I recently finished reading Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen, by Mark Buchanan, after which I thought of dragons. Ubiquity is about the sudden avalanches of events in the world that quickly cascade out of all proportion to reason. The book draws on the work of physicists who study the critical states of avalanches, forest fires, earthquakes, wars, stock market crises, scientific revolutions, epidemics, best selling books and just about any other aspect of nature (social or otherwise) in which mutually interactive elements in a system self-organize to create systems that are in disequilibrium. A “critical state” always seeks equilibrium through events that follow “power laws” in the distribution of their frequency and intensity. Events never know how big they actually will be until the proximate system reaches a threshold just below criticality, whereupon further interactions in the system create further stresses that will eventually be relieved through self-similar cascades of events.

Got all that?

Anyway, I thought about dragons after reading the book because Chinese culture reveres the wild beasts while in most of Western mythology we’ve killed the things off. Literary critical circles always had it that the West’s killing off its dragons represented the ascent of science and of the rational man in the world; while in the East dragons represented man’s relationship with nature in its most idyllic state, which, of course, is bullocks. China’s history of at least the last four hundred years has been one of deforestation, desertification, massive engineering projects that ignore environmental prerogatives, manic urbanization and rampant industrial pollution. So why is the Chinese dragon still alive and kicking?

And then I realized the dragon actually represents Chinese society itself, which has always been in a critical state of disequilibrium. Whether reading Chinese history or crossing the street, it’s plain to see the close-knit social networks that have been the foundation of stability and security for Chinese are also the driver of upheavals that are at the root of what has made Chinese society so enduring and dynamic.

The dragon, in other words, might have been sleeping; but history has not.