Digressions&Impressions

Hume and the State of Exception

The protector, the two secretaries, the council of state, with any five or more that the senate appoints, are possessed, on extraordinary emergencies, of dictatorial power for six months.--Hume, Idea Of a Perfect Commonwealth

In Hume's plan for a perfect commonwealth (recall this post), foreign policy is insulated from democratic control. He lodges it in the "council of state" which includes only three members: "The protector and two secretaries have session." These three members are chosen by the senate, which has some kind of function in deliberating about foreign policy. (Hume is not entirely clear on this point.) It turns out that the the three members of the council of state are the core membership (of eight) of a dictatorial junta in "extraordinary emergencies." That the council of state is always part of the dictatorial junta suggests that for Hume the emergencies arise, if they do, in foreign affairs, especially the context of war and conquest. 

As an aside, Hume's willingness to plan for exceptional circumstances with the abrogation of the rule of law in "what is the most perfect of all" possible political orders, is noteworthy because (a) Hume tends to be associated with a firm commitment to the rule of law and (b) with a kind of conservative commitment to the value of tradition. While Hume does not go so far as Walter Benjamin [recall] in treating the state of exception as the rule, he recognizes that it must be planned for.

In one sense, Hume's proposal is a nod to Livy's famous account of the dictatorship of Cincinnatus in Republican Rome. But Hume is explicit that his commonwealth is an improvement of ancient republics because he thinks these as "oppressive." Moreover, he has little fondness for Ancient Republicanism (which requires slavery). So, it would be a bit odd if he is really trying to make space for a modern Cincinnatus.

A better sense to understand Hume's treatment is to take him at his word, and note, first the "resemblance that [the blueprint of a perfect commonwealth] bears to the commonwealth of the United Provinces,a wise and renowned government." One of his improvements over the constitution of the Dutch Republic is by his own light the removal of the veto power "which every province and town has upon the whole body of the DUTCH republic, with regard to alliances, peace and war, and the imposition of taxes, is here removed." So, Hume's perfect commonwealth is not a confederation, but a federation that can act as a true unity in foreign affairs and even in an emergency.

In fact, Hume has also modeled the dictatorial power on a particular episode in the history of the Dutch Republic that he recounts in the History:

But the greatest difficulty still remained. By the constitution of the [Dutch] republic, all the towns in all the provinces must give their consent to every alliance; and besides that this formality could not be dispatched in less than two months, it was justly to be dreaded, that the influence of France would obstruct the passing of the treaty in some of the smaller cities....To obviate this difficulty, de Wit had the courage, for the public good, to break through the laws in so fundamental an article; and by his authority, he prevailed with the States General at once to sign and ratify the league: Though they acknowledged that, if that measure should displease their constituents, they risqued their heads by this irregularity. After sealing, all parties embraced with great cordiality.--Hume's History of England

I have already noted that Hume has, despite his fundamental criticism, very high praise for De Witt. In the quoted passage, Hume praises De Witt's courage and public spirit in risking the charge of treason by breaking the law (that gives all the provinces a veto power over treaties) in the case of an emergency (in foreign policy). So, Hume designs his own ideal state to make space for future leaders that can make public spirited decisions without too much constraint. But rather than trusting a single person with emergency powers, he assigns such authority to a small group; in addition, he requires the senate's judgment that there is, indeed, a state of emergency. It is an open question if Hume's approach does not lead to the oppression he dreads.

 

Bad News for some Libertarians and Conservatives on Precautionary Principles

[T]he acknowledgment of uncertainty and unknowability does not lead to a political-philosophical recognition of the fragility of modern life. On the contrary, this uncertainty itself becomes a ground for security action and intervention on the basis of speculation and imagination. As Francois Ewald put it...The precautionary principle invites one to anticipate what one does not yet know, to take into account doubtful hypotheses and simple suspicions. It invites on to take the most far-fetched forecasts seriously."--Marieke de Goede (2012) Speculative Security: The Politics of Pursuing Terrorist Monies, 50

The precautionary principle can be understood as follows: "if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus that the action or policy is not harmful, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking an action." Prior to reading De Goede's book I had two general reflections on the nature of precautionary principles (PP); first, the application of a PP is a means of pausing action, that is, as a moral tool that (a) could be used by Libertarians and Conservatives to slow down the machinery of government decision-making and (b) could be used by Progressives and Environmentalists to call attention to harmful, social consequences of policies on folk (or non-folk) that lack lobbying power. For, the precautionary principle is a natural accompaniment of uncertainty: if you don't know the wide consequences of an action on bystanders, you should be careful about advocating/pursuing it. It is a way to shift the burden of proof.

And, second, I worried that once Kuhnian ideas of science -- which treat science and consensus as strongly correlated -- are integrated into science's self-understanding, a (manufactured) scientific consensus itself could mask either considerable underlying uncertainty or facilitate further harms (see my piece with Lefevere for more reflections on the moral significance of such consensus). In practice, there are (i) complex judgments about whose risks and harms are counted in the context of justifying a course of action (or inaction) in light of PP (for an excellent example, see Kukla and Wayne's analysis here) and (ii) complex judgments about what possible futures one wants to allow (Arrow and Fisher (1974) showed that even without risk aversion "that the expected benefits of an irreversible decision should be adjusted to reflect the loss of options it entails.")**

Of course, logically the principle also facilitates government action because (and again quoting Wikipedia): PP "is used by policy makers to justify discretionary decisions in situations where there is the possibility of harm...The principle implies that there is a social responsibility to protect the public from exposure to harm, when scientific investigation has found a plausible risk" (emphasis added). That is, a precautionary principle can also function as a call to action. But because PP is a burden shifting demand, I had always viewed it as a means for slower, more responsible action that I associated with a generally conservative political outlook. (Given that I tend to view environmentalism as a species of conservatism, this fit my priors nicely.)

De Goede's book, which creatively uses Foucault-ian ideas, disabused me of the ideas in the previous paragraph. Rather she shows that precautionary principles are used to justify preemption; they are invoked in the "war on terror in the face of risks that are thought to be at once uncertain or unknowable and catastrophic to the extent that they require immediate action." (De Goede, xxviii)* The most chilling moments in the book are quotes from legal decisions that use the language of "temporary precautionary measure" (167) to deny those suspected of terrorist sympathies normal legal standards of evidence even in the absence of any criminal action (or evidence of intent). To what extent such precaution still falls under the classical precautionary principle (with its emphasis on scientific consensus) is, of course, also tricky; are the security and legal experts as well as the data-miners really representing a genuine scientific consensus?

Now, one might claim that given the-call-to-action-feature of a precautionary principle, we should not be surprised by such abuses; all principles are liable to abuse, after all. It is an open empirical (and contextually subtle) question if the abuses generated by applying precautionary principles are worse than their absence. It is familiar paradox, after all, that where such principles are needed most, they are most likely to be abused.

But rather than debating the merits of the precautionary principle, here I call attention to the key point in De Goede's book: in (urgent) contexts that focus on precaution (e.g., security), "the appeal to uncertainty replaces the demonstration of evidence as grounds for taking action" (174; see also p. 199). If this merely upends familiar habits of thought (and threatens cherished conservative principles), this would not be very disconcerting. But as De Goede notes, once such ideas get widespread bureaucratic uptake (not just in context of terrorism), a state of emergency is normalized and legally recognized. That's not just bad news for Libertarians and Conservatives.

 

On Casuistry and Aesthetic Experience in the post-classical novel.

The moment to propose an open marriage was before the wedding, not thirty-five years later.--I. McEwan, The Children Act, 6.

This court is a court of law, not of morals, and our task has been to find, and our duty is then to apply, the relevant principles of law to the situation before us--a situation which is unique." The Children Act, (26).

In commenting on Stoner, I noted, inspired by some reflections by Adam Smith, that the classical age of the novel (exemplified by the works of Jane Austen, George Eliot, Flaubert, Tolstoy, etc.) ends with the alteration of the laws and norms governing marriage (in particular the ease of divorce) and which, thereby, alter the character of (bourgeois) love.* It does not follow, of course, that in our post-classical age, (marital) love plays no further role in the novel (witness the popularity of Stoner). But the novel cannot be wholly animated by it without (say) a touch of knowing comedy. We might say, then, that Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach, is a taut homage to the classical age of the past.

Luckily for the contemporary novelist, even with no-fault divorce, moral dilemmas (and crimes) abound. Where the philosopher designs stylized, thought experiments in which we abstract away from nearly every lived detail in order to isolate a single moral variable (say, to test intuitions, or to explore the consequences of a principle, or to engage in casuistry, etc.), the artificial world of the novel can explore dilemmas in richer psychological, social, and political (etc.) detail (recall this post on Javier Marías The Infatuations); a skilled (post-classical!) novelist can maintain our interest as much in fine-grained scrutiny of the phenomenology of individual decisions as in (say) the nature of complicity in systemic injustice (exemplars are: Sophie's Choice; Elizabeth Costello, On Beauty, The Triple Mirror of the Self, etc.). While the rigorous thought experiment uses precision to banish uncertainty and ambiguity, the novel is no less precise in deploying uncertainty and ambiguity to enrich our moral possibilities (not to mention entertain and distract) by way of exploration of unique cases that are simultaneously, in one sense, also exemplary; as McEwan slyly notes (cf. 27 & 89) the novel shares this latter feature with the law, especially in circumstances that allow the application of the "doctrine of necessity" [or a Benjaminian "state of emergency" [recall]]. (In case you missed it McEwan reminds the reader of the role of "blind luck" (30) in shaping the preconditions for the practice of virtue.)

So much for taxonomy.

Without doubt McEwan is one of the most high profile post-classical novelists (e.g., Atonement, Amsterdam, Saturday, etc.) of recent years. The Children Act revolves around Fiona Maye, a celebrated, child-less family court judge, who we encounter in the middle of her first marital crisis to her "professor of ancient history" (who, fancies an affair with a statistician, Melanie). [I was relieved to learn it was not one of his students.] The scene is interrupted by an urgent call; she is confronted with an emergency case involving a family of Jehova Witnesses that refuses a potentially life-saving blood transfusion to a cancer patient (the seventeen year old boy, Adam). The unfolding moral circumstances of the case, and the Judge's relationship with Adam, sustains the reader's interest through the rest of the novel.

For, while Judge Maye claims in one of her opinions that having "at the centre of one's life one or a small number of significant relations defined above all by love" (15) as one the key "ingredients" of "welfare," her self-understanding suggests that in her private affairs, she is primarily focused on the "conventionally correct." (5) In fact, McEwan's focus is not really on dissecting late marital love; even the Judge sees the "stupidity and dishonesty of the exchange" (24) with her once "bohemian academic" (18)--this is not a classical novel. For, Maye is less worried about the loss of marital love than to become the "object of general pity...a form of social death" (57). We inhabit a world in which work, status, and the social role(s) of sympathy are taken more seriously than love.

As an aside, that the Judge is introduced as thinking that she has a "firm grip"  (5) on the conventionally correct, unsubtly forewarns experienced readers that the Judge will transgress at least one such convention. With a further nod to a "Shakespearean touch" -- Nor custom stale her infinite variety (17)--, we are left to ask if the Judge will share Cleopatra's tragic fate or if she will be more like the haunted Enobarbus. [I won't spoil the fun.]

Either way, McEwan reveals that memorizing the "speech of Enobarbus by heart" is not a recipe for practical wisdom as the Judge, an accomplished amateur musician, deals with intimacy, and the lack thereof, in marriage or, as the novel unfolds, in relating to the needs and desires of the people she judges and whose fates she helps shape. The inability of literature to offer moral education to those not quite prepared to receive it, it is by now a familiar trope in literature (although I know respectable philosophers that resist this position).

Indeed for all her exposure to, even immersion in the arts, Judge Maye's "self-pity" (43), even if recognized by her, is not an attractive spectacle. McEwan portrays her as more attractive and interesting as a Judge than as a wife. She becomes, in fact, more fully alive in her visit to Adam's hospital room, where in a scene of exquisite delicacy she sings (Britten's version of) 'Down by the Salley Gardens' while the precocious Adam accompanies her on the violin. The scene is comic and absurd, but McEwan pulls it off with panache and conveys the suggestion of unexpected intimacy between the young, dying Adam and the Judge.

But the novel falls apart on the final pages, and it is signaled by a bit of bad writing that, not coincidentally, involves another performance:

Her own playing looked after itself. As her fingers touched the keys [of the piano], she heard herself as though she were sitting at the back of the audience, as if all that was required of her was to be present. Together, she and Mark entered the horizonless hyperspace of music-making, beyond time and purpose. She was only faintly aware that something waited for her return, for it lay far below her, an alien speck on a familiar landscape. Perhaps it wasn't there, perhaps it wasn't true. (198-9)

The problem here not is the thought that is being conveyed -- experiencing the escapism of self and situation during/of (joint) performance, while registering a faint apprehension --, but rather the manner; I hope a reader can correct me, but nothing in the novel prepares us for that horizonless hyperspace. Neither Judge Maye (who is, perhaps, a bit enervated by some alcohol) nor the implicit narrator has expressed any interest in mathematics (or Star Trek, or the internet) and its connection to art, music, or aesthetics.

That's to say,  McEwan's inability to find the right words for conveying the what it's like of performance tells us something about the limitations of his aesthetics. Like the contemporary philosopher, the post-classical novelist is excellent at, and right at home with, casuistry (read the book, which lends itself to class room teaching), but words fail him when he has to describe the phenomenology of aesthetic experience.

 

Leaving Your Ego at Home: on being a historian of philosophy

And, herein lies, I think, one of the great things about doing philosophy through historical figures like Leibniz. Whilst it’s very hard to leave your ego at home, there is less personal at stake when trying to discuss what you think Leibniz thought about x than when trying to say what you think about x. For one thing, everyone knows deep down, it would be crazy to think that they understood Leibniz an sich, and, for another, we all know he was a lot better at philosophy that we will ever be! And yet the joy of thinking philosophically is ever present.--Paul Lodge.

If I am granted the (extremely) controversial claim that studying Leibniz is no different than studying any other canonical, and would be canonical, author,* then in the quoted passage from Paul Lodge, one can read (at least) four claims about being a historian of philosopher: 

1. One's ego is less involved in studying a canonical philosophy than philosophizing directly.
2. The people we study are "a lot better at philosophy" than "we will ever be."
3. It is nearly impossible to fully understand a canonical philosopher.
4. Being a historian of philosophy is a joyful activity.

Claim (1) will come as a surprise to those only focused on the often minute squabbles among historians of philosophy. Even so, there is an important element of truth to (1). This is not because historians of philosophy are by nature less ego driven or vain -- Schliesser is exhibit A to the contrary --, but because part of the training of becoming a historian of philosophy is a disciplined bracketing of one's ego. For, whatever one's ultimate goal(s) in being (momentarily) a historian of philosophy (and there are huge disagreements over this), an attempt to grasp another thinker(s)'s text is a key part of it. One central benefit of this disciplined exercise in understanding another is to become self-aware of one's presuppositions that one brings to the text. When historians of philosophy complain about anachronism, what they really worry about is the unthinking, un-methodical, even unconscious imposition of the reader's thought-world onto the text. This unconscious thought-world is a whole series of expectations about how words, concepts, meanings, terminologies, grammar, values, as well as political and cultural practices (etc.) relate to each other. We can become aware of such hard to detect expectations of our ego, when we systematically confront utterances by others that do not fit our expectations in usual even uncanny ways.

So, the historian of philosophy is increasingly skilled at being self-ware of central, usually hidden, features of her own ego while she gets increasingly skilled at entering into another person's text. So, the disciplined student of the history of philosophy is following the Delphic injunction to know herself. Along the way she learns to 'bracket' her own ego in  the midst of grasping the text of another. In practice, this 'bracketing' of one's ego is always imperfect, which is why, say, the writings of historians of philosophy tend to reflect the ruling fashions of the generations of their teachers (give or take). Either way, one way to understand Lodge's claim is to see that when one philosophizes 'directly' (without mediation of historical texts) the hidden life of one's ego is, even if one has a naturally modest nature, not as systematically bracketed all else being equal. In practice, of course, all else is not equal, and there are lots of other philosophical and social practices that can generate some such bracketing of one's ego (say disciplined by formal technologies, or by dissonances through one's cultural back-ground, etc.). Having granted that last point, so many of the worst social incentives in philosophy reward the hyper-projection of one's ego onto metaphysical or social reality; the previous sentence is not as cryptic as it sounds. Here's a small example: status in our discipline tracks rapid come-backs, witty put-downs, and bold conjecture (backed up with plausible enough systematic analysis); we rarely reward, in our public esteem, sympathetic colleagues that are incredibly good at listening to another and bringing out the best feature of their interlocuter's views. (Obviously, when we are drafting a paper we very much appreciate having the sympathetic colleague.) Being trained as a historian of philosophy is to be trained into becoming a sympathetic colleague. (Again, this is compatible with the further thought that a historian of philosophy is uncouth, listens to bad pop music, a jerk, etc.)  

On Rules for the History of Philosophy...or a defense of methodological anachronism

The distinguished historian of philosophy, Peter Adamson (from "without any gaps" fame; the podcasts are a big hit), has articulated "some guidelines encapsulating what I see as good practice in studying the history of philosophy" (quoted from rule 1) on his blog. He is up to the ninth rule as I write this. The rules themselves are an "open-ended encouragement to strive for an ideal which is not practically reachable" (see rule 4; see also rule 8). I very much like this feature of the rules because it encourages us to think of our practice as an open-ended process (and puts the idea of a gapless history in nice perspective). There is a further worthy feature of the rules that is never stated explicitly, but a kind of animating principle behind them: to treat the authors we are studying as serious thinkers in their own right--a judgment that vindicates, in part, earlier readers; for, "any text that has survived to get into your hands has already been through a process of selection by earlier readers," (rule 2).

Before I get to a more principled qualm about his rules, I want to offer one immanent criticism of the first rule: "It's possible for the same idea to appear independently more than once." Yes, this is possible and undoubtedly occurs, and it might generate interesting questions about the conceptual possibility space available to certain philosophers such that 'forced moves' get rediscovered--I call such forced moves: social-conceptual-necessitation. (Having said that, I thought his example of Al-Ghazali and Hume on causation especially poorly chosen; (a) we know that Malebranche was almost certainly familiar with Al-Ghazali through discussions in Aquinas and Suarez [I apologize for forgetting where I first read this!], and Hume certainly knew his Malebranche; (b) until Dario Perinetti has completed his study of the La Fleche library we don't really know what Hume (and Descartes) might have read in his most formative period.) But while I am no fan of a certain kind of lineage-tracing popular among historians of ideas, this rule also has the likely tendency to discourage inquisitiveness. In particular it is very tempting to assume that 'great' thinkers didn't read or read little--some philosophers (Descartes, Spinoza, Carnap, Lewis, etc.) even play with a recurring Meme along these lines.* But we need/ought not trust their self-presentation in these matters. We miss moves in an author if we are unaware of her interlocutors. My concern is not just a matter of getting the context right (cf. rule 4); we literally do not notice if some options/alternatives are quietly foreclosed. It matters, for example, that Spinoza had More's Utopia in his library (and almost certainly read Bacon's New Atlantis); this means he was almost certainly aware of alternative ways to think about, say, gender relations and ways to organize religious-theological pluralism in society (as well as property relations, Biblical hermeneutics, etc.) even if he never went back to Plato. Aware of this, we might upon re-reading Spinoza notice that he has developed resources to reject those alternatives or we might start to see cracks in his edifice (etc.).  [Below I return to rule 1!]

Even so, the rules are problematic, especially because they come with the weighty authority  of an emiment and popular scholar. Leaving aside the fact that Adamson seems to be ignorant of the methodological discussions among other historians of philosophy of the last few years, Adamson never recognizes that there are alternative ways to study the history of philosophy in which some of the vices he recognizes may well be necessary virtues. I'll pick one example: Adamson is extremely concerned to have the historian avoid anachronism (see rule 4, 7, 8, 9). As it happens I have more tolerance for the kind of un-selfconscious anachronism that trained historians of philosophy are taught to reject; such un-selfconscious anachronistic readings of a text can, but need not, be interesting on their own terms ('what axioms in S4 or S5 would Spinoza or Leibniz reject?' can be hugely illuminating both to our understanding of Spinoza or a time-slice of Leibniz and to the modern student of modal logic). But that's not what I have in mind in defending here.

On The Historian of Philosophy as a Kuhnian Revolutionary

Thomas Kuhn opens The Structure 0f Scientific Revolutions with the following statement: 'History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.'  I hope that it isn't too pretentious to end my polemic with a paraphrase of that statement: History of philosophy, if viewed as a repository for more than assorted arguments and errors, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of philosophy by which we are now possessed.--Daniel Garber (2005) "What's Philosophical about the History of Philosophy?" (146) in Analytic Philosophy and History of Philosophy.

The quoted passage is the final one of Garber's essay, which proudly defends so-called 'antiquarian' history of philosophy. It does not ask to what degree Kuhn's Structure produced a decisive transformation in the image of science. Nor does Garber explore to what degree a changed image of science leads to a change in the practice, evaluation or funding of science(s). But leaving aside Kuhn's self-presentation, there is no doubt that Kuhn's image of science -- hegemonic paradigms/consensus, revolutions, puzzle-solving, etc. -- changed the philosophers's image of philosophy often by way of contrast or emulation of an image of science--recall, for example, here and here on Williamson). Garber does not note the irony that to this day, Kuhn's status as a philosopher is controversial even long after his ideas have become conventional wisdom.

Garber's essay, thus, presupposes that there is an image of philosophy and that this image matters in some sense to the practice of philosophy. Even Timothy Williamson agrees with this much: "This book [The Philosophy of Philosophy--ES] grew out of a sense that contemporary philosophy lacks a self-image that does it justice." (ix) Williamson constructs an image that can do justice to what he claims is an existing practice and one that he favors; his image, we may add, is especially suited to his skills and interests--justice is convenient, that way. Garber proposes that history of philosophy can prepare, either indirectly by those that practice a disinterested history of philosophy, or more directly by those with a plan, the future of philosophy. He claims that,

[A]ntiquarian history of philosophy can help us to look at philosophy itself and its relations with other disciplines and with the larger world in a fresh new way. It is often taken for granted that the discipline of philosophy that we practise today is substantially the same as it was in past times. It is this assumption that underlies the way in which philosophers have generally used the history of philosophy as a source of arguments and problems for their current work. But a careful and genuinely historical study of early modern philosophy gives us a rather different conception of the subject, something from which we as philosophers in the twenty-first century can learn." (138)

One might think that the main message here is the denial that philosophy is essentially a stable kind with an eternal essence (recall Bolton). But while non-trivial, the key point is that this entails that there is always a possible alternative to the status-quo image of philosophy, or that the ruling self-image can be adapted to the new ends. Garber is explicit about this:

Benjamin's Angel in the Eye of the Needle

“The state of emergency” [Ausnahmezustand] in which we live is the rule.--Walter Benjamin (VIII)

Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps, "My friend is dead! What can I do?" The operator says "Calm down. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead." There is a silence, then a gun shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says "OK, now what?"--World's Funniest Joke

Upon dwelling lately on "On the Concept of History," I was impressed by the fact that not unlike Hayek, Benjamin's treats Fascism as a natural development out of (vulgar) Marxism and Social Democracy (see paragraph XI). That is to say, they both diagnose a kind of social-conceptual-necessity that can hold between a particular set of beliefs (and social institutions) at one point and later social outcomes.** They both take care to distinguish this particular necessitating relationship from a cruder and more general determinism and progressivism. Moreover, they are both (as good readers of Nietzsche and Weber) aware of the suppressed theological commitments that animate the very idea of living with faith in science, and tempt the reader into a theological critique of these commitments. 

A crucial part of Benjamin's strategy is to offer an alternative to what he calls "homogeneous and empty time" (13ff). For, echoing Bergson, he rightly notes, despite the best efforts of the collaborating bureaucrats and some misguided philosophers of science, who impose homogeneous time on us, this need not be experienced time. That is to move momentarily to a metaphysical-Spinozistic register that articulates one version of Benjamin's general position: something need not be past as long as its effects can be made to endure (Ethics 1p36; recall here, here). In practice, this entails -- as Benjamin stresses -- that at any given moment our world is largely the product of victor's justice.

Benjamin's position is a healthy alternative to the ruling dogma's of today's cult of contingency embraced by the quietist followers of Foucault and Wittgenstein that dominates our era's historical reflection. On this today's historians are, despite mutual contempt, at one with the randomness-embracing mathematical, social scientists. By this I do not just mean that they (falsely) disown complicity in ruling ideology (although certainly there is that); they forsake part of their task, that is to generate the seeds of alternative futures.