Thinking about the future as a mystery to be divined, rather than an outcome to be shaped, has become hard-wired into the way we talk about what will happen next in foreign policy.
When nearly 150 million US voters cast their ballots on 5 November, opinion polls were neck and neck, and commentators were forced into the awkward position of hazarding a guess. The story for 24/7 news became the pollsters themselves, their hourly new insights and their potential influence on the campaigns and the result. Questions about sizes of poll samples, whether people are truthful when polled, whether pollsters themselves are seeking to influence the result, whether the betting sites projected into America from third countries were seeking to subvert democracy, the cost of polling, whether pollsters are any good, all mask the fact that the important poll is the secret ballot. The urge to know the outcome before the event is another symptom of our anxiety about the idea of living with uncertainty. It may help to think about it differently.
It has become customary to make a distinction, when making assessments of world events, between a secret and a mystery. The former Cabinet Secretary, Lord Butler of Brockwell, made this observation in the Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction, published in 2004. At the end of chapter one, under the heading ‘The Limitations of Intelligence’, the review noted that: ‘A hidden limitation of intelligence is its inability to transform a mystery into a secret. In principle, intelligence can be expected to uncover secrets. The enemy’s order of battle may not be known, but it is knowable. The enemy’s intentions may not be known but they too are knowable. But mysteries are essentially unknowable: what a leader truly believes, or what his reaction would be in certain circumstances, cannot be known, but can only be judged.’