient, as if they had seen clearly into their future. This is no doubt partly explanied as a reporting phenomenon - ie we notice the few times a prediciton is spectacularly right and ignore the far larger number of mistaken guesses.

But there is more to it. Ideas that have shaped our world will necessarily appear to have foreseen the way we live. History is written by the victors and they have also shaped the cociety in which we live. Similarities between the two are no coincidence