The Augustinian threefold present—as in: the past as present remembrance, the present as current consciousness, and the future as present expectation—is the cognitive linchpin of real-time management.
Yet, it’s an odd sort of a-historicism to deny utopian possibilities because we live in an endless present that forecloses on anything like the unexpected future.
Actually, the unexpected event is informative. In this case, uncertainty isn’t the absence of information.
It is one thing to say the present advances to the future it helps render for itself; it is quite another thing to say the future advances to the contingencies the present affords. That latter is like finding the best hamburger in town at the Vietnamese diner, at least for now.
Catastrophism, like irony, is a knowingness, not knowledge. As when people are more wont to quote Rilke about death being the part of life turned away from us rather than Wittgenstein to the effect that death is not an event in life.
Ironically, the post-apocalyptic novel—doomer lit generally—nails home the fact that we don’t need widespread fear and dread of COLLAPSE to provoke remedy and progress, because, well, we no longer believe in either. Less repeatedly said: But this means you are still here, reading the very words.
If, as they say, need connects everything, then rarely have we been as connected as we were when isolated from each other during the pandemic.
Janet Flanner, the journalist, reported in 1945 from war-struck Paris: “Everything here is a substitute for everything else.” Think: Cigarettes could be traded for food, food could be traded for clothes, clothes could be traded for furniture, and so on. It is in disaster where everything is connected to everything else; that’s why the only thing complete is “complete disaster” these days.
Not to worry, we’ll scale up later. Later on, presses the happy-talk of true believers, we’ll relax assumptions and add realism. Don’t bother the details; we know how to reduce overpopulation (just don’t have babies!) and save the environment (just don’t cut down the trees!). Just keep fossil fuel in the ground! So much of this suffocates in its own fat: This time it’s different; leave the complications for later.
You’d think that “radical” in “radical uncertainty” would require responses other than the same-old same-old. Yet in his book on the last financial crisis, Mervyn King, former head of the Bank of England, ends up recommending more of the same, i.e.: Radical uncertainty–King’s term–needs to be better reflected in economic and financial theories and practices. It seems that “radical” is dumbed down at the precise moment when needed most.
There is something worryingly “closed-time” about the Precautionary Principle. If we accept its definition—“the principle that the introduction of a new product or process whose ultimate effects are disputed or unknown should be resisted”—then the precaution is based on what is known/unknown by way of effects understood now. If so, there appears to be little or no possibility—no second chance—of any “afterwards” that demonstrates when the initial precaution was irreversibly in error.
And yet. . .the more you have to lose, the less you can take for granted. We are left somewhere between “Though to/hold on in any case means taking less and less/for granted…” and “to lose/again and again is to have more/and more to lose…” (Amy Clampitt from her “A Hermit Thrush” and Mark Strand from his “To Begin”). What to do? Elizabeth Bishop suggests in “One Art”: “Then practice losing farther, losing faster”.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 