On the Apparent Weather-Makers
The apparent weather-makers of politics. — Just as people tacitly assume that he who understands the weather, and foretells it about a day in advance, makes the weather, so even the educated and learned, with a display of superstitious faith, ascribe to great statesmen as their most special work all the important changes and conjunctures that have taken place during their administration, when it is only evident that they knew something thereof a little earlier than other people and made their calculations accordingly — thus they are also looked upon as weather-makers — and this belief is not the least important instrument of their power. — Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
The aphorism cuts two ways. First: he who foresees the weather is not he who makes it. Then, more sharply: the crowd’s belief that the forecaster is also the maker “is not the least important instrument of their power.” The statesman’s power therefore feeds not only on what he knows, but on what is believed he can do, and that belief rests on a single confusion: the confusion between sign and cause.
Christ rebukes the Pharisees for this very confusion: in the evening you say it will be fair, for the sky is red; in the morning, foul weather, for the sky is red and threatening; you know how to discern the face of the sky, but you cannot discern the signs of the times (Matthew 16:2-3). Skill with signs is not yet skill with time, and skill with time is not yet mastery over it. Scripture keeps that distance open from end to end: God asks Job who cut a channel for the downpour and a path for the thunderbolt, who is the father of the rain (Job 38:25-28); Jeremiah asks whether any of the idols of the nations can bring rain, or whether the heavens themselves can give showers, and answers: it is You, O Lord (Jeremiah 14:22); the sun rises on the evil and on the good (Matthew 5:45); and at Lystra the Apostle tells the crowd that God gave them rain from heaven and fruitful seasons (Acts 14:17).
On the Sea of Galilee, the fishermen-disciples knew the lake better than anyone: which signs herald the wind, how long a storm lasts, when to make for shore. If there ever was a guild that “knew the weather a day in advance,” it was theirs. And yet, when the wind came down and the waves covered the boat, they cried out: “Lord, save us, we are perishing!” (Matthew 8:25). The One who slept rose, rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was a great calm. Their wonder was not that they had found a better forecaster, but that even the winds and the sea obey Him (Matthew 8:27). The disciples knew the weather; Christ commands it. Between the meteorologist and the Master there is no difference of degree, but of order: the first reads what the Other has ordained.
Dogmatically, the distinction has an exact form. St. John of Damascus teaches that God foreknows all things but does not predetermine all things: He knows what lies within our power without predetermining it, because He does not will evil and does not compel virtue, and events do not happen because He knows them, but He knows them because they will happen (Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, Book II). If not even perfect foreknowledge is the cause of free acts, still less can a man’s foreknowledge a day ahead be a cause. St. Basil the Great, in the Hexaemeron, brought down on the same foundation the astrologers’ claim that their knowledge of the signs in the stars made them masters of fate. And Blessed Augustine shows, in the City of God (Book V), that the same Providence gave dominion to Augustus and to Nero, to Constantine and to Julian, precisely so that it might be seen that it is not measured by the one who receives it.
The statesman, then, is not the master of the weather but its instrument, and Scripture does not shrink from saying so. “Shall the axe boast itself against him who chops with it? Or shall the saw exalt itself against him who saws with it?” (Isaiah 10:15). Cyrus is called the Lord’s anointed, girded by God though he did not know Him (Isaiah 45:1-5); the king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord like rivers of water (Proverbs 21:1); Pilate, who boasts that he has power to crucify and to release, hears that he would have no power at all unless it were given him from above (John 19:10-11). The Apostle’s word, that there is no authority except from God (Romans 13:1), does not sanctify the one who rules; it shows him his place.
Nebuchadnezzar is the icon of the man who took the weather for his own deed. Walking on the roof of the palace, he said: “Is not this great Babylon, which I have built by my mighty power as a royal dwelling, for the honor of my majesty?” (Daniel 4:30). The word was not yet finished when a voice from heaven announced that the kingdom had departed from him; his reason departed too, until he knew that the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whomever He wills. To appropriate the glory of a time that was received is the oldest form of the passion Evagrius calls kenodoxia, vainglory, which he places before pride and which cannot live without witnesses. The crowd that believes in the weather-maker is the witness it needs.
Philosophically, the aphorism raises a problem Aristotle placed at the foundation of science: the difference between knowing that a thing is and knowing why it is (Posterior Analytics I.13). His example is precisely that of sign and cause: from the fact that the planets do not twinkle we infer that they are near, but they do not twinkle because they are near. Not twinkling is the sign, nearness is the cause, and whoever takes the sign for the cause has turned the order of things upside down. The forecaster has the sign; the crowd ascribes to him the cause. The Latins named the error post hoc, ergo propter hoc: after this, therefore because of this.
Machiavelli, who knew the trade, described it without illusions: fortune, like a river in flood, is the arbiter of half our actions; the wise man does not stop the river but raises dikes in times of calm, and the prince who rested wholly on fortune falls when it changes (The Prince, XXV). The description is almost Nietzsche’s: the statesman knows something earlier and makes his calculations. Tolstoy carried the thought to its end: the king is history’s slave (War and Peace), and the names of great men are labels pasted on events so that those who do not understand them can read them. And Max Weber observed the consequence: charismatic authority lasts as long as the followers’ belief in it; if for a long time the leader brings no well-being, the charisma evaporates and the subjects say the god has forsaken him. He who was the weather-maker becomes, when the weather turns, guilty of the weather.
Psychologically, the mechanism is documented in each of its parts. The crowd judges by outcome rather than by decision (outcome bias, Baron and Hershey), and once it knows the ending it believes the ending was foreseeable (hindsight bias, Fischhoff), so that the one who “foresaw” seems wise in advance. Those who guessed right are seen; those who guessed wrong are forgotten. Tetlock, following two decades of specialists’ political forecasts, found results only slightly better than chance, and “the one who knew earlier” is in large part a case of survivorship bias. On top of this, people ascribe the outcomes of large systems to the persons who head them, because a person is easier to grasp than a system (the fundamental attribution error, Ross); Meindl, Ehrlich and Dukerich called this the “romance of leadership” (1985), the stronger the more extreme the outcome.
The circle closes in the statesman himself. Self-serving attribution (success is mine, failure is the times’) and the illusion of control (Langer, 1975) make him the first believer in his own power. He who began by knowing something a little earlier ends by believing he commanded: the crowd makes him a maker, and then he lets himself be made. Freud saw in the crowd’s tie to the leader the placing of one and the same figure, of a paternal type, in the place of each person’s own ideal (Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 1921): whoever can no longer bear the uncertainty of the times wants someone who holds them in his hand.
But there is something the aphorism, by its very edge, passes over: the crowd’s superstition is not the invention of a lesser mind, but a wrong address for a right instinct. People sense, rightly, that the weather is governed, that events are not blind chance, that someone holds the thread. Their mistake is to place this sense on the shoulders of a man. Israel, asking for a king “that we also may be like all the nations,” that the king may go out before them and fight their battles (1 Kingdoms 8:5, 20), does nothing else, and the Lord tells Samuel that it is not he they have rejected, but Me (1 Kingdoms 8:7). The Book of Wisdom describes the same road: men who could not honor their ruler in his presence made an image of him from afar, and the multitude, drawn by the craftsman’s skill, began to worship as a god the one they had a little before honored as a man (Wisdom 14:17-20); and this became a snare for the living, because men, enslaved by calamity or by tyranny, bestowed on stone and wood the Name that cannot be shared (14:21).
The same thing happened, at the scale of a single man, at Caesarea: Herod, arrayed in royal robes, addressed the people, and the multitude shouted: “The voice of a god, and not of a man!”; and the angel of the Lord struck him at once, because he did not give glory to God (Acts 12:21-23). At Lystra, Paul and Barnabas, taken for Zeus and Hermes, tear their clothes and cry out that they are men of like nature (Acts 14:11-15). This is what the statesman who is not a weather-maker looks like: he refuses the crown.
The aphorism must itself be bounded, lest it fall to the opposite side. It does not say that the statesman does nothing, but that he does not make the weather. Joseph, in Egypt, does exactly what Nietzsche describes: he knows something earlier than others and makes his calculations accordingly, seven years of plenty, seven of famine, the granaries filled in time. The difference lies in the address he gives: “It is not in me; God will give Pharaoh an answer” (Genesis 41:16); “God has shown Pharaoh what He is about to do” (41:25); and later, to his brothers: it was not you who sent me here, but God (45:8). His foresight was not an instrument of power but a service; because he set it in its place, he remained a man and fed a people. The work of man is real, but it is not the root: Paul plants, Apollos waters, but God gives the increase (1 Corinthians 3:6-7). And the question remains open for the philosopher himself, who would later long for the maker of new values: is not he, too, in the order of the spirit, another weather-maker whom the crowd must be made to believe?
Finally, the same weather is within. The Fathers call the clouds of the soul thoughts (logismoi) and teach that the watchful man (nepsis) senses their coming earlier than others: he sees when they gather, from which quarter, what wind carries them. But neither does he make them, nor command them. He knows his sky, and that is all; the calm is given by the One who rose from sleep and rebuked the sea. That is why at the end of the vigil stands, not self-mastery, but the cry from the boat, made a short prayer: Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me. The Psalm tells what follows the cry: He made the storm a gentle breeze, and its waves were hushed; and they were glad because they were quiet, and He guided them to their desired haven (Psalm 106:29-30).
