Death to the Intelligent Designer
“The autonomy of those moving needs to be supported and not hindered because the particularity of challenges are different at different scales, requiring life at those scales to be allowed to act with nuance to the complexity of a changing world. Trying to manage this from on-high as an intelligent designer or manager only makes the situation worse as it hinders the adaptation that life needs to engage in to move with changing social and environmental climates and shifting resources.”
From Avi (Dr KBH)
Did you ever play the popular 90s computer game ‘Lemmings'? It involved little anthropomorphized lemming creatures endlessly born onto your computer screen. Your job as the computer player was to use the limited options available to command the Lemmings to build bridges, parachutes and use other tools and infrastructures. If you as the player designed their world correctly, then you would save the lemmings from killing themselves by walking off cliffs or marching mindlessly into boiling cauldrons. Often these designs meant that many lemmings would have to be sacrificed by the player to achieve the objective of a ‘well-designed world’. The final aim of each level of the game was to direct the lemmings towards a magical exit, which I assumed was some sort of lemming heaven reserved for those lemmings who you managed to save.
What fascinated me about this game is that the little people-like lemmings were by definition pretty mindless, but you as the all-seeing eye were in charge of saving them through plonking down bits of technology or directing them to build bits of infrastructure here and there. All the while stuck within the framework of the game's design. This game reminds me of how life is designed by managers sitting in office chairs treating people like stupid little idiots walking to their death unless you as the lemming's manager intelligently and didactically designed a way to save them. It specifically reminds me of the variations of ‘management’ that I encounter in my daily work.
First is environmental management. In environmental management, the complexity of the environment and nonhuman social life is often fenced or controlled by managerial designs. These designs characterise life as populations of homogenous lemming-like units, while the lackeys of management record nonhumans as cold numbers in bureaucratic paper trails. It is these ‘conscientious’ human managers and their lackeys working for the ‘greater good’ that need to justify their existence by taking the moral high ground in the form of intelligently designing and managing naive nonhuman’s lives and the innocent virginal environment. This approach manifests as fortress-like fences around ‘wild places' and the widespread culling of populations that move out of ‘where they belong’ or ‘overpopulate'. This is in spite of the fact that forests and beasties move and migrate, whilst the most iconic of wildernesses are the offspring of human-nonhuman relationships.
Second is the management of people. Managers come up with supposed intelligent designs which in fact are abstract interventions they enforce ‘for the greater good’ and according to the ‘natural order of things’ onto the complex diversity of human cultures and to which people must then conform. People and ways of living that do not fit these highly simplistic models are marginalized or suffer. Just think about the last time some executive running the organisation, country or company you work in decided to ‘restructure’ it for the ‘greater good’ — usually involving them rearranging some options on a computer screen spreadsheet to make us lemmings act in a supposedly more efficient way.
Beyond this experience of being treated like a lemming under management, this way of seeing life goes much deeper, right to the root of how ‘we moderns’ understand what it means to be human. It is reflected in the myths of other people, past and present, being simple bands of hunter-gatherers reproducing and not doing much else. It requires the designers of modernity to save these noble or brutish savages — the lemmings — and bring them into line with the design of the game. Another version of it is thinking of children and other people as simple little lemmings that need schooling, where schooling is a bastardisation of the idea of education that lays out the ideological foundation of our lemming psyche and habituates us to its methods.
Thirdly, tying all these strands together, the dominant eugenic ideology of today would have us believe that people, plants and animals should not freely negotiate their movements. Instead, modern design and the all-seeing eyes of managerial enforcers need to control where people move and what they do. If those that choose to migrate illegally do so and fall into the sea, well that's their fault and in some sense a destined sacrifice to maintain population control and the greater good.
The outcome of all this is not a success. These plans fail in practice because they are not based on correspondence with the diversity of reality, and violence is then escalated in order to enforce them. This dynamic is present in countless examples, whether the war on drugs, the war on invasive species, the war on the microbiome, or austerity. These are plans made by someone sitting in their armchair looking at their computer screen essentially in the same way one looks at the game of lemmings (albeit with the occasional performative consultation). Feedback runs amok creating more profound crises and disasters. Furthermore, life — fauna, flora, fungi, fruits, forests, fields and fellow humans — is hindered in its ability to move and adapt of its volition. But social and environmental conditions change, life needs to flow with these changes in order to survive and thrive. That is the history of how life thrives.
The autonomy of those moving needs to be supported and not hindered because the particularity of challenges are different at different scales, requiring life at those scales to be allowed to act with nuance to the complexity of a changing world. Trying to manage this from on-high as an intelligent designer or manager only makes the situation worse as it hinders the adaptation that life needs to engage in to move with changing social and environmental climates and shifting resources.
A common retort to this understanding of mobility as a key driver of life is an accusation of opening the ‘flood-gates’. As someone who works in the water industry, my response is: This is not about opening the ‘flood-gates’ to convert everything into fluid capital nor building more defensive dams. Instead, trust the lemmings and support people to adapt themselves.
Managing people like they are lemmings on a computer screen is dangerous. Even when it comes to real lemmings, they do not conform to these armchair ideas of dumb units. Over the last century, it has been commonplace to believe that lemmings were stupid creatures that walked off cliffs into the icy sea when their populations exploded in too high numbers. An early nature documentary even depicted them doing so. In reality, the people who told these stories about lemmings had not bothered to observe that they hibernate in a special layer under the icy snow over winter and then emerge en masse in spring. It only appeared to the naive observer that there was a sudden population explosion. So, when those who made the documentary couldn't capture a shot of lemmings walking off cliffs to their death, they literally herded them off a cliff.
Turning to some people in key positions of managerial power, my preliminary observations of the US president and UK prime minister lead me to believe that they have continued with this command and control approach to designing our lemming lives. But, they have added an innovation that taps into people’s genuine experience of how plans sent down from on-high mess with our lives. These politicians reflect a trend of appealing to a performative variety of anti-establishmentarianism to gain those few extra electoral percentage points. They do this by shouting about how the government and ‘elites' have messed up people’s lives, tapping into a genuine experience, but still attempting to impose foolish plans albeit less transparently. They lend people the idea of resistance to the intelligent designer or manager messing up their lives, but in fact, are just conducting an enormous performative con.
And because ‘intelligent designer' ways of thinking have been nurtured through schooling and the securitization of life, intelligent design by management takes away our liberties, makes us fear each other, invests in reactive defences and makes us dependent on executives playing God, whilst debate remains within the blindly narrow parameters of their game.
The human populace do have the capacity to be collectively smart, but still act ridiculous because they are forced or schooled into acting like lemmings in order to fit in with the designers' ideas — often letting it become profoundly habituated into their being. We, the lemmings, are told that every lemming can be for themselves, while managers will ensure ‘the economy' delivers the necessary commodity options to survive the game of lemmings, and we will ultimately be saved through conforming to the God-like intelligent designer’s plans.
Atheists’ poo-poo the idea of a God in the form of an intelligent designer, whilst the famous Nietzschean phrase ‘God is dead’ is often used in a similar anti-theistic manner. However, in both cases there is a straight-forward ignorance of the diversity and lateral possibilities of godliness, where godliness has been reduced to an anthropomorphic ‘dude in the sky' playing with us lemmings. My proposition is that this God is not in fact dead, but we should attempt to kill this God-like intelligent designer in the guise it actively manifests in our life; as the managerial planning of life for the greater good. Then we can start realizing an autonomous and caring future.
Avi (Dr KBH)
I am trained in Social Anthropology and Social Science Research Methods. I work with practitioners and academics from multiple fields. If you want to step into the messy spaghetti of reality and enjoy the feast, I invite you to dine with me.
I focus on how human-environmental and human-human relations shape each other over time. I have conducted interdisciplinary research on fisheries, historical ecology, hunting, water sector, commons, evolutionary theory, institutional development and environmental management.