I

“We told you there’d be a pandemic and you didn’t listen to us.” Truth told, I’m a bit sour hearing public health experts repeat this continuously.

So I relish my own “I told you so!” back at them. “I’m now telling you you’ve been talking to the wrong people all along!”

II

It’s clear that the people who should have been informed about the dangers of a pandemic were not among the people addressed by experts. I have in mind the professionals who operate our real-time critical infrastructures, like water, electricity, telecommunications and transportation. No one told those men and women in the control rooms and out in the field that COVID-19 would wreak such havoc as it did in systems mandated to be so reliable.

From our interviews in Oregon and Washington State, it’s obvious no one predicted the actual, mega-impacts and interruptions that COVID has had on the real-time operations of core infrastructures, there or beyond. You probably already know essential workers were sent home to work offsite. Arguably less known is that those on-site had to get vaccinated, and some very experienced personnel left as a result. Far less appreciated, COVID put a brake on major infrastructure investment, improvement and management activities. Said one logistic manager of his state’s response, “All [COVID-19] planning happened on the fly, we were building the plane as it moved, we’d never seen anything like this.”

“COVID was a wake-up call,” we were told, again and again, by our interviewees, not something you’d expect to hear had the case actually been: “We told you there’d be a pandemic and you didn’t listen to us!”

III

So what? We wouldn’t have an economy, we wouldn’t have markets, if it weren’t for electricity, water, telecoms and transportation being reliable. Yet to my knowledge the professionals responsible for real-time operations in the infrastructures were never specifically warned and were never specifically talked to by the pandemic experts.

So: Pandemic experts, the next time around–and yes I agree there will be a next time–it’s you who are going to fail because those who didn’t hear were those you didn’t care to know, let alone talk to. Your duty of care is to talk to the right people.

I

In the mid-1970s a group of physicists and political scientists met at MIT and “arrived at the conclusion that if a World Government was not implemented soon, the probability of a nuclear war before the year 2000 would be close to 100 percent”.

But what were their nuclear war scenarios? Without sample details to evaluate, the experts are like the early astrologer who cast Christ’s horoscope and found the end of Christianity in sight.

II

In the early years of World War I, Rainer Marie Rilke, the poet, wrote that “the misery in which mankind has lived daily since the beginning of time cannot really be increased by any contingency. . . Always the whole of misery has been in use among men, as much as there is, a constant, just as there is a constant of happiness; only its distribution alters.” Here too is the literary all-rounder Jean-Paul Sartre, “essentially, there is not much difference between a catastrophe where 300 or 3000 die and one where ten or fifteen die. There is a difference in numbers of course, but in a sense, with each person who dies, so also does a world. The scandal is the same.”

But the numbers do matter in determining whether or not misery is a constant. “From a statistical point of view, which is that of social and political life and of history, there is an enormous difference,” Maurice Merleau-Ponty said of Sartre’s remark. We know from survey research that conclusions are drawn much more confidently from structured surveys and samples consisting of 3000 people than, say, 30 persons.

I may be misremembering, but I think it was Kenneth Boulding, the early heterodox economist, who thought that the greatest contribution of the social sciences to humankind was the sample survey, as imperfect as it is.

Panama, El Salvador and Ecuador import maize for domestic consumption. They paid in dollarized currencies for imports grown on ghost acres (i.e., not in-country) and reliant on virtual water from these other areas embedded in the tonnes of arriving maize. What, in any of this, is “domestic”?

In the same breadth, their governments are told to: promote policies that increase the inflow of remittances but reverse the outflow of skilled talent; mitigate the takeover of domestic sectors by multi-national corporations, but nevertheless ensure the corporations are properly taxed; and couple social protection to production more effectively, but also undertake specific degrowth needed in these unsustainable economies.

“Their” “sectors” “there”?

For the policy analyst, being relevant means offering an alternative to what is criticized. But there are other ways for criticism to be good-enough without offering an alternative. Critique, for example, is pertinent when solutions are not on offer and where “offering solutions” may well make bad messes worse. Indeed, the position of permanent critique resists anything like aiding and abetting sanctioned modes for “acting practically.” Then there’s bearing witness, which can make silent critique very loud indeed (e.g., the Black Sash in apartheid South Africa).

It seems to me that criticism is good enough when it provokes (even if discourages), disturbs (even when debatable), and sharpens attention even because it goes no further.

An example. Science and economics have been much chastised as: religion (e.g., each with metaphysics); imperialist (e.g., colonizing the traditional “why?” and “how?” of the humanities); and for being socially-constructed (i.e., not “the truth”). Also, critiques of science and economics as Big Business stress their production of so much Bad as to shadow any Good.

Good-enough criticism, I think, doesn’t take the position that Bad cancels out Good, as if a profession’s blind spots cancelled its strengths, when on reflection the former are clearly part of the latter. It differs from the kind of critique that wants to buttonhole people and positions once and for all. It’s good enough when the other side of a criticizing “no” is “yes, but.”

We are used to thinking of a creeping crisis, like slow violence, as one that builds up and up until catastrophe is triggered. But then one could just as well say that, given the gap between policies-as-stated and policies-as-implemented, implementation is the creeping crisis of policy-making and planning.

Yet, what is the crisis that results from policies not implemented as stated or planned? What’s the crisis in the longstanding interpretation of implementation as de facto policymaking?

Aren’t we better off for the realism? One example is it takes time to correct for new regulations whose real-time compliance by control room operators would reduce their infrastructure reliability and safety in the situation they face, then and there. Regulation for reliability and safety can’t just be a matter of planning and foresight by the regulator of record only, no matter how careful beforehand. As one interviewee put it to us, you can’t pretest real-time.

To be clear: I like the manifesto below; I agree with it! But that agreement is not because it’s also published as a journal article. Instead, I believe it because, as a manifesto, it demands change now in terms I understand and appreciate historically.

Since my argument depends on the definition of “manifesto” I use, here’s mine:

Always layered and paradoxical, [a manifesto] comes disguised as nakedness, directness, aggression. An artwork aspiring to be a speech act—like a threat, a promise, a joke, a spell, a dare. You can’t help but thrill to language that imagines it can get something done. You also can’t help noticing the similar demands and condemnations that ring out across the decades and the centuries— something will be swept away or conjured into being, and it must happen right this moment. . .This is a form that asks readers to suspend their disbelief, and so like any piece of theater, it trades on its own vulnerability, invites our complicity, as if only the quality of our attention protects it from reality’s brutal puncture. A manifesto is a public declaration of intent, a laying out of the writer’s views (shared, it’s implied, by at least some vanguard “we”) on how things are and how they should be altered. Once the province of institutional authority, decrees from church or state, the manifesto later flowered as a mode of presumption and dissent. You assume the writer stands outside the halls of power (or else, occasionally, chooses to pose and speak from there). Today the US government, for example, does not issue manifestos, lest it sound both hectoring and weak. The manifesto is inherently quixotic—spoiling for a fight it’s unlikely to win, insisting on an outcome it lacks the authority to ensure.

L. Haas (2021). “Manifesto Destiny: Writing that demands change now.” Bookforum accessed online at https://www.bookforum.com/print/2802/writing-that-demands-change-now-2449

In 2023, Mark Duffield and Nicholas Stockton published, “How capitalism is destroying the Horn of Africa: sheep and the crises in Somalia and Sudan,” in the peer-reviewed Review of African Political Economy (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03056244.2023.2264679). To its credit, the Review publishes “radical analyses of trends, issues and social processes in Africa, adopting a broadly materialist interpretation of change.” And what a breadth of fresh air this article is.

First, its tone is direct, its language unequivocally materialist in the great manner of yesterday, its focus is on the marginalized, and, equally important, how could we not want change after reading this?

We present in outline an historically and empirically grounded explanation for the post-colonial destruction of the nation states of Somalia and Sudan. This is combined with a forecast that the political de-development of the Horn, and of the Sahel more generally, is spreading south into East and Central Africa as capitalism’s food frontier, in the form of a moving lawless zone of resource extraction. It is destroying livelihoods and exhausting nature. Our starting point is Marx’s argument that the historical growth and the continuing development of capitalism is facilitated through what he called ‘primitive accumulation’. With regard to the current situation in the Horn, there is a sorry historical resonance with the violent proto-capitalist land clearances that took place from the sixteenth century onward in England, Ireland and Scotland and then in North America. While today, as in Darfur, this may be classified as genocide, the principal purpose of land clearances is to convert socially tilled soils and water resources used for autonomous subsistence into pastures for intensive commercial livestock production, which now in Somalia and Sudan amounts to nothing short of ‘ecological strip mining’.

To repeat, how could you (we) not want radical change when reading further:

. . .we argue that the trade is intimately connected with the deepening social, economic and ecological crisis of agro-pastoralism in the region and the way that livestock value is now realised. Underlying the empirical data is the intensification of an environmentally destructive mode of militarised livestock production that, primarily involving sheep, is necessarily expansive, land-hungry, livelihood destroying and population displacing. Sustained by raw violence and strengthened by United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi investment in Red Sea port infrastructure, the Horn and the Gulf are locked into a deadly destruction–consumption embrace.

More, there is a singular cause and it is clear: “This internationally facilitated mode of appropriation, with its associated acts of land clearance, dispossession and displacement, is the root cause of the current crisis.” Nor is there anything really complex about this:

The depth and cruel nature of the changes in Sudan and Somalia’s agro-pastoral economies cannot reasonably be attributed only to environmental change, scarcity-based inter-ethnic conflict, or avaricious generals per se. To lend these arguments weight, some hold that they combine to produce a ‘complex’ emergency. The only complexity, however, is the contortions necessary to fashion a parallel universe that usefully conceals the rapacity of capitalism. Particularly cynical is the claim, for example, that Somalia’s long-history of de-development is the result of climate-change-induced drought. It is no accident that the same international powers and agencies fronting this claim have, for decades, been active players in the Horn’s de-development.

You cannot imagine how much I want to believe these words! And I take that to be a good measure of just how effective a manifesto this manifesto is, at least for someone like myself.

Manifestos are their own public genre, whatever the publication venue. This is not a policy memo whose second sentence after the problem statement is the answer to: What’s to be done and how? But then we would never look to manifestos for the devil in the details, would we?

Keep the oil in the ground; stop fossil fuels; just don’t emit; just stop cutting down trees; just stop having babies; just stop using plastics; stop defense spending; stop being imperialist; stop techno-solutionism; dismantle capitalism; transform cities; save biodiversity; never forget class, gender, race, inequality, religion, bad faith, identity. . . and. . .

A huge category mistake is committed when conflating (1) the unfolding and interrelated consequences on life, property and markets of, say, a hazardous liquids pipeline explosion on populations and property and (2) the explosion’s consequences for the interconnected critical infrastructure system (ICIS) for those hazardous liquids, which includes not just these pipelines and associated refineries, but also–just as significantly–the electricity and water infrastructures that the former depend upon in real time.

So what? To equate “the system” with the impacts of the spread and interaction of knock-on population-and-property consequences of failure (Cf) is to identify the chief problem as one the lack of systemwide management of Cf. It is as if many official units (jurisdictional, administrative) were not or are not doing their job.

Yet the ICIS is in fact manage in real time by the control rooms of the respective infrastructures (which in turn are regulated systemwide by fewer regulators of record). That is, “coordination” can be taking place within the ICIS around shared overlapping system control variables, albeit not (or to a lesser) extent in the “system” of interconnected impacts (Cfs) from the explosion.

I

People seeking to control uncertain task environments pay a “control premium,” like the poverty premium (where poor people have to pay more for key services, such as insurance, credit, energy, shelter). An exclusive focus on control strategies cost them—and us—more than would be the case were they able to manage in the face of uncertainty. It’s like they are demanding money with menaces from us.

II

Here’s a different analogy to reinforce the point.

Compare algorithmic decisionmaking (ADM) and the current technology for gene editing known by the acronym, CRISPR. When it comes to ADM, the worry is that we don’t know how the algorithm works. What’s happening, we ask, because of the cultural biases imported via the original data into the algorithm? As for CRISPR, the worry is that, even when we know that this rather that gene is being edited, we’re still not sure it’s the right thing to do.

Suppose we had a CRISPR for ADM: We could go into the algorithm and excise cultural bias. But even then you’d have to worry about, e.g., what is bias to some is not to others. For that matter, is there any doubt that a new mechanism promising greater control in addressing one worry won’t produce another worry, equally if not more important?

The upshot: Control cannot answer the questions control poses.

III

So what?

It’s hard to believe, by way of answer, that all the talk about artificial intelligence (AI) “controlling” behavior will not need to be far more nuanced and contextualized for policy and management.

Consider the already-highly automated underwater oil and gas exploration. Alarms produced by autonomous systems during turbulent seas have turned out to be false alarms occurring. Indeed, and this is the point, operating at a higher level of autonomy and having to cope with recurring false alarms may no longer permit the real-time operators to revert, just-in-time, to lower levels of autonomy, e.g., managing (not “controlling”) via more manual operations, as and when nothing else works.

“I have never asked that all trees have one bark” Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Nathan the Wise

I

Each angel is its own species, Thomas Aquinas tells us. “Why mightn’t there be, somehow, a new science for every object?,” asks Roland Barthes. In those I see the rightness and certainty of context I also find in the lines of A.R. Ammons:

though I
have not been here long, I can
look up at the sky at night and tell
how things are likely to go for
the next hundred million years:
the universe will probably not find
a way to vanish nor I
in all that time reappear.

Why not each its own science and species, having-been for the rest of eternity?

II

Is our sense of incompleteness the felt part of an irreducible particularity of each being, that sense we never body forth as representative or total? This sense has been professed by very different world systems and believers:

“The [French] Constitution of 1795, like its predecessors, was made for man. But there is no such thing as man in the world. In my lifetime I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc.; thanks to Montesquieu, I even know that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare that I have never in my life met him; if he exists he is unknown to me,” declared conservative critic, Joseph de Maistre.

Or consider the more recent lines of poet, Fernando Pessoa,

They spoke to me of people, and of humanity.
But I’ve never seen people, or humanity.
I’ve seen various people, astonishingly dissimilar,
Each separated from the next by an unpeopled space