Not of Human Design

Consider how very much of what happens in our human world is unintended, unplanned, the result of human action but not human design.

We humans tend to think of the world from two perspectives only. One is the individual, yourself alone looking out. The other is the top down—the President, Brasília, the Boss, the gods, God. Both are conscious. And so our world seems to us populated by intentions—what I want to do this afternoon or what the Boss wants me to do tomorrow.

Such a world is soaked in ethics. Lula does this, Donald does that, for good or ill. I myself alone do this or that, likewise. We can blame the person, because such a world has only persons. Ethics applies only to people. We do not blame the rain for falling. We do blame Donald for starting a war without proper care.

But the actual world has a third thing: unintended consequences. They are not personal. For example, no one intends the price of oil to rise to $150 a barrel. True, it comes about from the individual intentions of you filling up your gas tank and Donald starting a war he does not know how to end. Economists say, “supply and demand.” (Admittedly, they always say that.)

The old way of labeling unintended consequences was to call them God’s will, or fate, or some secret human design. We do tend to personalize them, blaming inflation on, say, the “greed” of the shopkeeper. Theologically speaking, the so-called “problem of evil” comes from blaming an allegedly benevolent God for the existence of evils in the world.

Systematic thinking about unintended consequences, the third thing, commenced in the 1700s with the Scottish Enlightenment. The other Enlightenment, the French, kept the old, personal blame and the top down. The French Enlightenment loved reason, planning, design, the state. Not the Scots, who loved liberty—but were scientific about its causes and consequences. The other Adam, Adam Ferguson, wrote in 1767 that “nations stumble upon establishments which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.” It’s Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” not of God but of supply and demand—though perhaps, Smith added piously, indirectly intended by God’s benevolence.

Consider how very much of what happens in our human world is unintended, unplanned, the result of human action but not human design. Take, for example, the Portuguese language. There’s no top-down legislation from Brasília or Lisbon. (The French Academy tries to design French not to use English words such as “le weekend,” but of course fails.)

Start listing them and you come up with a very long and important list of results that are not the execution of human design. Attempts to design them top down would be silly or ineffectual—or evil. Visual arts, literature, music, friendship, love, science (mostly), political theory (and much of its practice), conversation, persuasive devices, journalism (in a free society), the dominance of English as a “lingua franca” (driving the French crazy), polite social behavior.

And especially consumer choice, business practices, economic innovation—in a word, most of the economy, which our masters in Brasília or Washington are confident they can steer.

Weekly column in Folha de São Paulo, Brazil
Translated into Portuguese for the newspaper.