The Precivilization Principle

From the first time I heard of the so-called precautionary principle, it did two things to me at the same time. First, I found it highly soothing, and obviously right. "Let's at least not do anything stupid or too unpredictable." It's much as in the Hippocratic Oath: "First, do no harm." If you don't know the real consequences of your actions, don't act, because you really can't predict how bad it might get. That seems like simple common sense.

But then, at the time I first heard about the pure, naked form of the principle, I'd already been acquainted with the idea that the people who get things done, and bring on progress, also have to take a certain leap of faith. "You've got to try if you want to succeed." "Fortune favours the brave." That's rather self-evident as well, ain't it?

Thus we have two time-honoured adages which are thoroughly opposed to each other, and both obviously speak about something crucial. It took its time before I found a way and the vocabulary to reconsile them with each other. Now I then think that whomever elevated precaution into a societal principle should be shot on sight.

The reason is that while prudence, precaution and risk-averseness is something that evolution has programmed into us, and which is wise at the individual level to a certain extent, at the wider group, cultural and scientific-technological-economic-political level it's a recipe for disaster. As individuals, we do have to mind our risks. But when group interaction, institutions and policy are brought to bear, the emerging society seems to benefit greatly from the occasional, well-incentivized leap of faith, whose worst downsides it then perhaps cushions after the fact. That's how we get innovation and progress and growth, instead of stagnation: by cherishing a culture where the occasional fool takes the leap of faith, and then perhaps succeeds. Because that fool is the entrepreneur, the next great scientific mind, and even the next unconventional mom/pop who raises the prodigy to change the entire world. If we just followed the precautionary principle, i.e. the generalized version of our innate risk averse tendencies, we'd never get anything done as a society.

To me the starkest rationale for this claim is then the contrast between Popperian scientific epistemology, with its principle of falsification, and the precautionary principle, read side by side.

The Popperian picture is that we can never prove that we're right. We can only do educated guesses, build theories, and then test them against reality. That automatically means that much of the time our guesses will be wrong, and that being proved wrong after that is no fail as such. Instead having been proved wrong after a principled try is the ultimate win: it alone tells us something incontrovertible about reality, gives us hard data on which to work further, and so enables progress beyond what we already knew and expected.

That picture of scientific progress can be generalized into most avenues of life, from sewer maintenance right onto marital happiness, at least in aggregate, and with regard to how our culture develops. "If somebody doesn't try and fail, nobody will ever learn."

Then contrast that brutal and also brutally efficient means of discovery which scientists and entrepreneurs do every day, against what the evangelists of the precautionary principle tell you. They tell you, we shouldn't even try if we don't already know the outcome. When we at the same time very well know that we can't really know the full outcome of almost anything we might do, and especially anything that might lead to innovation and progress.

How is that not the most anti-scientific, Luddite, back-to-theocracy, freedom-contrarian idea out there, if you think about it? We can't try at all, unless we know what happens is good, when all knowing comes from trying and failing?!?

That's a recipe for disaster, stagnation and if followed to the end, the end of the Western saga of consistent performance. A win of primal, individual risk-aversion over a vibrant, distributed society which could well tolerate experimentation and failure, quite without killing off its individual risk-takers in the process.

I think this basic difference in mindsets is also what separates a conservative from a progressive in the broad sense. What counter-intuitively places the current green movement on the conservative side instead of the progressive one, and so on. The real thing, here, is about who's for risks and the progress that comes with them, and who's not.

That's perhaps one of the main reasons I call myself a libertarian or a classical liberal: along with progressive marxists, we're the few of the still-vibrant Enlightenment ideologues who actually see progress and the indeterminacy that comes along with it as a value to be cherished. Not as a threat to be curtailed, but as a welcome possibility, thorns and all.

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