Management and ignorance.

It is no exaggeration to say that "modernity" has suffered the death of a thousand cuts over the last few decades. Few who spend much time thinking about how history instructs the present have any stake in defending "modernity" as the sign of progress and civility, and even the most Whiggish of those who plow the narrow fields of academic politics ought to have at least a few reservations about the way the last few centuries have unfolded. In other words, it is not always easy to love the intellectual stance of the Enlightenment, which while standing for reason and freedom in principle also stood for arrogance and cynicism in practice, especially towards those ideas or peoples whose principles or skins would not or could not be enlightened. I will not rehearse the case against modernity -- and for the uninitiated these papers provide some very good starting points -- but I would like to comment on four key strands as they apply to the concept of management, strands which, helpfully, the four papers in their t urns have targeted: science, economy, politics, and ethics. After that, I will take up the question that readers who have worked through these papers might still be asking: So what must be done?

Science

"Management and Its Discontents" reaches back to the stirrings of the Enlightenment ambition -- to conquer nature through practical power. All of modernity -- the good and the bad -- emerges from the productive arrogance that comes from this conceit, namely, that God created an intelligible and rule-governed world for us to interpret and remake. According to Bacon [1960: 39] in his central work, Novum Organon, "Nature to be commanded must be obeyed." The goal of the pioneer of scientific thought was to develop a rigorous method by which one could leverage a knowledge of nature into a predictive science, which in turn could be used to exert control over outcomes. Knowledge for its own sake was rarely the point; the point was instrumental knowledge, i.e., knowledge that had a view toward power and works. But the problem with such a view, as we realize some 400 years on, is that science is not founded on natural law but rather on natural law as filtered through human thought and language. No matter how well our descriptive models appear to latch onto the things themselves, human desires, emotions, and imperatives are as much part of those formulations as molecules and magnetic fields. This means that science cannot be presumed to be "purer" than other areas of human thought and endeavour; while it is doubtlessly the model for objective and disinterested investigation -- science is nothing if not relentless in its assertion of its own impartiality -- it only models that stance. Science is made by humans; it does not make itself. By extension, science cannot tell us how to manage nature or people -- although there are plenty of managers who try to rise above the messiness of ideology by buttressing their own ideology with the authority of neutral science.

Economics

The connection between science and another Enlightenment product, capitalism, is the focus of "Branches for Roots." This essay asks us to think what environmental management would look like if it aimed at monitoring and sustaining the relationships between human and non-human. Oh? Is that not exactly what it does do? Not really: management aims at monitoring and sustaining the non-human for its use-value to humans; it places all questions of the non-human within the framework of a historically specific economic organization used to distribute scarce goods. As Gifford Pinchot [1987: 325] rather coldly observed, "There are just two things on this material earth -- people and natural resources." One thing modernity has done is make it increasingly hard to imagine the "not-people" part of the world as anything but resources -- fungible, tradable, liquid. When everything can be bought and sold eventually everything will. Another thing modernity has done is make the circulation of capital appear to be a natural pro cess. So to conceive of "resources" as non-resources is, first of all next to impossible, given that the market works assiduously to affix all the world's contents with price tags; and second, counterproductive, given that the market has become the only mechanism by which those contents might be valued highly enough to save them from the market. A perverse but coherent program, one that the dismal science claims only to observe but in fact promulgates remorselessly.

Politics

If the Project of Reason made democracy possible, it also sowed the seeds for democracy's irrelevance. The complexity of modem techno-society, with its vast networks of communication, finance, information, and so on, required the emergence of a managerial class that could take on the day-to-day running of the system. As a result of complexity, fewer and fewer significant planning decisions are taken by the polity or its elected representatives because the sorts of deliberations suitable for such bodies cannot include those that are time-sensitive or unconformable with the yea/nay coding structure of the political system. As for the rest -- in other words, just about every decision that counts -- on them the managerial sub-structure of the political system goes to work. Autarchic bodies such as the WTO or the IMF are the most visible incarnations of the management regime, but behind the scenes in every jurisdiction are the silent bureaucracies that churn out the reports and analyses, the rules and regulations that so palpably affect the quotidian existences of humans and non-humans alike. To the extent that green theory and practice participate in this bureaucratization of the political imagination, to that extent they are committed to business-as-usual. "The Obscured Potential of Environmental Politics" argues that this consensual quietism can be invigorated only by a rededication to the actual sources of open and robust democracy: antagonism, partisanship, and dissensus. Environmental activists should never work within the system to make it, so to speak, see green; rather, they must work at the system to rearticulate the bases of democratic decision-making. Without that kind of radicalism, environmental politics comes to look much like what we see today: a Potemkin village hiding the ongoing failure of activists to achieve anything except at the edges of the environmental crisis.

Ethics

Zygmunt Bauman's sustained reflection on what it means to live in a world without solid grounds -- a "modernity without illusions," as he puts it -- is exemplary of the way we must think through not just the possibility of management in a postmodern world but how to formulate its ethics. Ethics -- the standards by which we measure the good -- are at the heart of the management problem, for management is always carried out with some version of the good in mind. When the pursuit of the good is overshadowed by the pressures to implement decisions things get especially confusing: then the imperative to "get something done" eclipses the reasons why decisions were to be taken in the first place. Process is important, but process unmoored from rigorous attention to its ethical content -- no matter that today this content is itself unmoored -- is by definition immoral. Reading Bauman, for example, might prompt us to ask, What is the ethical content of imagining the non-human world as a basket of natural resources, or society as a basket of human resources? Although it is easy to forget, those terms are metaphors -- and metaphors are never innocent. To paraphrase Heidegger, metaphors speak, not the man. As the Nazis showed, once people come to live by a metaphor as seductively simple as "society is a garden," the injunction to begin "weeding" can follow all-too easily. Some readers might find tough to swallow Bauman's notion that the progressive rationalization of the West really leads to the concentration camp; they would prefer to believe that Hitler and Stalin's management practices were aberrant, and they would point to non-Western despots such as Pol Pot or Mao to refute the argument that embedded in the metaphors of command and control are totalitarian predispositions. They are right to point that out. But I would say what is far more significant and disturbing is that the progressive rationalization of the West did not make the concentration camp unthinkable. The march of reason could easily conform to the gooseste p because there is no ethical content to reason itself. That may come as a surprise to scientists and managers alike who suppose their rationalizing goals coincide with the evolution of the good. ("We come to know more about how the universe hangs together; ergo, we are better people for it.") But while Bacon said that a true science proceeds by progressive correction, and while our understanding of nature will no doubt continue to improve, what does not appear amenable to correction -- at least not via the path of reason alone -- are the latencies of power and arrogance that stand behind human motivations themselves. How to be good to other people and the world is not a question the project of reason can reasonably answer. The simple fact is that human societies at a fundamental level are always at odds with their outside, whether that outside is nature, another society, or the outside elements within society. To put a finer point on it: society has yet to learn how it might develop its own projects and capa cities without impoverishing itself or its Others. Although there are millions of ways to soften the human impact, that still leaves millions of impacts.

And So...

And so if after digesting this set of essay readers of Environments ask themselves, How do we rid ourselves of this debilitating management paradigm? then, albeit with the best of intentions, they are asking themselves the wrong question. For "management" is not something we can dispense with, despite the ills we have seen are associated with it. To change from a management regime based on confident control of natural or human resources to a regime that explicitly denounced, overturned, or otherwise revolutionized the concept of control tout court would not constitute the abolition of management: we can only move from one form of management to another. But a management regime that gave more than passing attention to its own fallibility would be salutary, for it would be grounded in humankind's boundless ignorance rather than its fragmentary and fleeting knowledge. As these four papers have suggested, such a regime would offer coping strategies rather than command and control; it would open itself to the produ ctive clamor of dissensus; and it would parlay its knowledge-gaps into humbleness and restraint before a universe that continues to surprise. Ignorance, at least in the case of management, is indeed strength.

In the case of environmental and resources management, already we have seen long-reigning modern values (that gave us wise usage, prudent stewardship, and steady-state modeling) giving way before postmodern perspectives, which relieve managers of the obligation of being All-Seeing Eyes but at the same time open up the troubling possibility that sometimes the best management strategy is no management at all. More searchingly, resources management has turned reflexively on itself and discovered, belatedly, that to manage resources means that one has already determined that they are to be used. Management becomes like the doctor who rushes everywhere to help victims of an epidemic -- only to discover that he himself is the plague-carrier. Therefore, the paradigm shift required is not about doing this or that function better or applying a new and improved set of yardsticks to the problems at hand. Rather, it is about stepping back from a world we reduce in complexity by our every intervention; it is about combati ng those forces within management that make it an instrument not of environmental health but of human avarice. To renounce instrumental reason goes against the grain: it may entail knowing but not doing, or not knowing but still doing. Either way, management as a predictive science has become much more risky. But in bowing to its own ignorance it gives up its pose of mastery, which is the very worst standpoint from which to manage the world.

References

Bacon, Francis 1960 11620] The New Organon and Related Writings, Fulton Anderson, ed. New York: The Liberal Arts Press.

Pinchot, Gifford 1987 [1947] Breaking New Ground Washington D.C.: Island Press.

Andrew McMurry is an assistant professor of English at the University of Waterloo

He specializes in American literature and the rhetoric of the environment. He is the author of Environmental Renaissance: Emerson, Thoreau, and the Systems of Nature (Georgia, 2003).