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False Alarms

When predictions prove inaccurate, the would-be prophets should be pressed for explanations

Well, that dreaded Y2K bug never did bite. I, for one, will confess that I had approached December 31 with some worries in the back of my mind. For months I had been reading the grim forecasts. Computers all around the world would crash, the doomsayers had predicted. Electrical service would be disrupted; public water and sewer facilities would shut down; oil and gas would become scarce in the middle of the winter; food would disappear from the supermarket shelves. Even if all those disasters could be averted, the pessimists continued, there would be runs on the banks, as thousands of families took out extra cash as insurance against a possible crisis. A small but not insignificant number of Americans, fearing the worst, had stocked up on freeze-dried food, bottled water, and shotgun shells, as they hunkered down to wait for the digital apocalypse.

Then the New Year arrived, and nothing untoward happened. On the afternoon of December 31, I logged on to the internet, curious to learn whether the Y2K bug had done any damage when the clocks chimed out midnight in Australia. There were absolutely no signals of distress—nor would there be any serious problems in other countries as the hours passed. The lights were still on, the furnaces (or, in the case of Australia, the air conditioners) were humming, and the champagne corks were popping according to the usual schedule.

How did we pass through this crisis so smoothly? In part, the credit goes to the thousands of computer programmers who inoculated millions of machines against the dreaded bug. But that is only part of the story. The unavoidable fact is that the prophets of doom were just plain wrong.

Pinned down

This was a very unusual case, because the Y2K bug, by its very nature, was supposed to strike at a very precise moment. If it didn’t happen on New Year’s Eve, it wasn’t going to happen at all.

Most predictions are not nearly so specific. Economists might forecast a recession, or seismologists might warn of an earthquake, but they do not pinpoint their predictions for a particular hour and minute on a particular day. So the would-be prophets can insist that their forecasts are fundamentally accurate, even if the recessions and the earthquakes are unaccountably overdue.

Still, sooner or later the prophets should be called to account for their errors. And since someone who has been wrong once is quite likely to be wrong again—especially if he has not corrected his errors—inaccurate predictions should weigh heavily against an individual’s credibility.

In the world of science, the validity of a theory is judged by its power to yield accurate predictions. How is it, then, that people like Paul Ehrlich are still taken seriously as scientists? In his 1968 book The Population Bomb, readers may recall, Ehrlich predicted that there would be worldwide famines in the 1970s. Those famines never materialized; the world’s food supply increased much faster than the world’s population. But Ehrlich was not abashed. Far from correcting the flagrant errors in The Population Bomb, in 1989 he followed up with another book, which carried a similar title (The Population Explosion) and put forward an identical thesis.

Unfortunately, the same sort of insouciant disregard for inconvenient facts can be found within the walls of the Catholic Church. During and after the Second Vatican Council, proponents of liturgical reform assured us that the changes in the Mass would encourage more active lay participation in the Eucharistic Sacrifice. In fact, as those changes began to take effect, the number of Catholics who even bothered to show up for Sunday Mass slipped into a steady decline, from which we have not yet recovered. Nevertheless, confident as ever, the same liturgists assure us that a few more revolutionary changes will reverse the trend.

Running alongside those arguments, there is an equally illogic insistence that the Church should not allow any move to recover the beauty of the traditional liturgy, because such a move might discourage participation in the “vibrant” new rituals. If the “old” Mass was really as unpopular as these reformers tell us, this situation should take care of itself; left to themselves, the faithful would naturally choose the more attractive option.

Despite all their talk about the need for democracy within the Church, liberal Catholics seem deathly afraid of allowing the faithful to choose freely between old and new approaches to the liturgy. Perhaps they are afraid of the results such an experiment might yield: a realization that, under the reigning liturgical establishment, the prospects of successful renewal are no more realistic than the prospects of a Y2K disaster.

—Philip F. Lawler

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