Tomorrow's Troubles

Examining technological developments such as algorithmic control and population-based governance can prove difficult for reasons other than the sheer complexity of terms and structures. They are difficult to assay because of how deeply they are embedded in the warp and weft of contemporary life. From the operations of social media feeds to decision-making medical technology, Paul Scherz argues in Tomorrow’s Troubles: Risk, Anxiety, and Prudence in an Age of Algorithmic Governance, today’s society is largely structured and managed by probabilistic control. “The whole of political policymaking and even personal decision-making are now being forced into the form of a gamble on probabilities” (32). Tracing a genealogy from Blaise Pascal to the latest developments in Game Theory, Scherz evidences the ways in which, for us moderns, “To be rational now means to gamble” (32).

Part 1 of the volume explores the subjective experience of risk that motivates the lives of individual decision makers. Scherz connects the intellectual movement of the early modern era, one that moved away from a concept of providential contingency and towards a predictive probability, with the manifest anxiety and sense of powerlessness that become hallmarks of modernity. The tools of predictive probability claim to offer almost total control over risk while being simultaneously almost impossible to use for everyday decisions. One cannot, for instance, run a quick Bayesian calculation to determine whether or not to accept an on-the-spot invitation to grab drinks after work. Moreover, because probabilistic decision-making seeks only the possible outcomes, it is unable to provide a real and transcendent goal at which to aim. Instead, it creates an imaginary present in which one feels the overwhelming onslaught of infinite “possible events as if they were lying together in the same plane” (45) with no real meaningful goal. The result is a lot of worry, an over-inflated sense of responsibility, and deep sorrow when our quest for total security fails.

For Scherz, this predicament is not theologically neutral. The rejection of God’s providence and of transcendent ends in contemporary rationalizing burdens decision-makers with more responsibility than they need bear. They become little deities charged with the impossible task of seeing all ends and superintending their good—ultimately becoming little servitors for Mammon, the god of security and profit. This is bad not only for the spiritual life of persons, but for our social order. “Mammon is a cruel master who will fail you in the end, but he also leads one to cruelty towards others” (77).

Part 2 of Scherz’ book “illustrate(s) how this turn from trust in God leads to the objectification and control of others, ultimately resulting in dangerous shifts in contemporary subjectivity” (77). Probability theory, because of its flaws (e.g., the inability to predict novel things, things that can’t be factored because they haven’t happened before), “requires that those who govern treat people not as subjects with reason and free will but as objects of prediction and control” (84). Where human action is unpredictable, and therefore not governable by algorithm, contemporary power is deployed to make it predictable. Accordingly, “such tools are disempowering to those who are treated as . . . objects” of governance (126).

Scherz helpfully limns four probabilistic mechanisms of control: biopolitical nudging, depositing the will in the environment, social physics, and surveillance capitalism (128-137). The goal of such mechanisms is to align human populations more successfully with preconceived traits which make them more efficiently manageable. The concern of Scherz and others is that “though these techniques can ring many benefits in their train in terms of efficiency, convenience, and even substantive gods, like human life and health, they also raise numerous concerns” (137). Chief among these concerns for Scherz is the “underlying anthropology driving these systems” (139). Following the work of Romano Guardini and others, Scherz concludes that this underlying anthropology is essentially demonic: “Faced with the responsibility for all possible futures placed on him by managerial responsibility, and knowing that he will bear the brunt of the consequences of his choices under neoliberal responsibility, the person blinks . . . he forgoes the freedom with which he was endowed” and “gradually becomes enmeshed in false goods, and his exercise of freedom becomes more and more ensnared by automatic responses . . .delivered over to something outside him” (157).

Not all modes of prudential decision-making, however—not even some of the techniques employed in modern governance—are problematic. Part 3 of the book is dedicated to a careful analysis of the ways in which a Christian can and should go about deploying certain probabilistic techniques in ways that are life-giving. Scherz advocates for a theologically robust Epimethean society “founded on hope and trust” in God and in others (213). Tools of assessing future risk, where prudent and wise, could be used not to gain control over possible futures or other humans, but to make decisions that aim at achieving transcendent goods for both the individual and for society. “That is why these tools should not be thought of as a calculative decision tool but as an aid to deliberation”—deliberation that occurs in community with other persons as meaningful actors (196). Rather than confining human action, or exercising manipulative control over populations, such a society would order itself around transcendent goodsand “encourage virtues that more broadly reduce risks” (212).

As lofty, and perhaps ephemeral, as such a vision for society sounds, Scherz is careful to ground such superior values in real-world practices. This is the stuff of actual human life—of neighborhoods, health clinics, zoning policies, interpersonal romance, and waste-water management. Scherz makes it clear that trust in God’s providence, a robust anthropology of the human person as created in the Image of God, and prudential decision-making in community are not merely figments afforded by wishful thinking; they are in fact a real alternative to algorithmic governance which is itself illusionary, promising a total control over tomorrow’s troubles it can never realize.

Mark Brians is the rector of All Saints Anglican in urban Honolulu.

Mark Brians

Date Of Review:

August 4, 2023