He learned how to light a fire at the Boy Scouts, but his fireplace hasn't burned in 25 years. Sociologist Joop Goudsblom is in awe of fire and wrote a book about it:Fire and civilization, now a classic published in eight languages. Kennislink interviewed him on the occasion of the 2015 reissue.
What prompted such an extensive work on fire?
“The book grew out of a movie I once saw, La guerre du feu , in which a primitive humanoid managed to chase away a pack of wolves thanks to a burning branch. I immediately associated this image with power, an important concept in sociology. In every situation in which people find themselves, power plays an important role. This image showed so clearly the power difference between humans and other animals. The human monopoly on fire use marked a definitive shift in the balance of power. Humans took over the animal kingdom and the animals became more and more defenseless.”
You call fire 'an expensive institution', what do you mean by that?
“It's a variation of 'expensive tissue', a designation of the brain by paleoanthropologist Leslie Aiello because it requires so much energy to function. You can also call a social institution such as fire 'expensive', because the use of fire requires constant care and attention. Already in hunter-gatherer cultures, a lot of time was spent maintaining the fire, in which women played an important role. They had to make sure that the fire did not go out and it had to be protected against attacks from enemies, who wanted to run away with it or just extinguish it. It was also necessary that the fire did not get out of hand and became uncontrollable. Children learned to deal with fire at an early age.”
But current events show that the use of fire is getting out of hand, given all the firearms that are now in circulation…
“You can talk about this theme in a very relativistic way. As long as there have been cities and people have the capacity to start fires, every human being has been a potential arsonist. Arson has never been carried out on a large scale in peacetime, although regional 'epidemics' did occur in rural France and Russia between 1600 and 1900. From the beginning of fire control, people have used fire both productively, for example for cooking such as the biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham beautifully describes, as destructive, what we see in wars and attacks. We can only hope that national governments' monopoly on violence is strong enough to effectively suppress individual or organized tendencies toward arson.”
“9/11 is a stark example. We then saw that fire is far more destructive than we ever thought possible. It was probably also much more destructive than the perpetrators of the attack had thought. The twin towers should have withstood a Boeing, but due to the amount of fuel in an airplane that just took off, the fire was huge. I think Osama Bin Laden didn't know what he was seeing when that unexpectedly large conflagration hit his television screen. He undoubtedly rubbed his hands.”
In spite of the destructive use of fire, can we still maintain that fire control is a form of civilization?
“However fire is used, productively or destructively, there is always a collective learning process on how to deal with fire. Therefore, sociologically, it is part of human civilization. The older generation teaches the younger generation how to handle and use fire. In our society there is a strong division of labor:in our time and society the fire is mainly kept by professionals and only professionals, such as welders, firefighters and operators in an energy company, are confronted with it on a daily basis.”
You write that the visibility of fire has largely disappeared from our modern society. What do you mean?
“You just have to look around you. We benefit from heat and lighting while there is no sign of fire. We still live in the industrial age, although we deny it all too often. We have a bad conscience about that. We prefer not to be reminded of the enormous amount of fuel we burn every day. Just think of the energy that goes into the hardware and software of a computer and all those data centers that use an incredible amount of power every day. When we sit behind – or in front of – our screen, we don't notice the fires that have to be lit for this. You can call this a process of collective repression.”
Why don't we want to be reminded?
“In general, we experience the processes in the industry as filthy and dirty, which also produces a lot of waste that we also have to process, and often incinerate again. We have a bill hanging over our heads that we would rather not be reminded of. We do experience the drawbacks in our daily lives, such as particulate matter and other forms of air pollution, but that is just a tip of the veil.”
In the added chapter in the reprint you are much more critical of fire in our modern society.
"That's right. In recent years I have become increasingly aware of the downside of fire and the far-reaching addiction to fuels. Of course, the use of fire indirectly makes our lives particularly comfortable. Think of the availability of gas and electrification, which relieves us of so many tedious jobs. My father had to shovel coal every morning in the winter and empty the ash tray, I never had to do any of that. When the choice was made, half a century ago, few people have said:don't connect me to gas and electricity, I'd rather continue to use wood, coal or oil.”
“Half a century ago, English cities were notorious for their smog. A city like Manchester, where I went as a student, was so filthy. The church buildings were covered with soot. Now we take advantage of fire, which we have discreetly concealed. But partly because of that same fire, the human arm also reaches very far. There is little left in the biosphere that has not been affected by humans with fire.”
What should we learn from this?
“That we should limit fuel consumption more. I have the firm impression that almost all forms of sustainable energy that are currently being tested, without exception, are detours to the same principle, which is based on the combination of photosynthesis and combustion. While we should actually strive for energy without the intervention of these two processes, so no fossil fuels and no biomass either.”
You write about the use of oil:'What is gold for people, makes birds paralyzed'...
“I want to emphasize the uniqueness of the human species:we are the only ones able to use this stuff, while it is a dangerous substance for all other animals. Humans are the only species that use two sources of energy:food for our bodily processes and fuels to influence our living environment, for production and transport. The proportion of energy that we use through our food is negligible. This has been precisely calculated by such eminent writers and historians as Ian Morris and Vaclav Smil.”
Do you think we will ever get rid of our fire addiction?
“When I wrote my book in the early 1990s, according to archaeologists, human fire use dates back to about 250,000 years ago. Subsequently, archaeologists have found traces of active fire use dating back as far as 750,000 years. We are not talking about the possible passive use in the vicinity of natural fire sources, such as volcanoes or coal fires in China. A scientist like Wrangham goes back as far as 1.8 million years, even attributing active fire use to an important role in human evolution. Modern humans have maneuvered themselves into a position where they absolutely cannot survive without fire.”
Read resources and more
- Morris, Ian. Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels:How Human Values Evolve. Princeton University Press, 2015
- Pyne, Stephen J. Fire:A Brief History. University of Washington Press &British Museum, 2001
- Wrangham, Richard. Cooking. On the origin of man. (Transl. Catching Fire. How Cooking Made us Human) Publisher Nw. Amsterdam, 2009
- Interview on Kennislink with Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, author of 'Sapiens'_
- Mini symposium 'Fire and Civilization' on November 15, 2015 in Paradiso