Think Ahead – By Looking Back

By Shlomo Maital

     People, businesses, governments – all are in general notoriously myopic.  We live for, plan for, think about tomorrow, not the next decade or century.  We wrap our planet in a blanket of CO2 and tell our grandchildren to deal with it.

     How can this fatal flaw be overcome?  Bina Venkataraman is a Washington Post columnist, former Obama science advisor, and author of the book The Optimist’s Telescope: Thinking Ahead In A Reckless Age.    Here is an excerpt from her recent TED talk: 

      “In 2011, a magnitude 9 earthquake hit Japan, causing massive tsunamis, one of which flooded the nuclear plant in Fukushima. Chemical explosions damaged surrounding towns.  This disaster led to a meltdown of the nuclear reactors and displaced hundreds of thousands of people and killed many.    There were still more than 100,000 people in 2017, six years later, displaced by that nuclear disaster. One of the things that was so interesting to think about and learn was how the company that ran the nuclear power plant, TEPCO – how they had thought about planning for the future at the time. TEPCO had done a risk analysis, but it hadn’t looked far enough into the past. And what was interesting to learn was the high contrast between what happened in Fukushima and what happened in Onagawa, Japan in 2011.

     When I was there, I learned about the Onagawa nuclear power station, which was even closer to the epicenter of that earthquake than the infamous Fukushima Daiichi that we all know about. 

     In Onagawa, people in the city actually fled to the nuclear power plant as a place of refuge. It was that safe. It was spared by the tsunamis. It was the foresight of just one engineer, Yanosuke Hirai, that made that happen. In the 1960s, he fought to build that power plant farther back from the coast at higher elevation and with a higher seawall.

      He knew the story of his hometown shrine, which had flooded in the year 869 after a tsunami. It was his knowledge of history that allowed him to imagine what others could not.  Yes.  A thousand years – more than a thousand years before, you have a tsunami that floods a shrine, and the story gets carried forward – the Jogan earthquake of 869. So there was a marker in his hometown shrine.

      And there are actually markers in other areas of Japan that have survived from that particular earthquake. So there’s a place called Murohama where, on the top of a particular hill, in 869, people had fled to the top of that hill, thinking that was a safe place during an earthquake, given the risk of tsunami, to flee. And, in fact, it was one of the worst places you could go because two tsunamis, sort of two big waves crested over the hill and killed the people who had fled to the top of this hill.

      And so the people who survived this disaster who weren’t on the top of the hill decided to mark that place and to have that marker stay intact and the story of it taught to local schoolchildren and sort of passed on through the generations.

       So part of this future planning is taking the long view backwards and forwards.”

       Take a long view BACKWARDS!  Yanosuke Hirai was aware of a tsunami that occurred in 869, some 1,130 years earlier, and designed the future nuclear power plan to withstand another, similar one.   

        A Talmudic saying goes:  Know where you came from, and where you are headed.

        Knowing history can give us a longer perspective on the future.  If you fail to study where you came from, how can you truly know where you are going?  It is a great shame that studying history, like most of the liberal arts such as philosophy and literature, are being degraded or shut down, in our universities. 

         Jewish people gear up for the future by studying the timeless, vivid narratives in the Bible, ones that took place 2,500 years ago.  When we ignore the lessons in them, we pay a price.   The Biblical narratives, when we pay attention to them, give us a unique kind of telescope – one that not only can peer far into the future, but one that also peers way back in time, with great accuracy.  

         As Mark Twain said:  “History does not repeat itself.  But it does rhyme.”  He meant that details change, circumstances change, settings change, names change,  but similar events recycle.