None Dare Call It Hubris: The Limits

of Knowledge Michael M. Crow

President, Arizona State University School of Public Affairs

April 12, 2007

Are there limits?

• Increasing realization there may be a limit to what we as a species can plan or accomplish – U.S. failure to protect against and respond to

Hurricane Katrina – Apparent futility of the plan to democratize and

modernize Iraq

• Operating beyond our ability to plan and implement effectively

• Inability to identify conditions where action is needed and can succeed

• Child’s play compared to looming problems: – global terrorism, climate change, ecosystem collapse – Maddeningly complex but potentially inconceivably

destructive

Framing the debate

• Our current approach to framing problems: – Club of Rome, The Limits to Growth (1972)

• How much population growth and development, how much modification of natural systems, how much resource extraction and consumption, and how much waste generation can the earth sustain without provoking regional or even global catastrophe?

• Science policy/R&D, public debate, political action framed by the idea of external limits: – defining, measuring, seeking to overcome,

denying, insisting that already exceeded

Conflicting perceptions of limits

• Technological optimists: Limits are ever receding, perhaps even nonexistent – Science-based technologies allow progressive

increases in productivity and efficiency – 15 billion in industrialized nations achieve

once unimaginable standard of living

• Pessimists: global climate change, the ozone hole, air and water pollution, overpopulation, natural and human-caused environmental disasters, widespread hunger and poverty, rampant extinction of species, exhaustion of natural resources, and destruction of ecosystems

The dominant life-form

• All sides in limits-to-growth debate probably agree on two observations: – (1) Earth’s surface environment (dynamic, interactive system of complex biogeochemical cycles) falling increasingly under influence of single, dominant life-form: us

– (2) We exhibit serious limitations in learning, reasoning, innovation, communication, planning, prediction, and organization

Scientific and technological innovation

• Scientific and technological innovation has facilitated enormous growth (1850– ): – Population of the earth has increased

approximately sixfold – Average life span of those living in the

industrialized nations has doubled – Agricultural productivity has increased by a

factor of five – Size of the U.S. economy alone has increased more

than 200-fold – Number of U.S. scientists has increased by over

seventeen times – Volume of globally retrievable information stored

(analog and digital) expanded by incalculable orders of magnitude

During this same period…

– 20% of bird species driven into extinction

– 50% of all freshwater runoff consumed– 70,000 synthetic chemicals introduced into the environment

– Sediment load of rivers increased fivefold

– Two-thirds of major marine fisheries fully exploited or depleted

Alternative trajectories

• Central question: Will we choose wisely among alternative trajectories or blunder onward?

• Joel Cohen, How Many People Can the Earth Support? – Many possible futures available to us – But present trajectories of growth cannot be

maintained indefinitely – (Malthus correct but failed to appreciate

productivity gains via science and technology)

• Markets will adjust to eventual depletion of fossil fuel reserves – But likely too shortsighted to prevent global

economic disruption (global war?)

What are the limits?

• What are the limits? How do we define the problem? – Limits imposed by nature and the environment? – Limits on our collective ability to acquire,

integrate, and apply knowledge • Although difficult to isolate, useful to

consider six broad categories: – Limits of the individual – Limits of sociobiology – Limits of socioeconomics – Limits of technology – Limits of knowledge – Limits of philosophy

Individual limits

• We all operate out of self-interest, which is entirely rational

• Community spirit and altruism may be motivating factors

• Nevertheless, each must pursue own interests • As social systems grow more complex and impinge

more on natural systems, our individual vision captures less and less of the big picture

• Our only option is to accept the inevitability and the limits of individual rationality

• We must take into account in formulating public policy and collective action

Sociobiological limits

• Extraordinarily competitive as species and individuals – Toolmaking, language, self-awareness, abstract

thought

• We compete among ourselves at every organizational level

• We compete with other species at virtually every ecological niche

• Cooperation occurs (tribe or nation) in order to compete (war between tribes or nations)

• We dominate billions of species but lack structures to foster effective cooperation

• We must transcend our sociobiological limits of competition

Socioeconomic limits

• Market economics and democratic politics attempt to make virtue of individual and sociobiological limits

• Yet we cannot integrate consequences of competition into planning processes

• Our competitive nature values the individual over the group – But the aggregation of our individual actions

constantly surprises us

• Global economy predicated on expectation of continued growth and development derived from ever-increasing resource exploitation

Socioeconomic limits (continued)

• Difficult to anticipate or account for costs and risks of group behavior over long term – We do not deliberately waste time in traffic jams

to increase greenhouse gases • Costs and risks vary from individual to

individual and from group to group • Cost-benefit calculations (New Orleans):

probability of catastrophic flooding versus cost of protecting city

• Individual perspective outweighs collective in the political system

• Efforts to advance long-term interests of the whole by controlling short-term behavior of the individual doomed to failure (global collapse of communism)

Technological limits

• We turn to technology to evade the behavioral limits of biology and economics

• Technology harnessed to marketplace (industrialized societies enjoy previously unimaginably high standards of living)

• In doing so we have put our future into the hands of the lowest bidder – Cheap oil and coal, for example, ensure dependence

on internal combustion engine – Excess and not shortage of polluting hydrocarbon

fuels • History shows that gains in efficiency more than

offset by increased consumption – Less pollution per mile but more miles driven

• Technologies address current predicaments but compound future problems

Knowledge limits

• No a priori reason to expect that what we can know is what we most need to know

• Science uses disciplinary organization to focus on questions that can be answered

• Disciplines resist synthesis – Separated by methodology, terminology,

sociology, disparate bodies of fact • Disciplinary specialization has been the

key to scientific success– But such specialization occludes knowledge of

the whole – (Whole: 6 billion people with collective

capability of altering biogeochemical cycles)

Knowledge limits (continued)

• Can science generate the knowledge necessary to govern the world that science has made?

• Do we even know what such knowledge might be? – Producing 70,000 synthetic chemicals is easy

compared to dealing with their effects – Billions spent studying our interference with

biogeochemical cycles, but we remain clueless • Even less knowledge about how to organize and

govern ourselves to confront this challenge – Dangerous scientific/technological illiteracy

among senior policymakers/elected officials – Irony: technology-created wealth fuels

individualism over civic engagement – Insulation from complex technology-related

social issues

Philosophical limits

• “The academy” remains focused on relatively simple question of understanding nature

• More meaningful to understand nature with a purpose, an objective, an end – What is the purpose of our effort to understand nature? – To live in harmony with nature or to exploit it more

efficiently? • Philosophical inquiry guided by fundamental

questions – (“Why are we here?” and “How should we behave?”) – Literal answers provided by science amount to mockery

• (Expanding cloud of gas 15 billion years ago… formation of primordial nucleotides and amino acids….)

– Insufficient to promote commonality of purpose necessary for planetary stewardship

– We lack a unified or unifiable metaphysical basis for action

Philosophical limits (continued)

• Limits could be parsed and defined in many different ways

• Purpose to acknowledge boundary conditions in learning to manage our impact on earth

• How can we create knowledge and foster institutions sensitive to boundary conditions? – Not found in compartmentalized traditional

disciplines that we nurture so earnestly – We assign inordinate significance to

distinctions in a strict hierarchy: – Disciplines trump other disciplines based on

their quantitative capacities

Multiple ways of thinking

• Academy unwilling to embrace multiple ways of thinking, different disciplinary cultures, orientations, and approaches that have arisen over thousands of years

• Our science remains culturally biased and isolated: – Western science derivative of philosophical model of domination and manipulation of nature

– Little acceptance of natural systems and dynamics

Problems require multiple approaches

• The problems that we face are not hierarchical – Nor do they fall within strict disciplinary categories

• Problems require multiple approaches and an integration of disciplines – Biologists alone cannot solve the loss of biodiversity

• Each academic discipline has a Darwinian focus on its own survival – Lacks impetus or capacity to develop formal language comprehensible to other disciplines

– Debate must engage commerce, industry, and government

Ignorance society

• We need new ways to – conceive the pursuit of knowledge and

innovation, – understand and build political institutions, – endow philosophy with meaning for people

other than philosophers

• We trumpet the onset of the “knowledge society” – But when it comes to our relations with

nature, we are still an “ignorance society”

• We have the illusion of understanding and are not humbled that we do not understand – We refuse even to consider the possibility

Hubris

• Hubris, exemplified in the demands we make on science, is a major obstacle to coming to grips with our situation

• We are obsessed with trying to predict, manage, and control nature

• Consequently we pour immense intellectual and fiscal resources into huge research programs aimed at this unattainable goal – Human Genome Project, U.S. Global Change Research

Program

• But we devote little effort to the apparently modest yet absolutely essential question of how, given our unavoidable limits, we can manage to live in harmony with the world that we have inherited and are continually remaking

A new framework for knowledge

• New principles for organizing knowledge production and application

• Hints of an intellectual and philosophical framework for creating and using knowledge appropriate to our inherent limits – Sustainability to guide inquiry, discourse, and

action – Biodesign to mimic and harness natural processes to

confront challenges in medicine, agriculture, environmental management, and national security

– Adaptive management for data sets to impart increasing “predictability”

– Industrial ecology for a model of innovation that can enhance competitiveness while reducing our footprint on the planet

– Intergenerational equity to apply justice and liberty across boundaries of time

Institutional/organizational innovation

• Society will never be able to control the large-scale consequences of its actions– More flexibility, resilience, and

responsiveness in academia, private sector, and government

• Take action to reduce uncertainty about the future and carefully observe outcomes – Establish threshold criteria for which

planning to promote or obstruct a given outcome should be contemplated

– Avoid paralysis of “precautionary principle,” which saps innovation and risk-taking

• More institutional and organizational innovation will help us learn how to deal with the implications of our own limits

Innovation competition

• Ideological/institutional struggle between communism and market democracy can be viewed as one such set of competing innovations– Poorly planned and exceedingly costly, but

providing certain knowledge: • Rational self-interest cannot be successfully suppressed indefinitely

• Legal systems that foster dissent and freedom of choice provide fertile culture for innovation

• We must conceptualize a new series of innovations, at much lower cost and shorter run-time, and apply it to the problem of ensuring that our global society can continue to be sustained by the web of biogeochemical cycles that makes life possible in the first place