In his short 2016 book What is Real?, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben discussed the life and work of the Italian physicist Ettore Majorana, who disappeared mysteriously in March 1938. A brilliant 31-year-old researcher, and chair of theoretical physics at Naples University, Majorana boarded a ship to Palermo on the night of March 25, 1938, and was never seen again. Various theories on his disappearance emerged: suicide, seclusion in a monastery, or flight to Argentina.
However, Agamben develops a different theory based on Majorana’s last published paper. According to Agamben, this work indicates that Majorana had seen that one consequence of quantum theory would be a society governed by statistics: as he summarised it in his conclusion to What is Real?, “as soon as we assume that the real state of a system is in itself unknowable, statistical models become essential and cannot but replace reality”. In other words, according to Agamben, Majorana glimpsed how a society based on statistical models would supersede the idea developed by Isaac Newton, of a determinate reality.
Ettore Majorana had seen that one consequence of quantum theory would be a society governed by statistics.
The core dilemma lies in the fact that these interventions in social statistics are not neutral. Instead, they determine reality. Just as in quantum theory it is the intervention of the observer which determines the state of reality, so in social statistics, as Agamben’s Majorana grasped, it was the intervention of government which would determine the models and meanings of social statistics: as Agamben puts it, “the statistics of social sciences only intervene in [reality] in order to govern it”.
Some would take Agamben’s parsing of Majorana’s work as a prefigurement of his “turn to the right” during the Covid-19 pandemic. However, while Agamben comes out of the anarchist school of leftist politics in favouring small-scale social models, in this work he is not criticizing government interventions per se, but rather the statistical models on which they are based. This forms part of his broader approach to understanding post-liberal governance as based on imposing an ideology of “bare life”, mere survival, and not on qualities which empower humanity in the subjects of governance. In fact, Agamben’s discussion of Majorana reveals a novel argument that helps put the Covid-19 scientific crisis in a different light: this is that approaches to modern government, grounded in statistical modelling and data management, emerge not from the objectivity of the data but from the significance of quantum theory in shaping our society. What does that mean?
Agamben views post-liberal governance as based on imposing an ideology of “bare life”, mere survival, and not on qualities which empower humanity in the subjects of governance.
According to quantum theory, sub-atomic states emerge through the observations of human researchers. At the quantum level, natural laws never completely determine events in space and time, which depend on chance and probability. But when nothing can be determined except through participant-observation, human observers hold a clear role in the shaping of reality. In his book, Agamben discusses how this inevitably leads to a situation in which the modelling of probabilities becomes a necessary condition for the practice of science. With objective states unknowable, modelling calculations work through replacing reality “with the realm of probability”.
In sum, science came to model probabilities of the effect of interventions in reality. Yet the influence of this framework swiftly moved beyond the realm of physics. In the human sciences, “participant observation” over time became the norm of qualitative anthropological and sociological research. Quantum theory developed a strong influence in shaping social science’s theories as well as its statistical models.
When it comes to government, the role of probabilistic models is even clearer. These models are superimposed on reality, and, as Agamben puts it, “those who act with this probability in mind abide by this superimposition … [which] can nonetheless influence to some extent their decisions in respect to reality”. The role of probabilistic models has thus been the guiding feature shaping Western government policies and structures since the Second World War. The models – and their “quanta” – determine what is seen as good policy, on the basis of interpreting human behaviour and human lives through probabilistic functions.
Yet there’s an opposition between how governments and physicists conceive of models. While quantum physicists accept the creative role which measurement has in shaping perceptions of the real, governments don’t. Statistics rise in importance: we live in a data-driven society, and data effectively empowers political action, claimed to be based on “objective fact”. The enormous complexity of human realities becomes computed through models which are held to provide normative predictions of how those potentialities may play out, while the role of the models in determining the nature of these predictions is ignored.
In the Covid-19 pandemic, the role of quantum theory in social policy crystallised when potentialities directed by the Imperial College model of Professor Neil Ferguson (who trained as a theoretical physicist) were taken as actualities. This can explain many aspects of pandemic policy, and of its acceptance by populations. Just as governments were used to intervening in policy through the framework of probabilistic models such as Ferguson’s, citizens were used to government-through-statistics.
The enormous complexity of human realities becomes computed through models, while the role of the models in determining the nature of these predictions is ignored.
And here lies the basis of the crisis now facing modern science and government, for these models, as we now know, determined catastrophic governmental policy. The enormities imposed by the potentiality of the model during the pandemic have the capacity to challenge the authority of the science of probabilistic models, and therefore the role of statistics in empowering and shaping political interventions. In other words, this process has cracked the unspoken policy norm that insights from quantum mechanics mirror and should inform social relations – even if these insights are always approximate in scientific theory, and yet claimed as objective in government practice.
Does this create a crisis, or merely a need for a re-boot? Some philosophers of science might suggest that science always proceeds through a form of resolution of a crisis in its models. Alternatively, there is the argument that these models were just unbalanced and need adjustment or repair, as Agamben suggests a coin might be imbalanced if it constantly throws up heads more than tails.
As Thomas Kuhn tells us in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, when a major anomaly emerges in a scientific theory, a crisis ensues. While there are always elements of crisis in experiment and in theories, these can be patched over at times of general equilibrium. But we are well past such a moment now. Statistics have become a “problem” rather than a solution for governments and the model-driven paradigm – as statistics on excess deaths, global poverty, and backlogs to medical treatment in response to the pandemic management now have to be obscured.
Where then is this crisis located? Advocates of the status quo see it in the rise of misinformation that threatens adherence to “best scientific practice”; critics hold that the crisis lies in the corporate power backing epidemiological modelling and the fact that it has become socially destructive. Yet even for critics of the establishment, the crisis is usually defined in purely instrumental terms: it is caused by corruption of pharmaceutical corporations, or by the political interests of major journals and their financial backers. Instead, these are the symptoms of this newfound crisis in science itself, the cause of which is the anomaly which the failure of Covid and vaccination models have created for the general theories of science which have been the sidekicks of modern capitalism.
