Human Dispositions and Social Institutions

Human Dispositions and Social Institutions Akeel Bilgrami (bio) human beings have two remarkable traits, the second of which we had little reason to suspect that we possessed until the rise of new technologies such as the internet. The first is the capacity to anticipate events and tendencies, map their future in the short-, mid-, and long terms, and act accordingly. We can, of course, go wrong, and so there is always an element of risk in making decisions on the basis of the exercise of such anticipatory gifts that we possess. Nevertheless, to a considerable extent, such exercises are a great potential asset. The second is a trait that, as I said, I did not know we possessed until a few decades ago. I'm not sure what the best word for it is. Perhaps it should be "cognitive generosity." I stress cognitive deliberately to contrast with "material." Someone who has never given a penny to Oxfam, say, or indeed even to a panhandler, will put every little thing he knows on the web for the world to read and share in the knowledge. He has found an effective way to remove ink stains from clothes; he will post it on some website. He has made a delicious biryani; he will post the recipe. The humblest of knowledges, and he wants to share them with the world. If this really is a trait, it must be the product of evolution, but it took the technology of recent years to trigger it in us. Now, if we combine these two traits—the remarkable capacity for decisions and actions on the basis of anticipatory knowledges and the disposition to be generous and share the knowledges we have—we should have been able to preempt or at the very least to very quickly contain the pandemic with which we are now faced. The [End Page 235] striking genomic similarity of the coronavirus with SARS is now well known. Many who had studied SARS anticipated the inevitability of more contagious pandemics in the offing and sounded the alarm for the whole world to know and to act upon the knowledge. Yet no one did. Why? The answer is quite obvious. There is no quick profit in public health issues of this preventive kind. If onetenth of the anticipatory gifts we have that seem to be exploited for immediate private gain on the part of corporations and investment bankers were put to use in the preventive domain of public health, not only would the current crisis have been swiftly contained, it might even have been preempted by suitable medical safeguards. It would be glib to conclude from this that the two remarkable dispositions we possess are no match for the human disposition to greed. The eventual resting point of analysis cannot be merely to record the contest between conflicting human dispositions: it must be to explore the extent to which those conflicting dispositions can be enhanced or undermined by institutions. Thus, for instance, no less a site than the White House had institutionalized our dispositions to act on our anticipatory knowledges by setting up an initiative called PREDICT, intended as an early warning system for pandemics, with a view partly to aiding foreign countries that are preconditioned to be most vulnerable. Donald Trump shut it down just a few months before the coronavirus hit the news—yet another symptom of how much we have allowed our political economy of some four decades to institutionalize and channel almost all our dispositions, including the capacity to act intelligently on anticipatory knowledge, for private rather than public gain. So, human dispositions can be directed in all sorts of ways by the economic and political institutions we construct and entrench. But, equally, if it is we who construct and entrench these institutions, it is we who can dismantle or "remantle" them. Perhaps the one clear lesson of the current pandemic—and our utter failure to act on the anticipatory knowledges that had been posted far and wide by knowledgeable people—is that no remantling short of the public [End Page 236] ownership of healthcare and pharmaceuticals will suffice. Well, "suffice" is the wrong word here. Clearly it is not

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