Since the nationwide power cut a couple of weeks ago, people have been asking how it happened and who’s to blame. The regulator, Ofgem, can already tell us what occurred, but why is another matter. Part of the issue is that the National Grid doesn’t follow simple laws of cause and effect. It’s a complex system, and understanding it requires a sophisticated framework like Systems Theory, which asks us to think in terms of dynamic wholes.

This isn’t just a matter for experts. We assume the lights will keep burning and there’ll be food in the shops, but when things go wrong we glimpse the many conditions on which they rest. As Martin Luther King said in 1967: ‘Before you finish eating breakfast, you’ve depended on more than half the world.’

Dr King was making a philosophical point with moral consequences. ‘We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,’ he said. Therefore ‘whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.’ That’s an argument for solidarity with people who are suffering or persecuted, wherever they may be. 

Dr King probably had Christian sources for these ideas, but earlier in 1967 he nominated Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist monk who campaigned against the Vietnam War, for the Nobel Peace Prize. Thich Nhat Hanh spoke constantly about the interconnectedness of the human condition, drawing on Indra’s Net, a traditional Buddhist image of life. The net is infinite in dimensions and has a jewel at each intersection which reflects all the others. At every point we see endless reflections showing the net’s infinite scope. 

It’s a beautiful image, and Buddhism teaches that our outlook changes profoundly if we regard ourselves as interconnected parts of a greater whole, rather than discrete entities. The shift isn’t just intellectual. I think about society, but I feel my place in it when I connect with other people, especially in my Buddhist community. I care about the environment, but working in my garden teaches me that, while sweat and chemicals can make something look good, encouraging wildlife means working with the soil and the animals. 

Grids, systems, networks and of course the web, are the building blocks of the modern world, and they challenge us by showing how little we control our lives or even understand them. That may be the best reason to reflect that complexity is also a window onto our interconnected place in the fabric of life.