How can we dance...?

It is a common belief that doing nothing, taking no action, is intrinsically safe in most situations. If you do not move you cannot put yourself into trouble, you will not stumble or bump into someone, or even go in the wrong direction. And when things are reasonably good you might not even have a reason to try to change anything. This is the case that I pointed out a couple of weeks ago: when you have been favored by the lottery of life you perceive the world as a fair enough place to live in which could as well stay the way it is. But inaction is much less safe than it looks at first sight.

In the real of software development, there is a common mantra: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. This idea is the source of frequent debate among programmers and their managers, because software has the virtue of not experiencing wear and tear. Programs are digital entities that can be copied without error and whose integrity can be unambiguously verified, so the same program can be transferred from one computer to the next and keep running for years without any degradation, so the managers would be inclined to invest as little effort (a.k.a. money) in its maintenance as possible. On the other hand, developers who are forced to dive into old programs because they eventually prove to contain an error that needs to be fixed frequently resent the fact that they are written in languages that nobody understand anymore or that the documentation is incomplete, making the software essentially unmaintainable. In these cases the developer would typically suggest to rewrite the program in a more modern way to ensure that futures updates are easier and the manager would reluctantly accept, because the alternative would be to keep the program untouched and keep using it with the exception of the known faulty feature. However, this option is only available in the digital world.

Photo: Russell Charters

The moment you start dealing with physical devices, good old wear swings right in. Surfaces get scratched, joints erode, iron rusts, and while not doing anything will probably be OK for a certain period of time, in every single case inaction will eventually become a smaller or greater risk. If you do not check the fill state of your fountain pen you might find yourself unprepared to take notes, which is probably not a serious issue. But if you do not check the fill state of your gas tank you might find yourself stranded with your car in the middle of Mohave desert and that is a much more serious situation. Good engineers always try to strike a balance between the frequency of the maintenance and the cost of the repairs: if you check very often, you will be able to detect defect very early on, so the repairs will probably be short and cheap, but you will have to pay the labor for the checks; if you space the checks apart you can save in labor costs, but by the time you check them again the damaged pieces might be irreparable or, still worse, the device might break while in operation, driving up the cost of the repairs. So one way or another, it is indeed convenient not so much to fix things as to prevent them from breaking.

Immaterial things, like concepts, ideas and laws are not subject to wear in the mechanical sense, but they still require maintenance for a very different reason: they are meant to operate on top of a group of people, a nation, a club, the whole humanity, and the fact that humans change means that they also have to adapt. The Code of Hammurabi was groundbreaking back in its day because it laid out what punishments were to be imposed for the infractions of the law, but it also says that if a doctor causes the death or the blindness of a patient, he should lose the hand, which would be an absolutely unacceptable punishment in today's Western societies. The Code is nowadays completely obsolete because it still rooted in the customs of almost 3800 years ago.

Modifications in the environment are one important reason why inaction becomes riskier the longer it lasts. Imagine that you are having a picnic in a dry riverbed on a sunny day and suddenly you see a big cloud coming over. At that point it is probably fine if you keep nibbling at you finger sandwiches and chatting with your friends. When the rain starts to fall, you might decide that it is hot anyway so getting wet is not so much of an issue. But the longer you wait the more likely it is that a flash flood will be heading your way. If you insist on not taking action you might eventually be washed away by the river swell. That is why, while a bit of inaction is generally safe, prolonging it too much is bound to be become catastrophic sooner or later.

The risk of inaction is beautifully illustrated in the 1946 poem "First they came..." by German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller. It states how, when the Nazis put the communists in concentration camps nobody complained, because they were not communists and who wants to take a fall for communists anyway? Then they proceeded with the incurably ill, which were only half-living so it was almost a mercy. And as history progressed, more and more groups were being purged until it was the author's turn, but by then nobody was around to help them out of the trouble.

This idea came to me this morning when I inexplicably started to hum the 1987 song "Beds are burning" by the Australian band Midnight Oil. The story goes that they had just toured the Australian Outback performing, among others, in front of aboriginal communities. and witnessing first hand the deplorable conditions that successive governments (first the colonial ones then their own) had imposed upon the native inhabitants of the continent. The song decries the hypocrisy of the silent spectators that see the injustice and the violence and do nothing to prevent them. 

How can we dance when our Earth is turning?
How do we sleep when our bed are burning?

It is not easy to move forward any kind of social change, but the least that the decent people can do is to admit that their is a problem to start with. If everybody insist on denying it or waiving it away there would be no way to solve it. Only once the situation is visible to a sufficiently big fraction of the society will there be the energy required to set the change in motion. So next time that you feel like your bed is burning because of a problem in your community you can at least think of speaking about it. Even if you have no other means to contribute to a solution, making it known will already help and, with some luck, your sleepless night will eventually pay off once the situation is finally solved. Have a nice evening.