Have you wondered how narrow the world must be if indeed “power is the master narrative of politics”? What’s more bloviating: The economist’s “the opportunities are attractive, if technological and regulatory challenges are overcome” or the engineer’s “the opportunities are attractive, if economic and regulatory challenges are overcome.” Either way, their scapegoating “regulation” is to discipline.
Remember, the very same politicians believe there is not any major legislation or market reform that can’t be corrected once implemented. Hot News Flash: They’re wrong. Also think of those cases where power politics and material interests led to counterproductive outcomes unforeseen by power-makers. There surely had to be cheaper ways for the US to get the oil than undertaking two wars in Iraq.
Nature is on an investment strike in the climate emergency, and the Precautionary Principle insists we avoid positions that may have extreme consequences in favor of a more cautious approach. The question immediately arises, however: Where does the control come from to achieve that avoidance? You can legislate the Principle, but you can’t control its execution. More to the point, aren’t critical infrastructures the only real-time large-scale mechanism we have to manage for avoidance of consequential events we can’t control?
“Wicked problems, what do you want from us?” Yet consider all that has been lost by forgoing a one-off tax on windfall profits made because of the COVID-19 pandemic. So like the absence of official scenario planning in the Soviet Bloc because there were no alternative scenarios to compare against. If everything is political, how then is that not ridiculous? The repeated calls for Big-T transformations are a fixture like baby Jesus in all those Renaissance paintings of the Virgin.
Complexity doesn’t annihilate life; it is life. Just as war and pandemic create their own contingencies, so too the monumental wreckage of human intentions—good ones and bad—unmakes a stable present. Or if you prefer, make a complex one where unrealized intentions criticize everything that happens instead. I want to underscore just how much prejudice any “reliance on hindsight” is in this world of not-knowing, inexperience and difficulty. Even if we instead improvise with what’s at hand rather than “rely on the past,” it is as an avant-garde reinvents itself.
If, as so often advised, we are to scale up program and project success, how then do we scale out their failure, which is just as interconnected a phenomenon? The point is that success, just like progress, is something understood at best only retrospectively. This means it is better to talk about accomplishments, admitting all the while that their past and future interconnections are not complete. Even classical ballet, which put perfection before reliability, didn’t have a stable choreography.
To believe Kant, the three most important questions in our lives are future-oriented: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? That is the pull side: The often ambiguous ends to be achieved through more knowledge and hope are what pull us into the future. There is the push side of present tensions as well: the centripetal pressures of closing in on what we think we really know (or can know) and the centrifugal pressures of opening up what has been taken as intractable, for granted or unknowable. The good news is that ambiguity, like any metaphor, demands to be evaluated.
The litmus test that a policy or management issue is overly complexified or overly simplified is whether it can be recast in ways that open up fresh options for intervention without gainsaying its complexity. If—and yes it is a big “if”—a simplification can be recast as complex in ways that new interventions are now plausible or if the issue thought to be so complex no further action is possible can be recast to show otherwise, then the gist of the matter has been pushed and pulled beyond the current exaggerations. To recognize that your account can and should go further is, on the other hand, no exaggeration.
