Unknown Knowns and the Pandemic as a Social Process

We should read Habermas’s claim that we have never had so much knowledge about not-knowing through Rumsfeld’s categories: The pandemic shook what we (thought we) knew that we knew; it made us aware of what we didn’t know that we didn’t know; and, in the way we confronted the pandemic, we relied on what we didn’t know that we know (all our presumptions and prejudices that determine our actions although we are not aware of them). We are not dealing here with the simple passage from not-knowing to knowing, but with the much more subtle passage from not-knowing to knowing what we don’t know—our positive knowing remains the same in this passage, but we gain a free space for action.

It is in regard to what we don’t know that we know—our presumptions and prejudices—that the approach of China (as well as Taiwan and Vietnam) to the pandemic was so much better than Europe and the U.S. I am getting tired of the eternally repeated claim, “Yes, the Chinese contained the virus, but at what price?” While only a whistleblower can tell us the whole story of what really went on there, the fact is that when the virus broke out in Wuhan, the authorities imposed a lockdown and halted the majority of production across the country, clearly prioritizing human lives over the economy. This happened with some delay, true, but they took the crisis extremely seriously. Now they are reaping the rewards, including economically. And let’s be clear, this was only possible because the Communist Party is still able to control and regulate the economy—there is social control over market mechanisms, albeit a “totalitarian” control.

The pandemic is not just a viral process, it is a process that takes place within certain economic, social, and ideological coordinates that are open to change. According to the theory of complex systems, such systems have two opposite features: robust stable character and extreme vulnerability. These systems can accommodate great disturbances, integrating themselves and finding new balance and stability, up to a certain threshold (a “tipping point”), above which a small disturbance can cause a total catastrophe and lead to the establishment of a totally different order. For many centuries, humanity did not have to worry about its impact on the environment—nature was able to adapt itself to deforestation, to the use of coal and oil, etc. However, it seems that today we are approaching a tipping point—one cannot really be sure, since such points can only be clearly perceived once it is already too late. So we encounter a dilemma regarding the urgency to do something about today’s threat of different ecological catastrophes. Either we take the threat seriously and decide to do something which, if the catastrophe does not occur, will appear ridiculous, or we do nothing, and lose everything in the case of the catastrophe. The worst choice would be taking limited measures—in this case, we will fail no matter what occurs. That is to say, the problem is that there is no middle ground in regard to the ecological catastrophe: either it will occur or it will not occur. In such a situation, talk about anticipation, precaution, and risk control tends to become meaningless since we are dealing with “unknown unknowns.” We not only do not know where the tipping point is, we don’t even know exactly what we do not know. The most unsettling aspect of the ecological crisis concerns the so-called “knowledge in the real,” which can run amok. When winter is too warm, plants and animals misread the hot weather as a signal that spring has already begun and start to behave accordingly, thus not only rendering themselves vulnerable to late onslaughts of cold, but also disturbing the entire rhythm of natural reproduction. This is how one should imagine a possible catastrophe: a small-level interruption with devastating global consequences. So, to conclude, we should respectfully follow the old Latin motto Mortuis nihil nisi bonum (“Of the dead, [say] nothing but good”), and we should ignore for a brief moment all the catastrophic decisions of Rumsfeld and remember him as an amateur philosopher who introduced some distinctions useful to analyze our predicament.