Introduction
This piece ended up being longer than I originally thought it would be. As with most topics I cover, it’s complicated and multifaceted, and I can’t resist elucidating that complexity. The topic of this piece might also be frustrating, I’ll be pointing out what I believe is a problem without providing any kind of solution. Pointing out a problem is easy, doing the work to think of a solution is more difficult, but what’s even more frustrating is that I’m not sure this problem has a solution. What problem am I referring to? The way in which people, both individually and as a society respond to a man-made disaster.
Some of my favorite episodes of the satirical cartoon South Park aired shortly after the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The plot of the episodes are too absurd to explain without going into detail, but in the episodes there is a superhero called Captain Hindsight. He has the power of perfect hindsight, and he arrives at the site of every disaster to tell first responders what should have been done to avoid the disaster. Then he leaves without doing anything to help clean up, or help any of the victims. The character of Captain Hindsight and the episodes he appears in are classic South Park, simultaneously mocking BP and the people who suddenly became offshore drilling experts overnight so they could self-righteously blame BP for their mistakes. I want to expand on the idea behind Captain Hindsight: people’s tendency to quickly and strongly assign blame after a disaster, and who or what they decide to blame. How often do people accurately diagnose the circumstances and causes that led to a disaster? I’d argue that in the short term, people’s view of a disaster is understandably but fatally narrow and superficial. By the time a wider and more objective assessment is finally done, it’s too late to be useful.
We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Courthouse
A common pattern after a man-made disaster that one can observe, is that someone will lose their job or be put in prison, or in an especially brutal system executed as punishment for the negligence, incompetence, or callousness that allowed the disaster to happen. It’s also a well known phenomenon that a few individuals get scapegoated to keep the blame narrowly focused on them, so that some people can escape scrutiny, or so that wider institutional problems are ignored or overlooked. As I said above, as with most human behavior, this is understandable to a point. We don’t like to confront the uncomfortable truth that reality is chaotic and meaningless, and that at any point a legion of big and small mistakes or missteps could cascade into an avalanche of pain and suffering. What might be even more frightening to contemplate, is how often these disasters are narrowly avoided, and we never have any clue how close we came to untimely death or hideous injury. When something does happen to upend our lives, it’s easier, and it makes us feel better if we can lay all the blame and responsibility at the feet of a few people. It allows us to sleep easier when we don’t have to look deeper at the institutional or societal causes of calamities. I want to very briefly look at two events in particular to explain what I mean by institutional and societal causes, the 2018 and 2019 crashes of two Boeing 737 MAX aircraft that combined killed nearly 350 people.
Obviously for the sake of brevity I will make my summary of these crashes cursory, but if you are interested authors have literally devoted entire books to the subject. Boeing wanted to release a larger version of the 737 airliner with bigger and more efficient turbofan engines to compete with Airbus’ A320 Neo. To get the new version of their decades old plane released to airline customers quickly, and to avoid the long and expensive process of getting the MAX certified as a brand new airliner, Boeing used a software system to correct the handling changes to the plane caused by the position and greater thrust of the new engines, in lieu of an engineering solution. Even more crucially, part of Boeing’s sales pitch for the MAX was that current 737 pilots would not need simulator training to transition to the MAX, a long and expensive process for airlines. So, the software system that corrected the nose up tendency of the MAX (abbreviated as MCAS) was specifically left out of the pilot’s manual for the new aircraft.
Effectively, the MCAS misbehaving is what destroyed two aircraft, and led to hundreds of deaths. In one crash a sensor was installed incorrectly on the ground by maintenance crews, that faulty sensor fed incorrect information to MCAS. That is obviously an important part of the crash, and analyzing the behavior and decisions of the pilots in both crashes is an important part of disaster reconstruction as well. None of that analysis, or other mistakes made before the loss of both MAX aircraft absolves Boeing, however. In the company’s haste to release a new airliner they cut corners, and they created a dangerous aircraft as a result.
After the 2018 and 2019 accidents, many were quick to blame the pilots of the Indonesian and Ethiopian airlines that were flying the planes for the accidents, claiming that the training standards of the pilots were not up to those of American or Western standards. I don’t know if that’s strictly true, and even if it is I think that line of thinking gets uncomfortably close to racist assumptions of white and Western superiority, so extreme caution is needed when broaching that subject.
This is the pattern with people and man-made disasters. There are usually always mistakes made on the day of a disaster by those present on scene, and are the final catalyst for the worst possible scenario. People tend to latch on to these mistakes, and viciously criticize those who made the mistakes as the only ones responsible. Only later does a greater examination of the deeper institutional flaws begin to shed more light on the deep context that leads to needless tragedy. Rarely however, do people look even deeper, at the society that created the institutions that cause disasters.
Let’s return to the 737 MAX crashes again as an example. If we follow the chain of culpability and responsibility, at the end of that chain we find the pilots and maintenance crew of the particular aircraft that crashed. If we go back further on the chain we find Boeing, a company that built a dangerous aircraft where an accident was probably bound to happen, a company that spent more money on stock buybacks than they did on research and development. What if we follow the chain of responsibility even further back? What kind of society creates an airline company that cares more about enriching shareholders than it does about making a safe aircraft? What kind of values does a society have that creates people who value profit over human life?
This is another reason why people are so quick to assign blame based on superficial calculations of causes and responsibilities. It’s a lot easier to throw the people in the immediate vicinity under the bus than it is to follow the chain of culpability upward. Those higher up that chain are also eager to deflect responsibility away from themselves. After the MAX crashes Boeing was forced to compensate the airlines and pay the families of the victims, but how is that justice? Who else can get away with killing hundreds of people and only be forced to pay a fine? Even as this piece is being written long after the two crashes, the US justice is still deciding whether or not they should hold Boeing criminally liable. If it’s that difficult to punish a company for criminal negligence, how do you hold a society to account? A society is such a big and amorphous concept it’s impossible to know where to begin. How do you change a society to make it less prone to creating the conditions for man-made catastrophes, what do you change, where do you make changes? The title of my book seems appropriate here, these all seem to be a lot of questions without any obvious answers.
This question of societal culpability is so complex it can leave one spinning in circles. A moment ago I said that the US justice department spent years deciding whether or not Boeing getting 350 people killed is a crime worth prosecuting. That in of itself is one reason why the MAX crashes happened. The US was not unique in this attitude, but it was a country that always treated crimes committed by rich people with kid gloves. As long as you did terrible things in a fancy boardroom while wearing an expensive suit, odds are you would be treated lightly by the legal system in the United States. Let’s imagine that a group of gunmen carried out two separate, devastating shootings that combined killed just under 350 people in the United States. Would the US legal system hesitate to punish the gunmen? Now let’s imagine an airplane manufacturer designs a fatally flawed airliner that gets just under 350 people killed in two plane crashes. Should the US legal system hesitate to punish the manufacturer? If the answer to that question is yes, why? Is it because the manufacturer didn’t set out with the express intention of killing hundreds of people? Does the goal of wanting to make as much money while spending as little as possible absolve you from the deaths you’re responsible for? Does killing hundreds of people accidentally make any difference to the dead? It’s my understanding that you’re just as dead irrespective of whether or not your death is an accidental or intentional. Because Boeing killed through negligence that makes it okay? Because they killed with meetings and memos rather than with guns it makes it not a crime? Because the blame is spread through more people in the company than a few gunmen that makes it less criminal? These are the kinds of societal values that can lead to disaster.
The issue of who to punish, how, and why in relation to Boeing and the MAX crashes is a complicated question. There’s more to the story that I haven’t even mentioned either, like Boeing’s relationship with the FAA, which in part makes regulators and lawmakers culpable as well. Just because an issue is complicated, however, doesn’t mean nothing should be done. That would mean crime is legal, as long as you can make your crimes complicated enough that the justice system won’t touch it with a ten foot pole.
Conclusion
Every man-made disaster is a series of misjudgments, mistakes, miscalculations, and negligent behavior. In assigning blame for a catastrophe, most people are satisfied with fixing all their ire on a few people, or a few immediate factors. Why? Because it’s easy. Blaming and punishing a few people doesn’t require a lot of thought, and it doesn’t require any changes. Altering the attitudes and assumptions of an institution or an entire society takes work, and honest introspection. That kind of introspection and change are difficult enough without interference, and those in power and authority definitely interfere. Anyone who has a vested interest in the status quo remaining unchanged are loath to see their power threatened, even if that means getting people killed in the process. How do we overcome that resistance, and how do we make human societies better at spotting their flaws and correcting them before they lead to unnecessary tragedy? Frankly, I have no clue. Human societies have been around for a long time, and a lot of ideas have been tried, and to my knowledge none of them have been very good at self-correction. My only advice for the United States is to stop glorifying greed and start treating white collar crime the same as any other crime, you know, like the rule of law says we should. That would be a good place to start.
Postscript: I was inspired to write this piece after reading two books by the author Adam Higginbotham. The first is called Midnight in Chernobyl, about the world’s worst nuclear disaster (so far at least). The second is called Challenger, and it’s about the space shuttle explosion in 1986. Both books are highly entertaining and readable while also looking decades back from both disasters to seek out greater context and insight into why both events happened the way they did. If you want to read a book on the Boeing 737 MAX crashes, then I recommend Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing, by Peter Robison. I’ll provide a link to all three books below.
Midnight in Chernobyl: https://bookshop.org/p/books/midnight-in-chernobyl-the-untold-story-of-the-world-s-greatest-nuclear-disaster-adam-higginbotham/15129431?ean=9781501134630
Challenger: https://bookshop.org/p/books/challenger-an-american-tragedy-adam-higginbotham/20712668?ean=9781982176617
Flying Blind: https://bookshop.org/p/books/flying-blind-the-737-max-tragedy-and-the-fall-of-boeing-peter-robison/17204663?ean=9780593082515
P.S.S. Just before publishing this piece I read a news article about how the US Justice Department was likely seeking a plea deal from Boeing rather than a criminal trial to prosecute Boeing for the MAX crashes. The future will tell if that came to pass, but I’m not optimistic about Boeing actually going to trial. I’m not a lawyer so I don’t understand a lot of the intricacies of the law, nor do I want to. The more I learn of the legal system, the more convinced I am that arcane bureaucracy and injustice are synonyms.
Aside from my personal feelings about the injustice of the law, this lack of accountability on Boeing’s part is exactly the kind of thing I’ve been talking about in this piece, and There’s more than One Way to Skin a Democracy. Under what delusion is the US government, and the public at large operating under? Do they simply expect that massive corporations, whose only modus operandi is to make money will protect people and the environment out of the goodness of their hearts? Of course they won’t, corporations need to be forced to behave ethically, and that’s done with scrutiny and enforcement. If you refuse to punish companies like Boeing for killing hundreds of people, they will learn they can get away with it, and that in turn creates a society of negligence and callousness, which in turn creates a vicious cycle that feeds on itself. You can’t give corporations a blank check to do whatever they want, and be surprised when they abuse that blank check. We either need to revoke that blank check, or stop being surprised when they abuse it.