As an engineer, and a systems engineer at that, I have a tendency to put on my metaphorical wings and soar up beyond “the 30,000 foot level” in order to look down and see the big picture, to try to grasp how a system works. What its inputs and outputs are, what forces govern its operation, and where the triggers are that are capable of causing large changes are all things that can be difficult to discern when staring at a complex system from a close distance — or from within..
When I look at human civilization from high above, one question pops up: why is it so difficult to combat “Evil”? It shouldn’t be such a huge problem. Pretty much anybody can look at life and see that things are better if we all work together to do Good Things. Food, shelter, safety, and all those things commonly put under the rubric of “the pursuit of Happiness” are relatively easy to come by if people choose to “do the right things” and live peaceably together, secure in the knowledge that it is within our capability to build a serviceable civilization.
Of course, this debate can very quickly turn into a religious one, where Good Acts come from Godly Comportment, and Evil is in all of us and comes from Satan. That can be a lively discussion, but from an engineer’s perspective it is unsatisfying because it’s an answer without a reason. People like me are reduced quickly to one word: “why?”
Let’s look at our human situation from high altitude and leave religion out of it for the moment. Bear with me for a bi
t.
The first thing an engineer will do when trying to describe a thing, any thing, is to apply a Cartesian coordinate system to it. Fusion power plants, breakfast cereals, it doesn’t matter. In this way he can plot graphs he can use in PowerPoint presentations, where most people will go immediately to sleep.
Why does he do this? Because graphs reveal relationships that may not be obvious. Before a graph can be constructed, the coordinate axes must be defined, nominally two or more qualities that do not directly depend on each other. An example of this is a chart of something heating up when you turn it on: one axis will be time, and the other will be measured temperature.
Thus, the first job is to clearly identify candidate signals or characteristics of the system you are trying to describe, so you can plot them along an axis. All sorts of cool mathematical things can then be done, which the engineer mistakenly believes his audience will appreciate. Examples of such axes (these are properly called “dimensions”) include time (moving from earlier to later along a plot line), speed (from slower to faster), voltage (from low to high), and a myriad of other physical characteristics. With a little less rigor, we can add questionably-measurable qualities, such as happiness (from sad to ecstatic), ability (from quadriplegic to Olympian), aggressiveness (from meek to pit bull), and so forth. Even political despair (from Red State to Blue State) can be plotted.
I propose that we take a closer look at a dimension that I shall call “Tendency or Force” which moves along its axis from “Destructive” to “Creative”. This can be a human nature, or simply something found in nature, such as an earthquake.
There are many interesting plots we could make, choosing opposing dimensions like the already-mentioned “happiness”, or “temperature”. In the first case, after an exhaustive psychological study we might discover that people who create things (woodworkers, builders, authors, bakers, quilters — the list is long) are “happier” than those who destroy things (arsonists, ANTIFA, jihadis — this list is also long). In the second case, we will likely learn nothing because the creative nature doesn’t depend on temperature (or does it?). This might be an interesting plot, assuming we could trust our measurement methodology, but it’s ultimately unsatisfying because it is itself just an observation, a taxonomy of correlations that says nothing about “why”.
Let’s be creative then (ahem) and choose another opposing dimension for this plot: “effort”. What is it that pops out immediately when our first axis is put against the amount of energy and time it takes to achieve the created thing, or the destroyed thing? You can summarize this particular PowerPoint graph with one statement guaranteed to wake up the sleeping audience:
I don’t care what you make, or how long it took you,
it can be destroyed in an instant.
Simple or obvious? This goes to the heart of civilization, and its not just an attribute of humans wielding torches, it’s a part of the natural world itself. A forest that took a thousand years to create can be destroyed by one bolt of lightning. A mountain that took hundreds of thousands of years to form can be leveled in minutes by one earthquake. A guy with a bat can destroy in seconds a sculpture that took you a lifetime to conceive and shape. A political party with a match and some gasoline can destroy a library full of priceless books that took a hundred lifetimes to write. This situation is both simple and obvious. And a painful reality.
A huge number of people must do Good, in order that Evil not triumph.
That the world has achieved a sort of balance between the forces of creation and the forces of destruction, in light of the evident ease of the latter, is remarkable. We may say that this is the hand of God in action, or that the system has logically achieved a balance to maintain its status quo or it wouldn’t exist and thus we wouldn’t be here to think about it (Descartes, “I think, therefore I am.”, interestingly the same guy who invented the Cartesian coordinate system).
In either case, we can clearly see how it takes a far greater number of creators than destroyers to avoid living in a smoking ruin, and that by itself is a powerful statement, straight from the chart, almost a logical command to devote our lives to building up everything we know today and to maintaining everything our ancestors worked so hard yesterday to create.
Or we burn, because a lone, lazy narcissist decided to light a match. Because it was easy, and not enough of us did the “hard”.
And that is the “why”.
The 12 August 2015 explosion at the Port of Tianjin