What the LA Fires Teach
Stewart Brand is Wrong. We Are Not As Gods.
Know Thyself - Polly Young-Eisendrath on Substack
We are learning the lessons of fire. Again. The fires now burning in Los Angeles and the surrounding area have been catastrophic, massive, even biblical, and we all feel the horror, terror, and grief they bring. I also feel afraid and concerned for my friends and community in LA, as countless others do.
Sadly, what disasters seem to invite now is finger-pointing and blaming the “other side” for what they have not done to prevent future disasters. I hope for a different lesson from the fires of 2025. I want us to recognize, collectively and once and for all, that we are not gods.
In 1968, Steward Brand began the Whole Earth Catalog with the remarkable statement “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” Many have claimed, as I also believe, that 1968 and that statement, along with our ability to see the whole earth in photos, inaugurated our current tech revolution with its own brand of utopian ideologies. Many of the wealthiest and most intelligent people among us have been swept up into amassing fortunes as they have been investing in information, evidence, digital resources, surveillance, forecasting and data mining with the belief that the “data” will show us a safer and more sustainable way to live on earth and potentially in other places in our solar system. But hey, humans are too often wrong to pull off being super heroes of the solar system!
Even with our best machines, we have to interpret the “data” through our own limited first-person experiences because we are self-aware and believe in our individual experiences. Our interpretations always differ because we see/hear/feel things uniquely. Moreover, the earth is not “our planet” nor can we “save it” because we don’t own it. We live here, but we don’t run the place.
I don’t subscribe to any of the utopian ideology or fantasies of immortality now promoted and supported by those who put their faith in transhumanism and AI. When I look at recorded history, I do not see this kind of strategy ever working out. Significantly, recent utopian platforms (like, for example, National Socialism or communist Cuba) have led to horrible harms and crimes against humanity because they were under the control of a few greedy, fallible or even insane humans who became ever more short-sighted and mistaken because they felt like they were gods.
In 2025, we are learning once again how inaccurate we are in our forecasts about disasters and how mistaken in our utopian ideologies. On the other hand, because we are human and able to be aware of our own thoughts and actions, we can examine our mistakes and learn from them, if we stop blaming the “other” side.
For example, we can even learn wise lessons from our ancient past. Some of the best were developed by the Greeks, especially the poet and philosopher named Hesiod. He lived about 3250 years ago. His writings include moral and practical advice to humans about how to live among the gods. Although now we regard Greek gods as metaphors, when Hesiod was writing they were regarded as forces of nature.
The major god of fire is Prometheus. Notably, his name means “foresight” and he was clever at forecasting or so he believed. He governed fire and men (no women, yet) who were beholden to the gods for their survival. Prometheus decided to give fire to men, but he didn’t check it out with his CEO on Mount Olympus: Zeus. Zeus was furious because he knew that possessing fire meant men would no longer have faith in the gods.
To punish Prometheus for his wrong-doing, Zeus had him chained to a mountain where an eagle would eat out his liver every day, but the liver would grow back every night, so the eagle would return the next day — a punishment that any superhero movie would include. But Zeus’s punishment of humans is more subtle and intriguing. He presented Prometheus’s twin brother, Epimetheus – who was foolish and inept and whose name means “hindsight” – with a gift for men that would be equal to the boon of fire. Zeus sent a beautiful woman to Epimetheus. Her name was Pandora (that means “many gifts”) and she had the desirability and beauty of Aphrodite and the deceit of Hermes because she was crafted by Zeus and other Olympian gods to look like a goddess although she was human, the first woman. As the story goes, Pandora had lies and deceit in her chest in place of a heart. Epimetheus gave Pandora to men as his “gift”comparable to fire, given by his twin.
Pandora, like Epimetheus, was short-sighted. Her curiosity led her to open an earthenware jar in which had been buried all the maladies of the world, including death, disease, greed, hatred, madness and violence. When Pandora opened the lid, these evils escaped into the world, but she slammed it shut in a way that preserved hope -- still available on demand. And so, Prometheus’s gift of fire eventually led to human mortality because birth (women and reproduction) and death are bound together for humans. From then on, we became the “mortals” in contrast with the gods who were the “immortals.” Instead of assuming this whole story is simply a metaphor for our conflicting circumstances — that, for example, we begin dying when we are born and we know this — think of the story as a depiction of our reality and the limits of our circumstances amidst the forces of nature.
Hesiod teaches that we don’t manipulate fire for free. We do not have the immortality or the infallibility to master the forces of nature. And yet, we have the curiosity of Pandora and the forethought of Prometheus. We can look into our circumstances and get to know what works and what doesn’t work. Unlike the gods who are trapped in a rigid hierarchy, humans have the freedom to speak freely to each other, even across the lines of power, in ways that allow for negotiation and problem-solving. The gods cannot do this because of their eternally fixed identities. We have the flexibility of changing our minds, looking into what’s hidden and working within our real constraints. As the Buddha famously said, “Some here do not know that we will die, for those who do, quarrels end.” Knowing our limits, we can overcome our hostilities, negotiate our differences, and solve our problems together. We don’t command the world we live in, and both fire and death teach us that, but our nature allows for possibilities that are not available to the gods.
