I

The crux of counterfactual history is a present always not one way only. You want a counterfactual, but for which current interpretation or set of historical interpretations?

There are two moves that generate an answer, working like the blades of a scissors.

One devotes time and attention to “what is happening,” a state of affairs that can be interpreted in multiple different ways. The other devotes time and attention to “what has happened,” a state of affairs that could have turned out differently and so too the allied interpretations. Where the blades slice, they open up not only the contingent nature of events past and present, but also the recasting of what is and has been.

II

This is a problem when it comes to the instruments of risk assessment and management: The only way to get to any such tool is by following the shadow of its very problematic counterfactual history.

It’s not only that “risk” and “management” are historically contingent concepts with forgone alternatives. Their instruments and alternatives can be recast differently at any time.

Consider a city’s building code. Viewed one way, it is sequential interconnectivity (do this-now followed by then-that). But if cities also view their respective building codes as the means to bring structures up to or better than current seismic standards, then the code becomes a focal mechanism for pooled interconnectivity among developers and builders.

That neither is guaranteed should be obvious. That you in no way need recourse to the language of conventional risk management to conclude so should also be.

I have in mind those who regret the passing of pastoralism as if it were a singular institution with its own telos, agency and life-world. It wasn’t and it isn’t. When was the last time these people asked herders their party affiliation? When was the last time they really treated the pastoralist as neoliberal citizen?

I also have in mind those long-trough narratives of depastoralizing, deskilling, disorganizing and dewebbing the pastoralist life-world, leaving behind corpse-pastoralism, flogged by conflicts, mummified by inequality, buried at sea in waves of liquid modernity, dissolved by the quicklime of disaster capitalism and speculative finance, always harboring worse to come.

These commentators are like the freshwater biologists who consider Lethenteron appendix (the American brook lamprey) and Triops cancriformis (a type of tadpole shrimp) to be evolutionary success stories because the organisms haven’t evolved. By this measure, the best pastoralists are like feisty little tardigrades, those near-microscopic (another “marginal”!) organisms that survive in the most hostile environments on the planet.

I have in mind the hangover notion that policy and procedure are at every turn subordinate to state power, that politicians and officials are nothing but the state’s secretariat to capitalists, that capitalisms have entirely colonized every nook and cranny of the life-worlds, and that we have surrendered our minds entirely to politics, such as they are.

I have in mind the disturbing parallel between those who want to save Planet Earth by means of straightforward treatments like stopping fossil fuel or methane-producing cattle and, on the other hand, Purdue Pharma’s promotion of OxyContin as treatment for chronic pain that masked the lethal addiction to this kind of “straightforward” medicine.

Last but not least, I have in mind the remittance-sending household member who is no more at the geographical periphery of a network whose center is an African rangeland than was Prince von Metternich in the center of Europe, when he said, “Asia begins at the Landstraße” (the outskirts of Vienna closest to the Balkans). You can stipulate Asia begins here and Africa ends there, but good luck in making that stick within and across national policies.

Methodological upshot: It cannot be said often enough that you mustn’t expect reproduction of the same, even when reversion to the mean occurs.

–“Margaret Thatcher got it wrong when she famously said that ‘there is no such thing as public money, there is only taxpayer’s money’. The opposite is correct: there is only public money and all taxpayers use that money to pay their taxes. . . .When money returns to the government via taxes, it stops being money.”

–“If saving the planet requires a shift to a largely electrified economy powered by renewable energy, well, long-distance shipping — including air freight — looks much harder to electrify than, say, home heating and local driving.”

–“Domestically, the Confucian revival [in China] dates to the 1980s, raising the question of whether Orientalism and its objectification of the Orient are a thing of the past—as proclaimed by postcolonial critics—or if Orientalism, now re-appropriated by ‘Orientals’ themselves, has emerged victorious in the age of global capitalism.”

–“Beds have been the center of urgent political struggles — be they in prisons, detention centers, hospitals, or nursing homes. Our virtual conversation series centers ‘bed activism,’ [as] complex forms of resistance and visionary care that emerge from the intimate spaces of sick, disabled, detained, and imprisoned peoples.”

–“Kyle Powys Whyte describes the importance of not seeing the climate crisis as novel or unprecedented, explaining ‘today’s status quo, of course, is already an Indigenous ecological dystopia’ . . .”

–“Municipalization of domestic work will make it a public good and constitute domestic workers as public employees. . . .In countries where municipalities are rendering services and utilities to large impoverished sections of society, domestic work can be added on as municipal service.”

–“Kalecki did consider the possibility that capitalists might respond to the loss of their power with an investment strike. . .” [my italics]

–“Consider a concrete example. Policymakers, disappointed by the results of existing frameworks for reporting AI safety incidents,. . . design a bounty scheme whereby technologists and members of the public who discover vulnerabilities in high-risk automated systems receive financial rewards. . .

–“In what might be called a timescape of Anthropocene anxiety, only emergency action can forestall looming catastrophe.. . . .We emphasize [instead] the importance of taking political time and maintain that collective social responses to major climate impacts must center actually existing material and symbolic inequalities and place procedural and distributive justice at the heart of transformative action. This is so even where climate change will have devastating physical and social consequences.” [my italics]

–“I mentioned to you earlier that when we were in the Young Lords, one-third of Puerto Ricans were in the United States and two-thirds in Puerto Rico. Today, it’s 5.8 million Puerto Ricans in the United States and only three million on the island. There are more Puerto Ricans in the United States than there are on the island of Puerto Rico! So the numbers have been reversed. In fact, the Puerto Ricans in the United States are the most powerful part of the Puerto Rican nation, because they have elected officials, and they have an influence that the Puerto Ricans on the island don’t have.”

–“. . .and attempts to dispatch [US] troops to shore up the Guomindang government in 1945-6 were derailed by a transnational wave of GI protests. . .On bases and outposts across the Pacific, soldiers organized mass meetings and demonstrations demanding their rapid demobilization and opposing American military involvement in China, and their efforts were backed by comrades in Europe. Largely airbrushed out of history, the largest strike-mutiny in American history was a rare historical moment. . .”

–“Critics of such participatory initiatives typically accept that they have powerful effects but worry that debates among citizens are deployed as a technology of “governmentality”, producing forms of popular subjectivity compatible with elitist economic systems and technocratic political regimes. This article argues that instrumentalising political debate is harder than either side assumes . . .”

References available on request.

The relentless rise of modern inequality is widely appreciated to have taken on crisis dimensions, and in moments of crisis, the public, politicians and academics alike look to historical analogies for guidance.

Trevor Jackson (2023). The new history of old inequality. Past & Present, 259(1): 262–289 (https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtac009)

I

I have bolded the preceding phrase because its insight is major: The search for analogies from the past for the present is especially acute in turbulent times.

The problem–which is also a matter of historical record–is when the analogy misleads. Jackson, by way of illustrating the point, provides ample evidence to question the commonplace that the US is presently in “the Second (New) Gilded Age,” with rising inequality, populism and corruption last seen in the final quarter of our 19th century.

II

Even were we to have a more apposite analogy from the past for present national trends, we are still stuck with the fallacy of composition: Just because a tree is shady does not mean each leaf is shady. Not all of the country was going through the Gilded Age, even when underway. And doubtless parts of the country are now going through a Second Gilded Age, even if not nationally.

The upshot is that we must press the advocates of this or that analogy to go further. The burden of proof is on the advocates to demonstrate their generalizations hold regardless of the more granular exceptions.

Why would they concede exceptions? Because we, their interlocutors, know empirically that micro and macro can be loosely-coupled, and most certainly not as tightly coupled as theory and ideology often have it. Broad analogies untethered from granular counter-cases float unhelpfully above policy and management.

III

A fairly uncontroversial upshot, I should have thought, but let’s make the matter harder for us.

The same day I read Jackson’s article, I can across the following analogy for current events. Asked if there were any parallels to the Roman Empire, Edward Luttwak, a scholar on international, military and grand strategy, offered this:

Well, here is one parallel: after 378 years of success, Rome, which was surrounded by barbarians, slowly started admitting them until it completely changed society and the whole thing collapsed. I am sure you know that the so-called barbarian invasions were, in fact, illegal migrations. These barbarians were pressing against the border. They wanted to come into the Empire because the Romans had facilities like roads and waterworks. They knew that life in the Roman Empire was great. Some of these barbarians were “asylum seekers,” like the Goths who crossed the Danube while fleeing the Huns. 

https://im1776.com/2023/10/04/edward-luttwak-interview/?ref=thebrowser.com&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Of course, some read this as inflammatory and go no further. Others of course dismiss this outright as racist, adding the ad hominem “Just look who and where publishing this stuff!”

But, following on the earlier point, the method to adopt would be to press Luttwak for definitions and examples, including most importantly counter-cases. Right?

–Only within macro-design can you argue from first principles to fixed conclusions. So, when I’m told that macro-principle also governs really-existing micro-operations (think: universal human rights applying equally to each and every individual across the planet), I’m left wondering just how does this work? It puts me in mind of those Renaissance paintings that leave viewers guessing about just how close to the Virgin Mary did that dove have to get in order to inseminate her.

Did the earlier cave-people share the basic human right to healthcare? Will those smarter-than-human robots also have the basic right to refuse forced labor? Whatever. Nothing, though, stops some principles being grounded explicitly in and around how things work. In my field, policy analysis and management, I can think of three.

I

First—as a matter of principle—every design proposal must pass the ‘‘reliability matters’’ test. Would the proposal, when implemented, reduce the task volatility that managers face? Does it increase their options to respond to volatility? Does it increase their maneuverability in responding to different, often unpredictable or uncontrollable, performance conditions?

The test of efficacy here is not ‘‘Have we designed a system that can be controlled?,’’ but rather ‘‘Is this a system we can manage to redesign when needed?’’

II

Second—as a matter of principle—any macro-design that compels its professionals to work for an extended or indefinite period of time in a task environment outside their domain of competence cannot be expected to produce reliable services. A crisis of course can push real-time professionals to work beyond the limits of the known, and even of the knowable—but management professionalism can’t make the coping professional.

III

Third, as a matter of principle, management alternatives exist because society and economy are complex, i.e., because problems are complex, they can be recast differently.

The social and legal critic Roberto Mangabeira Unger wrote that the dilemma people face is ‘‘the dictatorship of no alternatives’’: ‘‘All over the world, people complain that their national politics fail to deliver real alternatives’’. But if we actually looked all over the world, we’d find much by way of alternative practices useful for our own management.

You cannot complain that, on one hand the planet is overpopulated with 7.5+ billion people, while in the same breadth, complain that too few really-existing practices are available for improving matters.

–The three principles together insist that system designers learn about contingencies that cannot be planned for, but which must be managed in real time, and then often case by case. This means that the responsibility and duty of real-time implementation veto over activating design and technology moves from the designers/planners to the operators/managers–when high reliability is the mandate.

–Paul Claudel, French poet and playwright, wrote in his Journal, “fear of the adjective is the beginning of style”.

–Georges Simenon: “It is said, probably apocryphally, that on completion of yet another novel he would summon his children and shake the typescript vigorously before them, asking, ‘What am I doing, little ones?” to which they would reply ritually, in chorus, ‘You’re getting rid of the adjectives, papa.’”

–“In adapting Mark Twain’s writing for the stage, Mr. Holbrook said he had the best possible guide: Twain himself. ‘He had a real understanding of the difference between the word on the page and delivering it on a platform,’ he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 2011. ‘You have to leave out a lot of adjectives. The performer is an adjective.’”

Principal sources

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii126/articles/michael-maar-by-their-epithets-shall-ye-know-them

https://www.ft.com/content/ac63ae0e-227a-11ea-b8a1-584213ee7b2b

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/theater/hal-holbrook-dead.html

I

Start with current debates over periodizing the last World War.

It’s one thing to adopt the conventional periodization as 1939 – 1945. It is another thing to read in detail how 1931 – 1953 was a protracted period of conflicts and wars unfolding to and from a central paroxysm in Europe. (Think: Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931, Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, the late 1940s Dutch war in Indonesia, the French war in Indochina from the late 1940s through early 1950s, and the Korean War, among others.)

From the latter perspective, the December 1941 – September 1945 paroxysm, with Pacific and European carnage and the Shoah, was comparatively short and embedded in a much longer series of large regional wars, which were less preludes to each other than an unfolding process that was indeed worldwide .

II

Now think of a major earthquake in the same way. What if it were also to be viewed as a central paroxysm in the midst of other disasters that unfolded, before and afterwards?

Current terminology about “longer-term recovery” would be considerably problematized when the longer term is one of disaster unfolding into disaster. Immediate emergency response would look considerably less immediate when embedded in a process of recurring response always before the next disaster.

Source

Buchanan, A. (2023). Globalizing the Second World War. Past & Present: A Journal of Historical Studies 258: 246-281.

I
Some policy analysts have been cast up onto the Island of Yes-But. They’ve managed–so far–to survive its tricky cross-currents that enclose it. On one side is the tide-race about how no one wants to hear policy and management issues are more complex. Yes, but then again analysts have a duty of care to ensure decisionmakers understand the issues aren’t as simple as the latter would like.

On the other side is the tide-race about why analysts never really know what to advise until they make a story or argument for it. Yes, but then again analysts know there’s been a dumbing from the five-page memo into a fifteen-minute PowerPoint presentation into the three-minute elevator speech and now the tweet. What next: Telepathy? “The knowing look” in 10 seconds or less? And yet—it remains true that analysts have to be able to sum up what’s going on and what can be done.

II

More, the island isn’t secure from cross-cutting faults and tremors. Analysts feel the centripetal pressures of closing in on what they think they know (or can know) and at the same time centrifugal pressures of having to open up so as to rethink what has been taken as unknowable or for granted.

III

Another problem is that those decisionmakers who don’t know they live and work on this same island. They act as if they were anywhere else but there with their advisors. Not for the deciders these yes-but’s or and-yet’s. Terra firma means firm and those who don’t understand are out there, shipwrecked or about to be. Of course, these very same decisionmakers are castaways from shipwrecks, but they deny any such origins.

The deniers include decisionmakers who believe there is not any major policy, law, or regulation that cannot be corrected once it has been implemented. Hot News Flash: They’re wrong.

IV

So, what to do? What are analysts to do when politicians are suffocating in their own fat of “stop thinking about the uncertainties and just get on with it!” “We really do know where to start,” they insist. “Leave the complications to academics.”

Well, one thing island analysts can do is recognize they need help from elsewhere off-island. Nothing is going to change for the better on its own here. So maybe it is time to rethink?

For example, George Bernard Shaw, in one of his polemics against the U.S. Constitution, counseled Americans to farm out the important stuff to Europeans: “Some years ago I suggested as a remedy that the American cities should be managed from Europe by committees of capable Europeans trained in municipal affairs in London, Berlin, Paris, etc. San Francisco rejected my advice and tried an earthquake instead. . .” Barcelona and San Francisco, for example?

Of course, European decisionmakers can be just as delusional and in denial as their American counterparts. But that point about municipalism. . . . After all, municipalities in the US have very different origins than those in Europe. . .Not as tongue-in-cheek is GBS as one might first suppose.

I

It’s tempting to see policy analysis in the American setting as the bastard child of American pragmatism and British rationalism: the former with its focus on consequences and less on intentions when deciding; the latter with a focus on the sequence of steps to deciding.

One consequence of this bastardization is that intentions can also end up consequential. If as some philosophers tell us, intentionality is part of action, then intentions are part of decisionmaking. And since decisionmaking is ongoing in policy and management, consequences arising out of a sequence of decisions end up looking like steps in causation. As a result, rationalizing what is pragmatic and pragmatizing the rationalizations can be as difficult to parse–much like the dancer from the dance.

II

So what?

Start with the obvious. It’s because we demand complex organizations be rational (formally. procedural) that they have had also to become pragmatic (informally, less procedural).

Less obvious but as important: Macro-designs formalize as principles what policy analysts and managers cannot help but treat more informally as localized contingency scenarios, while front-line micro-operations treat informally what policy analysts and managers cannot help but treat more formally when they talk about emerging patterns and practices across cases.

For instance, sometimes it’s too early to decide what is even better than the reliable operations of current infrastructures in the face of turbulent conditions and buttressed by emergency preparedness. Why? Because some cases are still early days when it comes to their mix of formal and informal, e.g.:

It is easy to forget that even in the so-called advanced world, domestic running water – for toilets, cooking, personal hygiene, washing clothes and dishes – is a very recent and ephemeral phenomenon, dating back less than a century. In 1940, 45% of households in the US lacked complete plumbing; in 1950, only 44% of homes in Italy had either indoor or outdoor plumbing. In 1954, only 58% of houses in France had running water and only 26% had a toilet. In 1967, 25% of homes in England and Wales still lacked a bath or shower, an indoor toilet, a sink and hot- and cold-water taps. In Romania, 36% of the population lacked a flushing toilet solely for their household in 2012 (down to 22% in 2021). . .

Marco D’Eramo (2022). “Odourless Utopia.” NLF Sidecar (accessed on line at https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/odourless-utopia?pc=1464)

I

How do you know you’ve made a mistake if caught in the grip of everything seemingly uncertain? You know better after the fact, when consequences are clearer. But how do you know in real time that this or that action is a mistake to be avoided in the fog of war or some all around you?

It is important, I think, to insist that real-time error avoidance is still possible even under conditions of widespread systemwide complexity and uncertainties (and not via a–much?–later hindsight).

II

Paul Schulman and I recently undertook research on a set of interconnected critical infrastructures in Oregon and Washington State. We ended up focusing on key interconnectivity patterns and shifts in those configurations with respect to systemwide control variables (think electricity frequency or water main pressures). We also focused on shifting performance standards as operating conditions shifted from normal, through disrupted, into failed, then if possible into recovery and a new normal for the interconnected systems.

The upshot is that not only do major uncertainties and risks change with shifting interconnectivities, but errors to be avoided emerge as well, and clearly so.

For staff in the interconnected critical infrastructures, there are conditions under which it is a shared error for infrastructure operators not to micro-coordinate by way of improvising and communicating laterally (not just up and down a chain of incident command). This holds even if (especially if) emergency response and initial service restoration are not guaranteed after an interinfrastructural shock.

III

So what?

I know I have been too casual in wielding about broad descriptions of “systemwide uncertainty, complexity, and conflict.” Error avoidance, in contrast, can be a far better site indicator for management-on-the-ground.

Source

E. Roe and P.R. Schulman (2023). “An Interconnectivity Framework for Analyzing and Demarcating Real-Time Operations Across Critical Infrastructures and Over Time.” Safety Science online.