What Failure Looks Like and Why It's Worth Risking

The question is not whether we might fail. The question is whether the failure we risk is preferable to the failure we guarantee by not trying.

This chapter is the most honest in the book. The honesty is not additional to the project of the book — it is constitutive of it. A book that describes the risks of the enterprise it is proposing without naming the risks of the enterprise itself would be a book operating in bad faith. Volume III's intellectual discipline, carried through into Volume IV, requires naming what could go wrong with Providence as directly as it names what would have to go right.

There are three categories of failure, each with different implications for the people who participated in the project and for the people who did not.