The Queen’s an anachronism: another problem with predicting the future

The Queen serve many roles, it seems. She provides stability to the British government, fosters links with the ex-colonies, promotes tourism, serves a safe focus for nationalist sentiment, gives the nation a centralised way of taking care of various palaces, provides nationalised opportunities for neighbours to come together, warms that deep part of the human heart that admires leaders but disdains those that make hard choices, is a focal point for unity, tradition and precedent, a link to history… The list is long, and to some extent genuine: she does provide these services to the nation.

But say we’d sat down, without any knowledge of the monarchy, and looked at that long list of desires, included in a list of a million other things we’d want. Nobody would have said: “You know, thinking about it, for issues 137, 2220 and 3558b… Well, the most efficient way we could deal with these is to institute an unelected hereditary figurehead, passing down by primogeniture. Come to think about it, that would also help with issue 344c…” The monarchy is certainly not the best way of accomplishing all the tasks we want it to accomplish, is likely very far from the best way. But it is the way we currently do so, changing it would require a lot of effort, and it has adapted itself to work in practice, within our current society.

Which brings us to the problem of prediction. Any consequentialist philosophy needs ways of estimating the outcomes of actions, as do most practical fields. Traditionally, the unexpected is seen as the problem: “Yes, these are the trends, but have you considered the risk of another 9/11, Pearl Harbor, Black Monday, Oil Crisis…?” The list of potential black swans is endless. But the monarchy example shows another problem with predictions: the future just may not be as different as we thought.

If we revived a frozen kid from the 1950s, we’d have to start by explaining that while we do have flying cars and space stations (and we had supersonic passenger airplanes), these are not generally used or considered very important. Though we could get all our energy from solar power (and global warming implies that we should), coal and oil remain the backbone of our economies.

Those futurists that predicted the fading of nation states and religion were correct in the trends – nationalism and religious observance have diminished – but they failed to realise how slow this would be, and how high a base these started from. We still cook. We use huge amounts of paper. People still work in office blocks. Crime is down, but it’s still pretty much the same type of stuff as it always was. We cured smallpox… and that was about it.

So even a clear necessity and the technical ability to implement a solution does not end up with that solution implemented. When predicting, we need to consider that “getting by with what we already have” is often a likely outcome. And when advocating for change, we need to remember that a “partial, interim, temporary solution” may end up lasting forever, once it’s embedded in the system.