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Mother Pelican
A Journal of Solidarity and Sustainability
Vol. 20, No. 12, December 2024
Luis T. Gutiérrez, Editor
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Innovation as a Matter of Life and Death
Giorgio Baruchello
December 2024
The ATM machine has been called "the only thing useful banks have invented in 20 years."
Photo by Jake Allen, Unsplash.
Click on the image to enlarge.
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Every few years, inexorably, a new buzzword captures the attention and imagination of top managers and eminent scholars alike, when not those of major policymakers, influential media outlets, marketing and PR professionals, and all stripes and varieties of lower cadres within public as much as corporate bureaucracies. Every few years, a fortiori, a growing and rather dismal score of old buzzwords comes to be neglected more-and-more callously by the same fickle audiences, i.e., until the increasingly peripheral lexical specimens are transformed into prosaic descriptors, vague recollections, embarrassing blasts-from-the-past, or even cultural fossils from a bygone business era, which can be of interest only to economic historians. Catchy terms, glamorous phrases, and attendant management and organisational styles have been rolling in and out of the scene for decades, if not even centuries. Think, for instance, of mantra-like formulations such as “the knowledge economy,” “total quality management,” “core competency,” “co-opetition,” “greed is good,” “emotional intelligence,” “management by objectives,” “Asian/Celtic/Nordic Tiger,” “big data,” or “disruption.” Nowadays, “innovation” seems to be enjoying its rhetorico-managerial and institutional heyday. Enjoy it while it lasts.
A standard set of identical key questions arises each and every time buzzwords such as these pop up in an ear- and eye-catching manner, and cockily strut awhile upon the public sphere’s marvelled yet often merciless catwalk: To what end? In what way? According to whom? At whose expense? Plus, of course, old Seneca the Younger’s immortal interrogative: Cui prodest? (aka cui bono?, i.e., to whose benefit?). Qua fastidious philosophy professor interested in value theory and business ethics, however, the most fundamental question for me continues to be the following one: Good or bad? Naturally, I am far from being the first and only person to have put such a question; nor am I suggesting that I have, or that I am ever going to have, the ultimate wisdom on this tricky subject, which I address but cursorily in the present opinion piece.
Entrepreneurship Rath Professor Ryan T. MacNeil, for one, has recently published a lengthy book on Dark Innovation (2024), which he understands, on the one hand, as being analogous to the “elusive[-] dark matter” investigated by physicists (p.1). By means of this analogy, MacNeil refers to all those “types of innovation that tend to be overlooked, downplayed, and marginalized: services innovation, public innovation, and user innovation[;]” as well as all “known unknowns” and “unknown absences” concerning “many innovation activities that are good for us” but escaping the intellectual grasp of innovation-averse “innovation studies,” meaning innovation “researchers [who, ironically,] have been closing ranks around certain theories, research questions, empirical contexts, and methods[,]” hence exhibiting “disciplinary sclerosis” (pp.1, 4, 95 and 146). On the other hand, MacNeil addresses the “disturb[ing]” fact that “innovation” can be “dark” in the sense of being “‘bad’ innovation” tout court (p.2). This aspect too “is so often ignored by innovation research,” where there prevails “an undoubtable pro-innovation bias” causing the subjectively-convenient yet objectively-inconvenient denial, diminishment and/or disregard of, say, “history books on companies like IBM, DuPont, and I.G. Farben[,]” all of which “gained strength by developing tools for mass murder” in the 20th century (p.2). Anduril, Baykar, and One Way Aerospace are duly following suit in the 21st.
Contrary to much postmodernist claptrap—philosophers too are more than capable of falling for glitzy buzzwords of their own making—there exist well-defined criteria for good and bad, whether or not such criteria have received de facto universal agreement across generational time and cultural domains (e.g., the golden mean principle), or whether they have ‘merely’ contented themselves with figuring prominently in official national constitutions, international covenants and treaties (e.g., the UN’s ICESCR qua civil commons), and/or sophisticated theories and time-honoured doctrines endorsed by global institutions such as UNESCO (e.g., Life-Value Onto-Axiology [LVOA]) or the Catholic Church (e.g., the https://pelicanweb.org/solisustv15n12page3.htmlSocial Doctrine of the Church). As per the four preceding hyperlinks, I have written extensively on such matters—thrice, in fact, when contributing to Mother Pelican. Hence, I won’t detail any of them here.
Instead, here, I must stress one important point that is implied by the aforementioned, standard, philosophical set of identical key questions (to what end? in what way? etc.) Insofar as current business practice and textbook economic theory still largely presume, and therefore promote at large, the atomising economic agent’s self-maximising rationality, any fundamental axiological coordinates, i.e., any decisive criteria for good and bad, can be obtained only through the intervention of rationalities and agents that are external to the economic sphere per se, e.g., national legislators concerned with pursuing the common good, enforced ergo justiciable human-rights provisions, scientifically-solid and thoroughly-applied health-and-safety measures, well-funded and well-staffed environmental agencies and monitoring bodies, etc. Guided by self-maximising rationality, in fact, the economic sphere is quite incapable of making basic axiological distinctions such as those concerning wants and needs (e.g., golden toilets vs potable water), life-enabling and life-disabling wants (e.g., nourishing food vs junk food), sustainable and unsustainable growth (e.g., clean vs polluting energy production), and human dignity or life itself and their opposites (e.g., historic markets in slaves and armaments).
Taken in their abstract form qua legal personae, economic agents possess no life-related coordinates whatsoever for biologically-sound discrimination, as exemplified in concrete form by: Profitable yet noxious trade in tobacco or pathogenic pesticides; expensive patents on life-saving medical treatments; enhanced fossil-oil drilling in Arctic regions that have become ice-free because of global warming; and outright financial speculation on the price of vital staples such as wheat and maize. Not to mention legally more opaque cases, e.g., the dumping of the developed countries’ hazardous industrial waste into cash-strapped developing countries, so-called “vulture funds” profiting from the sovereign debt of war-ravaged countries, or the innovations devised by accounting experts who foster tax elusion and tax evasion benefitting wealthy clients at the expense of communities in dire need of funds for, inter alia, their police forces, public prosecution offices, hospitals, research centres, schools and universities, etc.
Under standard criteria of economic rationality, allegedly ‘rational’ agents aim de jure at self-maximisation, i.e. getting more and more desire fulfilment (or “preference satisfaction”), whether mentally and/or physically healthy or not, often in response to cravings that have been craftily induced in the consumers by means of conditioning techniques developed by marketing psychologists and advertising professionals. So ‘rational’ an agent engages in money-based transactions that, in theory, must self-replicate endlessly, and secure increasing money-measured returns onto investment and/or management. This theoretically-endless self-replication process is expected to go on indefinitely, whatever may eventually happen to public health, people’s lives, and the planetary and/or social structures upon which such health and lives ultimately depend (cf. UNESCO’s EOLSS, where the most thorough rendition of LVOA has been produced to date.). Biological categories of life and death, as well as health and sickness, are absent in principle in this engineering-modelled economic rationality. At the same time, ‘growth’ continues and must continue qua paramount and accepted system-defining aim of the economy. In oncology, that is precisely what cancerous cells perform: A theoretically-endless process of self-replication within a host body, whose health and eventual survival is not and cannot be perceived by the self-replicating cells qua effective control response. For all talks of “innovation,” this kind of logic brings about the least novel of human fates: Death.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in Genoa, Italy, Giorgio Baruchello is an Icelandic citizen and works as Professor of Philosophy at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Akureyri, Iceland. Prof. Baruchello read philosophy in Genoa and Reykjavík, Iceland, and holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Guelph, Canada. He is the author of more than two hundred scholarly publications, including ten books dealing with mortality, cruelty, axiology, rhetoric, religion, and humour. Canada’s Northwest Passage Books has published five volumes of collected essays by Prof. Baruchello and a sixth volume is currently forthcoming.
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"Do not boast about tomorrow, for you
do not know what a day may bring."
Proverbs 27:1
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