Peter Emmerson

2.2 The growth in influence of uncertainty: interdependencies between business-oriented figurations including scientists and their partners the pure mathematicians.

These processes of change were interdependent with the emergence of a more liberal, democratic perspective from governing figurations, which found it much more difficult to suppress people who held and gave formal expression to views different from those in authority. This relaxation of authoritarianism was also accompanied by the arrival of the ‘Enlightenment’ writers who helped undermine the influence of tradition, by stressing the significance of a new and improved set of ideals correlated with the attempt to come to terms with profane experience – the laws of nature. These new figurations of truth-finders, who provided the ideological platform for the insurgent business-oriented groups, were influenced by mathematicians like Newton and more secular philosophers such as Bacon, Descartes and Locke. Turgot, Adam Smith and David Hume, furthered this type of approach speaking in terms of concepts such as ‘market’ and ‘reason’ in direct opposition to government by ecclesiastical or royal whim. It was not that the new liberal, realistic perspective to running things rejected the use of idealism as a means of controlling potential resistance, it was more that the enlightened model of idealism allowed greater room for diversity and personal autonomy; something quite unexpected and difficult to control. According to Smith there was less need for governing figurations to employ direct methods of constraint because this would occur naturally, guided by the universal rules of the market. These new truths that would assist the business-oriented figurations achieve their aims, were derived from a different amalgam of elements: less mysticism, more metaphysics (verbal and numerical logic) and increasing amounts of natural philosophy (science); a mix that produced social sciences such as economics. It is I believe reasonable to suggest that an unplanned by-product of the enlightenment belief in the efficacy of the laws of nature was the further exploration of uncertainty. The greater tolerance and more democratic style of the new elite of business figurations, was based in the fervent belief that control would be provided by the forces of nature if they were allowed to function: the application of the new market economics was an important example. This new metaphysics is another form of absolute truth, another form of ideal; this time more secular or natural, scaffolded on the rock of mathematics. The latter is not the direct word of God and does not have the same status as the Ten Commandments, but it has something approaching that, the authority of absolute truth expressive of the divine presence. Such a truth, albeit man-made, was extremely valuable to business-oriented figurations who needed clear justification for their ambitions and the means of control once their aims were achieved.

By the 19^th century, natural philosophers, now called scientists, were well established as partners of the governing figurations in Britain. Their status was interdependent with the success of the models developed by the likes of Newton that produced a less religious view of the universe using upgraded tools of idealism such as the new mathematics. Earlier however, in the 17^th century natural philosophy was a supplement rather than a rival to the old verities of theometaphysics; just an additional method of finding the absolute truth that facilitated the opening up of the new frontier with sensory experience. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that the growing acceptance of natural philosophical ideas reinforced previous changes that occurred during the reign of Henry VIII in lowering even further the volume of the voices of those espousing religious truths to the ears of the governing figurations. Even though Newton was a mystic and a believer in the absolute truth of the laws that God put in place to run the universe, the scientific style of thinking which he and others developed, with its requirement for the factual validation of models, made the discussion of uncertainty more likely: it is not a great cognitive leap to disconnect God from the laws of nature and mathematics, as Darwin and Einstein later showed. Where the certainty of God comes into question so can the certainty of everything, even mathematics and logic.

The new mathematics and the related trust in reason were more than adequate replacements for the decline in influence of religious truth-finders. It is as if people need a bank of truth on which they can rest easy: the currency (religious, philosophical or mathematical) deposited changes with movements in the balance of social influence between competing figurations, but the need for some form of absolute truth of whichever currency has been consistent. As business-oriented figurations flourished, so the truth vaults were emptied of religious currency and replenished with the more secular funds reliant on mathematics and applied reason. The problem for the fund managers replenishing the vaults with the more secular knowledge resources required by business-oriented figuration, is that the new truth-finding process, being less reliant on the absolute dogmatism of religion, is less valuable than the old stock because it is more unstable, being reality-based rather than mind-based. As a result it always falls short of the gold standard required to define absolute truth; science, even backed by the reliable shadow of pure mathematics, is defined by uncertainty. The new more secular knowledge compound contains an element of instability that the ancients such as Plato warned about. By introducing base metal such as human sensory experience into the knowledge coinage, albeit stabilised with a good quantity of gold in the form of the new metaphysics, the currency is always relatively unstable. In other words there is no possibility of absolute control.