Forum: Featured Discussions: Can science glean wisdom from disasters?

Looking at the geographical distribution of natural disasters in the course of history, one might well wonder how earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and forest fires can take tragic human tolls, again and again, in the very same place . Why do people

Looking at the geographical distribution of natural disasters in the course of history, one might well wonder how earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and forest fires can take tragic human tolls, again and again, in the very same place. Why do people return to these vulnerable sites? Why are they unable to recognize nature’s warning signs, signs that have appeared so many times in the past? One answer, from the New York Times journalist Andrew Revkin, is that modern societies have lost one of the virtues of traditional, oral cultures: the ability to listen to one’s elders and learn from past disasters. Today, Revkin hypothesizes, scientists must play the role of wise elder, discovering and maintaining records of distant tragedies and warning of future ones (1).

Revkin’s observation does more than illuminate modernity’s propensity for catastrophe. It drives to the heart of the Defining Wisdom project, since it forces us to consider the form wisdom might take in a technocratic age. What are the implications of looking to scientists as founts of wisdom? Can scientists really glean wisdom from natural disasters?

A century ago, the opinion was common among Europeans that natural disasters were antithetical to the growth of wisdom. As a prominent American geologist pointed out in an 1882 essay on hurricanes, “such conditions as they bring about are not favorable to close observation…[N]o mind can see calmly when the body is in the very hands of death (2).”  Some British and German scientists, secure in their sense of superiority over the populations of Asia, South America, even southern Europe, blamed the “backwardness” of these lands on the frequency of great earthquakes there. Were Europe subject to earthquakes on the scale of those in South America, Charles Darwin imagined, it would be “bankrupt,” and  “the hand of violence and rapine would remain uncontrolled (3).”  His contemporary John Milne, one of the pioneers of modern seismology, concurred that England would “sink to the lowest level in the rank of civilized communities (4).”  The widely read Victorian historian Henry Thomas Buckle bluntly argued that human reason could not withstand repeated natural disasters:

The mind is thus constantly thrown into a timid and anxious state; and men witnessing the most serious dangers, which they can neither avoid nor understand, become impressed with a conviction of their own inability, and of the poverty of their own resources. In exactly the same proportion, the imagination is aroused, and a belief in supernatural interference actively encouraged. Human power failing, superhuman power is called in; the mysterious and the invisible are believed to be present; and there grow up among the people those feelings of awe, and of helplessness, on which all superstition is based, and without which no superstition can exist (5).

Antiquated as these claims may seem, the question they confront remains urgent. Consider, for instance, whether Americans have gained any wisdom from the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina. According to New York Times reports, the piecemeal reconstruction of New Orleans has proceeded without acknowledging the vulnerability of patchwork flood protection to outlier storms. The rebuilding has only aggravated the city’s pre-flood geography of risk, putting low-income and African-American residents at comparatively even greater danger in the event of another extreme storm. Residents are being encouraged to consult the risk assessments for their neighborhoods on government websites, but internet access remains an obstacle for many. Even when available, the cost-benefit language of risk assessments may be difficult to assimilate to the values of family, faith, and cultural tradition that also influence a resident’s choice of home (6).

Today’s politicians and pundits may debate whether events like Hurricane Katrina or the earthquake in Sichuan were tragedies of civil engineering or of social injustice. But the real question is whether humans are capable of extracting wisdom from natural catastrophes in the first place.

Until the eighteenth century, the answer to this question seemed clear. Early modern philosophers associated wisdom with the aspiration to transcend the human limits of knowledge and approach a divine perspective that would reveal the universe’s master plan. Natural knowledge was a path to wisdom, because nature was expected to display the rationality of the creator’s design. What place could disasters find in this optimistic vision? Might disasters bear wisdom?

During the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century, many philosophers rejected the view that disasters were deviations from the usual course of nature, concluding that they were neither punishment for sinners nor reminders to the faithful. The promoters of the new sciences insisted that disasters were part of God’s original design, and that it was the task of natural philosophy to elucidate their function in the context of creation as a whole. By studying the workings of nature, scholars would discover “new testimony of the divine Wisdom” and so would “tempests, volcanoes, lightning and earthquakes, begin to lose their horror (7).”  Disasters were therefore sources not only of natural knowledge but of wisdom.

According to traditional histories of ideas, a single event severed this link between disasters and wisdom.  In 1755, a catastrophic earthquake struck the city of Lisbon, unleashing a tsunami and fire and killing as many as half of the city’s 230,000 inhabitants. The philosophical response to Lisbon radically altered the meaning of wisdom and its relation to natural knowledge in ways that have yet to be elucidated by historians. Kant and Rousseau famously rejected theological interpretations of the disaster in favor of strict naturalism. Rousseau blamed the victims for the location of their homes, while Kant offered (in Walter Benjamin’s estimation) the very first work of seismology. After Lisbon, it seems, natural disasters were set squarely in an objective framework of technical analysis, prediction, and control. 

Yet the earlier association between disasters and wisdom did not disappear. It persists in particular in the modern view that science thrives on disaster. As the meteorologist Horace Byers once noted, reflecting on his contributions to the rise of computerized weather forecasting in mid-twentieth century America, “It is an unfortunate characteristic of meteorology, that its great forward strides depend on disasters (8).”  Byers had in mind the invention of computerized weather forecasting for aviation purposes in the crucible of World War Two. But his observation applies equally well to the emergence of the first telegraphic weather service in Britain a century earlier, a direct product of the great storm of 1859, which wrecked 343 British ships (9). 

In the conviction that disaster breeds good science, we can hear echoes of the providential view of disasters. In the wake of the catastrophic San Francisco earthquake of 1906, for instance, the geologist T. C. Chamberlin injected the following note of optimism:

If, for instance, it shall later be shown, as I think not improbable, that the earth is now in a general way receding from a period of special deformation into one of relative quiescence, and that catastrophic action is on the decline, it will be a contribution of no small value to the comfort of mankind. The public is now very generally depressed by needless apprehension of great impending disasters, if not a universal and final catastrophe, apprehensions derived from the narrow and pessimistic views of the past. From my point of view, which is doubtless a partial one, a contribution of supreme value to the happiness and well being of mankind is likely to grow out of rectified views…derived from the prosecution of the earth sciences (10). 

Chamberlin suggested that the earthquake might lead not only to good science (if funding agencies cooperated), but also to a new dialogue between scientific experts and populations in vulnerable areas like California. Through such an exchange, the earthquake might indeed generate wisdom, in the form of liberation from unwarranted fears. Chamberlin, the son of an evangelical minister, may have hoped in this way to reconcile his chosen career with the spiritual mission of his father (11). 

Today, Chamberlin is best known for his account of the greenhouse effect, the process by which atmospheric carbon dioxide raises global temperatures. This, however, was a contribution that took decades to win recognition. Perhaps what was missing in the history of global warming science was precisely the spur that Chamberlin identified in 1906: disasters. Indeed, fictional catastrophes have substituted for real ones. A study of audience response to the global warming thriller “The Day After Tomorrow” registered a significant increase in concern over carbon dioxide emissions after viewing the film (12). 

Still, history shows that proponents of scientific progress are often too quick to believe that a disaster has left them wiser. Efforts to build more rational societies on the ruins of disaster have often proved to be hollow triumphs. Too often, in catastrophe’s wake, self-appointed modernizers have imposed an iron rule in the name of restoring order (13).  If modern science can indeed reap wisdom from disasters, then the question is, by what means?

Here, the history of seismology is instructive. Until the turn of the twentieth century, seismology was a low-tech endeavor, relying primarily on human eyes and ears for its empirical data. Beginning in Switzerland in the 1870s, scientists organized elaborate networks of lay observers in order to mine the experiences of ordinary people when the earth shook. With the proliferation of accurate recording instruments in the early twentieth century, many earth scientists hoped to turn their discipline into a more quantitative, objective discipline, modeled on physics. A new era of geophysics began, which transformed what counted as “evidence” of the earth’s history (14).  Out went data filtered by human bodies, in came the “hard” evidence of seismographs and accelerometers. The science of seismology and its practitioners moved increasingly further from the populations who had once served as its witnesses—the populations vulnerable to seismic disaster.

Today, however, geophysics is being transformed once again. New initiatives are setting out to inform populations about the seismic risks of their neighborhoods, as well as to cull information for scientific research from the wealth of experience such communities possess. One example is the Center for Hazards and Risk Research at Columbia University, which has piloted outreach programs that work with earthquake-vulnerable communities to design risk-reduction plans tailored to local economies, infrastructures, and cultures. Another is a website launched by the U. S. Geological Survey to collect data on seismic events in real time. Called “Did You Feel It?”, the site mimics the questionnaires sent out by Swiss scientists over a century ago.

Among the scientists pioneering this new wave of two-way communication between experts and laypeople is Dr. Leonardo Seeber of Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Dr. Seeber’s career has taken him to disaster sites from California to the Himalayas (his first son was born in the field in Pakistan). Currently, Dr. Seeber is planning an ingenious project in Bangladesh that will conduct basic and applied research on the tectonics of the delta of the Brahmaputra, Ganges, and Meghna rivers, an area at risk for earthquakes and floods, among other hazards. Dr. Seeber and his colleagues will conduct their investigation in part by enlisting local students and local technologies, while at the same time training Bangladeshis to educate their own communities on seismic risk. What’s more, the researchers will produce a geological map with information on all major natural hazards in the area, and, to top it off, will turn the roughly 200 holes drilled for research purposes into wells to provide the population with clean drinking water.

The holistic vision of Dr. Seeber’s project and its sensitivity to local needs suggest a corollary to Mr. Revkin’s insights on natural disasters. For the problem today is not just that modern societies have short memories. If we turn back to the mid nineteenth century, there is no doubt that oral cultures were already disappearing. But one crucial line of communication was still very much in place: that between scientists and laypeople. The divide between expert and amateur was not yet firm, and conversations between the two were not yet hampered by specialization and technical jargon. As illustrated by the history of seismology in the past century and a half, the trend in the sciences has been toward ever higher barriers to effective dialogue between experts studying high-risk environments and the people living in them. Thus, it is only a start for scientists to appoint themselves wise elders. In the modern, post-Lisbon world, wisdom must emerge from negotiations between abstract, universal, technical knowledge and the values and experiences of particular communities. True wisdom will emerge only as scientists once again turn to those who live with natural hazards and ask, “Did you feel it?”

 by Deborah Coen, Assistant Professor of History, Barnard College

 

References

1. “On Elephants Memories, Human Forgetfulness, and Disaster,” http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/on-elephants-memories-human-forgetfulness-and-disaster/?scp=2&sq=wisdom%20disaster&st=cse
2. N. S. Shaler, quoted in Sheila Hones, “Distant Disasters, Local Fears,” in Steven Biel, ed., American Disasters (New York: NYU Press, 2001), pp. 170-196, on 193.
3. Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle, chapter 14, http://www.literature.org/authors/darwin-charles/the-voyage-of-the-beagle/chapter-14.html.
4. John Milne, “Earthquake Effects, Emotional and Moral,” Transactions of the Seismological Society of Japan 9 (1886):  91-111, on p. 111.
5. Henry Thomas Buckle, History of Civilization in England, vol 1 (New York: Appleton, 1886), p. 87.
6. “A Billion Dollars Later, New Orleans Still at Risk,” http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/17/us/nationalspecial/17protect.html?scp=9&sq=katrina%20engineering%20rebuilding&st=cse
7. Matthew Mulcahy, Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624-1783 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), quoted on p. 58.
8. Quoted in Kristine C. Harper, Weather By the Numbers: The Genesis of Modern Meteorology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), p. 7.
9. Katharine Anderson, Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 110.
10. Chamberlin, Letter to George Darwin, June 30, 1906, in Science in America: A Documentary History 1900-1939, ed. Nathan Reingold and Ida H. Reingold (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 66; quoted in part in Naomi Oreskes, The Rejection of Continental Drift: Theory and Method in American Earth Sciences (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 132.
11. Oreskes, Rejection of Continental Drift, p. 340, footnote 53.
12. Anthony Leiserowitz, “Before and after the day after tomorrow: A U.S. study of climate change risk perception,” Environment 46 (2004): 22.
13. The growing field of disaster studies provides many historical examples of such hubris; see e.g. Steven Biel, ed., American Disasters (New York: NYU Press, 2001); Alessa Johns, Dreadful Visitations (New York: NYU Press, 1999). There is a large anthropological literature critical of technocratic responses to disaster; see e.g. Susanna Hoffman and Anthony Oliver-Smith, eds., Catastrophe and Culture: The Anthropology of Disaster (Santa Fe: School of American Research, 2002). 
14. For overviews see Benjamin F. Howell, Jr., An Introduction to Seismological Research: History and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), Oreskes, Rejection of Continental Drift.