It’s our machines that make us weak
There was chaos in the skies over Chicago last week, proving old Mr. Bosch’s point. He always said in science class that whatever is potent enough to do people good is potent enough to do them harm. He used to make this observation standing over his test tubes in his lab, wearing Victorian tweeds. We, his pupils, decided that the clothes must have been a present for his 75th birthday 75 years previous, making him 150 years old.
This, in fact, is just about the age Mr. Bosch would be today if he were still alive. But he is long gone and it’s some of his formerly snickering students who are pushing 75. I haven’t heard anyone snicker in the last few years, though, at least not at Mr. Bosch’s remarks. He turned out to be right in every one of his Victorian insights.
How could he not be? The handwriting was on the wall. True, a lot people don’t read handwriting. Or fine print. Most people read … well, let’s stop right there. Most people don’t read. They inhale and absorb the contemporary world, twisting on their muscular stems like sunflowers. Most people who read print at all read only headlines.
You don’t mean headlines, those banners on the front page that say SEX IN SPACE NEXT? Well, and what’s wrong with that? Do we detect a whiff of snobbery here?
Dear me, not snobber y, anything but s nobber y, perish the thought. It’s just that people who scribble for a living inhabit a world of their own. Writers rarely write headlines, for instance; therefore writers rarely write what people read. “Let me write the headlines,” the newspaper proprietor William Randolph Hearst said, “and I do nor care who writes the story.” Writers may not care much who reads the paper they don’t get to write, although they should.
Mr. Bosch warned that we’d outsmart ourselves and we did. We outsmarted ourselves royally. Carried away by our capabilities, we became fatally vulnerable to them. Only a generation ago, or at most two generations ago, a part-time employee’s clumsy attempt to set fire to his work station, then try to cut his throat, would have resulted in excitement, upset, and maybe sadness in the immediate neighbourhood. That’s all. There would been fire
The Roman legions needed a cooked meal, and lost. The horsemen of Asia had a meal under their saddle, and won
trucks and an ambulance, and later a criminal trial if the man survived, and an inquest if he did not.
But last week when 36-year old contract employee Brian Howard allegedly attempted to set fire at the facility servicing Chicago’s Midway and O’Hare airports, air travel in the United States all but ground to a halt. According to news reports, “by Friday night, more than 2,000 flights in and out of Chicago had been cancelled. Flights resumed after a five-hour gap, but planes were moving at a much-reduced pace, and no one could be sure when full service would be restored.”
Sparing no expense, employing the utmost in human ingenuity, we’ve built an air traffic control system sufficiently automated and interdependent to empower a lowtech act of sabotage by a single distraught individual to do it maximum harm. (Just imagine what a whole team of dedicated terrorists can manage.) A morning fire at the air traffic control center in suburban Aurora was all it took to spread disruptions throughout the air transportation system of the world’s most highly developed country. No system on a lower level of development would have been so adversely affected.
In Mr. Bosch’s time, air travel was pretty rudimentary, civil radar nonexistent, and nobody talked about homeland security and asymmetric warfare. The superiority of complex systems over primitive systems was taken for granted; automation was a clear advantage, and the technologically sophisticated had the field. At least, that was what emerged from the headlines.
But there was an emaciated science teacher wearing a starched collar and a Victorian suit, warning us to consider our assets liabilities and our liabilities, assets. “The Roman legions needed a cooked meal,” he’d say. “They had to light a fire. The horsemen of Asia were more self-sufficient. They rode with their supper under the saddle all day. It was a piece of meat, seasoned and tenderized. The mares had warm milk. The Huns didn’t need a fire and won; the Romans did and lost.”
I think in the world of Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIS and the Khorassan group, the teacher is Mr. Bosch. The race is not always to the swift.