Reporter: "What do you think the long-term consequences of the French Revolution will be?"

Zhou Enlai: "I believe it is too early to tell."

(This quote, while authentic, is too good to be true - the quote harks from 1972, and in context it is evident they are discussing the 1968 student unrest, not the 1789 revolution. Still...)

Indeed, takes a while for these things to unfold. For example, what we're seeing today is the result of the unfolding of the liberal program initiated centuries earlier. However, not only is taking time to unfold different from predictability, but specific predictions are not the same as general predictions.

It isn't always impossible to make good general predictions. For example, some papal encyclicals have predicted with spot on accuracy the general character of how things will develop long before they did if certain things aren't sorted out. These sorts of predictions, in part, benefit from concerning the unfolding of philosophical (and theological) beliefs, beliefs which contains within themselves their own logical entailments. So these encyclicals weren't predicting particularities like "what will be the stock price of Amazon in 2030" or "who will win the presidency in 2030 and will this president like ham", but rather the general prevailing conditions, attitudes, etc. characterizing future generations and the resulting social order, for example.

As my grandmother once said (sometime around her 85th birthday), "You know, in school, in history class, 100 years seems like a long time. It's not really."

As the adage goes, the Church thinks in centuries. Who remembers the Arian crisis today? Things seem bad now? Wait a century or two.