If you hear the word “fresco” come up in conversation, avoid any direct connection to ancestral cave paintings. We would immediately spot your disuse. Frescoes today designate modern tools, the “frescours” and “frescouses” the new prophets. Presented in the form of a deck of cards, they address current sensitive topics (biodiversity, diversity, inclusion, climate, mobility, etc.). The purpose of these workshops? “Raising awareness” of the company’s employees to the issues mentioned, all “in a playful spirit of collective intelligence” (sic). The name of the game is to discover cause and effect links. Based on diagnostics, players make predictions and see the usefulness of certain actions to be implemented within organizations. Life, nature and men become subjects of logic and modeling.
Beyond the work of raising awareness and raising awareness, which is always beneficial and not debatable, the relevance of this method of thinking remains to be questioned. Because as much as prediction, deduction, causal links work for matter, the inert, the non-living and everything that obeys mathematical laws, deductive methods remain more random when it comes to the alive. We can predict what we want, life systematically exceeds the prior conception that we initially had of it.
No matter how much we anticipate our next work meeting or our next family dinner, imagine what we will say, anticipate each other’s remarks, our representations remain schematic in comparison to the real moment, which gives us a unique and new impression when we live it. Because the image we have of the future situation is only a juxtaposition of things already known.
Intelligence predicts the unknown from the known. In wanting to look forward, she only looks back. But everything that is alive is accompanied by unpredictability. This is why wars remain unpredictable, natural disasters too, and diseases just as much. Reason why no one imagined on October 6 what was going to happen on the 7th. Reason why no one could guess in January 2020 the Covid-19 pandemic which would confine us that year. Reason why History and knowledge of the past do not allow us to anticipate the future.
There is no worse forecast than that which excludes the unpredictable
What is alive, human, natural always brings forth something rigorously new, what Bergson nicely calls “the continuous creation of unpredictable novelty”. Once the unexpected occurs, we imagine that the prediction was possible. But it is “a retrospective illusion”, a remodeling of the past based on the present, “a retrograde movement of truth”, Bergson warns. It is because something has become real that it becomes retrospectively possible. The mind does not move from the possible to the real, but from the real to the possible.
But what do forecasters do, if not logically deduce a future reality from present possibilities of action? Would the present contain all the elements making up the future? These intellectual maps and other mental constructions confuse the map and the territory, the evolution of which includes the random. These logico-deductive games aim to be clairvoyant while remaining blind to their own blindness. They betray a stubborn blindness in the face of chance, of life, of the contingent. There is no worse forecast than one that excludes the unpredictable.
Instead of trying to predict by extending the features of the past into the future and ignoring or almost ignoring unpredictable factors, let us anticipate what is not yet by observing from what is stirring elsewhere what can have an impact here. Making room for indetermination and intelligence of action would be more responsible than the forecasting logic of right-thinking progressives who think they are responsible by reducing life to mechanisms that can be solved in card games! It’s a bit quick to forget that the logic of life is not the logic of the mind.
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