Two minds

Progressive, The, Nov, 2002 by Wendell Berry

Nothing so entices and burdens the Rational Mind as its need, and its self-imposed responsibility, to make "informed decisions." It is certainly possible for a mind to be informed--in several ways, too. And it is certainly possible for an informed mind to make decisions on the basis of all that has informed it. But that such decisions are "informed decisions"--in the sense that "informed decisions" are predictably right, or even that they are reliably better than uninformed decisions--is open to doubt.

The ideal of the "informed decision" forces "decision makers" into a thicket of facts, figures, studies, tests, and "projections." It requires long and uneasy pondering of "cost-benefit ratios"--the costs and benefits, often, of abominations. The problem is that decisions all have to do with the future, and all the actual knowledge we have is of the past. It is impossible to make a decision, however well informed it may be, that is assuredly right, because it is impossible to know what will happen. It is possible to know or guess some things that may happen, and many things that have happened have not been foreseen.

Moreover, having made an "informed decision," even one that turns out well, there is no way absolutely to determine whether or not it was a better decision than another decision that one might have made instead. It is not possible to compare a decision that one made with a decision that one did not make. There are no "controls," no "replication plots" in experience.

The great weakness of the Rational Mind, contrary to its protestations, is a sort of carelessness or abandonment which takes the form of high-stakes gambling--as when, with optimism and fanfare, without foreknowledge or self-doubt or caution, nuclear physicists or chemists or genetic engineers release their products into the whole world, making the whole world their laboratory.

Or the great innovators and decision makers build huge airplanes whose loads of fuel make them, in effect, flying bombs. And they build the World Trade Center, forgetting apparently the B-25 bomber that crashed into the seventy-ninth floor of the Empire State Building in 1945. And then on September 11, 2001, some enemies--of a kind we well knew we had, and evidently had decided to ignore--captured two of the huge airplanes and flew them, as bombs, into the two towers of the World Trade Center. In retrospect, we may doubt that these shaping decisions were properly informed, just as we may doubt that the expensive "intelligence" that is supposed to foresee and prevent such disasters is sufficiently intelligent.

The decisions, if the great innovators and decision makers were given to reading poetry, might have been informed by James Laughlin's poem "Above the City," which was written soon after the B-25 crashed into the Empire State Building:

   You know our office the 18th
   floor of the Salmon Tower looks
   right out on the

   Empire State & it just happened
   we were finishing up some
   late invoices on

   a new book that Saturday morning
   when a bomber roared through the
   mist and crashed

   flames poured from the windows
   into the drifting clouds and sirens
   screamed down in

   the streets below it was unearthly
   but you know the strangest thing
   we realized that

   none of us were much surprised because
   we'd always known that those
   two Paragons of

   Progress sooner or later would perform
   before our eyes this demonstration
   of their
   true relationship