- Introduction: Planning and Understanding
Predictive knowledge, that is, ways of understanding that claim to forecast future events and prescribe responses, is both a comfort and a hindrance. It feels good to claim that we know what is going to happen, and that when the time comes we will know how to act. It feels good to have a plan. Believing that we have predicted and adequately prepared for the future can temporarily relieve anxiety.
The comfort of a plan, however, is often illusory, and comes at a price. Things rarely go according to plan, and often a plan is a merely narrative that protects us from the harshness of reality.
When a plan reveals itself to be an illusion we are left unprepared to deal with the complexity of reality, facing instead our own self-deception. Rigid plans and narratives fragilize us by giving us a simplified and inaccurate view of reality. We are left without knowledge of ourself or our situation. Meanwhile, reality is still out there in all of its complexity and incomprehensibility. As John Lennon said, “Life is what happens to you while you‘re busy making other plans.”
When a plan reveals itself to be an illusion we are left unprepared to deal with the complexity of reality, facing instead our own self-deception. Rigid plans and narratives fragilize us by giving us a simplified and inaccurate view of reality. We are left without knowledge of ourself or our situation. Meanwhile, reality is still out there in all of its complexity and incomprehensibility. As John Lennon said, “Life is what happens to you while you‘re busy making other plans.”
Living without a plan, however, seems inconceivable. How does one moves through one’s life without a trajectory, without a sense of the future? How am I to live if I am not trying to predict and anticipate the future? This obsession with prediction and planning, however, is a uniquely modern condition. Historical-philosophers like John Gray and Nassim Taleb have persuaded me that it was with the Enlightenment that the incitement to predict and plan first seized Western culture. This habit of planning, moreover, is related to more serious cultural problems that came out of the Enlightenment. In particular, it implies that the West has developed an unhealthy relationship with science and technology; that our culture has developed an addiction to superficially articulate language; and that we have traded in the slowness of wisdom and judgement for the speed of naive rationalism and interventionism. In short, Western culture’s addiction to prediction and planning is a result of the technological nihilism that emerged from the Enlightenment.
Individuals living prior to the Enlightenment had less of an inclination to plan and predict. They were closer to what Taleb calls ‘a nonpredictive view of the world’. The antidote to the West’s technological nihilism, I believe, is to be found in this idea of a nonpredictive view of the world. That is, a view that assumes we are never going to fully understand the world, that we will never be able to predict the difficult and tragic events that lie in the future, and that the task of prediction and prescription is a fool’s errand that must be abandoned. Our only option is to develop a nonpredictive view of the world, to learn to live with difficult questions, to cultivate the courage to go forth into uncertainty, to rely on our own capacity for judgement, and, perhaps most importantly, to welcome uncertainty and volatility into our lives. I am here to try and add to that project.
I will defend the idea of a nonpredictive view of the world by focusing on a simple distinction between planning and understanding. As I’ve tentatively argued, the modern world has inherited an unhealthy habit of prediction and planning, and that this habit is a part of the technological nihilism that emerged from the Enlightenment. This is not a claim that I expect to be taken on faith. Part of this writing, therefore, will be spent providing evidence that the Western world does indeed have an unhealthy relationship with planning that needs to be overcome. Once I feel confident that I have established this, I will then advocate a nonpredictive view of the world.
The main claim is that understanding ourselves and our situation should take precedence over planning a potential future. This follows from the claim that plans will organically emerge from understanding, while understanding will not necessarily emerge from plans. It is possible to have a plan without grasping reality, but it is impossible to grasp reality and not know what is the right thing to do. As a friend of mine once told me, you don’t need to imagine the future, because if you are fully in the present, grasping reality, you will be creating the right kind of future for yourself. It is this type of living, this nonpredictive view of the world that relies above all on understanding, that I intend to elaborate.
By drawing attention to the benefits of understanding I am not trying to completely discredit the idea of planning. Rather, I am suggesting that we are in the habit of turning to planning before we truly understand what is going on, and that we may benefit from redirecting our mental energy towards the task of understanding. As I said, plans will emerge organically from our understanding. I feel justified, therefore, in distinguishing between naively rational plans and organic plans. I believe that we are more inclined to rely on naive plans than to let plans emerge organically from understanding. God knows that I have had plenty of naive plans, and boy did they burn me in the end.
The idea of a nonpredictive life, one that is best lived in the present and without rigid plans has many precedents. Zen Buddhism and aesthetics, for example, encourage living in the present while keeping planning to a minimum. I believe, however, there is another mode of thought that can help us hold a nonpredictive view of the world: historical thought. It is my goal in this essay to argue that historical thought offers us a nonpredictive view of the world, and that it also offers us a powerful form of morality. This argument will rely most heavily on the work of R.G. Collingwood.
At the end of his life, Collingwood was attempting to articulate his philosophy of history, which he believed would culminate with something he called ‘historical morality’. Moreover, Collingwood implied that he viewed historical morality as a counterweight to the European habit of scientific thought. He believed that the West’s relationship with scientific thought was the definitive fact about Western culture, and that Western morality had suffered as a result. In particular, he believed that scientific thought, with its focus on the distinction between subject and object, had led us to objectify people, treating them as means to ends. He hoped that the philosophy of history could provide the foundation for a new type of morality that would not focus on mastering people, but rather on understanding people. He put this point quite clearly in his outline of The Principles of History: “If [my philosophy of history] is worked out carefully, then should follow without difficulty the characterization of an historical morality and an historical civilization, contrasting with our ‘scientific’ one.... A scientific morality will start from the idea of human nature as a thing to be conquered or obeyed: a[n] historical one will deny that there is such a thing, and will resolve what we are into what we do. A scientific society will turn on the idea of mastering people (by money or war or the like) or alternatively serving them (philanthropy). A[n] historical society will turn on the idea of understanding them.” (The Principles of History, 246). Collingwood, unfortunately, never lived to complete his final work. I, therefore, am attempting to chase his logic, and to answer the question: What would it mean to found a morality and a civilization on the notion of understanding? Moreover, that Collingwood places historical morality in opposition to scientific morality provides me the perfect launching pad for addressing my concerns with Western nihilism. He hoped to overcome the West’s unhealthy relationship with scientific thought by showing how historical thought could be a healthy alternative or counterweight.
I fear I have not been explicit enough. What I really hope to accomplish in this essay is to show how historical thought has the potential to alleviate the anxiety and barbarity that scientific thought has bequeathed us. This is not to say that scientific thought should be banished; it has done wonders for life on Earth. Science, however, does not deserve the unabashed worship that it receives. It needs to be criticized for its tendency to simplify reality and to prescribe action; we need to reckon with the fact that scientific thought encourages us to have rigid narratives that fragilize us to volatility and uncertainty. It would be good to explore alternative modes of thought that rely less on prediction and planning; it would be good to explore nonpredictive views of the world that rely solely on understanding. Historical thought, I believe, is such a type of thought, and can serve as a counterweight to scientific thought’s nihilistic tendencies.
So, that is what I’m here to do. I’m going to show you that science possesses nihilistic tendencies, and that it relies too heavily on predictive knowledge and planning. Then I’ll try to explain to you the value of a nonpredictive view of the world, and how history can help us rely on understanding, as opposed to planning. Onward.
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