Modern Fire

Setting the School of Life's "How to Survive the Modern World" on fire

Some years ago I went looking for a website related to The News, a philosophy-inspired book about (you guessed it) the news, by Alain de Botton. The book does a nice job of capturing the absurdity of the news, which I confess I still read (the news, not The News). Anyway, I got to the site and, bless them, there was a little sign up saying something along the lines of ‘It’s the weekend, nothing that important has happened, you don’t need to be looking at this stuff right now, off you go’. That’s right, the website was closed, and I was left to look at something else on my own devices.

Fast forward a decade and, annoying my kids by lingering too long at the shelves of our local library, I stumbled upon 2021’s How to Survive the Modern World. I’m a sucker for sideways self-help books and this one was written by none other than The School of Life, the brainchild of de Botton and some writer and educator pals.

How to Survive the Modern World, by The School of Life. Cover photo by Richard Misrach (Source: https://www.theschooloflife.com/shop)

Here’s how they begin:

Since the middle of the eighteenth century, beginning in Northern Europe and then spreading to every corner of the world, people have become aware of living in an age radically different from any other. With a mixture of awe and respect, trepidation and nostalgia, they have called this ‘the modern age’ or, more succinctly, ‘modernity’. We are now all inhabitants of modernity; every last hamlet and remote island has been touched by the outlook and ideology of a new era.

The book goes on to list some of the changes that becoming modern has involved:

• Secularisation. Our lives are no longer in the hands of gods or spirits.

• Progress. Time is an arrow pointing towards a perfectible future.

• Science. Bend, puny reality and bend, puny mortality, before our science-fuelled will!

• Individualism. Our identities are fashioned by us, not by families or tradition.

• Love. A soulmate is now mission possible.

• Work. A souljob is now mission possible. Hmm, that sounds vaguely offensive. How ‘bout: Work that we can and should love is now mission possible.

• Cities. Where most of us now live.

• Nature. Freed from our previous awe at natural phenomena, we are now in thrall to sublime technology. Three cheers for blogs 🥳

• Speed. Things are very fast and gettingveryfaster.

The authors also call to our attention some catastrophic aspects of modernity (just in case the list above didn’t strike you as catastrophic enough):

• Failure. Success is now attainable for all, so when we fail it’s kinda all our fault.

• Neurasthenia. Calmness, be gone! A flood of knowledge but a drought of understanding.

• Nostalgia. We long to live elsewhen.

• Envy. Look at all these dratted others self-actualising.

• Loneliness. We are connected but bereft.

• Huts. Somewhere to retreat to, to take distance from and make sense of the chaos. [Good on them for including this non sequitur on the list, I say]

• Sentimentality. No room for that, or melancholoy, unproductivity, surliness or confusion. Get on board the happiness train or else, punk.

What could any of this possibly have to do with future fire? I’m glad you asked. [Clears throat]

• Secularisation. How would wildfire be different if we were a less secular society? Could religion and spirituality bring us closer to fire? Would a dialogue with a supreme being help? It is impossible to avoid the stark contrast of today’s secular fire management with Indigenous cultural burning and its deep spiritual significance as a part of maintaining biocultural landscapes and Caring for Country. Yet fire is still deep within those outside this tradition. We still make campfires, we still light candles, we still bathe our food in flames. Could these vestigial traces of fire’s ancient hold on us be the key to reforming our relationship with it? Are they something we can leverage, to allow meaning and profundity back in?

• Progress. Hoo boy, I really feel this one. This is the implicit philosophy of just about all the fire science and management I’ve ever seen, mine included. We can do better, we will do better. No matter how difficult, no matter how unknown, no matter how high the piles of failure and defeat in our wake - we claw forward, T-800 style, towards paradise. Might the progress frame be a problem when it comes to living with fire? Could some level of acceptance of stasis, cyclicity or adirectionality help? And would that be the same thing as being comfortable with a particular level of ambient fire risk? I don’t know. And I must say, I’m partial to the progress story. I like the idea of things getting better, I like the idea that I can play a small role in it. Just don’t ask me at the end of my career whether all those hours of blood, sweat and RSI made a lick of difference.

• Science. My day job. ‘Nuff said. Actually I’ll contradict myself, as I am wont to do, and say that we are doing a pretty good job these days of not asking science to carry the weight of the world, at least when it comes to fire. There is widespread recognition that not all knowledge or wisdom comes from a journal article or textbook. There is deep knowledge in Indigenous culture, in the lived experience of communities, in the labour of those who work closely with fire. Yes, science is special, but it’s not a solution machine. Let’s call it part of a process of good governance (and a fantastic factory of tales far stranger than fiction).

• Individualism. Yes there are undoubtedly cultural pressures in academia, but I say the individualistic spark is pretty strong here. We are hired, promoted and fired as individuals. Even our team grants are made up of the imposing track records of individual investigators. The individualistic streak can also be seen in scientists’ striving for freedom from past dogma (not that we achieve it; scientists love talking about who has influenced them). In contrast, I sense the weight of powerful - if relatively young - collective traditions in fire management. How much do all these spoken and unspoken rules pave the way for better relationships with fire, and how much do they impede it?

• Love. It strikes me that none of the work I’ve done, the journal articles I’ve written, why even this very blog, would be possible without the sustenance I derive from the love of my life, my wife. Would a more old-fashioned union change that? If modernity didn’t beckon the two of us to strive for perfectible love, would I have more in reserve for fire? Or is the hunt for romantic alchemy an indispensable counterpart of other (e.g. scholastic) kinds of hunting?

• Cities. Urbanisation has undoubtedly played a huge role in transforming our relationship with fire. Nowadays so many of us are so far removed from dense tracts of vegetation (sadly, our homes and cities remain highly flammable despite this, but structural fires are a problem beyond the remit of Future Fire). At the same time, the interface between our cities and wildfire-prone land continues to grow, fold and mutate like an endoplasmic reticulum, providing ample surface area for the exchange of flames, convective and radiant heat between burning plants and us. The wildland urban interface is also hopelessly permeable to smoke and the complex downstream impacts of wildfire disasters on infrastructure, tourism and the like. Much of the story of future fire will be told in cities.

• Work. I think I’ve already covered this here and here and here. Seriously, someone please put me out of my misery and give me a) a permanent job b) a lifetime supply of funding or c) a way to sever the dream of either. I am grudgingly grateful for the sculptable aspects of academic research jobs - add a little of this, take out a little of that, sprinkle this, shape that. Hey presto, it’s a dream job! Right now I’m too invested in my Patrick Swayze impression to question modernity’s effect on my work (that was a Ghost reference).

• Nature. We are still deep in the psychosis that a neat line separates us from the air we breathe, the water we drink, the soil we grow our food in and the dense and sprawling webs of ecology, energy and information which sustain us. How can this not impact our relationship with fire? Nevertheless, love of nature resides deep in our hearts. Even in the cold heart of this city dwelling fire researcher and part-time writer. That bodes well, I think.

• Speed. My odes to the stupid speed of scientific publishing are legion. Data and papers amass with frightening alacrity. But they don’t seem to translate into correspondingly fast changes in management, policy, regulation or legislation. Can we reconcile the fast with the slow? Maybe we can learn from fire, a multi-timescale phenomenon par excellence. It could all be a moot point though, if all this modern acceleration means fire gets left in the dust by catastrophic climate change, Cybernet or World War III.

• Failure. Yes I’m trapped by my impossible quest for renewal of my lease on the second floor of the Ivory Tower success. But at least I know it! I can even make light-hearted blog posts about it. Perhaps the shadow of failure looms too large over our judgements about fire. Do we expect too much of fire managers, of researchers, of ourselves? Could we give a government a break over some failure? Hell no!

• Neurasthenia. Hey, I’ve covered this one too! I guess this is a pretty modern blog.

• Nostalgia. I detect a fair bit of pining for an age when our relationship with fire was different. I’m just not sure anyone agrees on what age that is.

• Envy. Could this be the secret weapon for improved fire governance? Using panicked fear of falling behind other more advanced fire-prone jurisdictions, to stimulate improved techniques, policies and outcomes? I realise this argument has been tried without success for education, healthcare, research and so on. But it’s worth a shot, right? I wouldn’t mind if the next big project I do is a comparison of fire management actions and policies and governance and laws across all the fire-prone lands of the world. We could compare notes, commiserate, inspire each other, remind ourselves of what’s possible, sing kumbaya. And then update it every five years in an ever more bloated bureaucratic process.

• Loneliness. This one makes me think of the centrality of community - of supported, connected communities - in responding to and resisting catastrophic fire and other hazards. If we placed pre-modern yoomans in today’s flammable towns, would the outcomes be any different? If we were all less lonely, would we care more about working together? Would we be more able to focus on the things that matter? Maybe not. We might just be Jack and Rose, still going down on the Titanic, but at least able to muster a smile while it’s happening.

• Huts. Huts have no connection to fire. Sorry. But going to the School of Life’s point about the need for retreat and reflection: would fire management outcomes be better if decision makers retreated to a log cabin somewhere, so they could deeply ponder our fiery predicament? I’m not convinced. And not just because huts are flammable. But if they were going to a cave, where a sage happened to live? Who knows what wonderful things might eventuate from that? To be safe, I should put a line item about huts into the budget of my next grant application.

• Sentimentality. I thought my Treatment Options post covered the neurasthenia point above, but it does a pretty good job of conveying the dangers of seeking happiness in academia, now that I think of it. I totally give melancholy, unproductivity, surliness and confusion a fair hearing there.

Well, how’d I do? Are you satisfied we can lay all our fire-related problems at the doorstep of modernity? Stay tuned for my next post, where I ask who would make the better firefighter, Derrida or Foucault.