People have always worried about the future, but not always in the same way. This at least is Paul Scherz’s argument in his very interesting new book, Tomorrow’s Troubles. Scherz, a professor of moral theology and ethics at the Catholic University of America, argues that how we worry these days lies at the root of some of our social and personal problems. We willingly surrender a big chunk of our freedom to managers to enhance our security. Anxiety-ridden, we worry constantly about roads not taken. Risk-averse, we tend to run a cost-benefit analysis whenever we leave the house. Even with the pandemic over, I still know healthy people who restrict their social lives to Zoom, for fear of catching COVID. 

With his book, Scherz has joined a relatively new trend in writing that explores arcane subjects that seem beneath our notice, but which, when examined more closely, allow us to see the world in a fundamentally new way. In commercial publishing, the trend includes books such as Cod and Salt. Everyday staples, accepted as a given and with presumably nothing interesting to say about them, are, in fact, integral parts of larger stories that involve empires rising and falling, and world history deflected onto a new path. In academic publishing, we find the same trend in books about rules or the number zero. What we assume to have always been, and taken for granted, has not always been. An evolution occurred; people’s attitudes toward the subject changed. When it did, society shifted on its axis. Something like this occurred with the subject of risk, observes Scherz.

The idea of risk did not develop until the late medieval period, writes Scherz. Before then, people saw events as random—the “arbitrary swerve of atoms that were the fundamental particles of reality”—or, in the case of Aristotle, something that proceeded because of a cause, but with no way to estimate the probability of any event occurring. The early Christian authors simply enfolded chance into God’s providence. They, too, lacked any science of risk.

Change occurred in the mid-seventeenth century when the French philosopher Pascal developed a mathematical probability theory applicable to a wide range of things. How should a gambler’s pot be divided when the game is interrupted? Is believing in God a good deal if it requires a turning away from earthly pleasures? Soon, people began to appreciate how all aspects of life could be seen as a wager, with each choice taking the chooser down a different road. A person’s goal was to choose the road that would yield the optimal combination of costs and benefits. 

Pascal’s approach evolved into today’s risk-based decision theory, which does more than just describe how people weigh costs and benefits as they plot their futures. As Scherz observes, risk-based decision theory has become prescriptive and normative. We are not simply able to calculate risk. You must calculate risk to be a responsible person. The theory guides what many people in positions of influence consider to be the only right way to approach decision-making. For example, if you choose to eat fatty foods instead of healthy ones, thereby putting your future health at risk, the authorities declare you to be misguided and insist on you being re-educated so that you choose differently next time. If that doesn’t work, you may be kept from buying fatty foods altogether. 

From this new approach to risk, Scherz says, also springs much of today’s anxiety. People imagine before them a variety of different routes they can take in life, all turning on a decision they make after calculating the various probabilities of enjoying happiness going forward. Their thinking is premised on a particular approach to time. They imagine different futures. The metaphor for time ceases to be a flowing river or an arrow, and instead becomes a decision tree. Thus, they grow anxious when approaching the future, fearing they might “miss out” by making the wrong choice and going down the wrong path. Even as they proceed down their chosen path, they imagine counterfactuals—“what ifs”—as the alternative paths, imagined lying off to the side, haunt their actual present.

I admit, it is hard for this writer to think otherwise. Indeed, doing so seems almost … un-American. Tocqueville observed that in Europe, peasants danced and frolicked when they had time off, while in America, a working man sat by his fireside alone, drank, and thought about his business. Tocqueville attributed this to the fact that Americans can rise above their station. Rather than fritter away time dancing in the present, the American working man preferred to combine the pleasure of calculating his future business risk, and the pleasure of drinking at the same time. I, too, enjoy making probabilistic calculations about my futile writing career while having a beer.

Scherz offers alternative modes of thinking about the future. He cites philosopher Henri Bergson’s notion of “lived time duration,” where the past continually influences the future, rather than time unfolding as a series of defined moments. According to Bergson, we erroneously imagine time as a series of discrete points, with a decision occurring at a single point—the moment when the fork supposedly begins. In fact, Bergson says, time is a lived experience, with different memories, thoughts, and feelings running through it. It is a dynamic progress that can never be isolated at any fixed point. There is no single moment in time, or point zero, from which a decision might spring and a fork begin. Such an isolated moment in time is an illusion—one that gives rise to decision trees and lots of anxiety. 

Scherz puts this concept to great use at the end of his book when he encourages people to adopt the Christian idea of providence, which also looks at time as a dynamic process, in this case, lived in relation to God’s will. Doing so takes the edge off the constant worrying about whether one made “the right decision” at that “fork in the road.” It helps those who berate themselves for “choosing wrong,” feel regret, and roll over in their minds “what if.” According to the idea of providence, people make choices because they are what they are. They are the creatures that God made. In the kind of paradox that Christianity is famous for, people choose freely, but there is also no choosing otherwise. So don’t fret over it.

The obsession with calculating risk has also led to our obsession with security. People were not always so obsessed, Scherz notes. Indeed, until the modern period, an obsession with security was viewed quite negatively. Today, in contrast, security is viewed as a necessity. Again, taking a Christian position, Scherz wisely observes how this obsession can make people miserable. 

The obsession with security typically plays out in the purchase of consumer goods. It inevitably leads people to compare themselves to others over who enjoys the most consumer goods, Scherz says. People then fall prey to ambition and greed. And yet no person’s security is more vulnerable than the ambitious person’s security, as that security lies at the mercy of events beyond his or her control. Because religion gently represses ambition and greed, it can spare a person quite a bit of unnecessary misery.

But what about those who project their minds into the future and worry only about meeting basic needs? Do they also need religion? Isn’t such worrying part and parcel of being a responsible person? Scherz notes that human beings, unlike non-rational animals, have the capacity to anticipate and dwell on what it would be like to run out of the food, clothing, and shelter they enjoy in the present. This ability to anticipate inevitably leads them to make probabilistic risk calculations as they plot their way forward. It’s anxiety-provoking, true, but is there any other way to live?

Even here Scherz invokes religion and the necessity of resisting the temptation to cast oneself into the future. “Do not focus on the comparison between the present and the future but only look to God, trusting in him,” he writes. There is some wisdom in what Scherz says. Do not try to be your own Providence. It never works. Jews have their own comedic version of this idea in the old Yiddish saying, “What makes God laugh? Answer: People making plans.” 

Scherz recognizes that worrying about meeting basic needs in the future is necessary. Nevertheless, religion helps people to enjoy what they have in the present by prodding them to scrutinize their motivation for worrying about the future. Scherz encourages people to look into themselves and interrogate their attitude, to make sure “forks in the road” and “rational decision making” have not overtaken their thoughts and added to their anxiety. Also, Scherz observes, people should ask themselves whether they want to meet basic needs in the future, or, in fact, really want a “retirement of their dreams.” In the latter case, the desire for security goes from meeting basic needs to being able to buy every consumer good, which worsens anxiety by another route.

Scherz says the obsession with risk calculation and security has given rise to two rival political philosophies, both of which turn people into objects of probabilistic analytics. People end up being treated the way chemists treat molecules in a lab experiment. In one form or another, these philosophies erase the individual and submerge him or her in a predictable population, the goal being to enhance that population’s security more generally. 

The first philosophy, managerial governance, uses the power of experts and bureaucracies, both state and corporate, to control people’s behavior and hold risk at bay. The problem with this philosophy is that it robs people of their freedom. 

The other philosophy, neoliberalism—basically, traditional market capitalism—views risk, or at least entrepreneurial risk, as a source of productive opportunity rather than a danger. According to neoliberalism, not central planning but markets should direct society, and while some individual persons may fail, society as a whole is freer and wealthier, with more people able to fulfill their individual desires. The problem with this model is that when everyone is free, and the cages are emptied, sometimes you have free foxes chasing free chickens. Those individuals who fail are people, too, Scherz notes, and while neoliberalism provides them with some support, there are limits. In addition, not everyone starts out in life from the same position—the fox has definite advantages over the chicken—so questions of equity and justice arise. On an individual level, the free market can be terrifyingly destructive, leading to social unrest.

Here Scherz offers an alternative, and in doing so works in the long tradition of others who have sought a “third way” between neoliberalism and top-down managerialism. I myself was exposed to this tradition decades ago, as a college student, when I read the works of Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, Michael Walzer, and Roberto Unger, all of them trying to move beyond the Rawls-Nozick debate and illuminate a hybrid governing philosophy that drew from the best in managerialism and neoliberalism. Scherz’s approach is refreshingly different from some of these earlier ones, drawing inspiration from religion rather than from secular philosophy, and probably most akin to MacIntyre’s approach. At the same time, his paradigm keeps a healthy toehold in secular philosophy.

He uses a Thomistic framework of practical judgment that emphasizes prudence in individual decision-making. Prudence, readers will recall, is also the operative term in the philosophy of Edmund Burke. According to Scherz, prudence needs to be given a place at the table when plotting a course of action, not replacing probabilistic risk assessments but complementing them. Relying too much on quantified risk/benefit calculations tends to objectify people. It is also anti-democratic because average people cannot grasp the models. Prudence benefits both the policymaker drawing up grand plans and the individual trying to decide how to proceed in private life, for in both cases it starts out with a commonsense judgment about what all this decision-making is aiming at. 

Scherz’s paradigm is probably most helpful on the individual level. On a societal level, for the last two millennia, there have been basically three forms of economic arrangement. The first has been some variation on the planned economy, such as socialism, managerialism, and mercantilism, where individuals are told what to be and what to do. The second has been some variation on free market capitalism, such as neoliberalism, where individuals pursuing their own desires about what to be and what to do drives the economy. The third has been the traditional economy, where tradition, such as what one’s parents or grandparents did, tells individuals what to be and what to do. By the standards of our day, the third is the strangest, and practically a non-starter. When Scherz uses religion to seek the right balance between neoliberalism and managerialism, his paradigm has real value. If he were to use it to strike out on an altogether new path—unrelated to the paradigm of the traditional economy, yet nonetheless falling under that third category best described as “none of the above”—most Americans would find it too strange to comprehend.

But as a guide to life on an individual level, Scherz’s paradigm has much to offer. Scherz wisely understands that religion has much to offer. For the anxiety-ridden among us, good advice about how to think about life can be more beneficial than a drug on those sleepless nights spent worrying about all those “what ifs” and roads not taken.