241 Pizza

I watched the TV pictures of the surge of ocean coming ashore, saw the buildings in its path, and had to stifle an inward “Yes! Sweep them away! Show us how small is Man! Show us how easily this Universe can make matchwood of our dreams!” And no, you do not need to remind me that they were somebody else’s dreams, not mine. “Show us,” I thought, “how lives and livelihoods can be snuffed out in the twinkling of an eye.”

Yes, they were other people’s lives and livelihoods, not mine, and I know without doubt that had I been there I would have worked like fury to save myself and others, and tried to be brave in the attempt to rescue everyone I could; so this strange thrill as a mere witness was not callousness or indifference: I hope (and believe) I would have behaved well.

But still the thrill needs explaining. Any thought one might have that it arose from distance and uninvolvement was dispelled when I read in The Times on Thursday an eyewitness account from a British tourist (“It was strangely enthralling”), who spoke not of the horror but the excitement. Michael Lindsay described the fascination with which he had watched an elemental force take hold and wreck human certainties, not suddenly but with a slow motion, swelling power. “At the time — I say this realising it may shock — it was rather exciting,” he said.

I have been asking myself why a small part of so many of us has fixed itself with almost lip-smacking attention on to the sheer scale of the mayhem. I think that there are two reasons. The less interesting of these is the more obvious. Accidents, all accidents, are gripping. The bigger the bang, the more violent the action, the more grotesque the damage, the better the spectacle. A generation of disaster movies testifies to this, as do those ghoulish motorists who stop to ogle after a road accident. We are of course arrested by any scene of destruction.

But this does not explain everything, I think. The gassing of Kurds by Saddam Hussein, the poisoning of thousands at that chemical factory in Bhopal in India, the deaths of 20,000 on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, would have been (I am afraid) “watchable” in television terms if witnessed, but, however grisly, something would have limited the spine-tingling quality of the witness. Human beings acting wickedly towards other human beings makes for a powerful, shaming moral tale, allowing us to argue how it might have been predicted, should have been stopped, could in future be avoided. But when we are all innocent — when the gods themselves strike — then I believe a new depth to our fascination opens.

From an avowed atheist such as I this may come oddly, but I do not believe that in his inner core the human animal wishes to be lord of the Universe, or even himself. When there comes a living demonstration that we are not, we watch with a kind of relief.

Bishop Butler, the 18th-century exponent of the “natural” case for religion, argued that as a clock is made to be wound up and keep the time, so a person is made to seek, acknowledge and subordinate himself to a greater power. Wilhelm Reich, the mad German Freudian sexologist and author of The Mass Psychology of Fascism, diagnosed in the German nation the twin (and inseparable) yearnings to dominate, and be dominated.

I cannot follow Butler to his “proof” of a deity, nor agree with Reich that what he found was to be found in Germans alone. But I do think that a sense of unmastered mastery is, to the human mind, a frightening possibility and a lonely one.

As we banish disease, seed the clouds for rain, and learn even to clone ourselves, scientific progress only deepens this discomfort, this inchoate shrinking back from mastery. We yearn for a sign from the cosmos of our fragility. We have just received such a sign. Thus — and I am sorry to say it and mean no cruelty or offence — the thrill.

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