Are you a fox or a hedgehog?

Bilahari Kausikan | Aug 21, 2013

Speech at Singapore Management University’s Convocation Ceremony 2013

URL: http://hardfoam.blogspot.sg/2013/08/are-you-fox-or-hedgehog_21.html

Let me begin by telling you two stories which I think are worth pondering as you stand
on the cusp of a new phase in your lives.

The first is an Arab tale that has been around in various forms since the 9th century.

There was a certain merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to the market. The servant
came back trembling with fear. Master, he said, when I was in the market I met Death
who threatened me. Lend me your horse so that I may flee this city and go to Samarra
and avoid my fate. The merchant willingly agreed and the servant galloped away. Later
that day, the merchant went to the market and there confronted Death. Why did you
threaten my servant this morning, asked the merchant. No, no said Death, I did not
threaten him. I was merely startled to see your servant in Baghdad because I have an
appointment with him this evening in Samarra.

The second is an old Chinese fable.

There was a man who lived on China’s northern frontier. One day for no particular
reason, his only horse ran away across the border. The other villagers tried to console
him for his ill fortune. But the man replied, what makes you think this is not a blessing? A
week later the horse returned accompanied by a splendid nomad mare. All the villagers
congratulated him for his good luck. But the man replied, what makes you think this is not
a curse? The man’s son delighted in riding the new mare but one day fell and was
crippled. Again the villagers tried to console him. But the man replied, what makes you
sure this is not a blessing? War came. Every able bodied young man in the village was
conscripted to fight the nomads. Nine out of ten were killed, but since the man’s son was
crippled he was not enlisted and survived.

Destiny and contingency — what has been indelibly written in the stars and the
unfathomable vagaries of heaven — are not rivals. They are co-conspirators forever
sporting with your lives. This is not just an abstract thought.

Twenty years ago on Saturday 11th December 1993, at about one thirty in the afternoon,
a twelve storey luxury high-rise apartment complex in Kuala Lumpur called Highland
Towers suddenly collapsed. Forty-eight people were crushed to death. A very good
friend of mine lived there. He was never known for early rising and would usually still
have been in bed on a weekend. However, on that particular Saturday for some
inconsequential reason – I think it was to sell his car – he got up much earlier than usual
and left his apartment about an hour before the disaster. So he was spared. But a few
years later, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer and died a lingering death.

We cherish the illusion of being in control of events. But in every decision, however
trivial, the seeds of a thousand futures are sown. In an instant a world of hope shatters,
even as life continues with insolent normalcy around you. In another instant infinite
possibilities may flower. Joy and grief are inextricably intertwined. An ancient Roman
philosopher once wryly observed, the most unhappy sort of unfortunate man is one who
has been happy.

As you try to elude the stratagems of fate and chance and pursue a career, what you
studied in the university will be of limited relevance. At least that has been my
experience, perhaps because I studied political science and international relations.
Politics, whatever else it may be, is certainly not a science. And having spent the last
thirty-four years practicing the craft of diplomacy, I have come to the sad conclusion that
any resemblance between what I studied about international relations and what I did for
a living was purely coincidental.

I doubt my experience was exceptional. I know of no successful businessman who

became successful just because he or she had a degree in business administration or
management. Nobody ever become a leader by taking a leadership course.
Social science is an oxymoron. At best the social sciences provide metaphors that allow
us to dimly glimpse an impenetrable reality in which nothing is ever ceteris paribus, an
assumption which is a conceit of the most conceited of the social sciences. But those of
you who have already enrolled in the faculty of social sciences, need not despair. All is
not lost. I stand before you as living proof that the study of the social sciences will
probably do you no permanent harm, provided you do not take it too seriously.

The world – or at least that part of it made up of human interactions and human
institutions – is far too complex to be comprehended in a holistic way by the human mind.
It is an intricate, chaotic and dynamic system characterized by so many feedback loops
that its behaviour becomes more and more unpredictable. Ironically, our general answer
to unpredictability is to develop ever more complexity: new technologies, new
institutions, more regulation and more information.

To teach, to write, even to speak, is necessarily to simplify. We cannot opt out of the
world. To deal with it we, consciously or unconsciously, resort to mental frameworks that
simplify reality in order to enable us to comprehend it. The purpose of a university
education, indeed all education, is to enrich our stock of these mental frameworks, the
better to navigate the treacherous waters of life.

But we should not forget that these mental frameworks are only human artefacts. They
are ideologies; social and political constructs that inevitably distort the reality they try to
comprehend, or at best capture only a tiny and ephemeral sliver of it. But it is seductively
easy to confound our ideas and opinions with ‘facts’. The highly educated, highly
intelligent and highly successful are the most prone to this type of error.

We can truly know something only after it has happened. But if we can only know
backwards, we must live forwards. Herein lies the essential fragility of human endeavour
wherein the best laid plans are constantly ambushed by chance. We always know less
than we believe we do. And our actions; the very effort to understand, changes the
behaviours we try to understand and influence. Self-deception is an intrinsic part of
human nature. So the odds are usually in favour of chance.

A former British politician, the late Enoch Powell, once wrote: “All political lives, unless
they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the
nature of politics and of human affairs.”

Powell was writing about the life of Joseph Chamberlain, the father of Neville
Chamberlain who notoriously told the British Cabinet on the eve of World War II that
Adolf Hitler would not deliberately deceive a man whom he respected and proudly
proclaimed ‘peace in our time’ after meeting him. That alone demonstrates the infinite
capacity of the human species to delude itself and that Powell’s insight has wider
applicability than any specific individual or the field of politics.

Universities are premised on belief in reason. But human beings are seldom entirely
rational. And the idea that in any situation there is an objective Truth discernible by
exercise of reason is a myth. Pontius Pilate was said to have asked Jesus Christ ‘What is
Truth?’. The reply was a quibble. I know of no convincing answer ever since.

This is a fundamentally illogical world, or rather a world of competing rationalities and

rivalling logics, the sum of which is seldom logical. There is a deep human need to
impose rational explanations on events that would otherwise compel us to confront the
existential horror of being at the mercy of unpredictable and inexplicable forces; a need
perhaps more keenly felt by Singapore civil servants and university professors than
others of the human species. But there is no logical reason to believe that any logic we
happen to favour is intrinsically more rational than any other logic.
I am not arguing that any opinion is as good as any other opinion. Of what value is my
opinion on, say, brain surgery or engineering or mathematics? Absolutely nothing.

My argument is only that the intensity of belief in an idea or the reach of its acceptance is
no guarantee of its validity. Truth if it exists, is always situational and conditional and thus
at best only partially, temporarily and contingently ‘true’. This is being obscured by the
ever more ubiquitous social media. Today we can, if we so choose, happily inhabit
worlds of our own creation where the only voices we ever hear are those that we already
agree with.

Alas, it is my impression that more and more of us are slipping into this 21st century form
of monomania. We are becoming more solipsistic and struthious. Hearing only what we
want to hear, we lose sight of the possibility of error. Not recognizing the omnipresence
of error, we do not learn. Judgement which rests on breath and variety of experience,
including the experience of being mistaken, is being devalued. The general view is that
the social media and other new communication technologies enhance human freedom.
Perhaps. But it seems to me that often it is only the freedom to choose our own chains.

There is no going back. Technologies cannot be unlearnt and their benefits are obvious
and indisputable. But there is insufficient appreciation of how they are also redefining
basic concepts of society, community and politics. And since man is a social and political
animal, what the consequences will eventually be no one can yet say. It is already
making an unpredictable world even more uncertain.

Life is a series of improvisations in response to unforeseen and unforeseeable events.

We can only improvise wisely if we accept the world as it is and not as we hope or fear it
to be. This is harder than you think. All too often, what passes for objectivity or originality
or for critical thinking is merely the Pavlovian impulse to cry black if authority should say
white. Again this tendency is exacerbated by the social media which divorces opinion
from responsibility and from reality. Some people of course never needed the social
media. But what was once just bar talk now can all too easily go viral.

To live in society – and we cannot but live in society – we need common assumptions.
Otherwise even something as basic as language would not be possible. But there is
generally an inverse correlation between certainty and significance. It is totally safe to
assume that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow. So what?

How to determine what we can significantly hold in common as a nation or as the human
species is often highly contentious. And even if consensus seems to have been reached,
it is prudent to keep in mind that the reach of assumptions or their tenacity bears no
necessary relationship with their validity.

Almost a quarter of a century ago, a neoconservative American scholar, Francis

Fukuyama, wrote an essay that boldly proclaimed ‘the end of history’. History of course
did not listen and went rolling along. A few years later Mr Fukuyama expanded his essay
into a deeply learned book that argued that History had indeed ended, although the rest
of us were insufficiently erudite to notice. A few more years later, he denied that he had
ever been a neoconservative, and maintaining a discreet silence over his earlier
prognostications, went on to write several hefty tomes on entirely different subjects.
It is easy to poke fun at the folibles of the learned. But a line can be drawn connecting the
assumptions that Mr Fukuyama shared with others of his ilk and policies that left the
Middle East in turmoil. Hundreds of thousands dead or wounded will not find consolation
in subsequent mea culpas. Nor despite the disastrous outcomes, have these assumptions
been abandoned or even seriously questioned. They continue to be enthusiastically
propagated by those who have become prisoners of their own ideology.

The problem of reaching consensus on significant common assumptions is more acute for
young countries such as ours with limited shared experiences. Singapore is not yet even
fifty years old as a sovereign and independent country. That is but the blink of an eye in
history. There is no dearth of foreigners eager to tell us what we should believe. And
unfortunately some Singaporeans are all too ready to believe them. They may well have
good intentions. But don’t forget where that proverbially leads us.

Your generation will have to endure a world of greater than usual political and
intellectual fluidity. Irrespective of their specific form and institutions, all polities, apart
from a handful mainly in the Middle East, today legitimate themselves by some variant of
the notion of the sovereignty of the people and the idea that the individual is at the centre
of the universe. These concepts took hold in the 18th century, and have been gathering
momentum ever since. Yet looking around the world, it seems obvious that the collision
of 18th century political philosophy with 21st century communications and other
technologies is creating a global crisis of governance.

Governance is becoming dysfunctional because a dynamic of distrust inevitably arises.

Social media blurs the distinction between opinion and expertise. If individuals believe
they are sovereign and that their ego is the supreme value, they will sooner or later also
come to believe that their opinion is good as anyone’s opinion and the inconvenient fact
that not all opinions are created equal becomes politically incorrect. Then any
disagreement however mild with any opinion by governments generates resentment and
resistance. Yet the fundamental role of any government is to mediate between different
views for the common good. Modern communications technologies accentuate this
dynamic by conflating the idea of the ‘public’ with the views of individuals or small
groups and providing the means for disseminating them widely and directly.

We cannot go back to legitimation by bloodline or the mandate of heaven. We cannot

abandon technology. But how and whether we can cope are still open questions. The
syndrome is most acute in the highly developed countries who eccentrically consider it a
virtue. But no country, including our own, is entirely spared, although ours is as yet only
a very mild case of this global disease.

I do not know when the dénouement will come or what form it will take. But come it must.
This is not a stable equilibrium. It cannot hold.

The problem is exacerbated by flux in the structures and processes of international

politics. The geopolitical order of the last two centuries is gradually but inexorably being
displaced. But the rising new powers provide no real intellectual alternative. They are
rising precisely because they were the best pupils of the old order. The new powers
validate themselves by their own versions of the same political philosophy – fascism and
communism share the same intellectual roots as democracy – and so today struggle with
their own versions of the same ills of governance.

It is unclear what the future will bring. One may darkly speculate whether the
technologies that were the fruits of our ingenuity have outpaced the capacity of our
current political and social institutions to deal with them. One can of course always hope
that human ingenuity will eventually cope with what our ingenuity has wrought. But hope
is only just that: a hope which may well prove forlorn. At very least the interregnum
between the current order and whatever will come after will be prolonged, measured in
decades and characterized by recurrent crises.

As you go forward into this uncertain future, console yourself with the thought that if
anything is possible, then too nothing is impossible. Isaiah Berlin famously made a
distinction between the fox and the hedgehog: “The fox knows many things, but the
hedgehog knows one big thing”. Be a fox not a hedgehog because that one big thing the
hedgehog thinks it knows may well be wrong. Intellectual consistency for its own sake is
foolish. And remember too that the world is infested with hedgehogs masquerading as
foxes. These mimics are particularly thick on the ground in universities and in some
sections of the civil service.

Face uncertainty with a stoic and pragmatic scepticism rather than with false optimism. I
said scepticism and not cynicism. False optimism lulls us into complacency. Scepticism
keeps us alert to the multiple possibilities that are inherent in any situation. Pragmatism
because the world will not arrange itself to suit our convenience. And stoicism because
despite our best efforts, we may be entrapped by the snares of fate or chance and fail.
But cynicism is corrosive and blinding. To confront uncertainty with cynicism is to
handicap ourselves in the game of life and almost certainly to doom ourselves to failure.

I do not expect you to believe me. Youth is always sceptical of the scepticism of
experience until it has acquired enough of its own. And of course, if you have paid even
minimal attention to my ramblings, there is always the possibility that I am mistaken and
have been talking arrant rubbish. For your sakes, I do most sincerely hope so.