The End of Heaven: Disaster and Suffering in a Scientific Age

119 Pages·2017·1.21 MB·English

by  Sidney Dekker

The End of Heaven
In this unique book, Sidney Dekker tackles a largely unexplored dilemma. Our
scientific age has equipped us ever better to explain why things go wrong. But
this increasing sophistication actually makes it harder to explain why we suffer.
Accidentsanddisastershavebecometechnicalproblemswithoutinherentpurpose.
When told of a disaster, we easily feel lost in the steely emptiness of technical
languages of engineering or medicine. Or, in our drive to pinpoint the source
of suffering, we succumb to the hunt for a scapegoat, possibly inflicting even
greater suffering on others around us. How can we satisfactorily deal with
suffering when the disaster that caused it is no more than the dispassionate sum
of utterly mundane, imperfect human decisions and technical failures? Broad in
its historical sweep and ambition, The End of Heaven is also Dekker’s most
personal book to date.
Sidney Dekker is Professor of Humanities and Social Science at Griffith
University, Australia, an institution founded on a commitment to social justice.
He holds two Dutch degrees in psychology and a PhD (1996) in cognitive
systems engineering from the Ohio State University, USA.
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The End of Heaven
ff fi
Disaster and Su ering in a Scienti c Age
Sidney Dekker
K ~~o~;J~n~~~up
ORKYOR LLONODONNLODNDOONN
Y
LONDONANDNEWYORK
Firstpublished2017
byRoutledge
2ParkSquare,MiltonPark,Abingdon,OxonOX144RN
andbyRoutledge
711ThirdAvenue,NewYork,NY10017
RoutledgeisanimprintoftheTaylor&FrancisGroup,aninformabusiness
©2017SidneyDekker
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ISBN:978-0-415-78989-9(hbk)
ISBN:978-0-415-78987-5(pbk)
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TypesetinBembo
byTaylor&FrancisBooks
Contents
Preface vi
Acknowledgments xi
1 Disaster, religion and science 1
2 Son of a preacherwoman 10
3 The entitled class 21
4 Existential dread 29
5 Human error 36
6 A question of faith 43
7 Killing death 51
8 Returning to dust 61
9 Grief without a god 71
10 The end of death 77
11 Resurrecting heaven 86
Coda 98
Bibliography 100
Index 103
Preface
I want to tell you a story.
Over the past two decades I have been professionally active on the back-end
of accidents and disasters. My role varied with need. I was embedded in
investigation teams, a supporter of second victims, an advisor to management
groups and boards of directors, a witness in courts of law. In all those places
I’ve seen shares of suffering and grief and loss.
These were, in a sense, my laboratories of chaos and pain: places where
struggles to restore a sense of order and fairness in the wake of disaster were on
full display. I was hardly ever there, by the way, as a detached, dispassionate,
objective scientist. I was there – all of me. I cried with the nurse convicted of a
felony over ayoung patient’sdeath. Ilost mytemper witha newmanager who
was about to reinstate the very things that helped his organization fatally collide
two aircraft a few years earlier. I shared tears across an ocean with the aunt of a
fighter pilot – vanished and presumed dead – who was officially accused of
“losing situation awareness.” I sat down for months, alternating between despair
and fighting spirit, with three airline pilots under house arrest after a crash that
killed over eighty people. And I was by the side of more. Some have drifted
out of view. Others are dead, jobless or in jail. One was murdered. I’ve written
about some of them separately in my book, Second Victim.
In this book, I explore a tiny corner of the bigger questions that these
encounters generated. These are questions that my research and professional
experience have long been bumping up against: questions of pain, of suffering
and loss and grief. These questions are as old as humanity itself.
This book is part of a particular genre in the safety literature. In that genre,
people speak of their lived experiences of a disaster, of getting caught up in the
wash of a tragic event. As they offer their reflections, authenticity is never in
doubt:thesepeoplehavelivedoutthefullconsequencesoftheirownarguments.
Remarkably, this genre has remained relatively stable over time. Plutarch’s and
Cicero’s accounts of the lived experiences of losing their respective daughters
some two millennia ago would seem familiar to readers today. C. S. Lewis’s
A Grief Observed – from the 1960s – would in turn not be strange to Cicero.
In contrast, the science of safety, such as it is, has evolved its explanations of
failure and disaster significantly over the past centuries. It has morphed its
Preface vii
vocabulary away from individual violations and component breakdown and
human error to an increasing understanding of the deep complexity of failure.
Paradoxically,oursophisticatedabilitytoexplaindisastercanactuallymakeitharder
to explain why we suffer. In our scientific age, accidents and disasters have
becometechnical problemswithout inherent purpose.That makesthe suffering
they produce more difficult to stomach, because it, too, seems meaningless.
It gets trickier, still. We have got ever better at illuminating the complexity
behind disasters. Rigorous theories and methods allow us to trace the causes of
accidents and calamities like never before. But this actually makes it harder to
pinpoint the source of suffering; to offer people the comfort that it is all under
control now. What our science shows is that it takes many factors, all necessary
and only jointly sufficient, and many of them quite ordinary for how we live
our daily lives, for a disaster to happen, or for it to affect us. So-called man-
made disaster theory, for instance, is typical of our scientific age. It puts
responsibility for the creation and prevention of catastrophe with humans – not
with nature or with some divine being. Disasters, it says discouragingly, arise
out of the most banal, everyday humdrum organizational processes and human
activities. Our normal, accepted ways of doing risky business drive frequent
successes as well as occasional failures.
But what assurance does that offer? Where does that leave us? In our scien-
tific age, we may have become clever but callous. We can offer sophisticated
expositions, but little consolation. Have we traded solace for science? Have we,
in our scientific age, come to the end of heaven with much we can explain, but
little to ease the pain? This is the fundamental tension at the heart of this book.
When questions about suffering are answered with how things went wrong,
we can feel lost in the steely emptiness of technical languages of engineering or
medicine. We might hear that there were lots of causes for the disaster – all
necessary and only jointly sufficient, and all of them baked into the normal
fabric of the system that created it. How can we satisfactorily explain suffering
when the disaster that caused it is no more than the dispassionate sum of utterly
mundane man-made imperfections?
This is where we get seduced to answer questions about how things went
wrongwithareplytowhywesuffer.Thedisasterhappened,wearethenmade
to believe, because of an erratic human who violated rules or procedures. This is
hugely tempting, because it allows us to put our finger on the sore spot, to
identify the culprit, toisolatethe nucleus of suffering and do something about it.
Yet it is, of course, a mere throwback to pre-scientific times, a reinvention of
sin and sinner under newfangled labels. The problem is that such a reaction can
create injustices bigger than the disaster, pulling both first and second victims
into a whirl of painful outcomes where suffering supposedly gets compensated
by inflicting more suffering. It typically doesn’t fix anything, and doesn’t prevent
anything – not even future suffering. And it makes lousy science to boot.
Here is how the book goes about exploring this tension.
Chapter 1 explains that as science has become ever better at tracing out the
dense causal webs that give rise to disasters, it may actually have become less
viii Preface
adept at giving us a sense of control over them. After all, what we find is often
complex and multi-faceted, with the sources of disaster embedded in normal
human, organizational and political life. This is unsatisfactory for most of us.
We have an existential need for control, for knowing why we suffer, and we
desire a quick, simple, reassuring answer. As a result, even those tasked with
the epistemology of disasters (e.g. accident investigators) can come up with the
simple existential reassurance (we found the ‘human error’!) under the guise of
identifying the causes of disaster.
Chapter2recountsthe1755Lisbonearthquake,whichprovedtobearallying
point for a renewed understanding of disasters, suffering and divine will.
Thinkers such as Voltaire convincingly argued that there is no sacred purpose
behind disasters. The Enlightenment was crucial in the development of the
scientific age and secularization, although its impact on our understanding of
disasterandsuffering dependson what wemean byit. Ifsecularization is simply
astoryofsubtraction,of sciencerevealinghowthings ‘really’workandpushing
religion out of the way, then all that is left is that steely emptiness of scientific
explanations. If, instead, we see secularization as an explosion in choice and
pluralism, as some scholars do, then the many stories humanity has produced to
deal with disaster and suffering are still valid and accessible for us.
Chapter 3 introduces the classical view of disasters and suffering, in which
theyarethesanctionandpunishmentthatfollowonhumanity’sviolationoflaws
and rules. It is a straightforward model, because it offers us both an explanation
for whythings went wrong, as well as a remedy for preventing themfrom going
wrong again (as in: stop violating the rules!). The epistemological and existential
overlap nicelyin thismodel –attheprice,of course, ofhuge oversimplification
and inhumane consequences.
Chapter 4 picks up on a crucial theme in the moral development of the
West:freewill.Ifweareabletotriggerdisasterandsubsequentsufferingbyour
owndecisionsand actions, then we need tohavethe freewilltodo so. This can
actually give us a senseof existential dread,as Kierkegaardcalled it,in the faceof
such choices. That dread, or anxiety, he said, is the dizziness of our freedom.
Wehave the freedom to dothe wrong thing, to mess it all up. Andwe have to
live with the consequences.
Chapter 5 traces the history of the idea of free will from the allegory of
Adam and Eve through early Christian thinkers: Augustine, then Calvin, and
into what many consider common sense today. Weber called it the “Protestant
ethic” which says that we achieve success through individual hard work and
discipline. Suffering is the result of a lack of individual hard work, application,
commitment. People, according to the Protestant ethic, are responsible for the
creation of their own salvation; their own choices determine their success and
their freedom from disaster and suffering.
Chapter 6 discusses the problem of the suffering by innocent victims. This is
one of the most difficult issues thrown up by disasters, whether seen through
the lens of the classical view or that of a scientific age. How can it make sense
that innocent people get caught up in their wash? It shows that we still rely on
Preface ix
various contortions of the classical view to make sense of innocent suffering.
We might, for example, invert the logic and see people’s resulting suffering
itself as evidence that they must have done something wrong, which triggered
the disaster. There is a cruelty to this explanation, of course, which gets revisited
in Chapter 11.
Chapter 7 dealswitha particular antidotetodisasterandsuffering that religion
haslongsupplied–andthatascientificagefallsdesperatelyshorton.Thisisthe
idea of an afterlife, which has been remarkably resilient throughout prehistory
and history. It traces examples from the Palaeolithic to antiquity and even
modern psychology and artificial intelligence, to illustrate that we are almost
hard-wired to think in terms of a separate mind (or soul) and body. This
doesn’t mean any of it is true, but fulfills the precondition for the belief that
disaster and suffering are ultimately redeemable.
Chapter 8 picks up the idea of an afterlife as antidote to disaster and suffering
fromtheJudeo-Christianorigins.Itshowsthatitwasthepoliticsofdisasterthat
brought the idea into the Judeo-Christian tradition. It attracted people because
it allowed them to imagine revenge and justice against those who triggered the
disaster that was unfolding around them. This is called the apocalyptic view,
whichsays that even if the world is a bad placenow,where disasters happen and
the innocent suffer, then it will soon be turned on its head (though not likely
in this life).
Chapter 9 takes us to the nineteenth century, to tap into the thinking of
Feuerbach, Darwin, Freud and Marx. Their influence on what is now our sci-
entific, or secular, age was significant. Feuerbach was among the most strident
promoters of secularization, leaving him without a chair at a German university
as a result. Freud recognized in our religious ideas about disaster and suffering a
host of psychological needs, while Marx saw in the afterlife a socio-economic
conspiracy aimed at prolonging suffering for the lower classes. For Darwin, it
was personal. He lost his daughter Annie in 1851 when, in his words, his dis-
belief was at last complete. He published The Origin of Species only a few
years later.
Chapter 10 reviews what our scientific age has to offer to help us cope with
disaster and suffering. It turns out that science doesn’t aim to end disaster,
suffering and death with an afterlife, but with research and genetic engineering:
offering what many would see as the fantasy of a life without a deadline
through longevity research. Death has become a technical problem for science
to solve. Other modes of alleviating suffering are on offer too: the narrativiza-
tion of disaster and suffering, for example, and the many ways in which we try
to deal with the fear of sudden disaster and inevitable death by focusing on the
quality of the life before it.
Chapter 11 returns to the theme set out in Chapter 2, addressing what is
known as Leibnizian theodicy. This says that a benevolent god and a divinely
created world are still compatible with the existence of suffering, because in the
end they bring good to the greatest number of people. The chapter highlights
the distinction between divine responsibility for disaster (as per Leibniz) and