Recent questions, from Louisiana disaster preparedness to timelines for troop withdrawal, hinge on a deep question of, “What can we know?” Specifically, I’m interested in the following difficulty: human models give us enormous power by predicting the future fairly well, but they seem to be always insufficient in the worst possible ways.

If chaos and critical states (and Heisenberg and human complexity) weren’t enough to spoil our knowledge of the future, there seems to be a necessary irrationality to reality. Unless we’re cooking with controlled experiments and Capitalized Abstracts, the devil is always in the details– from explaining history to solving moral dilemmas, we can’t get away from trouble, because there’s still an infinitude that we’ve been unable to capture by our theories and measurements. It’s a miracle of river-splitting proportions that our human game of mathematics can provide any comfort.

As a obsessive model-maker, I’d like to believe that it’s possible to capture some features of any process, and have it be enough to fool some of the future some of the time. I’m fairly certain I’ll never have proof that I can get that much, and no more, but it’s worked so far. What does that leave us with, though? Disaster. Catastrophe. Terrorist Action. The unexpected, unexplained, unaccounted for.

In some sense, our drive to model the universe creates these features. The unexplained is our greatest threat because we care so much about explaining. If we build a better model, the most it can do is provide a hidden potential for a new critical state– an unseen reservoir for everything left over to ferment in until the pressure is great enough that our world pops.

So we come to the real problem: why bother? Why develop new antibiotics when it leads to deadlier bacteria for our children? Why build stronger levees when there will always a storm strong enough to burst them? Why fight oil use when the human drive to use up any available resource and butt against new misery is as natural as water to a level surface?

I do think there’s part of a reason, but it can’t be about averting the unexpected. Since I spent this long posing the question, I’ll just sketch today was seems to me to be an answer (I don’t have more yet). I think it has to be about finding a way of life, rather than solutions to problems (I can rant some other time about how life isn’t a solution). We need to concentrate on ways to live healthy lives, individually and as a society, physically and psychologically. We still learn from disaster– not about the disaster, but about ourselves (because the unexpected is usually a direct result of our efforts). We’re still concerned with the future– more so, I think. But the future isn’t taken to be a string of possible unexpectedness, even though it’s that too. Instead, we worry about the harm or the kindness we’re bringing about in it by the actions and attitudes we take now, irrespective of the new challenges that are bound to appear.

The pragmatic fact that such an approach calms many of the fate’s furies– terrorism to consumerism– is another miracle. Of reincarnative proportions, that one.