Hope in the Ruins
LA Resident and Philosopher Edward Feser reports on the devastating Los Angeles Fire of 2025 — reflecting on how we lost our common sense, and how we can regain it.
Raymond Chandler wrote of “those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch.” When these notorious winds arrive, he noted, “anything can happen.” And it did happen, last week.
I’ve lived in Los Angeles my entire life, nearly six decades. During that time there have been several major earthquakes;many heavy rainstorms yielding devastating mudslides and serious flooding; countless major fires; and, in 2011, an especially destructive windstorm. But never before have I seen Santa Ana winds as powerful and wide-ranging as those that tore through L.A. last Tuesday.
Never before have I seen block after block of the city I love razed by Dresden-like firestorms. Never before have I personally known so many people whose homes were gravely threatened, seriously damaged, or in several cases completely destroyed, by a natural disaster.
Especially distressing was another personal first – my mother having to evacuate her home as one of the larger fires spread in the direction of the neighborhood I grew up in. At the time I write this, her home now appears to be safe. My immediate family and our own home are also fine. But a couple of the smaller fires that broke out last week were, for a time, alarmingly close.
The winds were strong enough on Tuesday that there was real concern about large trees or power lines coming down around or onto our house. From Tuesday night through to Thursday, we would hear word about friends, and our hearts would break as we’d learn that one after another had had their house burn down. New fires and flare-ups seem to occur daily, and this week will bring another Santa Ana event. Nerves have not stopped jumping, and the knot in the stomach refuses to go away.
So far, 24 people have died, over 40,000 acres have burned, and over 12,000 structures have been destroyed. Though it is not over yet, it is not too soon to judge that the fire of 2025 will enter history alongside events like the earthquake of 1994 and the flood of 1938 as among the greatest disasters ever to befall Los Angeles. Nor is it too soon to draw some lessons – about the limits, but also the scope, of man’s ability to prevent and mitigate such disasters.
As to the limits, there is no question that the immediate prerequisites of the fire were outside anyone’s control. No one could have stopped the windstorm. No one could have altered the fact that Los Angeles is currently bone dry, since the city has seen almost no rain in eight months. Though the hubris with which human beings attempt to control and alter nature is unprecedented today, we never fail to meet our nemesis in extreme weather events. As Horace said, you can throw nature out with a pitchfork, but she will always come back – sometimes with a blowtorch.
All the same, there is much we can do to counter nature’s worst. Of the city’s and county’s response to an earlier Los Angeles fire, Richard G. Lillard wrote, in 1966:
[They] fought this fire as they fight other brush fires… as if engaged in battle, with battalions of trained men brought in by air to the front, with bombing planes that drop borate solutions to smother flames, with observation planes and helicopters, with intercoms, strategy meetings, convoys of equipment and water, columns of tanklike bulldozers smashing out firebreaks, with cordons of armed guards to keep out intruders. A fire line has the sounds of the firing lines in war – the explosions of clumps of dry brush, the massive thud of falling trees, the roar of flames through the bush and treetops, and whirling smoke, the blasts of wind, the yells of fire fighters, the sudden retreats of men as they rush from a new hot spot in order to regroup, and the zooming of bombers as they come in close. (Eden in Jeopardy, p. 111)
As we watched on television the firefighters battle the inferno that raged toward my mother’s neighborhood, I was amazed to see how closely their efforts fit this sort of description – and with great success. While it certainly helped that the winds had died down by then, the firefighters could not have succeeded without military discipline, tactical insight, and technical prowess. The courage and competence of the fire department’s rank and file provide an example of government at its best.
Unfortunately, in the city’s leadership we have seen the opposite. Mayor Karen Bass was away on an unnecessary trip to Africa when the windstorm hit and the fires began, despite the fact that the National Weather Service station in L.A. had, two days before she left, warned of coming “extreme fire weather conditions.” When she returned, she stood silent and stone-faced rather than answer a reporter’s pleas that she say something to the citizens of Los Angeles about the crisis. This failure to be with and try to rally citizens during a crisis is a basic failure of statesmanship.
Even worse, it has come out that in the recent city budget, Bass cut funding for the Los Angeles Fire Department by $17 million, and had tried to cut it by even more. LAFD chief Kristin Crowley warned a month ago that these cuts “severely limited the Department's capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies.” After the fire began, Crowley said that the cuts did indeed “negatively impact” efforts to fight it, and reluctantly answered “Yes” when asked whether the city’s leadership had failed the department. It has also come out that a major reservoir above the now devastated Pacific Palisades was empty, and that this “may have contributed to firefighters losing water so early in their fight against the blaze.” Then there is the fact that extremist environmentalist policies have prevented land management practices that greatly mitigate the threat of brush fires.
Though good leadership could not have prevented the fires entirely, it certainly could have made them much less devastating. This crisis thus provides the latest illustration of the chaos into which so many major American cities have been plunged by progressive misgovernance. Great as the threat of natural disasters is, greater still is the threat posed by a political class lost in ideological fantasy, absorbed in battles with phantoms like “white supremacy” and “transphobia” while real dangers are ignored.
In a triumph of blind faith over bitter experience, Los Angeles voters nevertheless elected the progressive Bass in 2022, and two years earlier had elected the notoriously soft-on-crime District Attorney George Gascón. But after four years, even liberal L.A. had had enough of the chaos sown by Gascón, and voted him out in 2024. The current crisis has almost certainly sealed Bass’s political fate as well.
The collapse of common sense can’t simply be explained away as political groupthink, though. Rather, the deepest reason for our polity’s loss of common sense is its apostasy from the faith that built Western Civilization. We lost common sense because we turned away from the Faith that had a special hand in building California. Indeed, not too long ago, some even toppled statues of California’s founder and patron saint, Fr. Junípero Serra.
With so much now lost, how does one face the suffering of fellow Angelenos?
Perhaps the best example was set last week by the Halpin family, who, as shown in a moving video that has gone viral, sang that great antiphon of Christian hope, “Regina Caeli,” while standing in the ruins of their Altadena home.
Regina caeli, laetare, alleluia;
Quia quem meruisti portare, alleluia,
Resurrexit, sicut dixit, alleluia:
Ora pro nobis Deum, alleluia.
St. Junípero, pray for us.