Shock To The System

Whereby we set the Serenity Prayer on fire

What bigger shock to the system could there be than fire?

Okay, the Big Bang, you got me, but let’s stay here on Terra Madre for a minute.

Fire is frequently framed as a disturbance, because things were moving along quite nicely, thank you very much, until everything CAUGHT FIRE AND BURNED TO THE GROUND!!! I get it, fire can be very disturbing. But can fire be a shock to the system if it is also a 400 million year old part of the system? Is part of the problem that we see fire as a disturbance, rather than inescapable? As a bug, rather than a feature? Might a shift towards a long term view help us here?

O God, give us the serenity to accept what cannot be changed, the courage to change what can be changed, and the wisdom to know the one from the other.

What a great, great line. Simple, profound, practical and with a surprisingly long and diverse lineage (that includes pit stops on Seinfeld and in the august pages of this humble blog).

Medallion with text of Serenity Prayer (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Maybe it’s just me, but I have always read the Serenity Prayer as personal; something for an individual to adhere to, strive for or serenely abandon. Of course, there’s no reason the prayer can’t be applied to groups, like organisations, governments (now there’s a policy platform!) and society.

Which brings us back to fire. Is it something we can change? Or is it something that cannot be changed? At first blush the answer seems obvious - of course we can change fire.

But that in turn brings us to what we might call the High Modernist Prayer (with apologies to James C Scott):

O engineers, planners, technocrats, high-level administrators, architects, scientists and visionaries, give us the serenity to put up with recalcitrant luddites and loonies, the courage to administratively order nature and society, and the power to not have to worry about the luddites and loonies after all.

We can administratively order fire. We can manage it. We can control it!

(You can probably save yourself the time of reading the rest of this post and just revisit Tim Neale’s thread about his forthcoming book How To Control Fire, which I quoted on my post about the LA Fires.)

Are we stuck in some kind of control trap? Some kind of managerial Moebius Strip whereby we try to control stuff, don’t really succeed, try harder, still don’t succeed, kind of accept that we can’t control stuff, but kind of accept that we’d still better try, at which point we find ourselves back where we started?

Is it because fire appears tamable, in a way that the other denizens of Hazardland do not? Does fire lack the air of inevitability that heatwaves, tropical cyclones, earthquakes, tsunamis and floods seem to possess? (At least for now - you know tech is coming for them eventually).

Maybe we need to stop looking to other hazards for inspiration, and ask ourselves where society is abandoning, however reluctantly, attempts at control? When we look at those places, do we see chaos erupting? Or was the struggle for control the only struggle in the first place?

The drive for control is deep, no matter how much we dampen or counterbalance it.

In fact, the push for power (of the big and pointy sort) is a kind of counterweight to equilibrium, to stretch my metaphors past breaking point. Simplify everything, forget context, complexity or connection, and you can quickly generate a large amount of force over a very small area (a bit like a stiletto - no offense to those who partake). That kind of force can destabilise a whole system.

If only we had some means of finding and maintaining equilibrium. Can I make studying that my job? Don’t ask me to contribute to achieving it, it’s lovely and unaccountable over here in academia. I’ll be John Ralson Saul without the erudition.

Speaking of balance, I find myself wavering a little on my inchoate dream of optimal fire management. It seems reasonable to ask our decisions and actions to be transparent, evidence-based, cost-effective and so on. But setting aside the difficulty of actually knowing how our actions affect all the things we care about, across dizzying scales of time and space - are we sure optimising isn’t one of those deep impulses with a dark side?

An agency offering detailed justifications of everything it did would be remarkable, but a person doing that would be rightly thought of as a little odd.

Person A: [Does thing] I did thing for reasons A, B and C, which are valid for reasons D, E and F, and indeed optimal as shown by methodology G.

Person B: [Backs away slowly while alternating between maintaining eye contact and doing side eye]

I can’t quite put my finger on the problem here… Is it that offering an ironclad reason for everything gives a slight whiff of ‘the lady doth protest too much’? Is it because this means now *I* have to justify my existence now too? Without optionality around optimality, it’s not just a lot of hard work, it’s also a clear shift towards a more transactional way of being. Which freaking sucks.

But which also reminds me, I really must turn on the paywall here, just think of the cash I could rake in.