{"id":7766,"date":"2023-05-12T02:10:39","date_gmt":"2023-05-12T02:10:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=7766"},"modified":"2024-10-08T15:55:23","modified_gmt":"2024-10-08T15:55:23","slug":"congratulations-on-your-admission-to-the-college-of-augurs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2023\/05\/12\/congratulations-on-your-admission-to-the-college-of-augurs\/","title":{"rendered":"Congratulations on your Admission to the College of Augurs"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Congratulations on Your Admission to the College of Augurs<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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or, On the Empire of the Knowledge That Does Not Exist <\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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By Charlie Clark<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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What we have in the West is a series of empires, each with its own cultural project\u2026 [The current empire] is the empire of Anglo-American technocratic capitalism, the economic and technological empire of the WEIRD (the western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic). And the cultural hegemony of this empire is what goes by the name of the \u201csecular discourse\u201d in Berger or \u201cexclusive humanism\u201d in Smith. \u2014 Charlie Clark, \u201cEverything That Can Go On Is Going On,\u201d <\/em>Fare Forward (2015)<\/em><\/p>

Rome owes her grandeur and success to the conduct of those who were tenacious of their religious duties; and if we compare ourselves to our neighbours, we shall find that we are infinitely distinguished above foreign nations by our zeal for religious ceremonies. \u2014 Cicero, <\/em>On the Nature of the Gods (c. 45 BC)<\/em><\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

I used to work in the scrap metal business. The first week of every month is The Trade, when the steel mills buy scrap for delivery over the next 30 days. The Trade is a lot of calling around: the mills\u2019 buyers call the brokers who call the dealers, back and forth and back again. For the first few days, everyone is watching everyone else to see who will make a move. The mills try to tamp enthusiasm down; the dealers, to hype it up. The brokers side with the mills, because the mills are the powers that be, and the brokers get the same cut regardless of the price. Eventually, some big mill makes its buy for the month, and everyone else falls in line behind them. The whole market tends to move by some amount of dollars per ton, up $10, say, or down $20.<\/p>

In advance of The Trade, rumors circulate about what the market will do. Reports from manufacturers and mining companies are enlisted to support predictions. But actually, the only predictable factor is bullish sellers and bearish buyers. It\u2019s all posturing: everyone in the business knows that the movement of the market can\u2019t actually be predicted. The AMM\u2019s forecasts are just rhetorical ammunition\u2014if prophecies, only the self-fulfilling kind. The Trade is a poker game. Everyone knows their hand; they can see the cards on the table. But you don\u2019t play the cards, you play the guy across from you.<\/p>

Sometimes, I\u2019d try to explain this to peddlers. Because every month they\u2019d badger me, \u201cHey, what\u2019s scrap gonna do next month? I know you know something<\/em>.\u201d I\u2019d try and explain: \u201cIf I knew what scrap was gonna do next month, we wouldn\u2019t be having this conversation, because I\u2019d be retired, living on a beach somewhere.\u201d Knowing\u2014really knowing\u2014what the market would do next month would be like knowing tomorrow\u2019s lottery numbers. Of course, I did know something\u2014<\/em>I knew small movements were more likely than large movements and I knew to hedge my bets\u2014but what I knew would never come close to yielding a prediction.<\/p>

So why did I spend so much time trying? Why did I collect data and arrange it in tables and track the historical movements of the market to try and chart its future? Why did I build models\u2014naive models, I\u2019m sure\u2014and generate private forecasts? There was something almost ritualistic about these attempts at prediction; I thought about it as \u201cdoing my due diligence\u201d\u2014even though I didn\u2019t really believe it could work. My data was junk, my techniques were unrefined: at the end of the day, I knew my predictions were phony. I traded on them anyway. The amazing thing was that it worked. My record was actually very good.\u00a0<\/p>

My initiation into these secret rites must have occurred, osmotically, in college. My alma mater is one of junior members of a Northeastern athletic conference that produces a disproportionate share of our nation\u2019s elites. A plurality of those future elites take a degree in the social sciences\u2014economics being the queen of those sciences\u2014and go on to earn staggering salaries making predictions about the movements of markets and the actions of corporations. Was there some scale at which data became more than the sum of its parts, at which, through sheer aggregation, it became more informative than my intimate knowledge of a single firm in a single industry? I wouldn\u2019t know; I studied Classics.<\/p>

[T]he record of social scientists as predictors is very bad indeed, insofar as the record can be pieced together. No economist predicted \u2018stagflation\u2019 before it occurred, the writings of monetary theorists have signally failed to predict the rates of inflation correctly (Levy 1975) and D.J.C. Smyth and J.C.K. Ash have shown that the forecasts produced on the basis of the most sophisticated economic theory of OECD since 1967 have produced less successful predictions than would have been arrived at by using the commonsense, or as they say, naive methods of forecasting rates of growth by taking the average rate of growth for the last ten years as a guide or rates of inflation by assuming that the next six months will resemble the last six months (Smyth and Ash 1975). One could go on multiplying examples of the predictive ineptitude of economists\u2026 \u2014 Alasdair MacIntyre, <\/em>After Virtue(1981)<\/em><\/p>

[M]acroeconomics, despite the thousands of highly intelligent people over centuries who have tried to figure it out, remains, to an uncomfortable degree, a black box. The ways that millions of people bounce off one another\u2014buying and selling, lending and borrowing, intersecting with governments and central banks and businesses and everything else around us\u2014amount to a system so complex that no human fully comprehends it. \u201cMacroeconomics behaves like we\u2019re doing physics after the quantum revolution, that we really understand at a fundamental level the forces around us,\u201d said Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, in an interview. \u201cWe\u2019re really at the level of Galileo and Copernicus,\u201d just figuring out the basics of how the universe works\u2026. Or put less politely, as Mr. Rudd writes in the first sentence of his paper, \u201cMainstream economics is replete with ideas that \u2018everyone knows\u2019 to be true, but that are actually arrant nonsense.\u201d \u2014 \u201cNobody Really Knows How the Economy Works. A Fed Paper Is the Latest Sign<\/a>.\u201d <\/em>The New York Times, 10\/21\/21<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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What MacIntyre recognizes is that we are living in the Empire of the Knowledge that Does Not Exist.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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How predictable are human beings? There\u2019s a multi-chapter investigation of this question sandwiched between the Disquieting Suggestion with which Alasdair MacIntyre opens After Virtue <\/em>and the forced choice he offers between Aristotle and Nietzsche in Chapter 9. I suspect this section gets skimmed over by a lot of readers, as tangential to the main argument. If so, what MacIntyre recognizes and these skimmers do not is that, in our time, the main antagonist of a moral realism rooted in virtue ethics is not postmodern moral relativism but putatively amoral bureaucratic rationality. What MacIntyre recognizes is that we are living in the Empire of the Knowledge That Does Not Exist.<\/p>

MacIntyre observes that modern society has become dominated by the search for a quality he names \u201cmanagerial expertise.\u201d (We might gloss MacIntyre\u2019s \u201cmanagerial expertise\u201d with a series of related terms: efficiency, optimization, quantitative analysis, data science, wonkishness, or my personal favorite, Moneyball-for-Everything<\/a>. Consultants and financiers may not be accustomed to thinking of themselves as managers, but they are the managers par excellence <\/em>according to MacIntyre\u2019s meaning.) Managerial expertise is in high demand by both government and corporations, because both \u201cjustify themselves and their claims to authority, power and money by invoking their own competence as scientific managers of social change.\u201d Governments and corporations alike represent themselves to stakeholders as making decisions that are \u201cdata-driven\u201d or \u201cfact-based.\u201d The managers who populate bureaucratic hierarchies are, in this light, \u201cuncontested figures, who purport to restrict themselves to the realms in which rational agreement is possible\u2026 the realm of fact, the realm of means, the realm of measurable effectiveness.\u201d<\/p>

Predicting human behavior given particular conditions, and thereby affording decision makers some grip on that human behavior by which to exercise control over it, is what managerial expertise is all about: \u201cthe central function of the social scientist as expert advisor or manager is to predict the outcomes of alternative policies.\u201d Therefore, \u201cWhat managerial expertise requires for its vindication is a justified conception of social science as providing a stock of law-like generalizations with strong predictive power.\u201d As MacIntyre takes pains to demonstrate, no such stock of law-like generalizations exists\u2014nor can it exist. Its existence is demonstrably foreclosed by the nature of human affairs.<\/p>

Human affairs, MacIntyre argues, are defined by four sources of systematic unpredictability: \u201c[1] radical conceptual innovation\u2026 [2] the unpredictability of certain of his own future actions by each agent individually\u2026 [3] the game-theoretic character of social life\u2026 [4] pure contingency.\u201d First, paradigm-shifting discoveries are, by nature, unpredictable: you cannot predict the invention of the wheel; \u201ca necessary part of predicting its invention is to say what a wheel is; and to say what a wheel is just is <\/em>to invent it.\u201d Second, I cannot know what future action I shall take as the result of an unmade decision\u2014to know which decision I will make would be to have already made it. Consequently, I cannot know what effect my future action might have on the actions of another, so I cannot fully predict the other\u2019s future action either. Third, the indefinite reflexivity of game-theoretic situations<\/a>, the incentive of players to \u201cmaximize the imperfection of the information\u201d available to other players, the possibility of many different games \u201ctaking place at one and the same time between members of the same group,\u201d and the lack of \u201ca determinate set of players and pieces or a determinate area in which the game is to take place\u201d make real life transactions fiendishly complex. Fourth, there is no accounting for the virtually infinite number of \u201ctrivial contingencies [that] can powerfully influence the outcome of great events: the molehill which killed William III or Napoleon\u2019s cold at Waterloo.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Then again, maybe Rome was ruled by a hereditary cabal of bird watchers.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Of course, these sources of unpredictability do not render our ignorance about the future total. MacIntyre acknowledges countervailing sources of systematic predictability<\/em>\u2014among them \u201c[1] the necessity of scheduling and coordinating our social actions\u2026 [2] statistical regularities\u2026 [3] knowledge of the causal regularities of nature\u2026 [4] knowledge of causal regularities in social life.\u201d However, the interaction of these sources of predictability and unpredictability makes the generalizations available to the social sciences quite unlike those available to the physical sciences: \u201c[1] they all coexist in their disciplines with recognized counter-examples\u2026 [2] we cannot say of them in any precise way under what conditions they hold\u2026 [3] we do not know how to apply them systematically beyond the limits of observation to unobserved or hypothetical instances.\u201d In terms of laws governing human behavior, the best we can hope for from the social sciences are \u201cthe proverbs of folk societies, the generalizations of jurists, the maxims of Machiavelli.\u201d Which is to say \u201cmore like \u2018guidelines\u2019 than actual rules<\/a>.\u201d (This accords with my own experience: my reasonably successful record as a scrap trader owed more to such unlaw-like generalizations as \u201cPigs get fat, but hogs get slaughtered.\u201d than to regression analyses.)<\/p>

What shall we say then? \u201c[Managerial expertise] does indeed turn out to be one more moral fiction, because the kind of knowledge which would be required to sustain it does not exist.\u201d The social sciences may provide us with some valid inductive premises, but they have weak predictive power: too weak to vindicate the claims of managerial experts. There is no set of law-like generalizations that \u201ccould yield those particular causal explanations and predictions by means of which the manager could mold, influence and control the social environment.\u201d The knowledge does not exist. Human behavior is ultimately unpredictable, and management is a myth, a masquerade: \u201cOur social order is in a very literal sense out of our, and indeed anyone\u2019s control. No one is or could be in charge.\u201d Prediction of more than accidental accuracy\u2014that is, accuracy above and beyond the folk-wisdom base rate\u2014is an impossible dream.<\/p>

Consider the following possibility: that what we are oppressed by is not power, but impotence; that one key reason why presidents of large corporations do not, as some radical critics believe, control the United States is that they do not even succeed in controlling their own corporations; that all too often, when imputed organizational skill and power are deployed and the desired effect follows, all that we have witnessed is the same kind of sequence as that to be observed when a clergyman is fortunate enough to pray for rain just before the unpredicted end of a drought; that the levers of power\u2014one of managerial expertise\u2019s own key metaphors\u2014produce effects unsystematically and too often only coincidentally related to the effects of which their users boast. \u2014 MacIntyre, <\/em>After Virtue<\/p>

\u201cBut wait,\u201d you say. That can\u2019t possibly be true. Not only do governments and corporations employ people for their managerial expertise, those are the most prestigious and best-paid jobs there are. And all those consultants and analysts, they have real power and influence. The executives will do whatever the number-crunchers tell them. And whatever they\u2019re doing clearly works. They get results. E pur si muove<\/em>.<\/p>

Now, men are at liberty to mock at our religious fears. \u201cWhat does it matter if the sacred chickens do not feed, if they hesitate to come out of their coop, if a bird has shrieked ominously?\u201d These are small matters, but it was by not despising these small matters that our ancestors have achieved the supreme greatness of this State. \u2014 Livy, <\/em>Ab Urbe Condita (c. 27 BC)<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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The power of the augurs was no dead letter.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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How successful was Rome? How effective at achieving its goals, at projecting its power? How efficient in a Weberian sense? I\u2019m not going to try and answer the question rigorously. But I want you to think about Roman baths north of Glasgow and Roman forts off the coast of Yemen. I want you to look at a map of ancient Roman roads superimposed over the nightlights of modern Europe<\/a>. I want you to think about governing up to 30 percent of the world\u2019s population for centuries. (It\u2019s quite an exclusive club: Rome and China.) I want you to look at a calendar.<\/p>

What can account for this awesome effectiveness? What wondrous treatises on managerial science must have perished in the flames at Alexandria? What breakthrough in quantitative analysis bought Crassus his ticket to Carrhae? Surely the Romans possessed hoards of expertise, troves of bureaucratic rationality, stockpiles of experience in industries of astounding diversity: a wide, unswerving Via Caesaris beside which the McKinsey Way is a back alley. Then again, maybe Rome was ruled by a hereditary cabal of bird watchers.<\/p>

For what can be more important in respect of official dignity, than the power of dismissing the assemblies of the people, and the councils, though convened by the chief rulers, or of annulling their enactments? What, I say, can be more absolute power than that by which even a single augur can adjourn any political proceeding to another day? \u2014 Cicero, <\/em>On the Laws (c. 45 BC)<\/em><\/p>

By the time Cicero was made an augur, it was one of the last honors the Roman state had to bestow upon him. He had already completed the cursus honorum<\/em>: quaestor at 30, aedile at 36, praetor at 39, consul at 42. And all this as a novus homo<\/em>, a new man, the first in his family to scale the heights of Roman power. Now, at 53, he views his admission to the college of augurs as the crown set upon his achievements, not only as a symbol of his self-made nobilitas<\/em> but as the largest grant of personal power he has yet received. Sure, being consul is great, but what about \u201cauthority which may command even consuls to lay down their office?\u201d That\u2019s what being an augur gets you.<\/p>

How did Roman augury work? Three methods were of particular importance. In the case of augury ex caelo<\/em> or ex avibus<\/em>, the augur used a curved wand called a lituus<\/em> to mark off a section of sky for observation, then waited in ritual silence (silentium<\/em>) for an omen to appear. The augur\u2019s left side was generally considered lucky, but the meaning of an omen varied according to, in the case of augury ex caelo<\/em>, the kind of thunder or lightning observed or, in the case of augury ex avibus<\/em>, the species of bird, whether it made a sound and of what kind, or the pattern of its flight. Augury ex tripudiis<\/em> relied on observing chickens to see whether they fed greedily (a good omen) or reluctantly (a bad omen). In Rome, there were several permanent auguracula<\/em>, temples for the practice of augury, but a Roman army carried with it a tabernaculum augurale<\/em>, an augural tent where its commander could take daily auspices, and was also accompanied by a pullarius<\/em>, a keeper of the sacred chickens for performing augury ex tripudiis<\/em>.<\/p>

Consultants represent interpreters and theorists of individual cases and events. They often frame ambiguous information in new terms and theories, and thus develop and sharpen an interpretive consciousness within the client firm. Only this preceding theorization and term-building process enables an idea to diffuse. And, again, it is especially those consulting firms with a high public reputation that play a part in this process. \u2014 Thomas Armbr\u00fcster, <\/em>The Economics and Sociology of Management Consulting (2006)<\/em><\/p>

Of course, correctly interpreting the coded messages that the gods sent by implanting them on the entrails of an animal or by manipulating the flight of a bird or by causing abnormal phenomena was not easy. And that is why one always needed the services of an experienced seer. \u2014 Michael Flower, <\/em>The Seer in Ancient Greece (2008)<\/em><\/p>

The degree to which the auspices were integrated into the functioning of the Roman state is hard to exaggerate. Livy records that from the time of Tarquinius, \u201cnothing was afterwards done, in the field or at home, unless the auspices had first been taken: popular assemblies, musterings of the army, acts of supreme importance\u2014all were put off when the birds refused their consent.\u201d An election could not be held, a river could not be crossed, a battle could not be joined without favorable auspices. As Cicero also attests, the power of the augurs was no dead letter. If an assembly convened in spite of a bad omen, the augur could retroactively rule its enactments invalid. He could do this even for a defect in the conduct of the auspices, for example, an interruption of the silentium<\/em>. The augurs could\u2014and did!\u2014overturn the election of consuls, the chief magistrates of the Roman state, the commanders of the legions.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Augury isn’t some vestigial “moment of silence” civil religion.\u00a0<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Aspiring Academic that he was, Cicero expresses some skepticism about the augurs\u2019 prognosticative powers. Always eager to steer a middle course, he argues that while true divination had once been practiced, \u201cthis science and art of augury has to some extent vanished away by age and negligence.\u201d Even among the ancestors, \u201cit was sometimes used for political convenience, though very often as a real guide and director in counsel and action.\u201d In his day, he said, the authority of the augural college was preserved \u201cout of respect for the opinion of the masses and because of the great service to the State.\u201d<\/p>

According to Lindsay Driediger-Murphy, author of Roman Republican Augury<\/em>, even Cicero\u2019s mild skepticism would put him in the minority among Roman elites. She writes, \u201cAugury is in fact some of the best evidence we have for Rome as a deeply, consistently, passionately religious society\u2026 the elite Roman was not always the pragmatic, confident, efficient religious actor we have so long imagined. He was also a religious extremist.\u201d This checks out. Sure, maybe lightning conveniently flashes left to right when there\u2019s a consul to be inaugurated, but you\u2019re also carting along a cage full of sacred chickens for a thousand miles on your way to conquer Dacia. That takes some real commitment to the bit. Augury isn\u2019t some vestigial, \u201cmoment of silence\u201d civil religion: it\u2019s expensive, damned inconvenient, and taken completely seriously by a lot of powerful people.<\/p>

How could a highly effective, apparently rational society like Rome sincerely believe in a practice like bird augury? As Cicero writes, \u201cthere appeared to be great power and usefulness in the system\u2026 in reference to the people\u2019s succeeding in their objects.\u201d In other words, augury worked. It delivered the goods. In Weberian terms, it was efficient, and the Romans were being pragmatic in adhering to it. They didn\u2019t understand why it worked and they didn\u2019t need to: \u201cthe ancients were influenced more by actual results than convinced by reason\u201d (Cicero again). As for the real skeptics, the scoffers, they disparaged what they were too stupid or too lazy to understand: \u201cIt is the trouble and hard work involved in mastering the art that has induced this eloquent contempt; for men prefer to say glibly that there is nothing in auspices rather than to learn what auspices are.\u201d<\/p>

[T]he management of the future is a distinctly human problem. Or rather a double problem, for in fact one must first project what to expect or what to avoid, and second, considering that humans are social animals, one must also find some method of ending dissent and confusion and of deciding what is to be done. Both goals can be achieved by divination\u2026 Divination is not irrational but rather an attempt, perhaps a desperate attempt, to extend the realm of <\/em>ratio, the realm of knowledge and control, beyond the barrier of the future, and the barrier of death, into the misty zones from which normal knowledge and experience is absent. \u2014 Walter Burkert, \u201cSigns, Commands, and Knowledge: Ancient Divination between Enigma and Epiphany\u201d (2005)<\/em><\/p>

When faced with a number of alternative courses of action, divination allows one to bypass indecision and to proceed with confidence with a specific course of action\u2026. Its primary function, the one that makes it socially and politically efficacious, is its ability to help individuals and groups make decisions that are particularly difficult, stressful, contentious, or consequential. \u2014 Flower, <\/em>The Seer in Ancient Greece<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Heavy lies the head that wears the crown, but a little lighter when I paid my offerings to Data.\u00a0<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Why did augury work for the Romans? Why does \u201cmanagerial expertise\u201d work for us? If these techniques cannot do what they claim to do\u2014that is, predict the future\u2014why are we so invested in them? I would suggest that the true bases of our power lie elsewhere\u2014for the Romans, in their culture\u2019s unparalleled penchant for violence; for us, perhaps, in our singular devotion to buying cheap and selling dear or, perhaps, in our unique technological milieu\u2014but both of our divinatory practices nonetheless serve a vital function in our regimes.<\/p>

Here again, I have my personal experience to draw on. My job trading scrap metal was, in terms of the actual work I did, by far the easiest job I ever had. Given that all my effort toward forming a scientific basis for my decision making was ritualistic hocus-pocus\u2014something I half knew at the time, freely acknowledge now, and believe would be proven were it rigorously investigated\u2014the actual work required was about 15 minutes of phone conversation and 5 minutes of making up my mind. All I had to do was exercise the judgment of a reasonably intelligent person and make some decisions.<\/p>

The job was easy but profoundly stressful. Theoretically, if I made enough bad sales, it would cost me and the nineteen people who worked for me our wages and health insurance. Taking the auspices\u2014building junk models in Excel\u2014helped relieve some of that stress; I could \u00a0 According to Burkert, this stress-relief function is reflected in the oracles preserved from ancient cuneiform civilizations:<\/p>

What is striking about these texts is that they normally are quite uninformative, even dull: They usually say not much more than \u2018Hail to the king, do not be afraid, the god is with you, the god is at your side, the god has given your enemies into your hands.\u2019 It is exceptional for them to say \u2018no\u2019 to anything, for example, to a building project. We perceive that a king, however powerful, is desperately in need of reassurance, of strengthening his ego. He will be grateful for such an oracular message, and send appropriate gifts to the goddess or god.<\/em><\/p>

Heavy lies the head that wears the crown, but a little lighter when I paid my offerings to Data. If I\u2019d had the budget, it would have been extremely tempting and still more unburdening to pay a member of the spreadsheet priesthood to do the divining for me.<\/p>

If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc.)\u2014and particularly its financial avatars\u2014but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value. \u2014 David Graeber, \u201cOn the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs\u201d (2013)<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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What might life be like after the Empire of the Knowledge That Does Not Exist?<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Other partial explanations present themselves to me. Certainly, there are supply-side incentives as well. The augural colleges of the Ivy League keep their nests well-feathered by training the managerial class that serves capital. Augural makework and its consummation in bourgeois-bohemian consumerism may also serve some function in terms of dissipating surplus, a complement to letting Musk and Bezos shoot rockets into the ocean. (Marx has a line, I believe in the Grundisse<\/em>, about how, in economic terms, a war is as if a nation were to take a portion of its capital and sink it in the sea: a necessary expense in times of overproduction.)<\/p>

And the varieties of circumstances which influence these reciprocal interests are so endless, that all endeavour to deduce rules of action from balance of expediency is in vain. And it is meant to be in vain. For no human actions ever were intended by the maker of men to be guided by balances of expediency, but by balances of justice. He has therefore rendered all endeavours to determine expediency futile for evermore. No man ever knew, or can know, what will be the ultimate result to himself, or to others, of any given line of conduct. But every man may know, and most of us do know, what is a just and unjust act. And all of us may know also, that the consequences of justice will be ultimately the best possible, both to others and ourselves, though we can neither say what is best, or how it is likely to come to pass. \u2014 John Ruskin, \u201cThe Roots of Honour\u201d (1860)<\/em><\/p>

No more shalt thou by oracling abuse <\/em>
The Gentiles; henceforth Oracles are ceast,<\/em>
And thou no more with Pomp and Sacrifice<\/em>
Shalt be enquir’d at Delphos or elsewhere,<\/em>
At least in vain, for they shall find thee mute.<\/em>
–John Milton,\u00a0Paradise Regained<\/em> (1671)<\/p>

What might happen if we gave up our auguring? What might life be like after the Empire of the Knowledge That Does Not Exist? First, we could transition a large number of highly intelligent workers in the consulting, finance, and tech sectors into more productive roles. Coders learning to truck. Quants teaching high school algebra. Consultants going back to med school. Second, we could decide that the limited resources available for the governance of human affairs impose human-scale limits on the agencies exercising that governance. That\u2019s the logic behind the principle of subsidiarity: if managerial expertise is a fiction, we should stop entrusting senior management with so much authority. Third, leaders could accept responsibility for the exercise of their personal judgment. No more hiding behind your spreadsheets: your work can be evaluated by the standards of justice and the other virtues. (For starters, you could stand to take a pay cut: your best guess isn\u2019t worth 320 times more than the next guy\u2019s<\/a>.) Fourth, the governed could have some pity on those who govern\u2014it\u2019s harder than it looks and they turn to irrationalities to cope. We should be ready to give our rulers some grace, to extend them the final form of love, which is forgiveness.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Illustrations by Per-Ole Lind<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Charlie Clark<\/strong> is a writer and retractor. He lives in New Hampshire.<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Or, On the Empire of the Knowledge That Does Not Exist
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