Soothsayers and silver tongues: have a low tolerance for excuses--particularly the handy 'beyond anyone's control' variety.

• Author: Horton, Tom
• Position: Some Things Considered

SINCE ANCIENT TIMES, rational people have understood the future to be unknowable. But a large segment of any population has a need to pierce this unliftable veil--giving rise to both serious efforts and vast opportunities for charlatanism.

Sometimes it is difficult to tell which. Cicero wondered whether a soothsayer laughs when meeting another soothsayer. In the Florida village of Cassadega, southern headquarters of the American Spiritualist Association, for $50 you can visit your future or, if you prefer, the past, making stops along the way as far into your genealogy as you like. But usually the future commands more interest.

It is not just such fringe groups that obsess about the future. The popularity of horoscopes, tarot cards, even ouija boards and their like, as well as fortune tellers who advertise on late night cable television and the existence of large sections on the occult in virtually every bookstore all testify to a universal desire, irrational as it may be, to know the unknowable.

Every year on Candlemas Day in early February, millions of eyes are focused on a strange activity in a small Pennsylvania town that calls itself the Weather Capital of the World: A 15-pound rodent named Punxsutawney Phil ("Seer of Seers, Sage of Sages, Prognosticator of Prognosticators, and Weather Prophet Extraordinary") emerges from a simulated tree stump and either sees or fails to see his shadow, hence giving us a definitive forecast of the length of the remaining winter. In between Groundhog Days, Phil thrives in a climate-controlled room in the local library on premium dog food and ice cream. We treat our soothsayers well.

Besides Phil, today's soothsayers include sportscasters, stock market observers, meteorologists, economists and, sad to say, a few silver-tongued CEOs.

Meteorology, like economics, is truly a dismal science. Many years ago the local society of meteorologists in a large southern city canceled its annual picnic tradition once the sixth consecutive one was rained out. Predictions that tomorrow's weather will be like today's will, on average, beat the forecasts of our toothsome weatherpersons. Nonetheless, they will smile through and explain something about isobars and jet streams that inevitably brought today's weather, though none of this was mentioned yesterday, nor is yesterday's forecast acknowledged.

Whenever a favored football team suffers a disastrous loss, a sportscaster may blame it on the crumbling of its defense...