Natural disasters lack a “therefore”. Confronted with catastrophe wrought by humans it is easy to pretend we know what must come next. The Nazis invade Poland, “therefore” we must go to war with them. Islamists crash planes into the World Trade Center, “therefore” we must wage war on terror.
But when, off the coast of Sumatra, one tectonic plate slips beneath another sending a colossal pulse of energy through the water to be dissipated on fragile shorelines and even more fragile bodies across the Indian Ocean, what then? We cannot go to war with geology, with nature. It just does what it does, mindlessly, meaninglessly, blamelessly. There is no “therefore”.
In the initial shock we find this intolerable. It is a story without an ending. So, in the 48 hours or so after the Asian tsunami struck, we invented endings, consoling “therefores”. Therefore, we said, there must be early warning systems installed, people ready to pick up the telephone when a tsunami is on its way. Therefore we must place sensors on the ocean bed, along fault lines, to detect the first signs of a quake.
Well, the first might work if we can keep people by telephones alert for decades, but in the current state of the science the second definitely won’t. We know a lot about earthquakes, we know where they will happen, but we do not know when. A sensor under Tokyo would be firing all the time: the land there routinely shivers. One day a firing will forecast the deaths of thousands — at least 100,000 died in the city on September 1, 1923 in the great Kanto earthquake — but we don’t know whether it will be tomorrow or in 100 years.
The simple truth is what it has always been: nature, uncontrolled, unbidden, unpredictable, can still humble our pride and wreck our schemes in an instant. We are a thin film of thought confined to a narrow band around an undistinguished planet orbiting a pretty average star. A few thousand feet above us or a few hundred feet below us, our lives are impossible. Venturing beyond, we must take fragments of our home climate with us to keep ourselves alive amid the vacuum and radiation above or the fire below.
The fire leaps up and, from the vacuum above, asteroid and meteorites crash down. In Toba, again in Sumatra, 73,500 years ago, there was a volcanic eruption that blew 6,000 cubic kilometres of ash into the atmosphere and darkened the entire world for years. Some 65m years ago we think an asteroid hit the earth, possibly in what is now the Gulf of Mexico, and wiped out the dinosaurs. Truly we made it this far only by the dumbest of dumb luck; we are contingent creatures in a contingent cosmos.
So the second reaction to the tsunami, after the first “therefores” had failed, was a kind of pretentiously wise shrug. It is the way things are, we must do what we can, nothing more can be said. But this also is wrong. There is much more than this to be said. Nature does indeed just happen to us. But it happens within a specific human context. A tsunami today is fundamentally different from one 1,000 or 10,000 years ago. Understanding this is the only path to wisdom through the tears and wreckage.
In the early morning of November 1, 1755, All Saints Day, there was an earthquake under Lisbon. It killed a third of the city’s population of 275,000. Culturally, because of timing and location, it was probably the most significant natural disaster in human history.
Lisbon was a capital both of the secularising forces of the Enlightenment and of the Catholic church. A new opera house, a great library and a magnificent gallery were destroyed, but so were the cathedral and a whole litany of important churches. A message was clearly being delivered here, but what was it? As far as the believers were concerned, God had rebuked the sinfulness of the time. Like humans throughout history they interpreted the devastation as punishment. But for the great mandarins of the Enlightenment it was something quite new.
They had made huge claims for the power of human reason. Once we had shrugged off the shackles of superstition, they believed, we could understand and one day control the world. Man was to usurp God. The quake, striking at the heart of Enlightenment Europe, shattered such complacency. With God in his death throes, human reason might be all we had. But at Lisbon it had not amounted to much.
What about Tambora in Indonesia in 1815? This was the biggest volcanic eruption in recorded history, although still not technically a super-eruption like Toba. It killed more than 100,000 and that, in those days of limited communications and therefore narrowly available compassion, would have been that but for what happened later. Aerosols from Tambora reduced global temperatures by 3C and, in 1816, deprived Europe of a summer as the sun was dimmed.
This was now the romantic era in which the neo-classical rationality of the Enlightenment was being replaced with the quasi- religious power of the imagination. As Jonathan Bate, the critic, has pointed out, the dark summer of 1816 had a profound effect on the romantic imagination. Bate attributes Byron’s poem Darkness, a fantasy about the extinction of the sun, directly to the effects of Tambora. Perhaps the romantic imagination, by then suffused with dark forebodings, was ready to hear this message about nature’s capricious power. In 1818 Mary Shelley published Frankenstein, a warning that we would be destroyed by our own technological hubris.
Such events — the Krakatoa eruption in 1883 was another — appear like punctuation marks in a specific paragraph of human thought. Responses to them signal the move from the dominance of religion to that of reason and then to that of the individual imagination. In the 20th century reason was partially restored. The Californian quake of 1906 and the great Kanto launched a giant leap forward in scientific understanding. Plate tectonics — the understanding of the earth’s surface as a network of giant plates grinding against each other — is one of the greatest of scientific achievements and arose directly from a study of quakes. Now we know why there are lines of fire around the planet.
We also now know that we can do little with this knowledge. Scientifically, therefore, the Asian tsunami comes as, once again, optimism about our ability to control nature is ebbing.
Culturally the picture is more complex and indeed it may not become clear for some time. What is clear, however, is that the scale — both geographical and human — of this event — as well as its exotic nature: the giant waves, the tumultuous power of the sea — will guarantee its status alongside Tambora and Lisbon as an imagination-changing event. One can only guess at the form of this change.
Perhaps our attitudes to travel will change. Southern India, Sri Lanka and Thailand have become western playgrounds, tropical paradises of palm trees, sun, sand and sex. They are the consumerised version of the romantic dream of the primitive life in nature. Will the spectacle of nature striking back with such savagery cause us to think again? Judging by the most shocking spectacle of the week — the ethically questionable types who continued floating on Lilos and sunbathing amid the dead and dying after the tsunami had struck — probably not. But maybe.
Perhaps we shall begin to think again about our secularised, scientistic, self-actualising world view. The long-haul flight, palm-fringed beach and the gentle surf create, after all, the one true image of the contemporary good life. For this we make ourselves slim, for this we buy clothes, for this we sacrifice all else. Paparazzi daily make a living out of capturing the rich and famous on the beaches. You cannot really be said to be successful unless you spend weeks, if not months, in such distant places on such white sands. It is difficult in that context not to see the tsunami as some kind of nemesis.
Or there may be other ways we cannot yet grasp in which our imaginations will be transformed. But the one way in which they should be transformed is by reminding us of something we had forgotten yet again — that we are aboard this leaky vessel called life together, that the waves wash over us all, that we suffer the same losses and weep the same tears.
And, so reminded, we can make the only new year resolution worth making: to be better.
