Nothing’s Certain but Uncertainty
The following interview with Liu Moxiao on the subject of cascading uncertainties was published (in Chinese) in Journal of Mass Communication (Beijing) August 2022
The COVID-19 pandemic has unexpectedly ravaged the world since early 2020 and brought about a series of tricky problems such as constantly emerged virus variants, increased hate crime and depressed economic performance. Faced with all these problems and other unknown challenges, people tend to feel increasingly anxious, vulnerable and insecure. Do you think COVID-19 is making our world more uncontrollable and more uncertain than that of the past?
Prof. John Keane: Our planet has been ravaged many times by pestilence, yet every season of disease is a life-pounding moment when normality flounders, anxious uncertainties flourish and thoughts turn darkly inwards. Pandemics tear apart old habits. They break hearts. People grow fearful. Death looms. Certainties are tossed to the wind. In their guts, people feel the need to rethink things afresh.
The new global pestilence is similarly breeding bundles of new uncertainties. In countries such as the United States, Germany and India, the symptoms and signs are everywhere: people’s everyday fears of catching the virus, rising numbers of infections, dramatic increases in hospitalization and death rates. Financial insecurity is rising. The rich grow richer while workers grow exhausted, lose their jobs, or exit the labour market. Working parents forced to turn themselves into homeschool teachers are suffering rough times. Gender disparities are growing. In South Korea, business owners have shaved their heads in protest against the lockdowns that are hurting their businesses. These and other effects of the pestilence seem to have cascading effects: the insecurities generated by the virus and the way it’s being handled by governments, companies and citizens are snowballing. Beneath these uncertainties lie other unknowns, including fears about the probability that a whole generation of people survives Covid-19 with chronic conditions such as lung fibrosis and damaged kidneys. It’s too early to tell whether positive breakthroughs and public benefits flow from this new pestilence. Whether public commitments to improved health care, well-being and environmental responsibility grow stronger remains to be seen. For the moment, many societies in ‘the West’ are grumpier and angrier.
And the sense of uncertainty is spreading?
Yes, things are indeed serious, but dogmatically pessimistic claims about a new age of hyper-uncertainty are questionable. When seen historically, it’s unclear whether, and to what extent, our uncertainties are worse than the anxieties produced by previous periods of calamity. Two examples: are the difficulties of our era and fears of an uninhabitable planet comparable in scale and depth to the disasters of the first half of the 20th century, with its economic crises, a ‘Spanish flu’ pestilence that killed 5 percent of the world’s population, failed empires, the destruction of parliamentary democracy, totalitarianism and catastrophic global wars that robbed more than 100 million soldiers and civilians of their lives? Another example: how do the uncertainties of our age compare with the medieval pandemic that began in China in the early 1330s? Together with a civil war that was raging at the time, that plague killed half the population of China, moved along trade routes to what is today the Middle East, Europe and North Africa Historians tell us that in just several years this bubonic plague, known as the Black Death, killed at least a third of the European population. Half the population of Italy’s Siena died. It may sound strange to say, and it may be cold comfort, but comparatively speaking our pestilence, though more thoroughly global and traceable to our unprecedented wrecking of the biomes in which we dwell, seems for the moment to be much less lethal. History matters when trying to make sense of the period of great uncertainty we’re living though
Boccaccio’s The Plague of Florence 1348
How to understand or make sense of “uncertainty”? It seems to have a close relationship to concepts like ambiguity, pessimism and catastrophe.
Prof. John Keane: Uncertainty is a tricky word. We don’t really know how to respond straightforwardly to challenging, unsettling questions about its contours. Dictionaries tell us that it means lack of sureness about someone or something. Uncertainty ranges from situations in which we’re moderately hesitant about a course of action through to contexts such as uncivil war, economic collapse or the grave illness or death of a loved one where people’s lives are plagued by extreme uncertainties that have deeply upsetting or paralysing effects.
You’re right to mention that uncertainty parades under various names, such as doubt, skepticism and suspicion. But there’s a paradox in all this: when we attempt to get a grasp of the notion of uncertainty it proves elusive. Even the definition of uncertainty is uncertain. Uncertainty is the refuge of ambiguity. That should come as no surprise, for only life unaffected by flows of time – imagine the safe and secure life of deities, or a God, or angels in heaven - can be defined with any certainty. Uncertainty is a fickle character, a capricious tormenter of human yearnings for certitude, an irritable doubter of certainty and a chronic feature of all human action. We could say the good thing about this period of global disruption is that it is teaching us once again that uncertainty can’t be removed from our lives. Modern dreams of eliminating uncertainty through timeless knowledge, social planning, technocratic government and consumer happiness are false promises. There’s no known solution to the uncertainty of our human condition and the role it plays within our lives and the habitats in which we dwell. Uncertainty can of course bring us misery, drag us down, humiliate us, and leave us wallowing in despair. But here we need to tread carefully. We shouldn’t despair: the admission that we’re stuck with uncertainty, fated to live with the surprises it springs on us, can be a vital source of hope that our present-day lives won’t stay the same, and that we have a chance to improve the way we live together on this planet. A century ago, in his Psychology of Worldviews (1919), the German philosopher Karl Jaspers pointed out that those moments when we are gripped by uncertainty and face basic ‘limit situations’ can remind us that we are fragile and finite beings for whom dignity, freedom, happiness and meaningful living become truly precious. The sociologist Hartmut Rosa has recently said much the same thing: our sense that life is uncontrollable is a precondition of feeling alive and ‘resonating’ with the world.
Apart from Covid-19, do you think there are other sources that contribute to the current uncertainty?
Prof. John Keane: There are indeed other sources of uncertainty. It’s as if they’ve chosen to conspire, to produce cascading uncertainties. Our planet and its peoples are passing through an era defined by multiple uncertainties. Floods and fires, species destruction, shrinking US power, talk of the spiritual decadence of the West, disaffection with democracy, the rebirth of a belligerent Russia and a newly strident China are among the forces responsible for the rising tides of uncertainty. For many Western observers, they are doomsayers’ delights. Some pessimists speak of a great leap backwards, a regression towards catastrophe, a rebirth of the disquiet and fear and violent breakdowns that marked the world of the 1920s and 1930s. They are sure not only that we are gripped by VUCA – volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, to use the trendy managerial acronym - but also that the future will bring only threats, rather than new opportunities to live well. My former Cambridge colleague John Dunn, not known for his optimism, is among the conservative scholars who are speaking of the devastation we’ve foolishly brought on ourselves. They suggest that human stupidity is ensuring the irreversibility of current trends. They say it may well be too late to avert a global catastrophe. Their style of catastrophist thinking is growing in popularity. Schopenhauer is again fashionable. While there’s no agreement about the root causes of the unfolding tragedy, pessimism is the new cool, given wings by the ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ mentality of breaking news journalism, and by the information-spreading dynamics of networked, communicative abundance. The combined effect is to ensure that a collective sense of doom is enjoying an unprecedented boom. Or so it seems.
You’ve mentioned that breaking news formats as well as journalists’ love of sensationalism and the “go viral” nature of information spreading on social media platforms are all intensifying the pessimism of many people when facing multiple uncertainties. Could you elaborate more on the role of media in this uncertainty trend?
Prof. John Keane: The outbreak and spread of the Covid-19 pestilence has unfolded in the age of communicative abundance. The whole of life is media-saturated and a plethora of public watchdog and barking-dog institutions is ensuring that power comes under media scrutiny, as never before. Media events are constantly happening. This fact marks off the Great Pestilence from, say, the late 19th- and early 20th-century Russian and Spanish influenzas, which were reported and hyped for the first time globally by the slow-motion means of telegraph messages, steamboats, and newspapers. Our pestilence is by contrast a bullet-speed, night-and-day global media event that arouses fears of sickness and death on an unprecedented scale and depth. The uncertainties are stoked by crazy media moments: footage of unmasked and masked passengers fighting on planes and panic buying in supermarkets, for instance. India’s mainstream media has been running stories blaming Muslims and their mosques for spreading the virus and plotting terrorism. The silencing effects of journalists’ preoccupation with breaking news stories about Covid-19 also need to be noted. HIV-Aids, for instance, has become an invisible and silent epidemic that still kills an estimated 600,000 people every year.
Good quality investigative journalism is of course vital in reducing people’s uncertainty by providing them with abundant and accurate information to understand the world they are living in, and to make wise decisions. But there’s another trend worth mentioning, to do with media and democracy. Marshall McLuhan famously noted that media technologies shape and ‘amputate’ our bodies. They reconfigure the body’s sense of up and down, here and there. The automobile threatened the culture of walking; the telephone extended the voice but amputated the art of letter writing. Today, local and global multi-media platforms do more than reshape our bodies. Searching for audiences and advertising revenues and reputational advantage, they frame the Great Pestilence as a threat to the whole body politic. Exactly because democracies enjoy open media coverage they are especially vulnerable to reports that spread fears of annihilation. The ancient Greek military historian Thucydides noted in his History of the Peloponnesian War (431 BCE) that the typhus plague that killed nearly a third of the citizens of democratic Athens wreaked political havoc. As people ‘died like sheep’, word-of-mouth rumours encouraged survivors to live recklessly, just for themselves. Disrespect for morals ‘sacred as well as profane’ flourished, he reported. There resulted a ‘greater lawlessness’. Our times are obviously different, but the old rule still applies: pestilences stir up public troubles. They breed confusions, anxieties and fears. People lose their bearings. They do strange things, often misled by sensationalist reporting. In these circumstances, ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ journalism is a curse. It makes things worse. It draws public attention to ephemeral matters. People’s sense of context is damaged. Their grasp of underlying trends and the long-term consequences of what they are experiencing is weakened. They are encouraged instead to live for the moment, to forget about wider trends, to blind themselves to the significance of the times they are living through. They become ignorant. The best public remedy for this decadence is ‘unbreaking news’: forms of journalism that are investigative, context sensitive and freed from melodrama, exaggeration and lies.
John Dewey (1859 – 1952)
You are a world-renowned political thinker and writer, so do you think we can find wisdom from philosophers to help us cope with uncertainty?
Prof. John Keane: In matters of uncertainty, there’s a rule: when times seem out of joint philosophical questions about how best to classify and measure, the experience of uncertainty flourish. A good example is John Dewey’s classic The Quest For Certainty. First delivered as lectures at the University of Edinburgh in the fateful years of 1928/29, it attacked the whole Western philosophical tradition for its foolish search for definite knowledge of an ultimate and immutable reality. The hunt for fixed and unchanging knowledge, he argued, has resulted in a disabling split between the quest for contemplative knowledge of antecedent timeless essences and the mundane realm of everyday action. What was now required, Dewey reasoned, was the pragmatic joining of theory and practice so that the search for knowledge supports efforts to live well and to act rightly. Dewey urged philosophy to rid itself of metaphysics and to put its feet firmly on the ground by abandoning disembodied and ‘passionless reason’ and its ‘isolation from contemporary life’. Experimental scientific methods should hereon be our trusted guide to intelligent living protected by a strong measure of certainty. We must give up the belief that knowledge is a photograph of ‘reality’. Knowledge is rather tested in experience by experimental means that are measured against test outcomes and actual experience.
Practical knowledge was one of Dewey’s concerns. In this classic work, he went on to emphasise that the elimination of uncertainty from human affairs isn’t possible, not only because nature is a fickle mixture of regularity and unknown surprises, but also because human action is always risky. Referring to Werner Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty, Dewey argued that indeterminacy in human affairs is double-edged: it can bring good things, as well as bad, evil or good fortune. Human action is ‘fraught with future peril’. There is no escaping the ‘gnawing tooth of time’ and ‘vicissitude and uncertainty’, he said. But it’s the experimental method applied to socio-economic and political life that can help us tame the wild horses of uncertainty and bring more security to citizens’ lives.
Do you agree with the pragmatic solutions offered by John Dewey?
Prof. John Keane: The Quest For Certainty’s attack on Western metaphysics was impressive. Its practical recommendations were less so. They suffered vagueness, but elsewhere, during a long life well lived as America’s most prominent public intellectual, Dewey made clear his attachments to such political principles as the independence of universities, the public regulation of markets and corporations, life-long education, opposition to bigotry and fanaticism, and affection for power-sharing democracy. But given these commitments, it’s worth noting the strangely technocratic or managerialist bias within his political commitment in these lectures to what he variously called ‘operational thinking’, ‘pragmatic instrumentalism’ and ‘intelligent methods of regulation’, ‘orderly social reconstruction’ and ‘adjusting things as means, as resources, to other things as ends’. Dewey was a firm believer in the Progressive vision of good government: policy formulation and implementation based on evidence gathered by expert bureaucracies and other agencies. The role of democratic politics in the book’s vision remained unclear.
Equally questionable for a similar reason was his early 20th-century belief in the conquest of nature (‘science advances by adopting the instruments and doings of directed practice, and the knowledge thus gained becomes a means of the development of arts which bring nature still further into actual and potential service of human purposes and valuations’). A century later, the whole human project of manipulating and conquering ‘nature’ conceived as external to humans is suffering a profound crisis. Growing numbers of scientists and citizens and their representatives are understandably turning their backs on the vandalization of our planetary biosphere. They are instead embracing principles and methods guided by precautionary sensibilities. Contrary to Dewey, many people are insisting, rightly in my view, that the ‘operative intelligence’ of scientific-technical reason is making things worse, compounding the uncertainties of our times. Humans cannot be the measure of all things. We must stop supposing that our universe is a stockpile of resources to be plundered by humans at will, for our vanity and selfish pleasure. Humility in the face of the new uncertainties - humans as wise shepherds rather than arrogant masters of the biosphere – is now mandatory. As I’ve argued in my Power and Humility (2018) the re-imagining of democracy as a project of protecting humans and their biomes against the ravages of power exercised arbitrarily is an equally important part of this necessary headshift.
You are famous for your creative thinking about democracy, especially the idea of monitory democracy. Is monitory democracy useful in dealing with uncertainty?
Adam Przeworski (1940 -)
Prof. John Keane: Measured in terms of certainty and uncertainty, democracy is a different, and unique form of political rule. As a type of self-government of people who treat each other as equals, it’s the only political form that publicly admits of uncertainty as well as enables people to deal constructively with its potentially damaging effects. We owe to the Polish-American political scientist Adam Przeworski the insight that democracies are systems of ruled open-endedness, or organized uncertainty. But uncertainty is not only or principally the effect of elections, as he thought. Under the post-1945 conditions of monitory democracy, uncertainty is the combined effect of periodic elections and the continuous public scrutiny of power by watchdog institutions and social media platforms that together breed unpredictability in matters of deciding who gets how much, when and how. Democracy excels at whipping up social and political uncertainties. It has a sauvage (wild) quality, as the French thinker Claude Lefort liked to say. It tears up certainties, transgresses boundaries and isn’t easily tamed. Democracy denatures power. There’s a French proverb that runs rien n’est sûr que la chose incertaine (Nothing’s certain but uncertainty). This could easily be a motto for monitory democracy. The value placed by democracy on public openness, institutional pluralism and continuous public scrutiny of arbitrary power enables individuals, groups and whole organisations to question and overturn the supposedly ‘natural’ order of things. With the help of bodies such as anti-corruption agencies, investigative journalism, independent courts and periodic elections, monitory democracy promotes indeterminacy. It heightens people’s awareness that the way things are now isn’t necessarily how they will be in future. The spirit of monitory democracy challenges people to see that their worlds can be changed.
You’ve mentioned a very interesting thesis: with the help of bodies such as anti-corruption agencies, investigative journalism, independent courts and periodic elections, monitory democracy promotes indeterminacy. “Nothing’s certain but uncertainty” could be the motto for monitory democracy. In other words, the spirit of monitory democracy is to denature power, stir up uncertainty and encourage people to imagine other possibilities. Not too many people will link democracy with uncertainty in this way. Could you further explain this idea?
Prof. John Keane: Yes, there’s an emotionally deeper, less obvious connection between democracy and uncertainty. Inasmuch as democracy regularly demonstrates the fallibility of those who exercise power, it tutors citizens’ everyday sense of the malleability of the world. When it works well, monitory democracy casts public doubts on what Wittgenstein called ‘complete conviction, the total absence of doubt’. We could say that it helps triggers a long-term mood swing, a transformation of people’s perceptions of the world. The metaphysical idea of an objective, out-there-at-a-distance ‘reality’ is weakened; so too is the presumption that stubborn ‘factual truth’ is superior to power. The fabled distinction between what people can see with their eyes and what they are told about the emperor’s clothes breaks down. Especially under media-saturated conditions, when vibrant democracies are marked by dynamism, pluralism and a multiverse of competing stories told about how the world works, ‘information’ ceases to be a fixed category with incontrovertible content. What counts as information is less and less understood by citizens and their representatives as ‘brute facts’ (John Searle), or as chunks of unassailable ‘reality’. Talk of ‘truth’ lingers, but the sense that it has variable and contestable meanings gets the upper hand. Zones of verification featuring different criteria of what counts as truth multiply. The quest for truth in courts of law isn’t the same (say) as what is said about truth in mosques, churches and synagogues, or what counts as ‘fact’ and ‘knowledge’ in the field of quantum physics. The upshot is that what is called ‘reality’, including the ‘reality’ peddled and promoted by the powerful, comes to be understood as always ‘reported reality’, as ‘reality’ produced by some for others, in other words, as mediated veracity claims that are shaped and re-shaped and re-shaped again in complex processes of production and transmission of truth claims. Put paradoxically: reality is robbed of its reality, which is why political efforts by leaders to privilege their own certainties and to seduce and manipulate citizens using smoke and mirrors, lying and bombast, are deemed unwelcome, and dangerous. Democracy serves reminders that ‘truth’ rests upon acknowledgment, and that ‘truth’ has many faces. It nudges citizens into thinking for themselves; to see the same world in different ways, from different angles; and to sharpen their overall sense that prevailing power relationships are not ‘natural’, but contingent. Reality is multiple and mutable, a matter of re-description and interpretation - and of the power marshalled by wise citizens and their representatives to prevent one-sided interpretations of the world from being forced down others’ throats.
Based on what you’ve already said, it seems that people can’t fully rid their lives of uncertainty. In addition to philosophers, politicians and media experts, could you give some suggestions to common citizens concerning how to cope with or even live with uncertainty in their everyday lives?
Prof. John Keane: One thing’s certain about uncertainty: it can’t be eradicated from life on our planet, and it can have good and bad effects. Much depends on how it’s understood, which type of uncertainty we’re talking about, and how it’s handled. There’s another thing that’s certain: in these early decades of the 21st century, we don’t need to reinvent wheels when dealing with uncertainty. There’s an available repertoire of tried and tested methods of coping with, and positively harnessing, uncertainties that would otherwise drag people down. Take the example of markets. The past four decades of neo-liberalism have reminded us of an old wisdom: since markets are constantly in a state of uncertainty and flux because fortunes are made by discounting the obvious and betting on the unexpected, they are vulnerable to bubbles and market failures. When that happens, the lives of millions of people are damaged. That’s why markets must be regulated by civil society monitoring (strong trade unions, for instance) and by intelligent government regulations. That lesson applies equally to the means of violence: when societies allow their citizens to buy and sell weapons freely, without strict government controls, they are asking for trouble, as we see in the United States, where over 300 people are shot each day. That’s a yearly total of over 115,000 incidents, with nearly 40,000 otherwise avoidable deaths. The figures are obscene.
Certainty and uncertainty are intimate, everyday matters. There is an embodied, personal dimension of the experience of not knowing exactly who we are, what our world is and where we and our world are heading. Big talk of global spikes and planetary uncertainty is one thing. Daily living with uncertainty is another. And it’s a political matter.
Beirut, August 2022
We typically cope with uncertainty by setting it aside and hiding away from it, if we can. There are times and places where it’s impossible to do that. Think of recent worst-case settings, for instance the many thousands of Afghan people abandoned at Kabul airport by an empire in retreat; or reflect for a moment on the lives of more than two million Beirutis ripped apart by one of the largest non-nuclear explosions ever recorded; or think of the people of Haiti, nearly all of whom are currently suffering the back-to-back lethal effects of earthquakes and aftershocks, battering by tropical depression Grace, landslides, the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, gang violence, cholera, severe food shortages and child malnutrition. In catastrophe zones of these kinds, uncertainty rules absolutely. People’s everyday lives enjoy only one kind of certainty: disarray and death.
When people are luckier, and circumstance are kinder, we have the luxury of imagining that uncertainty has little or no grip on our daily lives. We hedge ourselves with certainties. We build nests of predictability. We do so by supposing things to be fixed, certain, settled. We doze, pillow talk, spring from our beds the same side every morning. We sit on the toilet; wash our faces, peer in the mirror at our bodies while brushing our teeth. We boil kettles, make tea, drink coffee, kiss goodbye our loved ones, catch buses, walk, mount our bicycles, send text messages, scan breaking news, doom scroll, say good morning, daydream before wielding the word ‘absolutely’ in our first morning conversations.
The point is that certainty is our mantra against lost bearings. But it’s not just a stop-gap remedy for confusion and disempowerment: contrived certainty is a condition of possibility of our being-in-the-world. It’s otherwise known as habit: learned dispositions that function as stabilisers and enablers within everyday life. Habits - what Aristotle called hexis and Maurice Merleau-Ponty called habitude and Pierre Bourdieu called habitus – can be positive. They don’t just dull the pains of uncertainty. In his La gaya scienza, Friedrich Nietzsche mused that a life without habits would hellishly require constant ‘improvisation’, but he also worried that their nourishing effects could become so habitual - ‘enduring’ - that habits turn into ‘tyrants’. He had a point. Habits come inside us. They become us. They may in consequence have harmful effects on our propensity to act in the world, as well as damage the lives of others. Bad diet, no exercise, masculinist arrogance, domestic violence, and racist talk are disabling habits, and thoroughly political matters; in the fields of everyday life and beyond, they arbitrarily shape who gets how much, when, and how. But habits can be positively enabling. Far from reducing us to lazy slobs or turning us into bigots, habits function as internalised experiences that strengthen our creative ability to navigate life’s vicissitudes. They serve as regularities that augment our being: empower us (and other living species), render us fit and such fitness, as the anthropologist Ghassan Hage has noted, enables us to handle the challenges thrown our way by the social milieux in which we dwell and evolve.
All things considered, should we be overall optimistic or pessimistic in this age of growing uncertainty?
Prof. John Keane: When confronted with the kinds of threats and challenges we’ve been talking about, I prefer to call myself a ‘possumist’. It’s a serious joke: possum is a compound Latin word from potis meaning capable and sum meaning to be. But possum has another meaning: it’s the animal that visits my garden each evening. It’s clever. To escape predators, it can pretend to be dead, and it can fly between trees. My possumism mustn’t be mistaken for optimism. To be an optimist in these times is to succumb to naïve foolishness. But there’s a flip side to possumism: it puts me on bad terms with pessimism. Gloomy convictions that we are living in a doomed age headed for hell are the conjoined twin of know-all certainty. Pessimism is optimism turned upside down. Part of the appeal of gloomy catastrophism is its cock-sure seductiveness. Its propositions and judgments appear to be in accordance with ‘the facts’. But what counts as ‘facts’ or ‘reality’ is always controversial. That’s why the form, content and genealogy of dogmatically pessimistic perspectives must be of interest to those who study politics, philosophy and media.
Here there’s another paradox. I think catastrophism is a type of certainty that sets out to crush and destroy uncertainty. It knows that everything is shit. It’s sure that unless everything somehow changes things are bound to become shittier. The Berlin-born economist Albert Hirschman called it ‘fracasomania’, the manic obsession with failure and decline, and his objection to its grip on our thinking was that it had no room for ingenuity, amelioration, problem solving and policy adaptation to evolving conditions. His rejection of catastrophism was pragmatic. Possumism is my mantra. ‘Possibilism’ was his. For Hirschman, determinism of every kind must be challenged. The social sciences have to pay attention to the fluidity and open-endedness of the fields of power they investigate. Researchers must embrace methods that steel their sense of uncertainty. They must cast doubts on arrogant truth claims, question big-picture stories, probe the uniqueness of situations and concentrate on unexpected dynamics. Their brief is to look for countervailing trends, signs of improvement and unintended consequences. They must ask counterfactual questions about how things might have been and whether new ways of turning historical corners are possible. Social scientists ought never make the mistake of supposing that the growing pains of change are equivalent to the collapse of entire social systems. Hirschman’s rejection of pessimism was a social science version of Oscar Wilde’s well-known remark: a pessimist is somebody who complains about the noise when opportunity knocks.
Faced with uncertainties, I think your idea of “possumism” is more useful or constructive than mere pessimism or optimism, both of which could be taken as variants of know-all certainty. But why is there an attraction to gloomy catastrophism instead of pure optimism? Why do people tend to respond to serious uncertainties with catastrophism? Is there any deeper root of this mentality?
Prof. John Keane: Yes, more needs to be said about the metaphysical ingredients of the catastrophism that’s become fashionable. Early modern geological theories of how our planet has been shaped periodically by sudden devastating events (mountain chain upheavals, vast floods, and the extinction of species) were sometimes inspired by Old Testament accounts of the great flood ordered by God. In the same way, the mentality of today’s catastrophism usually comes tainted by metaphysics. The key point in need of further research is that catastrophe thinking enjoys no innocence or ‘objectivity’: not only is catastrophism typically attached to a form of dogmatic belief in certainty, but its dogmatism often draws on deeper, older, often-forgotten metaphysical presumptions. Eschatology is its guide. People believing in catastrophism resemble religious figures dressed in secular clothing. They tend to hold the dogmatic conviction that in these turbulent times of mounting uncertainty what’s needed is a great purification – total solutions that miraculously rescue humanity from its fatal ignorance and stupidity.
Although you question catastrophism, I think you still remain worried about the cascading uncertainties of our time, right?
Prof. John Keane: Yes, and it’s why, in the face of all the dangerous trends we’ve been talking about, I remain attached to the norms and practices of power-sharing democracy. My thinking is rather unorthodox. It is customary to say that resilient democracies provide citizens with secure lifeboats in seas of uncertainty: protective mechanisms such as written constitutions and rule of law procedures; fixed-term elections and election monitoring; integrity watchdogs; bridge doctors (a South Korean invention) and other health and safety bodies; future generations commissions; and public enquiries. By means of these and other institutions, it’s said, democracy affords citizens and their representatives a measure of reassurance that power will not be exercised arbitrarily, in ways abusive and offensive to citizens. They feel safer, more secure.
I agree with this line of reasoning. But here there’s a less obvious and more pressing sense in which democracies engage and reduce uncertainty. When reimagined in terms of precaution, monitory democracy, the most power-sensitive form of self-government in the history of democracy, is the best weapon so far invented for guarding against the illusions of certainty by breaking up monopolies of unaccountable and dangerous power, wherever and however they operate. Democracy protects people against those who deny their own ignorance. Amidst the ‘noise’ of public life, as Daniel Kahneman and his co-authors have noted, decisionmakers who believe themselves capable of an impossibly high level of predictive accuracy are not just overconfident. They don’t merely deny the risk of noise and bias in their judgments. Nor do they simply deem themselves superior to other mortals. They also believe in the predictability of events that are in fact unpredictable, implicitly denying the reality of uncertainty. Gripped by a strong sense of reality as fluid and alterable, I understand democracy as a fair-minded defender of caution, a prudent friend of perplexity when in the company of those who exercise power with cocksure certainty. Nothing about human behaviour comes as a surprise: it sees that humans are capable of the best, and perpetrators of the worst. For that reason, democracy stands against every form of hubris. It considers concentrated power blindly hazardous; it reckons that humans are not to be entrusted with unchecked rule over their fellows, or the biomes in which they dwell. It upends the old complaint that democracy resembles a ship of fools, or a rollicking circus run by monkeys. A great threat to democracy is rulers who are blind fools.
When it works well, democracy stands against stupidity and dissembling; it is opposed to silent arrogance and has no truck with bossing, bullying and violence. Its role as an early warning system – spotting and countering the sources of destructive uncertainty, like reckless submarine purchases and military adventures, wanton destruction of species, market failures, including risky and fool-headed efforts to monetise uncertainty using such financial instruments as derivative securities, indemnities and catastrophe bonds - makes it attuned to conundrums and alive to difficulties. When democratic mechanisms function properly, they warn citizens and their representatives about the possible dangers of unknown consequences of consequences of consequences. In this way, by getting serious about the calamities of our times, and by tracking the possible calamities to come, democracy is the harbinger of certainty. It offers reassurance and comfort to worried, anxious citizens.