A guest post by Ismael Al-Amoudi, reporting on discussions held at the Centre for Social Ontology (www.socialontology.org) and a forthcoming Forum issue of the Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour.
Realist discussions of unpredictability and catastrophes
In 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic was circulating around the Globe at a baffling speed, only matched by the celerity with which myriad commentaries appeared, circulated and contradicted one another, thus generating heated controversies about the basic questions that occupied most people’s minds: how dangerous are present and future variants of the virus? What can we do to protect ourselves and the ones we love? How long is the whole situation going to last? And also, more grimly, how many are likely to die from it?
Although these abundant commentaries varied widely in their perspectives and conclusions, taken together they produced a strong collective sense that an almost unavoidable catastrophe had just happened, and that the destiny of large sections of the world population held on events as contingent as the contact of a bat and a pangolin in a Chinese market.
As a group of scholars with a lasting interest in realist social theorizing, we obviously wanted to help the best we could, without forgetting that our most distinctive tools were patient reading, sound reflection, truthful discussion and careful writing. Thus, rather than jumping into hot debates, we decided to step back and ask ontological questions about the very nature of un/predictability, contingency and catastrophes. While our thinking might not have been directly instrumental to tackling COVID-19, we do hope that some of our ideas might be helpful when addressing future catastrophes. In the remainder, I attempt a generalist summary of some of our claims and findings:
- The definition of catastrophes is in principle open to contestation: While there is broad agreement on the idea that catastrophes result from an initial set of contingent events that triggered a chain reaction of further events leading to the overall catastrophic situation, most commentaries define ‘catastrophes’ as classes of events or configurations that are detrimental to human flourishing in general. But it is possible to characterize catastrophes less sweepingly, as classes of events that are bad for certain specific purposes and sectional interests (rather than for generalized eudaimonia). Not only is the second approach more congruent with Margaret Archer’s critique of the myth of structural and cultural integration (1985), but it also opens crucial questions on whether some catastrophes might be desirable or at least acceptable? which social groups are most/least affected by the catastrophe? and which ones are most/least asked to contribute to the social cost of avoiding or dampening the catastrophe’s effects? As Lazega (forthcoming) argues through a longitudinal study of the Commercial Court of Paris, a powerful group of corporate actors can instrumentalise contingency and unpredictability to take responsibility for protecting the system while accumulating a disproportionate share of unchecked power at the expense of other actors in the field.
- Actualist conceptions of catastrophe are both pervasive and severely limited. From an actualist ontological perspective (implicit to most professional forecasts) the catastrophe is an event that follows anterior events; and the link between events consists in statistical correlations. From this perspective, there is an equivalence between knowing, explaining and predicting (cf. Porpora, forthcoming) and the future is, in principle, as predictable as the past (see Morgan, forthcoming). But, as Maccarini remarks (forthcoming), actualism leads to an “odd conclusion”: because social science has proven over time its incapacity to formulate non-trivial quantitative predictions that stand the test of time, such predictive tasks should be entrusted to forecasters drawn from the natural sciences, even when the natural phenomena of interest (say the spread of a virus) are highly influenced by social, cultural and historical mechanisms.
- Fortunately, there exist sound realist alternatives to understanding abrupt social change. From a deep realist perspective, catastrophes entail successions of events but also the complex entities generating these events over time and, crucially, the context where the catastrophe unfolded. As Archer (forthcoming) reminds us, it is not a single type, but several ontologically different types of mechanisms that account for macrosocial change, incl. catastrophic instances. The erosion of contexts supportive of established routines (Rescher, 1998) is arguably one source of explanation among others. But we should also consider the instability of those social and cultural contexts that are NOT characterized by logics of necessary complementarity (Archer, forthcoming). For instance, post- WWII Western societies displayed in many spheres of activity a logics of contingent complementarity that acted, according to Archer, as enabler and catalyst for unbound social morphogenesis (see Archer, 2017).
- The relational context is of utmost importance in containing the initial spread of the catastrophe: As Pierpaolo Donati suggests (forthcoming), the tendency of a catastrophe to spread is causally determined by the qualitative features of the social relations linking human agents. While certain types of (saturated) relations are conducive to containing the catastrophe, others are conducive to its exponential spread throughout the community. Therefore, we should be as much concerned with our communities’ capacity to control locally the spread of the catastrophe than with our capacity to accurately predict its future evolution and control it through centralized policy.
- We must acknowledge our performative role as scholars: while predictions drawn solely from statistical (regression) analysis are illusory (Lawson 2003), it is possible however to make tendential predictions (Porpora forthcoming), which are educated guesses based on familiarity with human behavior, deep beliefs, relationality, and existing knowledge of social mechanisms and institutions. Doing so means we must abandon the quest for a universal methodology while recognizing the diversity of social contexts. As social scientists, we can and should engage in performative processes where we do not seek to describe the future as much as to identify and champion tendencies conducive to brighter tomorrows.
Obviously, there is much more to say about how social scientists can theorize unpredictability, contingent and catastrophic events in ways that help steer them. These discussions are still open and the authors of the JTSB Forum Issue welcome additional comments and criticisms that will push the discussion forward.
Al-Amoudi, I. (forthcoming) Ontological unpredictability: What can realists say about unpredictability, contingency and catastrophe? Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12400
Archer, M. S. (forthcoming). ‘Coincidence’; a word with two meanings for explaining and predicting the future. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour.
Donati, P. (forthcoming). The prediction of social catastrophes: between necessity and contingency. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 44, (1), 24–45, https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12026
Lazega, E. (forthcoming). Borderline institution. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour.
Maccarini, A. (forthcoming). Imagine, predict or perform? Reclaiming the future in sociology beyond scientism and catastrophism. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour.
Morgan, J. (forthcoming). Everything, everywhere, but not all at once? Time, contingency and the open future. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour.
Porpora, D. (forthcoming). Do realists predict? Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour.
Rescher, N. (1998). Predicting the future: an introduction to the theory of forecasting. State University Press.