Michael Lissack water for the average family for a year), while many Western farmers pay as little as ten dollars per acre foot-far less than the cost of storing and deliv- ering their water. About 7 per cent of California's water supply-more than the entire Los Angeles area consumes-is used to grow rice in the desert, a practice made profitable only by taxpayer subsidies. When information is at a premium, numbers count more than words. Government programs work the same way. In public policy debates and deliberations, words like decency, right and wrong, peace fairness trust and hope have lost their force. Numbers which can offer so much illumination and guidance if used professionally and ethically have become the tools of advocacy. Even if their cause is worthy, people who massage data undermine the power and the purity of statistics that may be critical to future decisions. There are numbers we will never know and we should admit it. It is essential to understand a problem before making policy about it. But understanding is not the same as counting. Reliance on the very great regularity and predictability of human behav- ior in modern technologically advanced societies is based on a trust in often unseen experts who understand and operate the abstract systems on which the routines of everyday life are so heavily dependent. The dependence of modern men and women on time-space systems staffed by experts and spe- cialists is a thoroughly concrete datum of everyday life. Dependence on heat and light supplied by electricity, on plumbing linked to water supply systems, on automobiles and the unobstructed roadways they require, on telephonic communications, on regular garbage collection and disposal, to mention only the most obvious examples long antedating the products of recent electronic technology, binds people to myriad oth- ers in far-flung systemic networks. System integration sustains rather than subverts social order by inducing a fear of violent conflict and discouraging support for violent adversaries of the status quo. Trust in personal relations contrasts with the characteristically modern trust in the impersonal faceless commitments of experts who may rarely if ever be encountered in the flesh. With the development of abstract systems, trust in impersonal prin- ciples, as well as in anonymous others, becomes indispensable to social
114
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online