Delphic Maxim 123: Admire oracles
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each of the Delphic Maxims for 15 minutes a day.
123. Admire oracles
Well here’s a shameless piece of self-promotion from the Delphic Oracle.
Imagine showing up to this vast complex of structures after trekking across the Greek world. Imagine climbing through up the sides of this enormous valley, reaching the steep heights on which the Temple of Apollo stood, clambering through the crowds and weather and whatever, and finally reaching the Pythia, and you see this carved into the roof above you. “Admire oracles”. Thanks for the reminder.
I do actually admire the Oracle at Delphi, I have to say. For hundreds and hundreds of years, this oracle influence the politics of Greece. It was a spiritual focus for the entirety of those disparate kingdoms and city-states. The oracle recurs again and again in myth and history — so there’s really a lot to be admired. And the site itself, as I discussed previously, is absolutely beautiful. I wish that this had been the maxim I was compelled to write the day I visited Delphi. Oh well.
Who are the modern day oracles, and should we admire them? I actually think this is a problematic suggestion, because the art of prediction has become a dodgy one. It’s not a science, and increasingly economists, pollsters and politicians have been shown up as particularly bad at seeing the future. Even weather forecasts are only ‘accurate’ to a few days out. The more we know about the world, the more our science develops, the more it seems chaos and disorder throw a spanner into the art of predictability.
Oracles back in ancient times had the power of self-fulfilling prophecy. Because of the reverence people had for the Oracle, they were more likely to alter their behaviours because of the pronouncements it made. A divine prediction carries more force than a forecast from a Nobel-laureate economist — if only because people feel compelled to obey the gods.
You only need to consider the impact of black swans — the global financial crisis, the September 11 attacks, the election of Trump or the Brexit vote — to see how unpredictable the world is, and how people’s predictions (or failures to predict) mean that there are few if any oracles in the world today. Otherwise, we could probably have a reason to admire them.
The last federal election in Australia is a good example. Polls, pollsters, journalists, and I, all predicted an easy win for the Labor party. And instead the opposite happened. So how could we have confidence in the oracular power of any of the above. There were some who looked at the numbers and said “I don’t see how that outcome is possible” — I admire that logic, particularly in that it wasn’t predicting an outcome, but rather questioning the strength of the prophecy itself.
Maybe the new oracles we should admire aren’t those who can predict the future, but rather those who remind us that the future is relatively unpredictable, or who at least remind us that there is so much that we don’t — and possibly cannot — know.
After all, one of the Delphic Oracle’s most famous pronouncements made exactly that point. When asked who the wisest man was in all of Greece (because of course it was a man), the Oracle replied that it was Socrates:
“Wisest is he who knows that he does not know.
