EARTHQUAKES: THE CRACKS IN MODERN RATIONALITY
David Charles Gore
University of Minnesota Duluth
On January 12, 2010 a catastrophic earthquake hit off the west coast of Haiti, leveling the city of Port-au-Prince in 30 seconds and killing over a quarter of a million people.
On January 13, 2010, on the Christian Broadcasting Network, Pat Robertson said:
Kristi, something happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. Uh, you know, Napoleon the third, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you will get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, OK, it’s a deal. And, um, they kicked the French out of, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after the other. Desperately poor. The island of Hispanola is one island, it’s cut down the middle, on the one side is Haiti, on the other side is the Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republic is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, etcetera. Haiti is in desperate poverty. Same island. They need to have, and we need to pray for them, a great turning to God. And out of this tragedy I’m optimistic something good may come.
When he started speaking, at the bottom of the screen was a 1-800 number to reach Robertson’s Operation Blessing Disaster Relief Fund. What I want to address, however, are the religious implications of Robertson’s remarks, not in order to defend those remarks, or indeed the implications of what he said so shortly after a terrible earthquake, but rather to defend the possibilities offered by a religious world view.
If read most generously, Robertson’s remark is attempting to explain why Haiti and her people – despite the fact that it is a nation located on the same island as the Dominican Republic – seems to suffer disproportionately more than Dominican Republicans. While he never says a pact with the devil caused the earthquake, he certainly implies that such a pact explains why the Haitians “have been cursed by one thing after the other” – which is most obviously a reference to the earthquake. I think recent socio-economic theory does a good job explaining why such drastic socio-economic differences exist relative to Haiti and the DR, but I want to address the problems caused by Robertson’s comments for modern religious people.
A modern religious person might be in a bind with respect to the implications of Robertson’s comments because he may find himself believing in the science of plate tectonics – that the earth has a rigid exterior plate system with a hot molten core that keeps our planet from being as dry, cold, and desolate as the moon – and, at the same time, believing in God or a devil. Such a person may wish to dismiss Robertson’s claims as bad religion, but he still seems stuck with respect to the dual nature of his beliefs. He seems as if he is in a double bind. Can these beliefs, belief in God and plate tectonics, be reconciled? Need these beliefs be reconciled? Is it even just to use the word belief to characterize the position of the subject vis-à-vis the two very different notions?
One way to address these questions would be to parse the meaning of belief and to talk about the limitations of the stories we tell ourselves about modern reason. This position is carried on with much trepidation by the philosopher William James who wants to find a way to explain religious experience while at the same time maintaining a firm commitment to what Giambattista Vico would call modern study methods. James argues, from time to time, that our modern study methods do a very poor job of accurately describing or accounting for our experience. In his short essay, “On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake,” detailing his experience as a visiting scholar at Stanford University during the great San Francisco earthquake of 18 April 1906, he argues that science does a poor job explaining the experience of an earthquake. [He had a friend, B., who joked on his leaving Harvard that he would no doubt experience an earthquake while he was in California. The passage is somewhat long, but bear with me]:
As soon as I could think, I discerned retrospectively certain peculiar ways in which my consciousness had taken in the phenomenon. These ways were quite spontaneous, and, so to speak, inevitable and irresistible.
First, I personified the earthquake as a permanent individual entity. It was the earthquake of my friend B.’s augury, which had been lying low and holding itself back during all the intervening months, in order, on that lustrous April morning, to invade my room, and energize the more intensely and triumphantly. It came, moreover, directly to me. It stole in behind my back, and once inside the room, had me all to itself, and could manifest itself convincingly. Animus and intent were never more present in any human action, nor did any human activity ever more definitely point back to a living agent as its source and origin.
All whom I consulted on the point agreed as to this feature in their experience. “It expressed intention,” “It was vicious,” “It was bent on destruction,” “It wanted to show its power,” or what not. To me, it wanted simply to manifest the full meaning of its name. But what was this “It”? To some, apparently, a vague demonic power; to me an individualized being, B.’s earthquake, namely.
One informant interpreted it as the end of the world and the beginning of the final judgment. This was a lady in a San Francisco hotel, who did not think of its being an earthquake till after she had got into the street and some one had explained it to her. She told me that the theological interpretation had kept fear from her mind, and made her take the shaking calmly. For “science,” when the tensions in the earth’s crust reach the breaking-point, and strata fall into an altered equilibrium, earthquake is simply the collective name of all the cracks and shakings and disturbances that happen. They are the earthquake. But for me the earthquake was the cause of the disturbances, and the perception of it as a living agent was irresistible. It had an overpowering dramatic convincingness.
I realize now better than ever how inevitable were men’s earlier mythologic versions of such catastrophes, and how artificial and against the grain of our spontaneous perceiving are the later habits into which science educates us. It was simply impossible for untutored men to take earthquakes into their minds as anything but supernatural warnings or retributions.[1]
As usual, James is careful not to abandon modern science, but to argue that it is a habit that goes against the grain of our experience, and, that while plate tectonics may be convincing to our rational faculty, it offers us very little by way of explanation about the meaning or experience of earthquakes. This is not to justify the implications of Pat Robertson’s earlier remark, but it goes a long way toward justifying the possibility of religious interpretations of experience.
So, I toggle back to a contemporary religious person who does not believe in an angry God who is out to get us, and who does not accept that a 200 year old pact with the devil has any relevance to contemporary times. What could earthquakes mean? Isaiah said,
Thou shalt be visited of the Lord of hosts with thunder, and with earthquake, and great noise, with storm and tempest, and the flame of devouring fire (Isaiah 29:6).
St. John the Revelator warns that one of the plagues poured out on the earth will be “a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the earth” (Rev. 16:18). While I am not equipped to say what these statements might mean, they point toward a religious/poetic view of reality that gets too little play in contemporary public discussion. I think they are interesting because they offer the possibility that there may be something behind our experience which we may never fully understand. To see earthquakes as a visitation or sign is to see that there are limits to the world we have constructed for ourselves, and this is a critical insight for anyone who has embraced modern ideas of rationality and reason.
As pointed out in Vico’s New Science, itself a critique of modern rational political science, the study methods of modern political philosophers get something wrong when they attribute order to the rational exercise and arrangement of human power. In Vico’s “poetic economy,” fear of the gods induces men to place limits on their irrational drives so they can achieve order, but always an order on the cusp of chaos. As Giuseppe Mazzotta explains,
Like Lucretius and Hobbes (we can’t but recall Machiavelli’s maxim that it is preferable to the Prince to be feared rather than loved), Vico acknowledges the sovereign prestige of fear in the domain of politics. But fear is not only a strategy of power, a realistic mode of controlling the imminent dangers and real or imaginary threats besetting the security of one’s world. For Vico fear is the ground of the obscure consciousness of a self divided from itself, a terrifying vertigo of self-apprehension that induces man’s “swerve” from the bestial chaos of the origins. This fear, which is a founding moral-political experience, is rooted, Vico says, in the awareness of a lightning bolt that forces archaic man, desirous for self-preservation, to seek shelter in the recesses of the cave, acknowledge his limitations, and submit to the awesome, mysterious power of the divinity (NS, 377-379; 689). Because of the fear of bolts of lightning man builds altars, platforms, Vico places at the center of our field of vision as signs of the wisdom man possesses; man makes his own world (for the world is the one we make), but the lightnings, which are gleams of light that quickly appear and vanish, display the cracks in the architectonics of such a world.[2]
Say what you want about George W. Bush, but Hurricane Katrina, like the lightning and the earthquakes, are signs of the times. They are the signs of every time – signs that reveal the cracks in the foundation of the world we have made for ourselves, signs that show the limitations of our competence; Signs that remind us that despite the fact that we make human nature and can manipulate much of the natural world around us – we did not make the whole of nature. The planets, the sun, the stars, we cannot control. We may choose to say not yet, that with time and practice we will make worlds and stars, but in that choice we risk forgetting that man is a fool, not a sage, and a dependent, mortal fool to boot. Must we have earthquakes and volcanoes and lightning to remind us of this point, and must we forever be surprised by such reminders?
[1] William James, “On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake,” in William James, Writings 1902-1910 (New York: Library of America, 1987): 1216-1217.
[2] Giuseppe Mazzotta, The New Map of the World: The Poetic Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999): 192-193.
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