My sermon today will be on “incompetence.” Perhaps I should begin by confessing, that when I typed the word at the top of my laptop screen, it came out “incmopetence.” (There are reasons I never became a concert pianist.)
It is a little-known fact, or else a well-known fact little acknowledged, that apart from earthquakes, volcanoes, tornadoes, meteor showers, and other disturbing acts of nature, human malice is not at the root of all human suffering. Much of it is caused by human incompetence, or as the incompetent like to call it, “bad luck.”
That BP blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, for instance. Everything we learn about it adds to an impression of general ineptitude, beginning on the drilling platform that burned and sank, and working back in multiple directions through company management, and regulatory authorities that signed off on every move.
Newspaper columnists are obliged to flag current events; and this example will do as well as any other. For while I have no expertise in deep-sea drilling myself—never once tried it—the people I’ve met who have at least some, assure me that what happened aboard Deepwater Horizon was not exactly unprecedented.
They remember, for instance, the Alpha Piper blowout in the North Sea, a generation ago. In that case, the magnificently incompetent act was a design oversight: locating the control room next to the gas compression unit, without a blast wall between. This meant that all the men who could give emergency evacuation orders would be killed in the first moment of the crisis. But marks were also awarded to the crews of two connected platforms, who, in the absence of orders to desist, continued pumping gas and oil into Alpha Piper when they could see it was on fire.
In the case of Deepwater Horizon, we learn that the rig was functioning under a trainee manager, and from other details that, practically speaking, no one was in charge.
One’s propensity to make jokes is somewhat deflected by the thought of all the men who were killed, in both cases. For both directly and indirectly, individually and “systemically,” human stupidity is among the leading proximate causes of human mortality.
Politicians try to pass laws against it; to create rules and regulations so complex and cumbersome that (as we saw in the BP disaster) an easily-corrupted “judgment call” bureaucracy must grant exemptions from them, in order for anything to function at all. When disaster strikes, they add more rules and regulations.
But more profoundly, the rules and regulations—once they pass a point of irreducible complexity—create a mindset in which those who should be thinking about safety are instead focused on rules and regulations. To those who see danger, the glib answer comes, citing all the safety standards that have been diligently observed. From what we already know, this appears to be exactly what happened aboard Deepwater Horizon, and will not be rectified by the U.S. government’s latest, very political decision, to use means both fair and foul to prosecute British Petroleum, and punish the rest of the oil industry for its mistakes.
Let me mention in passing that President Barack Obama was in no way responsible for the catastrophe, and that there is nothing he can do about it. He is being held to blame for “inaction,” as wrongly as his predecessor was held to blame over Hurricane Katrina, by media and public unable to cope with the proposition that, “Stuff happens.”
In a sense, Obama is hoist on his own petard. The man who blames Bush for everything now finds there are some things presidents cannot do. More deeply, the opposition party that persuades the public government can solve all their problems, discovers once in power there are problems government cannot solve.
Alas, it will take more time than they have to learn the next lesson: that governments which try to solve the insoluble, more or less invariably, make each problem worse.
I like to dwell on the wisdom of our ancestors. It took us millennia to emerge from the primitive notion that a malignant agency must lie behind every unfortunate experience. Indeed, the Catholic Church spent centuries fighting folk pagan beliefs in things like evil fairies, and the whole notion the Devil can compel any person to act against his will—only to watch an explosion of witch-hunting and related popular hysterias at the time of the Reformation.
In so many ways, the trend of post-Christian society today is back to pagan superstitions: to the belief that malice lies behind every misfortune, and to the related idea that various, essentially pagan charms can be used to ward off that to which all flesh is heir. The belief that, for instance, laws can be passed, that change the entire order of nature, is among the most irrational of these.
Sheer human stupidity is the cause of any number of human catastrophes—including the stupidity of superstition itself. We need to re-embrace this concept; to hug the native incompetence within ourselves, and begin forgiving it in others.
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