Sphinx

To be absolutely honest, I’m struggling to focus this morning. Partly, it is simply that there are Too Many Things even for a normal week, let along for the penultimate week of term, and my ability to choose between different priorities other than those which actually have to be done more or less immediately has evaporated – they’re all important, none of them is so important that it’ll be a catastrophe if I don’t do it until tomorrow, and my head hurts. No, I know this isn’t a sensible strategy and will end in tears, but that doesn’t help.

I imagine, in my more sympathetic and understanding moments, that this is probably how David Davis feels. Mostly I am lacking in either sympathy or understanding, as the other – and more important – reason why I can’t focus is fury and bewilderment at the revelation this morning that there are no sector-by-sector-in-excruciating-detail assessments of the impact of Brexit, and apparently this doesn’t matter. To some extent I’m bewildered by my own bewilderment; this government keeps on providing evidence of its cluelessness, incompetence, mendacity, blustering arrogance etc., so why do I seem to retain a residual faith that they can’t possibly be this awful and useless? Do they really have no shame? Are they really so stupid and oblivious? Or are they simply overwhelmed by the realisation that they are committed to delivering the impossible, yet incapable of considering an alternative.

What is appalling is the apparent insouciance, the nonchalant shrug at having to admit that, no, actually, all those impact assessments mentioned on numerous occasions in the past weren’t actually assessments, or detailed, or much of anything, but it doesn’t matter because economic models can always turn out to be wrong so what the hell. It’ll all turn out okay, and in any case it’ll be someone else’s problem by then.

I’m reminded of some of the issues I was engaging with earlier this year, in a piece on ‘Counterfactualism and Anticipation’ (https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-319-31737-3_58-1). It’s paywalled, unfortunately, but I imagine I won’t actually be hunted down and torn to pieces by Springer’s copyright hounds if I reproduce a couple of paragraphs from the closing section that seem to be relevant:

Counterfactual thinking about the future is not scientific, or objective, or empirically robust. It often depends heavily on the assumption that past and present offer at least some guide to the future; that we can identify immanent tendencies in the present and explore their possible consequences, and that our existing data sets are our most important resource for such an exercise. It can indicate possibilities, but its main utility lies in questioning the more confident and dogmatic assertions of other forecasters; in highlighting the fact that past developments were never necessary or preordained, and emphasising uncertainty and indeterminacy.

Anticipation is not about forecasting; indeed, it is less concerned with the future, than with how we think about the future and engage with the present as a result. The inability of counterfactualism to aid in the identification of a single or most probable future is therefore not a problem from this perspective; rather, it directs our attention towards how humans think about the relationship between past, present and future – and how this may lead them into trouble. It offers a means of identifying and correcting common cognitive biases: confirmation bias, framing, reliance on unexamined heuristics such as analogies, and, above all, hindsight bias (e.g. Kahnemann, Slovic & Tversky 1982).

This is precisely the aspect of Thucydides’ account of the war between Athens and Sparta that Allison’s model ignores; far from offering a single explanation of a deterministic cause, the narrative highlights both the complex interaction of multiple causes (individual actions and decisions, the characters and cultural assumptions of different states, and the continuing consequences of past events, as well as structural factors) and the multiple ways in which things might have turned out differently (Hawthorn 2014). The same is true of his account of the course of the war, which is presented as neither predetermined nor purely contingent, but always open, even if there was a recognisable tendency towards path dependency. Above all, the ‘lesson’ which Thucydides’ readers can draw from a better understanding of these past events is that people suffer from multiple failings in evaluating the present and anticipating the future: oscillation between over-optimism and excessive pessimism, assumption of greater knowledge and confidence than is rationally justified, susceptibility to false analogies and confirmation bias, and a habit of reinterpreting events afterwards in a self-justifying manner rather than learning properly about their own errors.

The primary contribution of counterfactual thinking to anticipation is therefore psychological and ethical, as Audra Mitchell has argued: “It cannot give us predictions or certainty, and it can’t prove that everything will be ok, or tell us how to ensure this. But it can help us to see possibilities, to scope the boundaries of our knowledge, to appreciate the limits of our agency and to expand our ethical sensibilities” (2013). Mitchell’s argument focuses on the specific issue of the storage of nuclear waste, where it is essential for us to imagine futures that are unknowable or unthinkable – to break through what she calls ‘futural amnesty’ or the forgetting of the future – because what we do or do not do in the present will inevitably have far-reaching consequences. Relatively few issues – climate change is the other obvious one – combine such long time-scales with the knowledge that our actions or inaction will have consequences for the future. But the wider points she makes about counterfactual thinking and anticipation are valid also for shorter-term concerns.

By combatting assumptions of determinism in human history, and emphasising that there are multiple possible futures, counterfactual narratives work against a crippling nihilism and sense of a lack of agency. They can offer a qualified sense of hope, that the future might not be entirely bleak and certainly that its bleakness is not pre-determined – and hence, an ethical obligation towards the people of the future, to seek to build a better rather than a worse future. Conversely, imagining horrific and nightmare possibilities, including human extinction or degradation, provides the ethical imperative for trying to avert such futures; futural amnesty is a protective strategy, allowing people to get on with their lives without constant awareness of horror (this resembles Friedrich Nietzsche’s arguments about the inability of humans, with rare exceptions like Thucydides, to face too much reality), but it is also an abdication of responsibility for the harm that we might thereby do unknown future others. Counterfactualism tells us that the future is still open, that we can usefully seek to anticipate it – even as it also highlights the ways in which humans constantly fail in this effort – and that we have an ethical obligation to try.

The point is that Davis is partly right – uncertainty is inevitable when trying to anticipate future developments and their consequences, and economic models do generally assume the continuation of certain current conditions so can be derailed by paradigm changes or unexpected variables and events – and utterly, culpably wrong in thinking that therefore he’s isn’t obliged to try. As Audra Mitchell suggests in her excellent blog post ‘Stumbling into Eternity’ cited above, we have an ethical duty towards the future, to imagine possible developments – especially nightmarish developments – so that we can act in the present to try to avert them. Failure to do so may be comforting – of course it’ll all be fine – but it’s a dereliction of duty and a fundamentally immoral act.

It’s entirely possible that Davis and the rest of them are suffering from a crippling nihilism and a sense of a lack of agency, that they have found themselves with responsibility for something they cannot understand or control. But it was their choice – and this is what they are supposed to be good at, and what they’re paid for. The result is to inflict crippling nihilism and lack of agency on the rest of us, since we have no capacity at all to respond to looming capacity other than seeking individual escape roots, or just hiding under the duvet, or ranting at the internet…