I
Which present debt crisis—one, more, or all—are we talking about when it comes to managing better? Is it: that we can’t predict how to adapt better to future debt conditions; that increases in the public debt (including interest payments) are unsustainable even in the short-run; that our latest jargon about better debt management vaporizes like other budgeting fads; and/or that it’s not an issue of if the public debt becomes catastrophic, but only when? The four overlap, but each of represents a different kind of “present.”
Betterment comes to the fore not by having to choose which of present (or in combination) “more accurately” represents reality. Rather it is by insisting that each must be interrogated by asking the further question: “Yes, but what are the implications of not-knowing the present being identified in each?”
Doing so ends up in all manner of “yes-but.” As in: What if “not knowing the present” is the way we keep options open or in reserve, if only because we rightly insist that affairs constellating around the public debt remain difficult after three hundred years grappling with the yes’s and no’s of inexperience in better dealing with it? Indeed, getting to those options is the radical work of “yes, but” when it comes to betterment.
II
Earlier definitions of betterment figured in versions of the 18th century European Enlightenment. The term was used interchangeably with “improvement” or “progress,” though from time to time singled out as its own unit of analysis (most notably, Adam Smith’s “the great purpose of human life which we call bettering our condition”).
The explicit diversity in Enlightenment thinkers, however, made it inevitable that not-knowing, difficulty and inexperience would come into greater focus.
Voltaire discusses not-knowing in the entry “On the Limits of the Human Mind” of his Philosophical Dictionary; David Hume, Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, grappled with the acknowledged idea of “not-knowing as the key to the contented life,” according to one commentator. In the view of another, Adam Smith expressed “an open skepticism about the possibility of knowing definitively what it is we are really doing;” while Immanuel Kant famously wrote about “the unknowability of things-in-themselves.” “Full recognition of the importance of uncertainty and the unknowable in analysing economic processes is an eighteenth-century heritage. . .which cannot be emphasized too often. . .” writes a third observer.
As for difficulty, historian Jonathan Israel sketches its central role in the Radical Enlightenment: “The notion, still widespread today, that Enlightenment thinkers nurtured a naive belief in man’s perfectibility seems to be a complete myth conjured up by early twentieth-century scholars unsympathetic to its claims. In reality, Enlightenment progress breathed a vivid awareness of the great difficulty of spreading toleration, curbing religious fanaticism, and otherwise ameliorating human organization, orderliness, and the general state of health was always impressively empirically based.”
Nor was the role of inexperience remote to versions of the Enlightenment: “In the light of the triumph of Newtonian science, the men of the Enlightenment argued that experience and experiment, not a priori reason, were the keys to true knowledge,” writes historian, Roy Porter, where inexperience ironically became a touchstone for criticizing French Enlighteners: “Above all, critics complained, in politics the philosophes lacked the quality they pretended to value most: experience.” More, the almost universal priority given to education by Enlightenment advocates reflected their acknowledgement that more education was to mean, acutely, more experience.
III
So what? Widespread not-knowing, difficulty and experience can give rise to social dread, and the response to dread is knowing what to do by way of betterment.
The large-scale systems for betterment—whether defined around markets at one end or social protections at the other—are managed in large part because of widespread societal dread over what happens when they aren’t managed reliably and safely. Critical infrastructures for energy, water and healthcare (among others) are so essential that they mustn’t fail, even when (especially when) they change. That they do fail, and materially so, increases the very real pressures that it’s far too costly not to manage them.
We of course are meant to wonder at the perversity of this. But that is the function of this dread, isn’t it? Namely: to push us further in probing what it means to privilege social and individual reliability and safety over other values and desires. We are meant to ask: What would it look like in world where such reliability and safety are not so privileged? For the answer is also altogether evident and right before us: Most of the planet lives in that world of unreliability and little safety. We’re meant to ask—because the answer is that evident, even with (precisely because?) of the yes-buts.
Sources
Gay, P. (1969). The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. The Science of Freedom (Vol. 2). First Paperback Edition. W.W. Norton & Company: New York, NY
Groenewegen, P. (2002). Eighteenth Century Economics: Turgot, Beccaria and Smith and their Contemporaries. Routledge: London and New York
Israel, J. (2010). A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy. Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ.
Lloyd, G. (2013). Enlightenment Shadows. Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK
Porter, R. (2001) The Enlightenment. Second Edition. Studies in European History. Palgrave/Macmillan: Great Britain.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 