Our Simple Actions in a Complex World
Are Undermined through Unintended Consequences!
Exploring Ideas Discussed by Edward Tenner in his Book:
Why Things Bite Back: Predicting the Problems of Progress

1.    Invitation

The following is an invitation to go on a dangerous mission should you wish to accept this challenge!? (1)

The danger in this mission is that it could well undermine our faith in the imputed rational nature of the world, and, even more, undermine what religious faith we might have in either the imputation or the personification of reality as having a spiritual complexion in what ever form that might take, be that along traditional lines or along non-traditional lines. Indeed, even the secular idea of progress may well be seriously undermined! (2)

So, you have been warned! (3)

2.    Introduction

	Recently, I came across an interesting book by Edward Tenner as imaged and noted below, namely, Why Things Bite Back: Predicting the Problems of Progress. I would like to review some of its key ideas in an open meta-review, i.e., through an exploration of the disturbing philosophical consequences that would appear to flow from the wake of its key concepts relating to ideas of ‘our place in the world’, ‘the nature of progress’, ‘should nature be personified and seen as revengeful’, and, ‘to what extent religious treatment and interpretations of reality are undermined and self-undermined?’ (4)

Fourth Estate edition

First ed., Alfred A Knopf Inc, Westminister, Maryland, U.S.A., 1996., etc.
Latest version of paper: www.homestead.com/noelshomepage/noelshomepage3.html
"Depressed? Don't be. But do read the new book ... Edward Tenner's ``Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences.'' Tenner .... is, on balance, cheerful, in his mordant manner, about ``the tendency of the world around us to get even, to twist our cleverness against us.'' -- George Will, Newsweek (5)

3.    Assortment of Presuppositions, Propositions and Unintended Consequences?

A key concept of this book is that ‘our simple actions in a complex world are undermined through unintended consequences.’ I will examine this idea through noting three examples proposed by the author that exemplify this type of situation. In the process I would welcome similar observations that we too can also add to this list.  (6)

	Next, I will propose a list of philosophical meta-consequences that such ideas might have in the fields of our ‘perceptions’ of ‘self’ and ‘others’ in this ‘World-of-Life’; wondering whether we should personify nature, and, if not, just how should we re-name this revenge-like factor along more appropriate lines (as a type of re-bound effect exhibiting for-us unintended consequences sometimes of a radical and profound nature); in what manner should we perceive ‘progress’ (as progress qua progress); and, what might be the disturbing religious implications behind this type of thinking (to the extent that such attitudes could completely undermine religious theory, practice and critique?)? (7)

	For example: antibiotic are suppose to control the course of infections and eventually eliminate the occurrences of such infections, however, those infectious vectors that survive such antibiotic measures, as a result, will become relatively more virulent and such virulence can even be transmitted between different infectious vectors. Processes of treatment  can have the unintended consequence of creating infectious vectors that effectively are treatment resistant! (8)

	Similarly, in the parallel world of computing, email communications and Internet interconnectivity, we find a whole fauna and flora of malicious code in the form of trojan horses, viruses, worms, spam, etc. Such electronic interconnectivity was suppose to be an ideal, unhindered realm of communicative interaction, but, instead, we have to operate in a paranoid-like fashion and often expect and suspect the worst that could happen in our venturing forth in this still novel, augmented fashion. (9)

	The author also examines the consequences of certain measures to control pollution at coal-fired plants for the production of electricity through the increased height of smoke-stacks. Many stacks are over 1,000 feet, some have reached beyond 1,250 feet, indeed, a number of stacks are now higher than the Eiffel Tower. Locals may now do their washing but pollution has merely been shifted further on and in different forms. Even when stacks scrub soot and other carbon particulates, inadvertently the emissions have been rendered more virulent by virtue of the very lack of carbon to absorb some of those chemicals. Now days pollution is not just a local phenomenon. I have previously noted that 12 percent or so of the pollution from China is visited upon Alaska and no doubt more so upon Korea and Japan who stand in between this eastward drift of pollution (and clearly witnessed by myself on two recent visits to China, and, during the course of the Olympic Games in Beijing). (10)

	All we have to do is just dip into this book and find other examples of this type of revengeful phenomenon. What others might come to mind? (11)

	What this author is arguing for is this: our actions will also have negative unintended consequences, and, that even proactively anticipated consequences will have other unanticipated negative, unintended consequences, etc. That observation more or less accepted, we are now forced to re-examine a number of fundamental attitudes we hold towards the world and the apparent reality of that world (along with all presuppositions of a ‘rational’ and ‘reasonable’ world)! (12)
	
	Rather than examine what I might think along these lines, let me merely note an open set of questions with a broad reason as to why we might need to re-ask them. ‘Open’ in two senses – a list that is not closed, and, open as to how we might or might not set out to re-write our response to such rhetoric. (13)

4.    An Open Set of Questions

1.	By referring to reality ‘biting back’ we have personified reality. Are we allowed to do that? To what extent do we go beyond the metaphorical in such a literary practice? And if we philosophically discount this practice of metaphoricalization how should we define such a phenomenon when such a phenomenon, or phenomena, can no longer be seen as vengeful, filled with revenge, spiteful, intent on disrupting our passage through this World-of-Life? How would you name this inevitable tendency for the best laid plans of men and mice to come thoroughly unstuck..? (14)

2.	What are the religious implications of such an inevitable tendency for all our plans to be laid waste? How might the Divine overcome an intrinsically malevolent realm of nature, or, is there no real separation between the same? Can there be a true sense of providence when the appearance of this rebound effect, reversal, disruptive reaction, inevitable deconstruction of our intent is forever and everywhere self-evident (without a relatively enduring sense of the providential?)? Or, is the Divine just malevolent pure and simple? Giving with one hand and surely taking with the other? What implications might this ‘chaotic corruption of karma’ have for the religious person? Indeed, is there any existentially valid space for the religious person, or, could the Life-World truly possess a religious complexion in any shape or form? (15)

3. Nor can the secular person escape this ‘chaotic corruption of destiny’! Such inevitable disruption can only spell the death of all forms of progress? That civilization is only a fragile vestige of human constructivism, forever cut down to size and reduced to no more than habits with no real evidence of a substantive sense of progress. That ‘progress’, perhaps, is only an illusion… as preached by post-modern ‘realists’ et al? (16)

4.	Or are we just plain wrong in all of this? That much, or many, of these apparently unintended consequences of our actions could well be treated as karmic, deserved, unfortunate side-effects, minor defects in our plans that merely need to be further overcome, etc. That the world has room enough for both religious and secular visions of reality, and, that that there is an existential excess in the course of all our endeavours that ensures the progressive preservation and augmentation of civilization as we know it and as we would eventually like to know it?! (17)

5.    Provisional Conclusion(s)

	In the form of my personal response I would like to say: “We do have a place in the world, one both carved out for-us and carved out by-us! Our passage through this World-of-Life is inaugurated through happenstance and is fatally disrupted by the same. Our finitude and finality, however, must forever remain part of this world. Even though our intentions are undermined through unintended consequences, and even our anticipations are equally undermined, still, the eternal impact of the realization of those courses of actions, whether intended or unintended, must forever ripple and reverberate through the entirety of the Life-World since the very being of this world is simulated through re-simulation and being re-simulated is thereby re-continued despite the relatively superficial nature of such ‘unintended’ adversity. Indeed, our being as ‘persons’ in this world is existentially projected, accumulatively, both to ourselves and to others beyond and despite such natural disruption. We are an existential excess, the cream that floats on the surface of the milk, a profit that cannot be reductively reduced to a series of mere accidents whether intended and/or unintended. We are given ample room, so to speak, to move in what ever manner we might wish to construct for ourselves be that secular and/or religious in orientation. Revisiting the best from our past as we confront the future ensures a civilized excess that is continued and developed, re-continued and re-developed, and, that, therefore, some substantive sense of progress is ineluctably ‘inescapable’ after all!? (18)

Or, am I just plain wrong in this relatively positive re-assessment of our ongoing enplacement in the world before-others?! As if the world were lived entirely inside a transcendental suspension where all apparent value whatsoever possessed no value, that value were neither given to it nor taken away from it!? That all vestige of value… were only an illusion… and nothing more…! In a world without progress in any form… where all forms of circulation have no surplus value, no surplus meaning, and, no surplus meaningfulness…??” All in all, either way, a dangerous existential state of affairs to have to grapple with philosophically!? (19)			         							         Noël Tointon, Sydney, 26.1.09.

Postscript

	Intentionality, in being successfully exercised, gives us the illusion of a relatively unimpeded power in the context of the performance of that particular intentional event. In the ongoing course of our existence we have come to cut our intentional cloth in a reasonable accordance with our intentional expectations we would normally associate with that type of act about to be exercised. A great proportion of our existence is lived within these reasonable parameters of successfully predicted expectations. On the edges of this world we exercise our chance as in games of chance, or, hesitantly exercise new skills not yet perfected, or, in some instances just set out to see what happens without much expectation of what might actually develop. All intentionality can be diverted or obstructed by unintended consequences. However, given the meeting of most of our reasonable expectations, on most occasions, the potential introduction of the chaotic appearance of unintended consequences must temper our expectations from time to time but never unreasonably temper all expectations all the time. Although, eventually, all intentions are re-written by chaotic circumstances, a reasonable person would expect some degree of an intentional window of opportunity to present itself in this regard. Normally, we are not immediately undermined by unintended consequences. In effect, this period of relative non-chaotic normality allows us to intentionally course through this world in a manner that appears to be both relatively transparent and relatively unobstructed, permitting us to act in a non-perturbed manner wherein we find ourselves skillfully re-adjusting and re-aligning ourselves when and where necessary and in a manner thought appropriate to the current situation to-hand. Into this gap of opportunity, as long as we remain relatively reasonable, we should find our path through this World-of-Life relatively transparent and unobstructed, and, furthermore, enriched by the degree of existential value entered into and openly engaged. This sense of an intentional enrichment augmenting the value of both our integrated existence with others and within our own engaged sense/s of self. (20)

	This existential augmentation re-produces a relatively more ‘substantial’ sense/s of world, sense/s of self and sense/s of the other, and, in a theological framework, a more substantially projected sense/s of the Divine in some form/s or other (when reasonably defined, e.g., through a coherent process theology). However, from a non-existential, absolutist perspective, a ‘substantial sense’ can have no engaged merit what so ever! All sense of the substantial is focused upon through a de-focusing upon all sense of the relational. However, in and through an ongoing overall transcendental suspension, the suspension is both exercised and suspended, etc. Rightly, therefore intentionality is existentially exercised through this form of a dialectic and dialogue between the materialization of the apparently substantial and the de-materialization of the relatively relational. And it is in such a fruitful dialectical disposition that one would reasonably expect a theologian to equally subscribe to. That even the Divine, in any hypothetical form what so ever, would and should be expected to exercise some form of an intentional life between these otherwise impossible-to-realize states-of-affairs of the ‘absolutely material’ and the ‘absolutely relational’. Thence, for all intenders, the expression of relevant forms of identity through this existential gap of consequential opportunity! N, 6.3.09. (21)