I can see an A380 flying outside my window. Which is, I guess, an appropriate sign of the new year in the third millenium. The strange thing about watching the plane fly is not that it defies gravity (after all, all planes do that, and for a little bit of time so can we); no, the truly amazing thing is how slowly it flies, just hanging in space.
Watching the plane land makes me think about perseverence – or stubborness, if you choose the name on the other side of the coin. If the plane had personality, then you can imagine it saying:
Look, gravity: I acknowledge your existance. But I demonstrate my contempt for your force by taking the path that I choose. And just to rub it in I will do it really, really slowly.
Of course, the plane is not a person, and what is really happening is the application of aerodynamic principles and engineering to a natural, and fairly well understood, force. Or to simplify: the plane flies without emotion and in accordance with a precise (and pre-determined) route.
Now at this point I considered saying something about the intractable conflicts in the world today – festering sores that pop up in the same parts of the world, and for the same reasons. Maybe – I would have said – the conflicts are not emotional at all, but are instead just the natural consequence of the environment (just like the geometrical emptiness of the plane’s descent). But that would be obvious, unhelpful and callous.
Despite Marx, we are not molecules in a river without control over the direction of the river bed. As human beings, one of our greatest gifts is the belief that order can be found in chaos. We spend our entire lives training and the applying pattern-matching abilities, and we are educated to view history in the same way that we read novels: as a nice story with overarching themes.
Of course, this is necessary. But I am starting to think it is a necessary evil. True, no human can comprehend a war as the separate flows of thousands of people and millions of interactions between those people, and so it is necessary for us to try and abstract something that makes sense. The problem is, if we do too much of this, and allow it to become our only way of thinking, then we lose the knowledge that this is what war actually IS.
So for the new year, and for all the conflicts, crises and conflagrations that are to come, I resolve to look closer at the video screen, and to try and figure our how each individual pixel looks and changes.
This is the best kind of resolution (for me), because it is a further step along an intellectual path that I was already taking anyway. And it’s not cheating, as far as I am concerned, because I think that the only resolutions with half a chance are those where your (generally conservative and slow to accept change) brain gives them half a chance.
So here we go: it’s post-2008 and let’s hope it’s an era of compassionate individualism. But how do we make it happen while preserving the motivation for collective action and investment that created engineering materpieces like the A380?
