Natural Lightning Rods, Part II
Not just beautiful in parts, but in wholes.
(This is a continuation of an earlier post from quite a while ago - over a year, about a lightning rod on the white basswood tree in the Missouri Botanical Garden.)
The beauty I saw in this lightning rod was not just how the rod worked for the good of the tree, but also that the rod working for the good of that tree worked for the good of the other wholes it is part of: it makes the garden more of a garden and the city more of a city.
At a first glance, it may not seem surprising that a better tree makes a better garden, and a better (public) garden makes a better city. How could making a part better end up making the whole worse?
However, it's not hard to think of examples. A bigger tree can prevent other desirable plants from growing because it is big. Similarly, a bigger tree is one that is more dangerous when it falls over onto a house. For artifacts, a classic example in design literature is trying to make cars safer by making them stronger. This seems reasonable at first glance, right? However, making cars stronger meant that the force of the impact was more directly transferred to the rest of the car, meaning that the driver and passengers immediately fly out of their seats and towards the now-mostly-stationary car frame. The safer option, a notably weaker portion of the car called the crumple zone, causes the seats to decelerate more gradually.
Now, you may say that the strength of steel is not good because it is not good in all circumstances, or the size of the tree is not good because it is not good in all circumstances. For the Christian, they may say that none is good but God in heaven.1 Yet even then, doesn't Jesus tell us that he will be a source of division2 - is division good? For the modern left-leaning atheist, I can't see a single thing (outside of God) that is good in all circumstances, yet it would be strange to conclude there is no such thing as good and evil given how strongly that moral language pervades (and should pervade!) political discussion. For both, and for those in neither of those categories, I'm happy to chat on Discord if you'd like to take up this discussion further - I don't blame you if you remain unconvinced.
For willing readers, I can offer a time-tested idea of what good means here. St. Augustine, and St. Thomas Aquinas following him, consider a "privation theory" of evil. What this means is that evil does not have existence in itself, but it is always something that is always parasitic or reliant upon the good.3 Analogously, evil is an emptiness or a shadow. In other words, good can exist without evil, but evil can't exist without good. Rather than good and evil working like forces in opposite directions that can cancel each other out, evil needs some remaining part of the good to get anything done. Evil is always a twisting, a shifting, a misplacement or replacement.
What follows most directly from this definition of evil is that anything being good in itself is the precondition for both the thing being used for evil and used for good. There's a medieval dictum that expresses this the same: corruptio optimi pessima - the corruption of the best is the worst. A bigger tree, a stronger tree, a more powerful tree, a more tree-like tree, is good in itself, but the story doesn't end there.
The second point that follows is that the goodness of some whole is not the sum of the goodness of its parts. Rather, there is always something uncontained in the parts - specifically, how the parts come together in the right relation and proportion4 that needs to be considered when judging an artifact. Then, we must ask, what are the other wholes that the tree is part of?
A Tree in the Garden
First, this tree is part of a garden. A garden is a place where man tills and keeps things. There's an excellent symbolic history of a certain Garden in Genesis that God has designed. The garden is neither the natural without man nor the domination of man of nature - it is man with dominion over nature.
If the tree was in a forest, without man, it would also be a little silly to put a lightning rod on it. The good of the forest is a well-functioning ecosystem that demonstrates the infinity of God's goodness through diversity, both within the forest and relative to other ecosystems. Part of that functioning is the risk and the benefits of forest fires, which lightning rods would probably reduce. (Brandon on the Discord pointed this out directly - it was good to know that we were on the same page!) Additionally, a taller tree per se is not one that demonstrates the good of the ecosystem more directly.
If the tree was in a lumber forest, under the domination of man, the end would simply be the pale porridge of revenue, which at best dignifies labor in its generic way and at worst becomes a very generic (and therefore easily mis-directable) good. A taller tree is simply a tree that can be more directable by the whims of man by selling for more money, rather than glorifying the tree.
The garden is neither of those things: the tree is understood as a tree, not as wood, unlike the lumber forest, but unlike the natural forest, it is under the care of the people that maintain it. The lightning rod is not a fertilizer or magic potion to make it grow more but rather it is an umbrella for electrical tragedy, held up for protection like a dwelling protects a family.
A Garden in the City
Then, this garden is part of a city, not a private garden. If, for example, the tree was in my backyard, it would be a little silly to put a lightning rod on it. At a first pass, it is not common, so there can be an indication that folk wisdom would not treat a lightning rod as a reasonable safety precaution given common risks and common costs for it. Furthermore, there is not as much of a need to preserve the particular trees against such rare events. The good of the yard is for the good of the family, and the tree is related to that good, but only mildly so.
Rather, this garden is a public garden. There is some entrance fee, but the purpose of the garden is for the city and the region as a whole, being the Missouri Botanical Garden.5 There is a simple childlike glory for the city in having the largest tree of a certain species in the nation, just as it is beautiful when a man uses his body to challenge his body and do something as simple as jumping as far as he can.6
In representing the work of and being a service to many people, a city can strive for what in other cases could be unnatural. A full-time musician on a farm is in trouble, a full-time musician in the city is in the orchestra. To refer to an earlier example from Part I, Notre Dame is only built in Paris, not in Lisieux. (Lisieux remains as God's place to build.)
The point is that in designing this artifact - by adding this lightning rod to the tree - there is not simply the question of whether the thing works, but whether it works in context. Put another way, there is the consideration of how the parts of the artifact fit together into a whole, but there is also the consideration for how the whole artifact fits with the other, larger wholes.
Mark 10:18
Matthew 10:34
Summa Theologica, I.Q48.A1
For a little bit longer discussion of relation and proportion (though not much longer) see Love Christ, Make Better Tech
Aquinas makes an offhand comment his Treatise on Law that indicates the medieval understanding of the city is not just the population center (within the walls) but also the farms around it, which follows from the city being the self-sufficient society. I like this idea.
Secret Base (Jon Bois). The Bob Emergency: a study of athletes named Bob, Part II | Chart Party. Beginning at the 1:00 mark is a beautiful story of Bob Beamon and his jump.