Discrepantly, def. “. . .in a discordant or inconsistent manner” The OED also records the word’s first use in English to be from a 1601 translation of Montaigne’s Essays
Between you and me, my guilty pleasure is reading histories of ideas. When I read about the evolution of concepts like liberty, autonomy, the Enlightenment(s), equality, capitalism, the nation-state (or histories of that hyphen), I feel I’m actually learning something important. At these times, it matters to me that Isaiah Berlin and Jonathan Israel, both historians of ideas, have very different understandings of “the Enlightenment” that matter to them.
But I’m a practicing policy analyst and should know better than to expect anything to be resolved at that level of abstraction. If I’m learning anything, it is learning discrepantly. It’s the discrepancies–and their many varieties–that become unavoidably visible via the comparison and contrast of concepts at a given time and over time.
“All men are created equal,” but its writer had slaves. “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains,” but its author consigned his five children to an orphanage. Your culture’s version of the concepts differ from ours as if both sets were something like settled knowledge; but something new always turns up for (re)interpretation–and importantly so both of us are repeatedly told. And then, in case it also needs repeating, no major plan–including those for liberty, individual autonomy, Enlightenment, equality and the rest–survives contact with really existing events, situations and contexts.
Some respond to such discrepancies as if they don’t or shouldn’t matter. So what if Jefferson and Rousseau were shits in some of their roles? So what if our idealized ethics turn situational in practice? Don’t we already have more than enough proof that ideas have independently affected human history?
The problem I have with that last question is I’m being asked once again to go off running to levels of abstraction in which I love to thrash about but invariably find insufficient and misleading. Why? Because there is always a knowledge-into-action gap between macro-principle guiding policy and management and micro-operations in implementing or executing policy and management on the ground. Macro-principles do not on their own determine every micro-operation on their own. It takes really-existing practices and skill–particularly those of recognizing system patterns and formulating localized scenarios–to maneuver through the intervening contingencies and conjunctures so as to connect the two poles. And even then there are no guarantees.
That focus on really-existing practices and skill in managing to realize missions and objectives is extremely important. Philosophers like Gilbert Ryle and Michael Oakeshott stressed the importance of thinking adverbially. It’s not democracy as a set of macro-principles we are talking about but what it means to act and behave democratically together (not just individually at the micro-level). Do those practices include voting, free speech, assembly or not? If so, how? If not, what practices are actually denominated when saying people “behave democratically”?
Which leads to my final point: Learning discrepantly is to my mind a set of practices as well.
It’s not about talking away or otherwise avoiding inconsistencies and discordance between human values and human behavior. I don’t think of the aforementioned discrepancies as stumbling blocks but as affordances. Learning discrepantly is identifying, managing and improvising practices for decisionmaking because of, not in spite of, the messy middle. It’s another way to take complexity seriously when the current inconsistencies and discordance open up affordances for ongoing decisionmaking hitherto unseen. (And this is also why there is some kind of justice in the first use of “discrepantly” in translating Montaigne’s Essays, a book all about persisting in the face of human complexities, contradictions and limits).
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 