Existential justifications for innovation/rupture have historically produced atrocity

(Jon P., WorkingLifeAndInnovation@Agder, Creative Continuation: An Alternative Perspective on Innovation and Society In Debating Innovation: Perspectives and Paradoxes of an Idealized Concept ed. Rehn and Ortenblad)

In our Western tradition we tend to cherish deep changes, those that make us take big steps forward. In that sense the fascination for radical innovations resonates with a long history of linear thinking and attempts at squaring of circles, as if the early post-WWII ideologies of technological push, trickle down, and flattening of cultural spaces (Porter 2000) have zombie-like returned to become the most valid of intellectual and political currencies available for buying us into the future (Sennett 1992, 2006). Even to thinkers who are critical toward mainstream theories of innovation and economic growth, the belief in ruptures and leaps pre vails. Yet another fad in this vein is the (re-)birth of missions as a guiding principle for the need to take these big steps, not only to follow up put ting a man on the moon by sending another one to Mars, but, more importantly, to care for our common future (Mazzucato 2021). Further specification of this need is often made by referring to the 17 goals for sustainable development as listed by the United Nations (United Nations 2015), to which the concerned inhabitant of this planet and especially the intellectual segment of its populations is supposed to repeat: Yes, we can! But one thing is to acknowledge that radical changes and innovations often fail, and especially so when they are set to solve what is commonly referred to as “wicked problems” (Crowley and Head 2017), problems that are so multiple in origin and consequences that they cannot be addressed by recipe-like solutions, another thing is to face that attempts at big leaps forward often have the most catastrophic consequences for societies exposed to them. We do not have to repeat the historical debates on colonialism, neo-colonialism, or the famous Chinese big leap forward to make the point. Recent cases of Western missions designed to remake Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan to brighter futures suffice to prove our continuous and paradigmatic fascination with the concept of radical change and the subsequent blindness to the downsides of its missionary agency.