The End of Heaven

Disaster and Suffering in a Scientific Age

Sidney Dekker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351819206
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

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. Accidents and disasters have become technical problems without inherent purpose. 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.

1 Disaster, religion and science

“No rush.”

The doctor sounds dead tired.

Shaving foam clings to my cheeks. I bend the phone handle away from my face to prevent the white fluff from clogging the speaker holes. A towel is wrapped around my waist. Wet footsteps trail into the kitchen behind me, coming to a stop where I stand. The linoleum feels lukewarm and squishy under my feet.

“How are you?” the doctor asks from the other end.

Behind me the fridge hums wearily, a base tone to carry the thick silence of the apartment.

How I am?

The phone in my hand is a nineties model, the only phone we have, jacked into the only outlet in our place. Its cord is a long, coiled and springy leash to allow movement. It pulls and stretches through the fingers of my left hand.

I don’t move.

How I am?

He doesn’t want to know.

I am awake but even more tired than before I went to sleep. The top of my head gives off a crackling, brittle sensation. A frazzle lines my entire being, like baking paper pressed against the insides of my limbs, my torso, my eyeballs. A weariness deep enough to stay beyond the reach of caffeine for the rest of the day.

My face is getting cold and hard from the aborted shave.

I give the doc a noncommittal answer. He murmurs something back.

“You probably want to come over,” he says. “But, again, no rush. I’m going home now. Somebody else is taking over.”

I feel my mouth go dry. My heart takes a run and presses up against the inside of my chest, as if it wants to leap out and reach beyond the present, colonize the future, as if it wants to wrestle fate and steer it into a favorable direction once more.

Deeper into the apartment, one side of our bed lies untouched.

Around five that morning, my anxiety had finally surrendered to a fractured, patchy sleep. I awoke an hour and a half later. I traded my bed for the pounding of a hot shower – Scandinavians mercifully understand their plumbing.

“OK,” I say into the phone. “Yeah.”

What little sleep there’d been is quickly draining from the bottom of my brainpan, the lint and fuzz of it still clinging to my upper gums and the roof of my mouth.

Disaster comes in many forms. Its definition is best left personal, not technical. The loss of a breadwinner, a loved one, is a disaster to a family. Yet that same loss is only a statistic for what investigators regard as the disaster that landed on their desk. The unintended death of a patient is a personal and professional disaster for those whose care and cure failed to prevent it. Not to mention what it means for the surviving family. For the hospital risk manager, the death may chiefly be a liability or public relations disaster.

Even if we cannot agree on what constitutes a disaster personally, we have, over the past century, got ever better at explaining their technicalities. We can now model the landslide that took the breadwinner’s life: caused by a burst tailing dam that wiped out workers and villagers alike. We now have techniques to chart the pathway of organizational discontinuities and missed diagnoses that cost that patient her life.

The book of blots

It wasn’t always like that. On the 28th of December 1879, at a quarter past seven in the evening, a Dundee-bound train was crossing the Tay railway bridge over the Firth of Tay in Scotland. The line connected Edinburgh to Aberdeen, running along the east coast of Scotland. With the North Sea on one side, a violent storm had been blowing at almost right angles to the bridge. It was a bad storm indeed: wind gusts in Glasgow, further inland, were clocked at 80 miles or well over 120 kilometers per hour.

Yet it had been designed as a safe system. Only one train could be on the bridge at any one time, controlled by a signaling block system (essentially still in use today, albeit with different technology). At 7:13 pm, a northbound train slowed to pick up the baton that would give it exclusive access to the bridge from the signal cabin on the south shore. It headed out onto the bridge, picking up speed. The signalman later said he turned away from the bridge to tend to his little stove fire in the cabin, but a friend present with him watched the train. When it got about 200 meters onto the bridge, the friend saw sparks flying from the wheels on the east side. This continued for some three minutes. By then, the train had reached the highest girders. And then,

There was a sudden bright flash of light, and in an instant there was total darkness, the tail lamps of the train, the sparks and the flash of light all … disappearing at the same instant.¹

The friend alerted the signalman, but he refused to believe a word of it. The dark, stormy night would have blotted out any good views of the bridge. The signalman tried to talk to his colleague on the north end, but found that all communication with the signal cabin there had been lost.

The train never made it to the other end.

The bridge underneath it had collapsed, plunging the train into the Firth. All onboard were killed – more than seventy people.

What had caused the disaster? Some didn’t have to look far or deep at all. The day the bridge collapsed was Sunday. Commentators believed that making people work on Sunday was a sin, and considered the fall of the bridge a divine punishment. “[It] was a judgment. It is hoped the company will take past doings into earnest consideration and amend their ways,” a clergyman commented. Others agreed. Working on a Sunday was desecration, it was the Lord’s Day, after all. “Those suddenly carried away into eternity,” Reverend Dr. Begg said, “must have known that they were transgressing the law of God.”²

This might have been the last word on such a disaster before the scientific and industrial revolutions. Consider an earlier example of a similar wind-induced collapse. On the 1st of August 1674, the nave of the huge Dom Cathedral in Utrecht, the Netherlands, had become an earlier victim of vicious North Sea weather. What many now believe was a tornado whipped up by a storm front, took out the part connecting the tower and the cross-wise transept just after seven in the evening. That part, the nave, had suffered from both funding shortages and Renaissance influences. It had a flat wooden roof instead of brick vaults, and the nave lacked flying buttresses. The buttresses it did have were low. Yet people didn’t turn to construction engineering to give meaning to its collapse. Utrecht had been at the center of see-sawing Reformation and Counterreformation from 1580 onward. Its Dom Cathedral had been re-Catholicized by French occupation forces during 1672–1673. Soldiers of Louis XIV had removed anything that reminded of Protestantism. The Reformist Dutch saw the ruination of the nave in the next year as a highly visible punishment for the Roman desecration of their Cathedral. They let the rubble of it lie until 1826.

At the height of the Victorian era, when the Dundee-bound train plunged into the Firth, it was no longer an option to let the debris of disaster linger for centuries, lest its moral lesson was forgotten. Much of the train was recovered from the water: the engine was eventually even returned to service. Nor was it deemed good enough to let the disaster’s engineering lessons remain the private conclusions drawn by a few stone masons. Blaming the slack morals of the users of the bridge was not going to do either. Technical descriptions of disaster had become increasingly seen as a chief way to learn and make progress. For James Watt, a history of failures was the most longed-for thing in all of mechanical engineering. “We want,” he said, speaking decades before the Tay disaster, “a book of blots.”³

Much of the Scottish, and later English, polity mobilized to make sense of what had happened on the Tay Bridge that evening. They drew on witness statements, on mathematics, meteorology, science and engineering. Soon, critical aspects of the design and construction of the bridge, of the iron that had been cast and used, of its maintenance and wind loading, were under scrutiny by various commissions and inspectorates and a specially appointed court of inquiry. Break lines and scrape marks pointed to a number of failures of lugs, rivets, cover plates, gibs, cotters, braces, tie bars, flanges, piers, iron girders, and columns. In the end, the three members of the court failed to agree on their exact technical findings, although their divergence was mostly in the metallurgical and masonry details. Reasoning backward from the rubble, as if running a disaster movie in reverse but never able to sweep the parts back together again, proved vexing: a one-to-many mapping. The nature of the debris could be accounted for by too many possible collapse scenarios. The court did agree on many contributing material, design, construction and managerial factors, and concluded that the late December storm had been extraordinary. Future bridge design would have to take wind loading into account differently.

A question of what, a question of why

So what was the cause of the disaster and the human suffering that resulted from it? A technical explanation can do things that the religious one can’t. And vice versa. Technical explanations can explain what happened. This, we could say, is answering an epistemological question: a question of knowing what and how. But can a technical explanation tell us why it happened, why the suffering was inflicted precisely on those people? More trains crossed the Tay bridge on the 28th of December 1879, even that evening. Many would have asked why disaster snared the train that their loved one was in – not the previous one, or the next one. This is an existential question: a question concerned with life, its experience, its end. All the forensic engineers or courts of inquiry in the world remain silent on that wrenching, exasperating question. The quest for the cause of a disaster, an accident, fatal illness, is an epistemological one. It traces out what we know and how we know it. Our timeless struggle to come to grips with the sources of suffering is existential. It addresses deep concerns about life, death, fate; and our role in it all, our free will.

Acts of God

Accidents and disasters were long seen as acts of God (a concept that survives in insurance language). Mortals were at the mercy of random, uncontrollable events. If there was anything intelligible about accidents at all, then the explanations came from religion and superstition. People died because of sin, violations, fate, predestination, witchcraft, taboo-breaking, demonic machinations, divine punishment. Such answers explained, consoled, remedied and redirected – all at the same time. Not only did they point us to the source of suffering; they gave us the illusion of control over it.

The remedies could indeed be straightforward. We should stop taking Scottish trains on a Sunday, for instance. We should try harder not to sin or stray from the true faith, we should pray harder, bring more offerings, change our errant ways, behave more piously. And for those we lost, we could perhaps count on seeing them again in an afterlife. That has always been the brilliance of religious answers to disasters and suffering. If we suspend disbelief about their epistemological claims – and mind you, we have suspended such disbelief for centuries – then a religious answer can deal with both the epistemological and existential question in one go. What happened when the train plunged into the Firth? Morally slack people violated divine laws. Why do we suffer? Because morally slack people violate divine laws.

In the nineteenth century, we began to see accidents and disasters less in divine or demonic terms, and more as unfortunate coincidences of space and time. Some were deemed to be random physical events without much inherent meaning.⁴ But as we became more technically advanced, we also developed our explanations for how things came apart and how people died. This has accelerated over the past few decades. Startling failures such as the fatal Tenerife collision of two Boeing 747 jumbo jets in 1977 and the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979, brought accidents back to center stage. To control disaster and suffering, we increasingly put our faith in science, engineering and modern forensics. While Church attendance and religious affiliation in the West declined, government spending on accident investigation grew dramatically.⁵

The problem is that we have been building ever bigger and more complex systems. For sure, we increasingly protect them from the sorts of failure modes we know about. We make safety cases and conduct risk analyses, we put in alarms, sensors, procedures, layers of defense, automatic recovery systems. But it also means that when things go disastrously wrong, there are many, many contributing factors; many possible causes. These contributors are all necessary and only jointly sufficient to push a system over the edge into disaster. A complex, well-protected system doesn’t just collapse because of a single human error or component failure. Whereas this doesn’t make the question of what went wrong unanswerable, it can make that answer long and scattered all over the place – with causal webs so large that we sometimes don’t even know where to stop.

As the science of complexity has developed over the past few decades, it has strayed ever further away from being able to offer simple answers to why we suffer. The more we have learned about how complex systems fail, the more difficult it has become to actually pinpoint the cause of suffering. We live in a complex, non-deterministic world. Failures of complex systems are seldom the result of the malfunctioning of a single part – human or machine. These systems are mostly too well-protected, too redundant, to allow single failure modes to bring them down.

For the most part, we don’t like that at all. There is a steely emptiness to technical talk of interactions and parts and equations and the emergence of failure. Science leaves an existentially-sized hole in our understanding of why things went wrong. To the question of why we suffer, we desire a simple answer. We want an answer that explains the pain, misery and anguish in fifteen seconds or less.⁶ We don’t want complexity: we want simplicity. We want a source to zoom in on, an understandable one, and we want to act on that source in a way that offers closure. We want to zero in on the origin of the pain, and make it go away. And then we want to go on with life in the relative security that we know why we, or someone else, suffered; that the suffering is now over; that it will not happen again.

Better be wrong than afraid

This puts the study of accidents and disasters in a double bind. In our scientific age we expect experts to ...