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Aversion to Risks — Or Loss of Meaning?

Stephen L. Talbott

I'm going to pursue a brief exercise in parallel with the one Henry Perkinson so adroitly executes in his book, No Safety in Numbers: How the Computer Quantified Everything and Made People Risk-Aversive (1996). My aim is not so much to quarrel with Perkinson as to suggest some additions to his analysis that would deepen its explanatory power and perhaps also avert a few problems.

What is Perkinson's Thesis?

Perkinson speaks of the rationalistic dream of Descartes, which presents us with a mathematically structured world we can expect to understand. This rationalism, he writes, "ushered in a period of unlimited optimism that human intelligence -- if enlightened -- could construct a better, if not a perfect, civilization or culture" (p. 172). The advent of the computer, with its superhuman, nearly perfect mathematical and modeling capabilities, was the ideal tool for fulfilling this Cartesian hope.

But, Perkinson tells us, something else happened along the way. When applied to the humane and social studies, the computer drained those disciplines of their traditional significances. Scholars eventually had to be satisfied with abstruse, mathematical models that didn't relate to much of anything they had previously cared about, or else they had to resort to an epistemological relativism that made their own views impregnable (if also hardly worth defending) before the computational onslaught. This last tactic, employed by postmodernism, is born of risk aversion. One tries to become safe from attack -- immune to the precise certainties of computer modeling.

Epistemological relativism, according to Perkinson, is in turn linked to egalitarianism. If no one has a special claim on the truth, then neither does anyone have a right to impose his own version of the truth upon others. Any power structures enabling this imposition should be attacked and dismantled.

Likewise, the computer, with its uncanny ability to spot even the most minuscule, long-term, statistical trends, revealed previously unrecognized threats to the environment, to human health and safety, and to the well-being of minority groups. "To avert these risks our egalitarian-disposed society has created a climate of prevention that curtails and sometimes prohibits conduct that has the potential to endanger any creature's well-being. In such a climate people must behave so as not to put others at risk" (p. 173).

The computer has also caused a great deal of economic dislocation, making workers risk-averse. The attack on junk-bond dealers such as Michael Milken reflected society's anger at those whose activities were thought to jeopardize the welfare of workers.

And, again, politicians, given extensive polling and software tools for measuring the impact of every action upon the electorate, have been paralyzed by this knowledge, abandoning their responsibilities to govern in order to conduct unending election campaigns.

In sum, the computer gives us precision, but the burden of this precision proves heavy. It also proves disillusioning, for it finally teaches us that "we never really know what we are doing -- we can [for, example] never anticipate all the possible health and environmental consequences of our actions" (p. 174). Yet, for all the failure of Descartes' dream, its spell "is broad and deep" and continues to drive us. We want perfect knowledge and perfect aversion of the risks this knowledge reveals to us.

Perkinson asserts at the end of his book that risk inevitably haunts the human condition; we should not seek to eliminate it altogether. Social improvement comes through criticism, and effective criticism is mediated through institutions such as those of the economic marketplace and of democratic governance. If we paralyze such institutions in a frenzy of risk-averse fervor, we will destroy our future.

Risk-Aversion and Meaninglessness

Perkinson, I think, makes a good case for our having become more wary of risk in recent decades, and for that wariness being linked in one way or another to the computer. What I want to suggest, however, is that we need a more fundamental category than risk-aversion to understand what is going on. The category I have in mind is meaning -- admittedly a difficult one to deal with.

People who are driven by profound meaning are not risk-averse. The Christian martyr, the patriot eager to fight for his country, the mother who suffers and sacrifices for her children, the terrorist gripped by a great cause -- these people take risks because they find the risks freighted with meaning.

Our age, however, has widely become known as the age of meaninglessness, and for good reason. Beginning with the birth of modern science in the time of Galileo and Descartes, meaning was systematically and ever more thoroughly excluded from the most influential human disciplines. The qualitative side of the world, from which alone meaning can arise, was explicitly downgraded to secondary status, while the measurable was equated with the real.

But number alone cannot give meaning. A brick of gold and a brick of granite may have the same mass, and they may reflect light at different wavelengths, but such quantitative facts will never capture the meanings gold and granite hold for human beings.

The downgrading of everything qualitative was not an arbitrary, or even a conscious, choice. It is simply that the world was in actual fact being experienced with less and less qualitative vividness. Through the window and grid of the perspective artist we found ourselves gauging spatial relations where in earlier art we had felt the presence of the sacred (Talbott: chapters 21 and 22). Through the printed word and image, we learned to inhabit abstract realms far removed from the previously given and sometimes overwhelming meanings of the outer world. The world indeed became for the first time "outer," receding farther and farther from the human being, who now looked out upon its external surfaces as a detached observer. The world's meanings were no longer insistent; they no longer flowed into us from without. Either we would learn to summon meaning from within ourselves, or we would abandon it.

The dominant tendency, with science leading the way, was to abandon it. We have, in almost all things, embraced ever more abstract habits of mind. The prime abstractions, of course, are pure mathematics and logic, and these know nothing of meaning. They are able to give us absolute precision, perfect validity, a yes-or-no sort of truth because they do not have to be about anything. In fact, they can't be about anything if they would retain their perfect validity. As Bertrand Russell wrote, "mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about" (pp. 59-60). We can, of course, apply logic and mathematics to the world, but then we no longer have pure logic and mathematics, and our precision, our absolute validity, begins to be muddied by the qualitative obscurity of the world. We have to employ some sort of model, and this raises all sorts of vexing questions regarding what it is we're talking about -- for example, what does the model have to do with the real world?

Summarizing: we have for several centuries been cultivating abstract habits of thought. Qualities and meaning have disappeared -- which is to say that the world has disappeared -- behind a veil of abstractions. And our thinking is dominated by the binary, yes-or-no rigidity appropriate to the vanishingly thin, if absolutely precise notion of truth found in mathematics and logic.

Consequences of Meaninglessness

Against this all-too-briefly sketched background I would like to expand upon a few of Perkinson's remarks.

When the computer enabled us to mathematize our culture, we began to realize that we do not understand, and cannot understand, what we have wrought. (p. 175)

But I do not think we should focus too sharply on the computer as the cause of our failure to understand. The drive to abstract and mathematize (of which the development of the computer is one result) was already entailing the loss of the qualitative and meaningful, as I have just tried to explain. And without reliable meanings to employ, surely we have no hope of understanding! So I am suggesting that we need to look first of all at our evolving habits of consciousness, and the changing relation between self and world that those habits signify. Already with Galileo and Descartes we had begun to discard meaning for the virtues of precision. We thereby set out upon a path where eventually we could be wonderfully precise about we-knew-not-what. The hope of understanding -- as opposed to effective but blind power -- was an unavoidable casualty of, or perhaps just another name for, these developing habits of consciousness.

A second remark by Perkinson concerns the odd conjunction during the 1980s of declining unemployment and rising risk aversion in the workforce. Part of the reason, he says, was that

many of those the computer had put out of work or dislocated were from the college-educated middle class. This was the first time since the depression that so many of those who were unemployed were professional workers -- engineers, technicians, accountants, managers, and executives...These middle-class workers, stunned by the loss of their jobs, vociferously demanded an explanation of what was going on, and more than this, they wanted guarantees of job security. (p. 120)

There is doubtless truth in this. But something else needs adding -- something related to a fact that Perkinson himself notes: the computer was transforming "the entire factory into a single machine that creates more wealth" (p. 115). Surely workers sensed, one way or another, the growing, machine-like character of the organization, which left little room for people, whether employed or not. So the question here, too, was one of meaning, or rather its loss in the face of depersonalization and mechanization. This could hardly help contributing to the general sense of insecurity.

Putting it a little differently: being laid off is a much more traumatic experience when it is accompanied by a growing sense that one's inner connection to the whole, purposeful activity of the workplace is disappearing, and that what befalls one is therefore arbitrary and unpredictable. The anger directed at junk bond dealers and merger specialists (underscored by Perkinson) fits into this picture, for these financial wheelers and dealers were notorious for dealing with businesses in complete disregard for the community of purposes that had previously bound them together. Instead of purposes, there was the mathematics of profit maximization.

Concern for profit is essential as an economic discipline on the way toward achieving some worthwhile end. But when profit itself becomes the end, then the human being, his purposes, and his meaningful work, have fallen out of the picture.

A third observation by Perkinson:

At the heart of postmodernism is epistemological relativism which asserts that since we can never demonstrate any proposition to be true, then all propositions have equal epistemic standing -- none are privileged....All knowledge becomes subjective, and each community decides what is certain -- for itself. (p. 172)

I don't question this summary of postmodernism. What needs adding, I think, is a criticism of it. The postmoderns, like the rest of us, have lost all feeling for the relation between truth and meaning. They have accepted that the only hope for objective understanding is lodged in the notion of propositional truth -- yes-or-no truth in the mathematical or logical sense. That is, they have accepted the positivist hope as the only real one. Therefore, in light of its failure, they embrace meaning as necessarily subjective and relative.

But genuine, objective understanding never has been a matter of truth alone -- truth in the yes-or-no sense of mathematics. This demand for unambiguous precision is the correlate of a reductionism that cannot help conceiving the world, first, as mechanism, and finally as mathematics. But in reality yes-or-no truth, including mathematical truth, has always had to stand in dynamic equilibrium with something else -- something that gives content to truth, making it be about the real world. This is where meaning comes in.

Here I have to do a little explaining. Meaning has a curious relation to yes-or-no truth. The primary device for creating meaning is what Owen Barfield has called other-saying -- or, loosely speaking, metaphor. That is, we speak fictions, saying one thing literally but meaning something quite otherwise by it. One has to look through the false, literal, not fully intended, yet essential reading of the text in order to see the new, metaphorical meaning suffusing the literal statement from a different level.

As Barfield shows, all or virtually all our currently literal meanings -- including terms of science, such as "force," "stimulus," "behavior," "cause," "organism," and so on -- began as this sort of other-saying. When Newton assimilated the word "gravity" to modern physics, his meaning had to be grasped as metaphor, since gravity at that time meant something more like "heaviness" or "desire for the earth" than what we mean by "force" today.

As to the relation between meaning and truth, Barfield concludes:

I do not think we can say that meaning, in itself, is either true or untrue. All we can safely say is, that that quality which makes some people say: "That is self-evident" or "that is obviously true," and which makes others say: "That is a tautology," is precisely the quality which meaning hasn't got. (pp. 32-34)

Meaning, then, is born of a kind of fiction, yet it is the content, or raw material, of truth. This is the very difficult and subtle dynamic we have to learn to explore if we would ever gain a solid understanding of the world.

Formal, abstract systems such as logic and mathematics give us yes-or-no truth unrelated to the world. Meaning, on the other hand, operates more at the level of the individual term than the proposition, and it challenges us to achieve an ever deeper, ever more richly textured grasp of the things we are reasoning about.

Objective understanding, then, cannot be simply a matter of truth, nor is it simply a matter of meaning. It is a result of a tensive play between these two things, where the yes-or-no certainty of truth about nothing wrestles with the expressive depth and richness of inarticulate meaning to yield more or less revelatory pictures of the world. Each requires the other. Yes-or-no logic requires fertilization by meaning in order to gain content; meaning requires the constant attack and discipline of logic in order to become explicable.

(I have tried to elucidate the relation between truth and meaning at greater length elsewhere -- 1995: chapter 23.)

This is not relativism. The pictures are more or less revelatory. But neither is it the thin, brittle absolutism of yes-or-no truth. It is, rather the pathway along which an ever more profound understanding of the world can, with great effort, be won.

So it has been my argument that the dead end of postmodernism, like the development of the computer, is a symptom of long-developing habits of abstraction that have increasingly put the world's meaning out of sight, forcing us to accept a binary, virtual reality of precise certainties that have been orphaned from the full-textured world of our actual experience, or else to take refuge in mere subjectivity.

Here is a fourth remark by Perkinson. Speaking of the need to continue improving society through processes of criticism, he writes:

Many people remain under the spell of Descartes, believing that we must first have an idea or understanding of what a perfect or good culture is before we can improve what exists. This belief denies, or attempts to transcend our condition of human fallibility. For, since we are fallible, we cannot ever come up with an idea or conception of a perfect polity, a perfect society, a perfect economy. We can, however, improve our culture by criticizing what already exists: by looking for what is wrong, inadequate, harmful, mistaken, in what already exists. (p. 176)

But while it is indeed the case that we cannot have yes-or-no truth about the world (because what is significant about the world does not come in the form of atomic, yes-or-no facts), we can have more or less sound, more or less profound understanding based on rigorously grasped meanings. It seems to me misguided to suggest that we could produce worthwhile criticisms of anything in the absence of a store of living and fruitful meanings that capture some of the sense of the world.

So I would, against Perkinson, argue that we have been coming to the end of our ability to criticize helpfully, and this for the same reason that we have been showing ourselves risk-averse: namely, our inherited store of meanings has been steadily eroding under the assault of our abstract habits of mind. The question is whether we will regain the sort of meanings that might save the situation. I believe we can do so -- for example, by rediscovering a qualitative science of wholeness -- but that is another paper.

I would like to conclude by indicating -- again all too sketchily -- the problems I see with risk-aversion as a fundamental explanatory category. Perkinson writes that "it was the quantification of potential and actual environmental disasters that made environmental risk credible to most Americans" (p. 61). He goes on, however, to qualify this:

Statistics about risks do not alone lead to societal measures to avert risks. It is only when the risks at issue are thought to be involuntary and irreversible and to be somehow caused by the system that those statistics lead to societal measures to manage or control risk. (p. 69)

This qualification seems right on target and Perkinson's reference to "the system" points us to an important consideration. One could say something similar about the drive to achieve social justice for minorities, women, the handicapped, and so on. Here, too, the system as culprit plays a crucial role, and forcing changes to the system becomes critical to the proposed remedies.

Unfortunately, "the system" tends to be a vague abstraction (although we are naturally tempted to personify it whenever a suitable villain comes along). This abstraction is very much the heart of the problem. The individual citizen simply does not feel that his own behavior is concretely and meaningfully linked to the problem or the solution. Only a governmental program, which is conceived in the same mode as a computer program, is thought to offer a real solution.

Again, then, we are up against the problem of meaning -- in this case, the meaning of individual action (which is, in the end, the only kind of action we can talk about). In this light, and with no attempt at explanation or justification, I would make the following bald assertions about the environmental movement in this country:

In human relations, where meaning has been hardest to abandon altogether, we are still familiar with the kind of trade-offs and compromises we can healthily make in conducting our exchanges. As parents, for example, we would never willingly do anything at all to harm one of our children, but in mediating among them we sometimes have to make hard choices. What we try to do is preserve the overall fabric of meaning and fairness in which we and our children move, so that the integrity of the whole is maintained. As in a work of art, a change in the pattern here -- even a regrettable one -- might be compensated by a redesign over there. This is the way we would relate to the environment, too, if we were able to bring it alive again as a source of meaning.

Everything qualitative and meaningful offers us this kind of flexibility, this kind of receptivity to artistic responses born of human freedom. We do not find the same flexibility in systems of logic or in the numerical and statistical results whose effects Perkinson elucidates so well.

So our fundamental problem, lying beneath the symptoms of risk-aversion, is the loss of meaning. This loss allows the abstract, quantitatively driven logic of systems and programs to substitute for a conscious, individual, freely creative contribution to the coherence of the world in which we live.


This paper was read on April 26, 1997, at the inaugural convention of the New Jersey Communication Association, Montclair University, Montclair, New Jersey.

Bibliography

Barfield, Owen. "The Nature of Meaning." Seven 2 (1981).

Russell, Bertrand. Mysticism and Logic. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1981.

Perkinson, Henry J. No Safety in Numbers: How the Computer Quantified Everything and Made People Risk-Aversive. Cresskill NJ: Hampton, 1996.

Talbott, Stephen L. The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst. Sebastopol, Calif.: O'Reilly & Associates, 1995.

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Steve Talbott :: Aversion to Risks - Or Loss of Meaning?