The Tragedy of Human Agency: the Uncertainty of Evolution
David Held, GP’s General Editor, explores social, economic and political understandings of evolution in a lecture recently delivered at Durham University.
“…Only the exaggerations are true”
Adorno (1951) Minima Moralia
Evolution – the process by which different kinds of living organisms are believed to have developed from earlier forms.
Evolution – a set of prescribed movements; a process of change in a certain direction; the process of working out or developing.
Evolution – the progressive development of humankind over time through significant stages from rural to premodern, modern and beyond
In political and social thought, my main focus today, evolution has been part of a progressive narrative of the development of humankind through time. From 19th century thinking to modernisation theory, evolution implied progress, secularisation, scientific change and technological advancement.
Marx thought of the shifts in stages of human life as changes in modes of production. These were driven by contradictions between the forces and relations of production, giving rise to an evolutionary movement through feudalism, capitalism and eventually, socialism and communism. His ideas of progress in society were widely shared in the century that followed, even though the account of the source of progress changed.
In the early decades after the Second World War, it was science and technology that were the drivers of evolutionary change. One version of this was famously articulated as Modernisation Theory, which emphasised the significance of science and technology in the reshaping of human societies, marked by progressive secularisation. Max Weber had once beautifully expressed this process in his famous essay, The Politics of Vocation, when he spoke of societies which had ‘eaten from the tree of knowledge’ and now lived in a ‘disenchanted garden’. In this world, there may be war among Gods but which of the Gods predominates – religious, consumer-driven, or celebrity - is an individual choice in an individuated world.
And, yet it is hard to think how we can sustain an evolutionary and progressive narrative for humankind after Auschwitz and the Gulag. It was Horkheimer and Adorno in the Dialectic of the Enlightenment that set out to explain why it is that we should not be surprised that the Enlightenment and the Renaissance did not give rise to a linear process of development. At the heart of modern reasoning is a battle between the reflexive and deliberative concept of reason, with its search for critical insights, and an instrumental conception of reason driven by science and technology. Instrumental reason is focused less on the asking of about the meaning of things, and more on an instrumental relationship to nature and eventually the management of nature itself.
The idea of the management or domination of nature is part of the Judeo-Christian tradition. God has sovereignty of the universe, and humans have God’s authority to govern on Earth. This rule is established by God upon the creation: ‘let us make men in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the Earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the Earth’ (Genesis, 1:26).
This idea of extending the dominion of humanity over nature through science and technology entered into philosophy from the late 16th century. Francis Bacon, for example, saw the quest to manage nature as a means to combat the fall from the original state of paradise. ‘For man by the fall fell at the same time from a state of innocency and from his dominion over creation. Both of these losses however, can even in his life be in some part repaired; the former by religion and faith, the latter by arts and sciences’ (Bacon, “The New Organon”).
For Bacon, scientific knowledge is potential power - the tool or instrument which can be used to master nature. Science is the key to the understanding and control of nature. By obeying nature, one can, according to Bacon, command her: ‘for you have but to follow and as it were hound nature in her wanderings, and you will be able, when you like, to lead and drive her afterwards to the same place again.’ (Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, vol 4, p.296). Matter has no intrinsic meaning and is, therefore, open to manipulation and control. Leaving aside the obvious implications of referring to nature as her, his project is clear: to conceive nature as matter, which can be mastered with little regard for its independent qualities or characteristics.
Nature is the sphere of pure objects. And since consciousness and purposeful activities are attributes of man and/or God, the use to which nature will be put depends on man’s decision or divine bequest.
Bacon’s formula could easily be secularised. With the Industrial Revolution, scientific and technical development could be harnessed for commercial and economic purposes, and linked to economic growth and the core drivers of ever-greater prosperity. Accordingly, science and technology, and all forms of instrumental knowledge, become the key to driving income and wealth. The agenda of ‘impact’ is then set in motion; the value of knowledge becomes measured by its utility in enhancing external ends.
For Horkheimer and Adorno, the dialectic of Enlightenment refers to the way the domination of nature unfolds as part of an instrumental engagement with it. Nature has meaning insofar as it has a purpose; as do people insofar as they are productive. All nature is open to the calculus of control. As this process unfolds, the external world is constituted as a world of quantifiable objects open to manipulation. The increasing control over humanity and nature brings ever-greater opportunity but also risk. What began as a project of emancipation from nature ends as a project of instrumentality and control. While of course there are many reasons for Auschwitz and the Gulag, there are questions about how the industrial form of killing in these places was possible, even conceivable, without thinking of large swathes of humanity as without utility and meaning, and therefore dispensible.
Of course, this is not how the Enlightenment began. But humankind is part of a complex process of intended and unintended consequences of action. The Enlightenment is hugely important, as is the project of progress through development. But neither are possible if we do not understand the frailty, or even tragic nature, of human agency. Why is this?
Human agency unfolds in a complex series of multiple feedback loops, defined by unacknowledged conditions of action, on the one hand, and unintended consequences, on the other. We are, as Anthony Giddens articulated in the Theory of Structuration, knowledgeable agents pursuing our lives and constituting our realities through reflexive achievements. We do this every day in the things we do and how we do it. At the same time, however, our knowledge is always partial and one-sided. Many of the conditions of our actions are often only dimly apparent. The unconscious (and the mechanisms of repression which are part of our daily filtering) shape how we act but often in ways that we are not fully aware of or can easily understand. Desire and interest interpenetrate our knowledgeable activities in complex and sometimes even dark ways. The same is true for how patterns of ideology, of past frameworks of understanding and meaning, impact our development and shape our engagements, often in ways we don’t fully grasp.
It was Marx who once wrote that humans make history, but not always in circumstances of their own choosing; rather, under circumstances given and directly transmitted from the past. He went on to write in a line less often quoted, ‘the weight of tradition hangs like a nightmare on the brain of the living’. And he goes on to say:
‘And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.’ (18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte).
Indeed. Often. It is the complex weight of the unconscious and the ideological baggage of borrowed languages that the past brings to our everyday actions. But the complex series of multiple feedback loops is even more complicated than Marx suggests. What we intend often does not lead to the anticipated result for reasons other than the repetition of history. We often find that what we seek is not what we get as our actions have consequences that escape our control. Moreover, when many people pursue similar things together, for instance, producing goods and services and trading in markets, the aggregate effect is often not the one desired.
Markets can be conceived as the accumulation of self-interested action, but they can generate huge destabilising forces and massive crises. The global financial crisis is just one instance. Moreover, the many sensible individual decisions to produce goods and services using the cheapest available energy sources from across the world (fossil fuels), can now clearly be understood as part of what generated climate change. The existential crisis of climate change in our century began with the many reasonable decisions of many reasonable people to produce what was important to them under market conditions. Of course, climate change now threatens to overwhelm us, and is, in that sense, an existential crisis. It is also indicative of something that all those who live close to nature understand: that nature needs to be understood and respected if we are to live at ease alongside its powerful elements and forces. It is not our object and we are not its subject; rather, we live in very complex, overlapping interdependencies.
Thus, we do not just evolve. There is no simple evolution. Even the concept of evolution is hard to apply to human history. Instead, we have the complex interplay between knowledgeable agents locked into complex cycles of the unknown and the unintended. Everyday practices may have tragic implications. Being human is being open to enormously diverse possibilities as well as the potentially tragic nature of our shortcomings. It is not, as Descartes thought, that, ‘I think, therefore I am’. It is rather, that we are reflexive agents bound by unacknowledged conditions and unintended consequences.
Understanding this helps us begin to grasp why it is that humankind may not reach the end of this century without a major setback. As Martin Reiss, President of the Royal Society, put it, we have created risks in our world which could overwhelm us. Why? To understand this question, we need to grasp why we are today at a crossroads, with one road pointing to the rise of nationalism and authoritarianism, while another to a more open cosmopolitan future.
The path to authoritarianism is created by the search for decisive solutions from ‘strong man’ leaders faced with a world that is seemingly out of control, from the global financial crisis to austerity and mass migration, and where a retreat to the familiar (and away from the Other) offers a tempting way forward. Of course, we have been here before. The 1930s saw the rise of xenophobia and nationalism in the context of prolonged and protracted economic strife, the lingering impact of World War I, weak international institutions and a desperate search for scapegoats. The 2010s has notable parallels: the protracted fallout of the financial crisis, ineffective regional and international institutions, and a growing xenophobic discourse that places virtually all blame for every problem on some form of Other.
But there is an alternative pathway. To begin with, we can recall where the pursuit of authoritarianism leads. The routes chosen in the 1930s all led to calamity and destruction, and the rediscovery in the 1940s onwards of the dangers of simply putting up the shutters, pursuing protectionism and denying the equal dignity of each and all. The architects of the post-war era, who put in place a re-invigorated law of war and the human rights regime, set down elements of a universal constitutional order in which the principles of the equal moral standing of each and every person, and the equal rights and duties of each and all, became the bedrock of peace and stability. Elements of cosmopolitan model of politics can be found in some of the most important achievements of law and institution building in the twentieth century.
In order to grasp the reasons why we are at a crossroads in global politics, it is important to understand the deep drivers of political change in recent decades, all of which take us a long way from an evolutionary account of human understanding and politics. One of the central concepts needed to unlock this is ‘gridlock’ and the way it threatens the hold and reach of the post-Second World War principles of global cooperation and the cosmopolitan project (Hale, Held and Young, Gridlock, 2013). The post-war institutions, put in place to create a peaceful and prosperous world order, created conditions under which a multitude of actors could benefit from forming corporations, investing abroad, developing global production chains, and engaging with a plethora of other social and economic processes associated with globalization. This is not to say that they were the only cause of the dynamic form of globalization experienced over the last few decades. Changes in the nature of global capitalism, including breakthroughs in transportation and information technology, are obviously critical drivers of global interdependence. Nonetheless, all of these changes were allowed to thrive and develop because they took place in a relatively open, peaceful, liberal, institutionalized world order. It was a wonderful design, and it worked for many decades.
These developments, however, have now progressed to the point where our ability to engage in further global cooperation has been altered. That is, the economic and political shifts in large part attributable to the successes of the post-war rule-based order are now amongst the factors grinding that system into gridlock. As a result of the remarkable success of global cooperation in the post-war order, human interconnectedness weighs much more heavily on politics than it did in 1945, and the need for international cooperation is marked. Yet the “supply” side of the equation, institutionalized multilateral cooperation, is stalling. In areas such as nuclear proliferation, the explosion of small arms sales, terrorism, failed states, global economic imbalances, financial market instability, global poverty and inequality, biodiversity losses, water deficits and climate change, multilateral and transnational cooperation is now increasingly ineffective or threadbare. Gridlock is not unique to one issue domain, but appears to be becoming a general feature of global governance: cooperation seems to be increasingly difficult and deficient at precisely the time when it is extremely urgent.
There are four reasons for this blockage, or four pathways to gridlock: rising multipolarity, institutional inertia, harder problems, and institutional fragmentation. Each pathway can be thought of as a growing trend that embodies a specific mix of causal mechanisms. First, reaching agreement in complex international negotiations is hampered by the rise of new powers like India, China and Brazil, which means that a more diverse array of interests have to be hammered into agreement for any global deal to be made. On the one hand, multipolarity is a positive sign of development; on the other hand, it can bring both more voices and interests to the table that are hard to weave into coherent outcomes. Second, the core multilateral institutions created 70 years ago, for example, the UN Security Council, have proven difficult to change as established interests cling to outmoded decision-making rules that fail to reflect current conditions. Third, the problems we are facing on a global scale have grown more complex, penetrating deep into domestic policies and are often extremely difficult to resolve. Fourth, in many areas international institutions have proliferated with overlapping and contradictory mandates, creating a confusing fragmentation of authority.
These trends combine in many sectors to make successful cooperation at the global level extremely difficult to achieve. The risks that follow from this are all too obvious. To manage the global economy, prevent runaway environmental destruction, reign in nuclear proliferation, or confront other global challenges, we must cooperate. But many of our tools for global policy making are breaking down or inadequate – chiefly, state-to-state negotiations over treaties and international institutions – at a time when our fate and fortunes are acutely interwoven. Signs of this today are everywhere: climate change is still threatening all life as we know it, conflicts such as Iraq continue to run out of control, small arms sales proliferate despite all efforts to contain them, migration has increased rapidly and is destabilising many societies, and inequality threatens the fabric of social life across the world.
Today it seems that gridlock also has a self-reinforcing element. The rise of nationalism and populism across the world can be seen as part of a downward spiral in which gridlock leads to unmanaged globalization or unmet global challenges, which in turn help to provoke anti-global backlashes that further undermine the operative capacity of global governance institutions. Gridlock not only emerges from self-reinforcing interdependence, in which globalization has deepened beyond the management capacity of the institutions that helped create it, but is also compounded by its pernicious impact on national politics. The result can be a schizophrenic crisis as we are caught between deepening interdependence and major global challenges that require sophisticated management, on the one hand, and populist and nationalist movements that seek to demolish or weaken our capacity to do so, on the other.
Major leaps forward in the institutional structures of nations and the world order often follow major wars and calamities. But political wisdom requires that we learn to make significant and strategic changes before tragedies unfold, and not just with hindsight. After all, our ability to harm ourselves has increased; when weapons of mass destruction, global pandemics, and environmental collapse loom, reform-through-crisis becomes a very unattractive option. Looking back at the institutional world order set down after 1945, and the reasons for its successes and failures, it is clear that we have to understand and grasp these if we are to avoid the cycle of calamitous tragedies and institutional change. How we shift from the postwar institutional order to a new structure of “sustainable interdependence” is a major long-term question. But it is not a question that is easily answered.
It is hard to write a story since 1945 of progressive development. There have been many achievements, of course, as the world has shifted from bipolarity to multipolarity, as prosperity has spread across many parts of the world, and as we enter a more complex communication networked world order. At the same time, and here is perhaps the paradox of humankind, we live at the edge of a precipice. War, climate change, or other calamities could easily see us over the edge. Hence, we may not reach the end of the twenty-first century without a major setback.
We seem capable of immense creativity and destruction all at the same time. Evolution and regression seem to define the human condition.
David Held is a Professor of Political Science and Master of University College, Durham. Among his most recent publications are Globalisation/Anti-Globalisation (2007), Models of Democracy (2006), Global Covenant (2004), Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture (1999), and Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (1995). His main research interests include the study of globalisation, changing forms of democracy and the prospects of regional and global governance. He is a Director of Polity Press, which he co-founded in 1984.
Image credit: Nishant Chinnam CC BY-SA 2.0
