Finding meaning to catastrophe

Finding meaning to catastrophe

Martin Kettle
Guardian News Service
London

The modern era flatters itself that human beings can now know
and shape almost everything about the world. But an event like
the Indonesian earthquake exposes much of this for the hubris
that it is.

Perhaps we have talked so much about our civilization's
potential to destroy the planet that we have forgotten that the
planet also has an untamed ability to destroy civilization too.
Whatever else it has achieved, the Indian Ocean tsunami has at
least reminded mankind of its enduring vulnerability in the face
of nature. The scale of suffering that it has wreaked -- 20,000
deaths and counting -- shows that we share such dangers with our
ancestors more fully than most of us realized.

An entirely understandable reaction to such an event is to set
one's face against any large questions that it may raise. But
this week provides an unsought opportunity to consider the
largest of all human implications of any major earthquake: its
challenge to religion.

A few days after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York, I had
dinner with the Guardian's late columnist Hugo Young. We were
still so close to the event itself that only one topic of
conversation was possible. At one stage I asked Hugo how his
religion allowed him to explain such a terrible act. I'm afraid
that's an easy one, he replied.

We are all fallen beings, Hugo declared, and our life in this
world is a vale of tears. So some human beings will always kill
one another. The attack on New York should therefore be seen not
as an act of God, but as an act of fallen humanity. Then he
paused, and added: "But I admit I have much more difficulty with
earthquakes."

Earthquakes and the belief in the judgment of God are, indeed,
very hard to reconcile. However, no religion that offers an
explanation of the world can avoid making some kind of an attempt
to fit the two together. And an immense earthquake like the one
that took place off Sumatra inevitably poses that challenge
afresh in dramatic terms.

There is, after all, only one big question to ask about an
event of such destructive power as the one that has taken place
this week: why did it happen?

As with previous earthquakes, any explanation of this latest
one poses us a sharp intellectual choice. Either there is an
entirely natural explanation for it, or there is some other kind.
Even the natural one is by no means easy to imagine, but it is at
least wholly coherent.

The tsunami took place, say the seismologists, because a
massive tectonic rupture on the sea bed generated tremors through
the ocean. These unimaginable forces sent their energy coursing
across thousands of miles of water, resulting in death and
destruction in a vast arc from Somalia to Indonesia.

But what do world views that do not allow scientists
undisputed authority have to say about such phenomena? Where do
the creationists stand, for example? Such world views are more
widespread, even now, than a secularized society such as ours
sometimes prefers to think.

For most of human history people have tried to explain
earthquakes as acts of divine intervention and displeasure. Even
as the churches collapsed around them in 1755, Lisbon's priests
insisted on salvaging crucifixes and religious icons with which
to ward off the catastrophe that would kill more than 50,000 of
their fellow citizens.

Others, though, began to draw different conclusions. Voltaire
asked what kind of God could permit such a thing to occur. Did
Lisbon really have so many more vices than London or Paris, he
asked, that it should be punished in such a appalling and
indiscriminate manner? Immanuel Kant was so amazed by what
happened to Lisbon that he wrote three separate treatises on the
problem of earthquakes.

In the UK, British society seems to be more squeamish about
such things. The need for mutual respect between peoples and
traditions of which the Queen spoke in her Christmas broadcast
seems to require that we must all respect religions in equal
measure, too. The Blair government, indeed, is legislating to
prevent expressions of religious hatred in ways that could put a
cordon around the critical discussion of religion itself.

Yet it is hard to think of any event in modern times that
requires a more serious explanation from the forces of religion
than this week's earthquake. Voltaire's 18th-century question to
Christians -- why Lisbon? -- ought to generate a whole series of
21st- century equivalents for all the religions of the world.

Certainly the giant waves generated by the quake made no
attempt to differentiate between the religions of those whom it
made its victims. Hindus were swept away in India, Muslims were
carried off in Indonesia, Buddhists in Thailand. Visiting
Christians and Jews received no special treatment either. This
poses no problem for the scientific belief system. Here, it says,
was a mindless natural event, which destroyed Muslim and Hindu
alike.

A non-scientific belief system, especially one that is based
on any kind of notion of a divine order, has some explaining to
do, however. What God sanctions an earthquake? What God protects
against it? Why does the quake strike these places and these
peoples and not others? What kind of order is it that decrees
that a person who went to sleep by the edge of the ocean on
Christmas night should wake up the next morning engulfed by the
waves, struggling for life?

From at least the time of Aristotle, intelligent people have
struggled to make some sense of earthquakes. Earthquakes do not
merely kill and destroy. They challenge human beings to explain
the world order in which such apparently indiscriminate acts can
occur. Europe in the 18th century had the intellectual curiosity
and independence to ask and answer such questions. But can we say
the same of 21st-century Europe? Or are we too cowed now to even
ask if the God can exist that can do such things?