Fate and the Marshall Fire

That arbitrary, capricious, whimsical force called luck visited Boulder County last week in the form of patchwork destruction. Up to a thousand homes and buildings in a single day were reduced to rubble, the result of some combination of a bone-dry prairie, a hurricane-force wind, and a spark from who-knows-what. Some homes managed to escape the fire's ravages even as neighboring houses were completely obliterated, the tell-tale mark of that invisible, otherwise undetectable, force known only by its works, luck.

One might plausibly argue that the enormous damage was actually a reflection of man's hubristic desire to domesticate nature. After all, grassland fires have visited the prairies somewhat regularly over the centuries such that the wanton construction of suburban housing therein quite literally "tempted fate." It is here where luck intersects with prudence.

Our focus, however, will be less on any lack of prudence at the wholesale level than on the role of chance at the individual level. For instance, what accounted for the micro-wind patterns that determined such a seemingly-random selection of targets.

First, though, we look for context to our MM 6/10/19 Good/Bad . . We'll See session and the notion that individual events can rarely be judged as good or bad in isolation but only in the fullness of time, as each speculative path opens the way onto a thousand new possibilities -- of little solace, of course, to those whose near-term lives have been so dramatically upended. 

And, so, we are left to ponder what sort of metaphysics might be at play. Some might argue there is no such power, that the understanding of the cause-and-effect is just a matter of further, and more precise, investigation outside our current reach. Others might attribute this power of contingent outcomes to some sort of Divine Providence.

Such was the subject of Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey in which a Franciscan friar sought evidence of Divine Providence through the painstaking investigation of the five casualties in the 1714 collapse of an Inca rope bridge near Lima, Peru. After six years and the compilation of a huge book chronicling the lives of and among the victims to measure spiritual traits, both the friar and the book were publicly burned for heresy. 

We might apply the San Luis Rey question to more modern-day instances of apparent randomness like those who barely caught or missed the flight on a doomed airliner or happened to be present just as a bridge or condominium collapsed or found themselves right there at the wrong time in Boulder’s King Soopers store last March. Or, at this different level, those whose homes were caught in the wrong eddy of the firestorm.

Perhaps, then, our inquiry might expand into an overall look at whether one’s destiny is defined by a series of random contingencies, as applied to both nature and nurture. Compare that view to the certainty of Aristoltle and Heraclitis that character is destiny. We might, though, leave the whole question of fate, free will and contingencies to Herman Melville’s when he wrote, “chance has the last featuring blow at events.”