Deep Security - first thoughts on The Age of the Unthinkable

Yesterday, scientists gathered to hear confirmation thesis overly of the Higgs boson. A new vital an key part of 'quantum' physics is in place.

Quantum physics deals with the fact that at the very tiniest level we are surrounded by huge uncertainty. The laws of nature that hold for the everyday and indeed for the universe as a whole do not hold at the smallest level. In the everyday, this means that eg there is increasing uncertainty as to how reliable a computer might be. It is impossible to be totally sure what the tiny electrical charges that make it work will do.

And how true this is of life as a whole. 200 years ago we we beginning to think that we could control the world - scientific theories, treaties between nations, and so on - but Freud, Einstein, Global Terror, weather patterns (I could go on) show us how wrong we can be. The Titanic sums it all up.

Sometimes human pride gets the better of us. The Paris Peace Conference after the First World War was an example of politicians thinking they could solve the problems of Europe by paperwork (and it imploded into World War II.) Some fell for it thinking that Iraq would be easy to sort out, and we have discovered our error.

In The Age of the Unthinkable, by J C Ramo, the author explores what the answer might be. How can we know the 'deep security' of an immune system in life that, like that of our bodies, is flexible and powerful enough to cope with the random and uncertain risks that come our way. He suggests cubism as a image to help understand modern complexity - we need to learn to see things from every angle. He says we need to learn:

Flexibility

- you may have a dream of what you want to do, but unless you constantly refine and update it, your chances of success are limited.

Seeing

the big picture, understanding that all sorts of things are interconnected, and learning to spot the potential. "Context is everything."

Empathy

opening your mind to others, and their ideas, even those you dislike.

What is Ramo's solution? The answer he suggest is to hand power over to as many as possible, so that you get an explosion of "curiosity, innovation and effort". You spread power instead of hoarding it. He offers the example of Wikipedia: "The average time between vandalism of a Wikipedia page and its repair is now less than five minutes. The average time to fix an error in that version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica you have on your shelves is, well, never... (And even if you bought a new edition, you'd have to wait years between version.)"

I'm not sure Ramo is totally right. Just to take the example of software, it is far from obvious that open source software is better than 'commercial'. However, perhaps there is much truth here, especially as we learn to be humble in the world God has made, and as we seek to value one another as free children of God..