"Unity and Diversity of the Human Species: genetics, linguistics and migrations"

ISVOR Knowledge System Seminar held by Luigi Luca Cavalli Sforza
Centro Incontri Marentino (Turin) - 23 May 2002

Excerpts from the presentation by Piero Bassetti and reply by Luigi Luca Cavalli Sforza

Reference: www.incontrisulpianeta.it

As part of the series of seminars organised in 2002 by Isvor Knowledge System in collaboration with Ernst & Young Cap Gemini’s CBI Network Italy (see the site "Incontri sul Pianeta" indicated in the box), Luigi Luca Cavalli Sforza (one of the world’s foremost experts in the field of human genetics) spoke about the creative use of genetics research as applied to the evolution and history of our species.
Piero Bassetti [ * ], who took part in the seminar as a discussant, sketched out his own lines of reasoning, from which his own personal view emerges of the problem of responsibility in innovation.
The following excerpt contains an almost verbatim account of his comments, and the reply by Cavalli Sforza
(Online: January 2003)

This document is a branch of page 7 of Topics

(…) I’d now like to mention another point, which is very much in line with the type of cultural work we do at the Bassetti Foundation.

So: what is responsibility in innovation and who should be taking this responsibility?

At one point, Cavalli Sforza referred explicitly to the responsibility that informed persons develop when acting as operators on behalf of nature, as elaborators of cultural models.

Essentially, this is the way we carry out the task of selection, even if this is cultural in nature.

I would like to say here that from the material point of view the subject we’re discussing is innovation, while from the moral point of view it is management and the responsibilities of management.

Why? What does management mean? The English word "management" comes from "ménager", which in turn comes from "mano", or hand. And the hand has a long history. Our ancestors didn’t have thumbs, they weren’t able to grasp things. Since those times we have created more sophisticated hands, for example those of robots, and techno-structures in particular. In the end, techno-structures have collectivised the problem of managing.

Basically, are asking nowadays for historic-cultural mediation in our civilisation to be carried out by managers.

This, in my opinion, is important, because until fairly recently this mediation was carried out by princes. Piedmont is a prime example of this: from monarchy to techno-structure.

This means that the responsibility for bringing about transformations – a task that is entrusted not just to geniuses but also and above all to our free will – is entrusted nowadays to managers. But I feel that managers are not always aware of this, and this is the question that we at the Bassetti Foundation, are working on.

The system has created a filter of irresponsibility.

We are in the habit of saying that it is the market that is responsible, because it is on the market that we measure consensus with regard to any given innovation.

But the proposal leading to the innovation does not come from the market, the market only judges the success of the innovation. So it judges, for example, whether Coca Cola is better than Pepsi Cola and Coca Cola’s stock rises or falls accordingly.

In this way, however, the market also judged Thalidomide. And when it was discovered that Thalidomide produced phocomelic children, why, that wasn’t the market’s fault.

If you look at any significant innovation, the true historic-cultural responsibility lies with the person who proposed it.

Let’s take the automobile: when people first started driving cars, it was hard to imagine that they would come to represent a drama, that we would reach saturation point.

Today – as any layperson can understand – it must be damned hard to sell cars, because you begin to suspect, as they come off the production line, that nobody knows where to actually put them, if you consider that on Sunday afternoons regions like Lombardy have all their roads physically covered with cars.

But if it were true that cars, for example, had created the problem of pollution, at whose door can we lay the responsibility for an innovation that natural selection will probably condemn some day, or else absolve (making us change cars’ exhaust systems)?

It is clear that the market cannot be considered responsible, in any precise sense of the term. Unlike a discovery, which involves "disclosing" or "finding", innovation is always an "occurrence": someone who innovates "makes things occur", makes facts come into being, and facts change reality. But who assumes the responsibility for an action that affects reality?

We said that the responsibility for new occurrences cannot be attributed to the market, but I don’t yet feel that we can say it has been officially attributed to managers. Because managers are asked to operate inside a calculation within which responsibility, in a certain sense, disappears.

So, what is the relationship between managers and knowledge? What do we need to know to make our day-to-day choices? There is a general impression that if we had to deal with the whole complex range of knowledge available to us today, we would come to a complete halt, unable to cope.

However, can we continue to treat science – as it has been treated on many occasions – as a type of black box? We were not interested in what went on inside it, we knew that somebody put something in, we saw what came out at the other end and we took it from there.

But it seems to me that we are now being prompted to say: «No, we need to be actively aware of the way certain processes take place, because without this knowledge, which, by the way, poses the question of interdisciplinary learning and the overall view, "managing" would be really difficult».

Moreover, if responsibility does not lie with managers, who does it lie with? Capital, perhaps? In this case too the answer would appear to be negative, because Capital acts more or less blindly on reality: it is not required to know what will happen when the managers have used that money to implement a particular innovation.

We have created an almost perfect system of avoidance of responsibility. We have also created the idea of collective work, which largely breaks with the idea of personal responsibility as held in the classical tradition. We have constructed the "decision-making" aspect of innovation, which has become techno-structural and collective: the parameters for measuring and ascertaining responsibility have been brushed out of the picture by alienating operations resting on calculations, behind which we can hide.

You could say that we have constructed a sort of Darwinism. We have washed our hands of responsibility and entrusted ourselves to an external selection criterion: when cars can’t be sold any longer, we’ll stop making them. This is set out in capitalist theory as the "logic of competition". However, in my opinion we have not had the courage to advance the theory that the concept of responsibility (a concept which societies have always asserted as a way of organising power) has in substance been abolished.

The Fondazione Bassetti has sought to address this issue, prompted for example by an industrial sector such as textiles, which certainly does not have the same dramatic consequences as the atomic bomb or Thalidomide, but can introduce a great many changes in social customs: the introduction of duvets changed the way we sleep, and the introduction of the mini-skirt changed the way we live and act.

We need to bear in mind that even innovation that is not concentrated in the latest developments in science and technology can have a strong transformational content. And we need to reflect on the fact that it is not possible to carry on ad infinitum deluding ourselves, as we often do, that we do not know who is really responsible.

Some people find it convenient to say that it is the politicians who are responsible. But the national state has in effect been abolished (a development I agree with, by the way), and there is no longer any reason to look to Berlusconi or Bush to understand who is really conditioning us.

With globalisation we have broken down the organisation of political power, we have broken down the organisation of the market, and therefore of power on the market, and we have broken down financial power, because the world of finance has washed its hands of responsibility for its investments.

Essentially... we have drawn closer to the way in which Nature transforms the world. But can a society that has opted for Darwinian selection as the "measure" of its conduct really work?

It is true that there is a strong similarity between the ideas of Darwinism and the workings of capitalism. And when Piero Bassetti spoke of the various forms of responsibility, he dwelt mainly on the market and was in no doubt over the fact that the market exerts a form of external control.

Basically, to draw the parallel with biological evolution, it is natural selection that controls everything and the market is a force that exerts a similar type of selection, because ultimately it is the market that decides if a company can carry on as it is or if it needs to change.

I have to say one thing, though: natural selection is a completely automatic force which is based on facts. These are, essentially, the reproduction and survival of the individual and of the group, which is made up of many individuals. The market too is completely automatic, but the market is always controlled by people and is therefore a less universal force in some respects. The market, which means the people who buy things, can also make mistakes.

Of course, it is subject to fashion and fashions are less valid than natural selection. Natural selection, however, does not make mistakes, because species need to survive and reproduce if they are to continue.

So the market has a gigantic force, but is not entirely objective. The response of the market one day may very well differ from the response of the market another day, and ultimately this is a limitation.

Besides, the market does not consider other important factors, because they concern the collective dimension and can sometimes lead the market somewhat astray.

We sometimes need to control the directions the market takes, because they could be wrong. When President Hoover opted to leave the market to function in complete freedom, in practical terms he created the Great Depression.

(...)

Another problem that undoubtedly requires a more scientific approach is the question of the costs of a technology. Could the negative environmental effects of the car be foreseen? Could we have foreseen the saturation not just of the market but also of the environment, with the result that on holidays cars risk coming to a complete standstill? The problem is that as things now stand acting within the pure confines of the market is just not enough.