Irrealism and Puritanism
"Man is neither angel nor beast. And he who would be an angel is a beast." Blaise Pascal
There's a world between the pretensions of studies and the randomness of the construction site, between idea and reality.
The realization of a project always raises unforeseen questions and demands a certain flexibility. The modern world is the creation of engineering rationalism, but this technique sometimes loses sight of the practical.
We call entropy the lack of knowledge of reality on which our actions are based ; management claims to control this vagueness.
"To manage is to foresee", but at the same time, a decision that is too precise will miss its goal (1).
Criticism of managers follows that of merchants. Both are accused of reducing the world to their own vision, that of the dominant. In general, this criticism is idealistic, and therefore fights on the same ground: management is not generous enough, merchandise is not beautiful enough. It's a bit like the reaction of a spoiled child. The critique of the extremes, on the other hand, is that of the warrior versus the manager. Peace has a price, and it's up to each and every one of us to put a price on it.
For us, here, it's a question of criticizing the effectiveness of means, whether of government or of battle: ignorance would be useful up to a certain point, and harmful beyond that. But this quantitative formulation is still wrong, although it refers to a practice: that of scales and hierarchy. "The devil is in the detail", said Jacques Delors. Traditional management is carried out as if by myopia : with broad authoritarian strokes, it imposes details and subordinates to adapt (2). For some things, it worked, but in general, it no longer works. Ecological problems and the sensitivity of the population are no longer satisfied with this approach. We're at a bit of a loss when faced with the injunction to achieve perfection, which translates into the precautionary principle or a sectarian (and ineffective) puritanism.
We don't have a miracle recipe, and anyway, there shouldn't be one. The need for a guide who would relieve us of our responsibility is fortunately devalued, even if it reappears among some religious fanatics. The question, therefore, is one of the allocation of resources.
Teleology had its heyday : "the end justifies the means" and we have seen the results: for some wars now, we have been living with the consequences of the means employed. It is up to us, after sustainable development, to show that "if man is the product of his conditions, it is necessary to create human conditions" (Situationist International)
Some thus think that eternity, immutable, would be the true nature of man. And let us scorn the daily movement... Beautiful stance, which will need to be dismantled, because, as Montaigne said, "the world is a perpetual shaking."
The state is not ahead of society, but rather behind. This is why, in times of crisis, its tension on standards is less and less efficient.
Evolution of Practice with Computing
Starting in the 17th century, Nature began to be seen as a machine, and technology gradually replaced practical engagement. Quantification boosted research and encouraged the production of increasingly complex artefacts. In our time, terminals, phones, sensors, drones, and other devices enhance our ability to track and monitor... This development carries the seeds of increasing social separation.
The virtual world removes the economy from what we might reasonably envision: digitization enables an infinite variety of practices, but only a single code. Yet computer simulation has its limits. Researchers, who once moved between the lab and the field, now spend more and more time in front of screens, reading reports from across the world and operating complex machines remotely. We've shifted from curious wanderers to pure intellectuals - at the risk of recruiting only atrophied bodies. The proposed model will have the purity of an artefact, far more attractive than the crudeness of former praxis. Decision-makers will have access to a seductive tool, functionally complex but lacking the robustness of real-world experimentation. Even trial and error will take place virtually...
Private (Apple, Facebook) as well as public research is increasingly preparing for the rise of virtual reality. Thanks to the ubiquity and integration of various sensors, along with now-sufficient computing and transmission capabilities, we will soon be able to meet "together" in a virtual world - Second Life becoming First Life, what is now known as the "metaverse." The strength of this trend is undeniable, even as recent elections reveal that this "disembodied" culture is facing a crisis. One might ask whether the majority is not, in fact, turning away from virtuality, infinite growth, and the gentleman's agreement of political correctness-whether reality itself is not beginning to reassert itself against our growing Byzantinism.
The perfection of studies, in fact, becomes a source of real-world error. The distance afforded by design also provides the comfort of abstraction, away from the difficulties of implementation. Necessary disorder must be reintroduced-and that''s not as easy as in SimCity.
Side or Perverse Effects
All stakeholders know that tolerances are necessary and that efficiency requires limits to generalizations.
In the face of any criticism, the daily and incessant movement appears as a temporal peculiarity that opposes the long term. The long term then more easily takes on the perfect face of the monument-something outside of time. But the long term is far from stable. It will only be the result of our actions and, of course, of unforeseen events.
A harmonious society requires a dynamic balance, far more difficult to formalize than a perfect society.
France and Germany are often contrasted, and it's interesting to compare the realism of these two cultures. French culture developed a rationalism against which German idealists rose. But each country has its tradition : improvisation for one, debate and discussion for the other. Democracy and its contradictions inherently involve movement.
The existence of limits forces us to put projected models into perspective. Take, for example, urban boundaries and their evolution as both regulatory practice and symbolic reality. Zoning materializes social separation. We are well aware of the unfortunate threshold effects and avoidance strategies: those of parents seeking a good school, or job seekers wanting a prestigious address.
The invocation of social diversity has come to be seen for what it is: an excuse for incompetence, supposedly justified by the ideology of multiculturalism underpinning an anti-democratic urbanism. Sometimes the law is not enforced, or serves merely as a facade meant to replace the difficulty of taking action.
Operational urban planning cannot be equated with the trial-and-error method of experimental science.
When the state commits (as in the energy transition law) to achieving "zero-emission" zones by 2030-thanks in part to electric vehicles-it is essentially shifting pollution to other "zones," such as energy production plants, for example. Urban planning cannot be a mere translation of transient forces.
Such lofty regulations encourage perverse practices: avoidance (violating the spirit) or exploitation (using loopholes), with lasting consequences: the visible nature of the permitted boundary. Every educator knows that a guide serves as both a model and a deterrent: what the rules wish to ignore becomes desirable.
The question of improving the rule inherently challenges it and introduces a temporal contradiction. Those who want scheduled revisions to the law strip it of its permanence. Making the rule unquestionable renders it fragile and relative.
The society of the spectacle resolves into the spectacle of administration. It becomes the state versus action.
Progress is represented by the rule-but also limited by it. Civilization cannot be reduced to its model. The ideal democracy is never realized precisely because it is made ideal-it becomes a cardboard republic.
Civilization and progress are as much models as they are fashions.
When, for instance, a government decides to heavily tax high salaries, large companies understand that they should hire their senior executives in another country. When the state regulates truck driving on weekends and limits driving hours, some come up with the idea of organizing shuttle services from border to border using small vans driven by foreign workers...
Market Choice as a Substitute for Creation
Everyone knows-or thinks they know-the fetishism of the commodity. The society of the spectacle glorifies choice as a creative act, following the misadventures of modern art and its commercialization. Freedom becomes the act of choosing between Pepsi and Coca-Cola. Democracy itself would be reduced to choosing a leader every five years.
The DJ becomes a musician; it is the triumph of the art enthusiast, with the blessing of the Ministry of Culture (despite the condemnation of Andre Breton). Fetishism and abundance devalue activity in favor of the finished product. Dispossession and alienation are the result of this reification. Everyone wants, even in a video game, to build a civilization, but not to accept being civilized.
There is a purity to artifacts that stands in contrast to the triviality of reality. Here we find again the opposition between nomadic looters and investing farmers. The spectacle glorifies the beauty of the speculator and criticizes the imperfection of decision-making.
In the struggle between living disorder and dead accumulation, we find the action of capital. In the human world, permanence is only the result of a renewed will-or of an object devoid of stakes. Movement is natural, even if difficult to accept by a planning mind.
The quality of activity does not lie in its regulation, and regulation is only effective as long as it frames a skill, a craft. When quality assurance and bureaucratic procedures have emptied work of personal investment, all that remains is a poor product-like those ill-fitting, impractical, polluting, and unhappy yellow vests.
What the Client Can Really Choose
At first glance, the options available to decision-makers today seem broader than ever: a globalized network of possibilities, richer and more diverse in quality than in the past. Yet in practice, these opportunities have grown increasingly distant from the decision-maker's actual experience. Partly because mobility has decreased, but also because the complexity of decision-making structures has expanded dramatically.
The criteria the client is able to articulate are no longer self-determined but imposed "from outside" through processes such as quality assurance and standardized norms. The work of the client-defining the goal and providing the means-has already been pre-structured, stripped of responsibility and, ultimately, of effectiveness. In the end, the client becomes merely the expression of forces already at play.
Finance has further reduced management to quantitative targets. In moving from a logic of proximity and trust toward one of pure price competition, something essential has been lost-a form of quality that is difficult, if not impossible, to recover. We see the consequences daily. For example, despite increasingly strict energy standards (or perhaps precisely because of them), many buildings and cars produced after 2020 consume more than those from the 2000s. And there is no shortage of similar examples.
This isolation of the client, of the decision-maker, leads to the replacement of lived practice with procedures and mechanisms-tools meant to bypass the very human element that is now regarded with suspicion.
The Totalitarian Temptation
In the early forms of bourgeois democracy, from the Middle Ages through the British monarchy, the law was essentially a codification of popular custom-the reflection of ordinary, everyday practice. The law intervened only to sanction what was exceptional; it did not dictate what citizens should do, but rather confirmed what they already did. An honest person naturally lived within the law, without needing to worry about it.
The first duty of a politician, one might say, is to accept that we do not live in a perfect world.
After the French Revolution, however, the law took on a different role: it was meant to be "normative," defining the standard. The Civil Code was, in effect, the consolidation of France's many customs begun under Louis XV, and it served to unify the Nation.
But with modernity-the era of the blank slate and the "new man"-the State assumed a new mission: to produce laws that would shape society and individuals alike. No longer was it enough to be honest; one had to stay constantly informed of legal changes, adapt one's behavior, and comply. Any hesitation or delay meant falling into illegality, exposed to every kind of pressure.
Even the State itself struggles to abide by its own laws. What takes hold instead is a selective tolerance, extended to friends and allies-a slippery slope of corruption and favoritism. Just as a building must be constructed to withstand more strain than its occupants will ever impose, so too the public sphere should be stronger than the private, and placed in service of it.
In practice, the excess of regulations produces the opposite effect: it allows people to pick and choose their morality from a surplus of laws. Circumvention becomes part of the system itself.
Illegality is often tolerated by a State too weak to enforce the rules-except against those who remain scrupulously honest. As Jules Romains suggested, every citizen is, in effect, an unwitting criminal. This is what makes dictatorship always dangerously close.
"When, in a popular government, the laws cease to be enforced, as this can only result from the corruption of the republic, the State is already lost."
- Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws
"Do you want to prevent crime? Then make the laws clear, simple, and designed so that the whole society they govern will unite to defend them-without any part of the nation working to undermine them at their foundations. Let these laws, protectors of all citizens, favor each individual rather than particular classes of men. Let them inspire both respect and fear; let people tremble before them-but only before them." - Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments
(1) "Since all things are always simultaneously in motion (the very principle of the dynamic paradox), it is entirely possible that by 1943, the dispersion of military resources will have reached such an extent that their survival will, to a large degree, be independent of installations located on German soil."
Autumn 1941, Winston Churchill.
"All things always being simultaneously in motion (the very principle of the dynamic paradox), it is entirely possible that by 1943, the dispersion of military resources will have reached such a scale that their survival will largely be independent of installations located on German soil."
Autumn 1941, Winston Churchill.
(2) "Holding the executants accountable allows the decision-makers to evade responsibility, according to the method of Reinhard Hohn as described by Johann Chapoutot."
(3)
The exception that proves the rule : Claude Shannon