Blaise Pascal, mathematician and philosopher, once said:

All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

This seems to have a particular relevance at the moment, when many of us are being asked to do precisely that. I also agree that this is definitely a problem we have. However I prefer to think of it as just one consequence of our inability to think about change in any rational way. We fear change, which is why we yearn so much to go back to “normal” at the moment, even if normal life was pretty unsatisfactory for many of us before the pandemic struck. We fight against change if we think what we have is threatened from outside the room we might otherwise sit quietly in, whether that is the loss of our income or that of our influence in the world or our “sovereignty”.

The only way in which we can contemplate change is in the context of some utopian ideal of improved productivity making one aspect of our lives much better while not requiring us to change any other part of them. Hence so much resistance to any idea of redistributing what we already have in favour of “Pareto improvements” to the economy, ie those which benefit some people without making anyone else worse off, and the obsession amongst economists with the “productivity puzzle” in the UK in particular:

So we look for ways to achieve this miraculous productivity improvement while leaving everything else essentially unchanged and the magic word which promises this more than anything else is innovation. Innovation will enable us to do more with less (or, more usually, make us do a lot more much cheaper, therefore encouraging us to use even more in the process). Innovation will have spin offs in lots of other areas we have not even imagined yet, but they will all be good ones! Innovation will solve the productivity puzzle.

In The Innovation Delusion, Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell challenge this. As we have become more and more desperate for all change to look like innovation, we have made actual innovation harder to achieve, while saddling ourselves with higher and higher maintenance costs of new “innovative” infrastructure which is increasingly unsustainable to finance, rather than maintaining what we already have better.

I therefore prefer the quote that they use, from Kurt Vonnegut:

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

Innovation-speak, as they call it, is not innovation at all, but presenting ideas as innovative when they are not. As they say:

It plays on our worry that we will be left behind: our nation will not be able to compete in the global economy; our businesses will be disrupted; our children will fail to find good jobs because they don’t know how to code…Innovation-speak is a dialect of perpetual worry.

No wonder we are unable to sit quietly in a room alone.

And in the coming years when we will need to make substantial changes that work well enough for all of us to be able to continue living on this planet together, this approach will not work. We need for our thinking not to be magical, but grounded in realism. We need to make new things that we can afford to maintain sustainably. Innovation-speak will not get us there.