NZZ, 21.1.26. English Version
The Jargon of Inevitability
Hardly anything promotes intellectual laziness as much as the jargon of inevitability. We encounter it everywhere: in economic analyses, business forecasts, political speeches, technological visions, and everyday conversations. It became notorious through the neoliberal primal scream “There is no alternative” – a formula suggesting that some superhuman necessity directs our fate.
Today this tone is omnipresent in the AI sector. Its prophets use the jargon to smooth the path toward their preferred goals. Concerns about sustainability and political regulation appear to them as obstacles to the unstoppable march of progress. Some — for example, the investor Marc Andreessen — are willing to accept the erosion of democratic structures by proclaiming that politics must submit to technological dynamics. This alone, they believe, grants the engineers and investors of Silicon Valley their world-historical mandate.
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The jargon of inevitability rests on a fundamental error in thinking: confusing model and reality — or as the saying goes: the map is not the territory. This error is, so to speak, part of the cognitive equipment of the human being. When we think, we follow certain rules, perhaps “compelling” ones. They suggest: if you assume A and B, then C necessarily follows. But this necessity is a feature of the model, not of reality. It is the result of simplification. On the map we can show that a straight line connects points A and B. In the landscape, however, it may well be a dead-end path.
Science recognizes necessities in the form of laws. Physical laws hold within physical mod-els, economic laws within economic ones. Their purpose is to make statements about reality — and to the extent that this succeeds, we may justifiably say the laws also hold in nature or in the economy. That’s all. But successful models easily tempt us to overdraw their explanatory account — that is, to claim more than their assumptions allow. Economic models, for instance, often shine with elegant mathematical formulas from which market forecasts can be deduced. And then reality refuses to cooperate. As in the 2008 crash. Influential economists like Paul Krugman diagnosed not only a crisis of the financial markets but a crisis of economic models. Sociologically speaking, one could say that experts, banks, governments, and rating agencies formed a kind of narrative community that cultivated the jargon of inevitability and — as Krugman put it bluntly — went astray because they “mistook beauty, clothed in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.”
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The jargon of inevitability is well suited to stifling political debate through supposed factual constraints — through the jargon of unassailability. Hannah Arendt wrote that “every factual truth excludes all debate.” This sounds apodictic, but what she meant was that “discus-sion, the exchange and conflict of opinions, is the very essence of all political life.” The statement “Fact is that …” often turns out to be an argumentative bludgeon: “Shut up, you just have an opinion.” One postures as an advocate of “the facts,” yet the “facts” are nothing more than the ossification of one’s own opinion.
Ludwig Wittgenstein spoke of the “bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” This is precisely what the jargon of inevitability accomplishes. It is the grammar of disenfranchisement; the effortless compulsion of a way of thinking that tries to make us believe political events and developments occur without human involvement. The very term “artificial intelligence” demonstrates this: we project a human concept onto machines and then interpret their algorithms as an autonomous power that will inevitably surpass and dominate us. Yet it is human beings who drive this development — and who have the greatest interest in portraying it as without alternatives.
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Critique of jargon means unmasking this bewitchment — and thereby directing our gaze not only toward the “bewitchers” but also toward other possibilities for the future that have been pushed aside by the weight of supposed necessity. It encourages us to cultivate the form of intelligence that distinguishes human beings. Robert Musil called it the “sense of possibility”: thinking that what is could also be otherwise.
There is more than one future — that is the battle cry of imagination. The jargon of inevitability drives it out of us. The most apocalyptic of all visions would therefore be the one in which we humans have lost imagination — and no longer even miss it.
