BackFlight 370 and the uncertainty principle
What explains this obsessive fascination with the missing flight that seems to cut across every possible human differentiator?
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“When the elephant disappeared from our town’s elephant house, I read about it in the newspaper." Thus begins the celebrated Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami’s famous short story, The Elephant Vanishes. A Boeing 777 is the modern, technological equivalent of an elephant—both in terms of dimensions and potential for disappearing without a trace. When this flying elephant vanished from the sky one March afternoon, the entire world read about it in the newspapers. Heard about it on television. Blogged about it, tweeted about it, and posted and liked and shared and argued about it on social and asocial media.
Considered purely in terms of relevance, the news was irrelevant for most of the world. Most people who were tracking it did not have relatives on board Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. Most of them will never fly a Malaysian Airlines flight, or a Boeing 777. A substantial number of them are unlikely to even step inside an aircraft ever. And yet, the event of the flight’s disappearance was widely reported, and its attempted recovery avidly followed.
More than anybody else, it is, of course, the kin of the 227 passengers and 12 crew members who deserve to know what exactly happened. If not answers, at the least, they needed closure, and they got it on Monday when the Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, picking his words carefully, informed them that Flight MH370 had “ended in the southern Indian Ocean". Not crashed, but ended. This wasn’t a discovery—it was a deduction.
Employees of a British satellite and telecommunications firm, Inmarsat, carried out a week-long, pizza-fuelled, data-crunching exercise in a glass-panelled office in London, thousands of miles away from where the aeroplane was last located by a tracking system, to conclude, on the basis of available data, that there was “no hope of finding survivors"—a message which the Malaysian prime minister duly relayed, through the international media, to the relatives of those whose lives had also “ended" where MH370 had “ended".
But closure, of course, does not mean anything has been explained. The global audience that has followed the story of MH370 continues to be transfixed by the disappearance of a large aircraft. So what explains this obsessive fascination that seems to cut across nationality, age, race, class, and perhaps every known human differentiator?
Is it the fear of death and of the fragility of our existence, as this writer suggests? But existence—from Afghanistan to Somalia to Vidarbha—has always been a fragile one for most of humanity, and for much of history, and all of us who read newspapers and watch television or surf the Internet have always known it.
Is it then the terror of being off the grid, as this essay argues—“the surprise that in our digitally monitored era, people and objects can still somehow vanish". Or does it have something to do with the very human yearning for a remnant of mystery, for a sign, however ambiguous, that even in a world where every single element of reality has been mapped out and transformed into data, it is still possible for an individual entity to elude the omniscient system?
While there might be some truth in all of this—fear of death, terror of being off the grid, comfort in the possibility of evading the powerful, all-knowing system—there is one element that is common to all these explanations for why MH370 has caught the imagination of the world: uncertainty.
Modern industrial civilization and the edifice of technology and all its multifarious accomplishments rest on one fundamental principle: the elimination of uncertainty. Another name, a value-laden one, for uncertainty, is risk. From weather forecasts to insurance policies to credit appraisals and genetic engineering, modern man’s biggest battle has been not so much against nature as against uncertainty (which nature has a lot to do with). And the one industry where it is absolutely necessary for uncertainty to be stamped out is aviation—for any uncertainty here automatically becomes a matter of life and death. Thus any event that scuppers, and mocks, the principle of certainty, especially in the world of civil aviation, strikes a blow at the very heart of modern industrial civilization.
Three weeks after taking off from Kuala Lumpur, the fate of MH370 continues to remain shrouded in uncertainty. To say that the aircraft lies, in bits and pieces, somewhere in the Indian Ocean, is only to parrot the most likely probability—to voice to a data projection into the past. While it may have real consequences in the real world—say, to do with insurance claims, etc—by itself, it is of no more existential consequence than a weather forecast that may or may not come true. The reason is simple: No debris has so far been found to substantiate this conclusion.
In any case, the moment Flight 370 disappeared from terrestrial radar, its existence, as also the existence of all the passengers and crew on board, had shifted into a symbolic realm, into the realm of conjecture—a realm not unlike the world of Murakami’s fiction, which is replete with unexplained disappearances of humans and animals. As it happens, even satellite data, which formed the basis of the Malaysian prime minister’s announcement, belong to the semiotic realm of signs and signals that need to be decoded for meaning—not to the realm of fire and oceans or life and death.
According to the narrator of Murakami’s short story, one reason why the vanishing of the elephant was so intriguing to the people of his town was because it violated the principle of unity. Everything—all things that exist and happen in this universe—must ultimately be accountable to the one principle that guides us in our day-to-day life of travel and commute and consumption to which MH370 belongs. This unifying principle is the principle of certainty. When it is violated, it inevitably comes as a shock.
It is a different matter that the principle of certainty might get regularly broken at the individual level—the laptop crashes, the phone gets lost, or a trusted friend betrays you. While such things do happen, they do not pose a challenge to the systemic certainty that continues to define the way we are in the world—the laptop can be repaired and data recovered, you may buy another phone, you make new friends.
But an elephantine aircraft that vanishes from the sky and defies recovery, defies technology, and defies human explanation, is something else altogether. It shatters the bedrock of certainty on which we base our lives. It reveals our unquestioning faith in technology to be nothing more than a comforting fiction. And fiction, if it has to work in the Internet age, needs—even more than the Aristotelian unities of time, place and action—the Murakamian unities of design and function. Not only does the disappearance of Flight MH370 disrupt the unity of the world we’ve designed for ourselves (in our heads), it also undermines our notions of how it works. We don’t like it. We don’t know how to deal with it.
Yet for all that, as the narrator of The Elephant Vanishes dispassionately observes, “The earth would continue its monotonous rotations, politicians would continue issuing unreliable proclamations, people would continue yawning on their way to the office, children would continue studying for their college-entrance exams." It is this background hum of banal, quotidian certainty that lends a troubling poignancy to the extraordinary break with certainty that MH370 now represents.
And in what must seem like a perverse twist of irony, all the multiple narratives of uncertainty that have emerged around the disappearance of Flight 370 and the 239 people who were on board, now perforce have to converge on a singular locus of certainty—in the words of Murakami’s nameless narrator, “They will never be coming back."
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