Innovation, Ethics and Our Common Futures: A Collaborative Philosophy
Rafael Ziegler
200 pages, Edward Elgar Pub, 2020
Thirty years of sustainable development discussions – and all the major drivers globally point in the direction of unsustainability. A transformation in direction of sustainability is more urgent than ever. But what is the role of innovation?
More of the same, innovating new things for markets, does not work. At the very least, innovation is in need of qualification. Social innovation has attracted interest for a change in practices aiming beyond self-interest towards the common good. Responsible innovation rethinks the knowledge-technology relation, anticipating consequences rather than remediating impact after. Free innovation points to households and citizens as sources of new ideas addressing actual needs. Exnovation shows the creativity and courage required for divesting from products, policies, and practices. My book Innovation, Ethics and Our Common Futures surveys insights from these emerging streams of innovation theory and practice.
For this task, the book places innovation in relation to philosophy. Sustainability transformation matters, and thus is a matter of values. What can we learn from the philosophical discussions of liberty and community, emancipation and domination for thinking about innovation?
I propose a collaborative approach. Think again of current, global unsustainability, and the ongoing, sixth mass extinction of species. It confronts us with “our” Guernica, a catastrophe and at the same time a complexity akin to Picasso’s famous, multi-perspectival cubist painting. It confronts the viewer with various perspectives to “make sense” of what is happening. And it invites reflection on where you are standing. I take a sufficiency perspective – of enough for all, and with respect for all. The book proposes an ethos of sufficiency for a transformation towards sustainability. It includes just as much transformative innovation missions as it calls for a better recognition of social exnovation. The following excerpt is from the introduction chapter. —Rafael Ziegler
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Apollo gave Hermes a herald’s staff in recognition of his role as messenger of the gods. Hermes wore winged shoes to travel fast and he invented a musical instrument, the lyre. Transferring divine ideas, travel, speed, invention – does Greek mythology not offer the perfect patron of innovators? In the Roman Empire, Hermes, now known as Mercury, was a popular god. He was the patron of merchants. He not only carried the herald’s staff but also a wallet. Mercury was also the god of thieves. He had to give the lyre to Apollo in exchange for the cattle he stole from him. Divine ideas, invention, travel, speed, theft and wealth? The god also illustrates the mercurial, slippery quality of innovation – an important yet elusive concept.
Innovation and Philosophy
The verb ‘to innovate’ originates from mid-16th century Latin use: from in- ‘into’ + novare ‘make new’ (from novus ‘new’). Somebody invents the lyre and brings it into her world, somebody else the wheel; and to be sure this somebody could be a group, and various groups could independently have the same/similar innovations. Be it from necessity and pressing problems, be it from curiosity and playfulness, innovation in this sense is a feature of all societies.
Innovation society in a weak sense refers to the actors, institutions and ways of thinking promoting/hindering innovation in any society. This weak sense misses out the more specific and stronger sense, in which this expression is used in contemporary nation states. It refers to societies that aim at promoting innovation and therefore have innovation policies.
This development significantly affects the circumstances of innovation as citizens in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century nation states have come to know them. From the side of production and supply, innovation society in the strong sense is one with products and services that keep on changing, with entire industries coming and going, with institutionalised uncertainty. As a result, skills, habits and relations are in principle in question: tomorrow they might be obsolete. Everyone is encouraged to be a lifelong learner. This affects workers and employees, entrepreneurs and managers. Competition and innovation from others means that one’s business model could become obsolete at any time. This pushes companies to propose ever-new ideas and hopes that attract resources and, most importantly, believers.1
From the side of consumption and demand, uncertainty and restlessness can also be observed. On the one hand, consumption promises and often delivers convenience and satisfaction, status and even immortality2– all via the purchase of goods. On the other hand, goods and services continuously change. Lifestyle management in consumer society is a full-time job. It makes civic participation difficult as its consumers-citizens just do not seem to have the time3 (Blühdorn 2013).
Innovation society is not confined to things bought in the market, it includes just as much the associated meanings and practices. Nevertheless, because the prevailing use of innovation is focused on technological novelty for commercial use (Godin and Vinck 2017), there is a tendency to reification: innovation as a matter of commodities with an (expected) exchange value and associated market instruments. The innovation society is seen as an innovation system that can be externally observed with quantitative performance indicators for patents and growth.
Granted the central importance of innovation for the economy and the production of goods and services, we can start with the observation of our condition as beings with an economic need, that is the human need to ‘extract, transform, distribute, and consume the produce of nature’.4 In a first order system of reproduction, corresponding to the weak sense of innovation society introduced above, the goods are produced within a society that perceives its economy within a stationary state. Goods help reproduce the society – say the food produced in agrarian society – but all this happens in the endless return of the cycle of the seasons. To be sure, there is invention and innovation from time to time, but this is accidental or problem-driven; the prevailing mode is stationary (and above it all, the immortal gods entertain with their adventures).
By contrast, in an innovation society in the strong sense, innovation is a societal strategy and there is a second order system of reproduction. The goal is an ‘innovation-friendly environment that makes it easier for great ideas to be turned into products and services’ (to quote from the definition of the EU ‘innovation union’). The gale of creative destruction, unlike the wind that brings the rain, is intentionally called forth by investors, and it blows relentlessly from the future. There are expectations and rules that reinforce the cycle of creative destruction and thereby seek to create a second-order stability, that is one that ensures the endless further cycling of creative destruction. Capitalism is the most well-known and economically dynamic expression of such a society, and is associated with experiences that this section started off with: the institutionalized uncertainty of producers and consumers; the legitimacy of identifying innovation with monetary numbers or patent indicators; the tendency to associate the new with the good and the old with the traditional (in a pejorative way) etc. It is in the search of the novel that ‘innovation citizens’ seek to become immortal like the gods – and that they become mortally scared if the spiral of progress does not deliver the goods.
If these rules of second-order reproduction in innovation societies become problematic, a third-order innovation society emerges. The second-order rules of the innovation game become the subject of reflection. Innovation has lost its certainty, with it the future its progress. No longer is it just a matter of more innovation: this third-order society also asks if innovation is needed and if so, what kind; if it should be resisted and discontinued; how (not) to measure it; if and where it needs to be accelerated or slowed down; and above all, why it is relevant – for what ends and for what goods? The direction of innovation society becomes an issue, not least because the expansion and deepening of markets undermines its own social and ecological preconditions. The unintended consequences of innovations no longer fit together into a narrative of an invisible hand creating overall benefits and a rising standard of living. It is put into doubt by climate emergency and persistent unsustainability. As second-order innovation society seems difficult to stop, catastrophe looms as the unintended, inevitable results of the invisible hand of progress.
Many nation states of the early twenty-first century seem to be somewhere between these second and third order societies. There is the rise of the qualifiers. Responsible innovation focuses on knowledge and technology,5 free innovation on the household,6 sustainable innovation on a long-term socio-ecological perspective.7 Social innovation is the most generic of these qualifiers, sometimes used to refer to innovation from civil society as a contrast to business and markets, but often also to qualify innovation within markets or at the intersection of markets, civil society and politics as aiming beyond only self-interest towards the common good.
I will use the qualifier ‘social’ as a short term for a dissatisfaction with post-Second World War second-order innovation discourse. The qualifier points to a call for rethinking innovation and social change beyond business, markets and technology development for commercial use (but crucially including the latter in the search for a change of direction).
A Collaborative Philosophy of Innovation
This book propose a collaborative concept framework to explicate and make available for reflection a space for a variety of disciplines and actors that in their different ways contribute to the formation of innovation as a concept for a third-order innovation society. This collaborative aspect implies a need to listen to the contribution of various social sciences on innovation. This will be the major task for chapter two. The survey of innovation in the social sciences there will show the limitations of the technical innovation for commercial use focus in the mainstream discourse, and place this discourse in a larger context. These empirical and ontological issues about what innovation is and where it happens are a crucial step for a less biased investigation of innovation, justice and sustainability. Which ideas for innovations are currently invisible, blocked or poorly supported simply because they do not fit the mainstream discourse?
Chapters three to six will turn to evaluative perspectives on innovation. This follows the idea of a ‘Cubist’ approach that is open and enriched by a variety of perspectives, rather than one central perspective. Many philosophical perspectives have insights to offer, and the subsequent chapters seek to harvest those. At the same time, this presentation is not ‘a view from nowhere’ but rather a dialogue with an evaluative starting point: sufficiency. This position is not more central than others; however, I would like to suggest that it might be especially apt for a transformative contribution that is a discussion of innovation and its role for overcoming current unsustainability and injustice.
In light of persistent pro-innovation bias this is an important point that requires repetition and insistence. To borrow a drastic example from the Cubist inspiration above: one of Picasso’s most well-known paintings is Guernica. It was painted in 1937 in the aftermath of warplanes of the German Condor legion attacking the Basque town Gernica. The Germans supported their fascist ally General Franco in the fight against the Republicans. Gernica was a place of the Republican resistance movement. On 26 April 1937 the planes attacked with incendiary bombs, invented in 1918 in Germany but only used 19 years later by the Condor legion to aid in the destruction of the urban centre. The military innovation quickly spread and was reinvented during the second World War. German, British and American forces used it to cause destruction in British, German and Japanese cities. In Picasso’s painting the bombing appears as an attack on life: there is a grieving woman with a dead child, a horse in agony, a dead soldier on the ground, a woman entrapped by fire. Black and white only are used to create a jumbled impression with various perspectives in a confined space. Ethnographer and poet Michel Leiris comments: ‘On a black and white canvas that depicts ancient tragedy, Picasso also writes our letter of doom: all that we love is going to be lost’.8 The face of a woman somehow floats into the room with a flame lit lamp bearing witness to the scene, and a dying dove on the wall forms a crack in the wall that lets in some light. Leiris continues: ‘and that is why it is necessary that we gather up all that we love, like the emotion of great farewells, in something of unforgettable beauty.’
Guernica, the Second World war and genocide might seem ‘long ago’ for many citizens of affluent nations with their advanced innovation systems. However, consider ‘ecocide’: in view of an unprecedented decline of nature and species in human history, the 2019 UN-IPBES Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, calls for a ‘transformative change’.9 ‘Technological innovation’ appears in the report as part of the problem: an ‘indirect driver’ of ‘accelerated, global change of nature during the past 50 years’. But innovation also appears as a ‘key leverage point’ of ‘transformation for sustainability’: ‘ensuring environmentally friendly technological and social innovation, taking into account potential rebound effects and investment regimes’. The report with its ecological Guernica message provides ample grounds for thinking deeply about innovation, justice and sustainability.
Hermes as a god of commercial wealth is an impoverished messenger. Rather, it is important to think of the messenger as one of many goods and of plural values that must be witnessed for a richer understanding of innovation and development, however jumbled and messy.