London's Burning

On September 7th, 1940, the German Luftwaffe bombed London after a smattering of RAF attacks on Berlin.  Particularly excited by this turn of events was Hermann Goering, who telegrammed his wife Emmy and bragged "I've sent my bombers to London!  London's burning!"  The irony, of course, was that the shift by the Luftwaffe to the bombing of London provided a respite to RAF Fighter Command that was essentially on the ropes by that point in time, running short on aircraft and especially short on pilots.  Now, 71 years later after Germany failed to destroy England's defenses, London is once more on fire, but this time her own people are doing the deed.

There may be a handful of surviving RAF pilots who are now asking themselves just why they flung their Hurricanes and Spitfires into the sky against the Messerschmidts and Heinkels, if the end result was going to be angry mobs burning down shops, houses, and businesses.  Did they suspect that the nation of England might well be destroyed by the barbarians from within? 

There doesn't seem to necessarily be an easy way to categorize the riots.  Nativists would try to point to immigration or race as being the source of the problem, but there were plenty of pictures of Anglo-Saxon looking folking swinging heavy objects at police cars or being dragged off by riot cops.  Marxists, on the other side of the fence, would try to blame lack of economic opportunity, but can a convincing case be made when a Sony distribution facility was targeted and looted?  (I tend to doubt that anyone is going to put "The Internationale" on their stolen iPods)

It goes without saying that there won't be any shortage of opinions on the cause of these riots (and other ones around the world).  I don't think it's unlikely that we'll begin seeing the same sort of thing start to occur in America, either.  However, one explanation lies in complexity theory, the branch of mathematics which deals with spontaneous organization of patterns.  In short, complexity theory notes that patterns can arise where they didn't previously exist, generally caused by energy entering a semi-closed system.  An example of this is a neon sign -- neon gas just sits in the tube until electricity is applied, when the molecules begin to glow.  An even better example is a spontaneous traffic jam -- for no real reason, cars begin slowing en masse, until traffic slows to a crawl.  Just as quickly, it can dissipate, the road becoming clear once more, without anyone really knowing the cause.  Yet another example is the action of acts defending their colony or digging a nest.

While we see the effect of destabilizing industrial society in the riots, complex systems also seem to exist at a higher level in places like Washington.  A poster commented here a couple of weeks ago about the debt crisis solving itself, if the government would simply quit spending.  We look at the "debt ceiling deal," and ask just how each party can support something so meaningless, claim some victory, blame the other side, and kick the can down the road.  On top of that, we ask how someone like Alan Greenspan can just say that the printing presses can keep running, or Bernake can just float a trial balloon about QE3?  The answer is that our system of leadership has taken on a particularly rigid and chaotic pattern after years of energy inputs in the form of lobbying, power grabs over budgeting, and everything else that goes with fighting over the spoils in a late-state empire. 

The pattern which has emerged is very much like that traffic jam -- nothing is going anywhere and no one really knows why, even though there's no wreck on the road, no construction to channel the traffic down to one lane.  Nothing moves, nothing changes, it just keeps plodding on to the inevitable point where it collapses into chaos, once there is no more energy to feed into the system.