Thought some of you might be interested in this article (from Flint's favourite limey rag [g]).

From http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,444520,00.html)

Thursday March 1, 2001 The Guardian

In their book The Collapse Of Chaos, Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart tried to explain that the apparent simplicities of our commonsense view of the world hid a teeming ocean of complexity. "If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them," they wrote, "we'd be so simple that we couldn't." Britain in the 21st century is a bit like that. If the web of electricity cables, microwaves, rails, roads, airways, computers, fibre-optic links, retailers, distributors, sewage systems, phone lines, warning systems, farmers and manufacturers was simple enough for us to understand it, it would be too simple to exist.

We only notice the complexity of the technology we have come to rely on when it stops working. We only marvel at smooth roads and cars travelling along them at 90 miles an hour when they are blocked by snow. We only realise the incredible level of mechanisation and international animal-shuffling of modern farming when a disease breaks out in livestock at opposite ends of the country and rural life shuts down.

We only remember that it is complicated to have hundreds of people and tonnes of goods, travelling in four different directions, on two levels, in two different kinds of transport, in all weathers, at combined speeds of hundreds of miles an hour, when they collide and people are killed.

Except that we don't marvel, we don't realise, and we don't remember. By entering a "just-in-time" era of high-speed transport and communication, with high standards of health care and thousands of standard products available anywhere, anytime, we have only raised our threshhold of expectations. We think of technology and the fantastic degree of organisation and interlinkage that makes Britain work, when we think of it at all, as making the country a more convenient place to live. Often it does. But convenient isn't the same as robust. When things go wrong, convenient Britain can turn out to be fragile Britain.

Cohen recalls the words of Arthur C Clarke: "Any well-developed technology is indistinguishable from magic."

"We've turned so much of our technology into magic that when it turns into something else it seems hard to comprehend," he says. "Like when getting into a room in Newcastle and walking out of the room a few hours later in London turns into a train, crashing into another train.

"It's a lot to do with how complicated life is. We couldn't live the kind of complicated life we live if we had to deal with our own waste, build our own fires and generate our own electricity. It's only when things go wrong, when trains crash and sewage floods into the street that you remember the complexity is there."

The piling-on of crises and disasters can give the impression that Britain stands on the brink of chaos. For once, the Queen spoke for many people yesterday when she said of the Selby train disaster: "This is a particularly shocking tragedy coming on top of so much anxiety and loss from the foot-and-mouth outbreak and, before that, the recent floods."

She could have added the autumn fuel crisis, the Hatfield disaster and its aftermath, and an unlucky bag of other mixed woes. It's tempting to invoke chaos the ory; the notion that a small event, such as the flutter of a butterfly's wings, can produce huge consequences elsewhere, like a tropical storm.

But chaos theory is not involved. The common factor is the ugly sister of chaos - complexity. "In the jargon of the mathematicians, this is complexity rather than chaos," says Ian Stewart. "A lot of people get them mixed up."

Chaos theory, first developed by meteorologist Edward Lorenz in the 60s, involved unpredictable results emerging from minute changes in the data fed into a calculation. It was all about simple systems obeying simple rules - as the weather, for all its unpredictability, does.

Complexity produces unpredictable results from the interaction of a whole host of actions which, by themselves, seem simple. The fuel crisis, says Stewart, was a classic example - a protest outside a few oil refineries could shut down an entire country with astonishing swiftness. So are the paralysing effects of computer viruses, simple programs that can bring great institutions to their knees because of their complete reliance on technology.

"Complexity is the world we live in. People still think it isn't. People still think that when they go to a supermarket and buy a pound of meat it's exactly the same thing they used to do 30 years ago when they went to a shop up the road. In no respect is it the same. The meat has gone through the hands of 75 different people. It might be a French sheep, slaughtered in Belgium, butchered in Germany, part sent to Saudi Arabia and part sent here.

"I blame the training of today's managers. They've not been trained to think about robustness and stability. They've been trained to think about efficiency. Efficiency, to a modern manager, means that every conceivable component is just about to break down.

"The big problem here is reductionist managers operating with a complex system as if it was simple."

In complex Britain, a problem can not only spread rapidly, as it has with foot and mouth disease, but problems can be compounded by other problems. In the Scottish Borders, where snowfalls have been so deep that they have been compared with the savage winter of 1947, many farmers postponed deliveries of feed and fuel and didn't clear the snow from their roads as normal because of fear of infection. Now, with electricity supplies cut off by the weather, many are in desparate need for fuel for emergency generators - but the snow is still blocking their roads.

The speed and efficiency of the rescue operation around the Selby crash was an example of complexity at its best. The reason why the car and its trailer came off the motorway are not yet known. But the conjunction of the country's fastest rail line and one of its major roads were ultimately summoned up by our demand for speed and efficiency, our impatience with delays and hitches.

"We're a very intolerant society nowadays," says Andrew Porteous, professor of environmental science and technology at the Open University. "We expect instant perfection. You see it everywhere. People have a fit when their computer crashes. They don't expect it to happen."

In low-tech societies, such as Britain in the past, or parts of the developing world today, societies tend to take a more fatalistic attitude to disasters and crises. It doesn't protect them from destitution or suicidal despair. Nor does it stop them doing everything they can to put things right. If we have become impatient with technology which might as well be magic to us, people such as the cattle-herding Fulani of Nigeria and Cameroon make no distinction between magic and technology when they are seeking to cure their livestock.

The Fulani have a wealth of ancestral veterinary knowledge to fall back on - they practise a form of vaccination against foot and mouth disease in their cattle, for instance - but also go to wise men who, they believe, might cure their beasts by picking out good verses from the Koran.

Their low-tech world leaves them and their livestock vulnerable to a host of diseases such as rinderpest and HIV. They are at the mercy of the weather. At the same time, they are less reliant on technology they don't understand; they may have radios and bicycles, but they don't depend on them. The lack of a media blanket such as the one covering Britain means that a tragedy that affects one group has little impact on another 50 miles away. The lack of functioning African governments means that compensation and inquiries are not expected.

"Here there's the expectation of a safety net arrangement, of society owing something to them," says Phil Burnham, professor of social anthropology at University College, London, who has worked with the Fulani. "Out there, they may feel their kin owe them help in times of crisis, but there's no one else they can turn to, other than to pray."

In spite of the small backlash from environmentalists and anti-globalism protesters, compared to the Fulani, we remain wedded to progress, demanding of efficiency, and condemning when something goes wrong. We're hooked on complexity.

"The classic difference between peoples like the Fulani and a modernist society like ours is that we believe things are going to get better, that we're going to continue to develop new technologies, knowledge and science," says Prof Burnham.

"If something happens to suggest things aren't going to get better, somebody immediately starts blaming somebody, because there's a faith that science should be able to sort it. The idea that there are things we don't know about, or beyond our control - that's not a part of the modernist orientation. In so-called traditional societies, they think there are things you can't control. You can't just invest more money and get a breakthrough. Things aren't always going to get better tomorrow."

-- Johnny Canuck (j_canuck@hotmail.com), March 01, 2001

Answers

Oh, by the way, Johnny and the little canucks are heading to Maryland and Virginia for the weekend. We'll keep an eye out for Jose and the world's most famous pig farmer......

-- Johnny Canuck (j_canuck@hotmail.com), March 01, 2001.