Human beings have an astonishing capacity for five four five things:
1) Double standards;
2) Inability to understand relative risks;
3) Taking things personally;
4) er…
5) … that’s it.
Item 1: I spent my teenage years at a Rudolf Steiner school. While my time there was very happy and I emerged almost normal from the experience, I was surrounded by a great deal of self-delusion and general woo. We’re talking serious homeopathic antivaxery here, from a lot of seriously Germanic hippies who take their Goethe neat. They would pull up at school in badly-tuned VW beetles, rattling exhausts belching particulates and who knows what else into the atmosphere, and disgorge far more children than safety would allow – and yet prominent on the paintwork were decals the size of dinnerplates saying ATOMKRAFT – NEIN DANKE*
A decal, recently (not to scale)
Item 2: I was once told a story by a Dr L. J. of Pasadena of a TV interview she saw with a schoolmom who had seen Little Johnny (Not His Real Name) onto the school bus. After he’d gone she realized he had an apple in his lunch box which – heavens to betsy – might have been sprayed with a chemical called alar. Thus alarumed, she got in her car and gave chase, flagged down the school bus, and heroically removed the offending apple from within her child’s comestibles. ‘And the entire time she was telling this tale’, spake Dr L. J., ‘the woman was smoking a cigarette’.
Which brings me to Item 3, a magisterial essay in today’s Torygraph by Boris Johnson, whom posterity will show to have been the greatest statesman of this or any other age. Mr Johnson draws our attention to the age-old connection that humans make between their actions and the occurrence of natural disasters.
Now, in the Old Days of Amoteinu v’Imoteinu, when God made a habit of manifesting himself in front of people disguised as pillars of cloud or burning bushes (God, that is, who was disguised – the people had comedy beards made out of cotton wool and shepherds’ crooks made out of old coathangers), it was quite normal for people to imagine that natural disasters had, at root, some supernatural agency, and that their occurrence might be related to human misdeeds. Offend the Gods, and you’d be struck down by lightning, or earthquakes, a plague of lawnmowers, or an outbreak of Big Rock Candy Mountain Spotted Fever, or something.
Nowadays, as St Paul once wrote to the Effluvians, you’d think that we’d have put away such childish things; accepted that natural disasters such as the recent earthquakes in Japan, Chile and other places happen for reasons of plate tectonics; that any reference to ‘Acts of God’ in insurance documents are no more statements of causation than charming antiquities of usage; and that such Signs and Portents are no more signals of Rapture or the End Times than the discovery that some of the chickens in the Jardin Des Girrafes lay double-yolked eggs occasionally.
Ah! What portendeth This Prodigie?
But no – the peg for Mr Johnson’s article was hearing some ill-informed opinion that the Sendai earthquake, the tsunami, the explosion at a nuclear power plant and all such related tzores were caused by the audacity of humans drilling for natural resources, and the ‘quake was the reaction by an irritated Mother Earth. Mr Johnson was naturally worried that such hubristic ignorance might colour future debate on the absolute necessity for us to build more nuclear power stations; and that we might see the recrudescence of the Atomkraft Nein Danke brigade, whose view of things is coloured more by hippiedome than logic.
One might worry, of course, that Mr Johnson’s argument might be taken up by climate-change deniers. He mentioned no such thing in his article – however, here we do have scientific evidence that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased in recent decades and centuries to concentrations not seen for millennia; that this increase can be attributed to human activity; and that having so much of the stuff in the atmosphere will have consequences. Consequences that follow from science – not from the wrath of the capricious Gods.
* Translation: I should decline your kind offer of very small portions of processed cheese.
aww, I had something else to say but got lost in memories as a child since we had those pins at home (I know, shocking
). It’s a very catchy one, strong colours and a smiling sun.
but I’m assuming that the Mr Johnson didn’t mention anything about “some places on earth are more prone to earthquakes due to how the earth is?”* … sesmic plates and all that? no?
*It’s still a tragedy of course, just trying to point out that it is less likely that an earthquake happens some places than others.
No.
Bird omens! My favorite!
Lots of A.N.D. Brigade teal deer and post hoc irrationalization about the earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima Dai-ichi in the blogosphere today, if you’re feeling hypotensive. Ugh.
Here is a very good counterblast, if I might use the phrase:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/03/14/the-japanese-nuclear-reactor-overreaction/
Hmm… I read something in the New Scientist a couple of years ago about the melting of the polar ice caps resulting in a redistribution of weight over the Earth’s crust, with corresponding effects on seismic activity, which we should expect to increase until things stabilise and we reach a “new normal”. And there is the hypothesis that rising temperatures increase the frequency and/or severity of hurricanes, e.g. Katrina. But since this is not my field, I don’t know how good the evidence supporting these hypotheses is.
I haven’t seen the Atomkraft stickers before, but my mum used to wear a badge saying “Clouseau fans against the beumb”.
I seem to recall hearing that we currently have a lower rate of catastrophic seismic activity than ‘normal’. I think I heard it from
sunday school, uhhh,brainwashing headfartcamp, ummmm, some science podcast. So, we’re mostly just catching up these days, as dreadful as the human tragedy is.My first pin badge (that I recall) said “John Lennon Lives”. I got it in Aberdeen, in summer 1981, and I had no idea who Lennon was, being only 4 and a biscuit years old, or why people insisted on telling me that he lives. But it sparkled nicely. Fortunately, not only was he more famous than Jesus (or Hey
JudeZeus, as the locals are fond of calling him), but also more sensible. So far, Lennon hasn’t attempted an ill-fated comeback.And finally, I imagine that the poor chicken wot portendeth the top right egg was left with a distended port.
“So far, Lennon hasn’t attempted an ill-fated comeback.”
I dunno about that – remember “Free as a bird?”
(shudders)
Goethe was a hippy?
I suspect Goethe was more of an aspiring Bullingdon Club type than a hippie… so perhaps he and Boris would have got along.
I recall visiting Tuebingen some years ago and being very taken by the sign on a wall somewhere that said “Hier kotzte Goethe” (“Goethe threw up here”)
Why did I have to go and read teh interwebz today? Ya know, I’m all down with being prepared for natural disasters and economic crises and everything. Yep, indeed. But I suffer from no delusions that the vegetable garden, canned goods, hand-cranked radio, and solar flashlight will be of any use whatsoever, should a 10-meter tsunami suddenly deposit a fishing boat or flaming bungalow on my house. Perhaps teh interwebz can tell us how to prepare for that.
It’s scary, isn’t it? I actually started on my earthquake kit this weekend, after talking about it for a while. Bottled water, water purification tablets, canned food & granola bars, flashlight, first aid kit… and many, many crossed fingers and toes.
Ifwhen Vancouver gets hit by The Big One (and there’s a 10% chance of a 9.0 quake in the next 50 years, with a much higher chance of a smaller one), we’re going to fare much, much worse than Japan, as difficult as that is to imagine. We’re not prepared (we had our first ever earthquake drill just a couple of months ago), and our building code is nowhere near as good as theirs. Some outlying cities, e.g. Richmond (where the airport is) are pretty much at sea level, and built on reclaimed bogs… they wouldn’t stand a chance.We’re all trying not to think about it too much…
When I lived in New Orleans (pre-Katrina), I very stupidly decided to stay in the house that I rented, throughout one hurricane. Evacuation routes are closed at a certain point, and then you’re stuck. The landlady came by and kindly left me an ax, with instructions to take it and the dog up in the attic and chop a hole through the roof, if the water started to rise alarmingly. That particular hurricane was all wind and not much water – it sucked a few loose panes out of the window frames, but there was no flooding, so I thought the whole ax/attic thing was rather silly.
Had I lived in that same house and stayed through Hurricane Katrina, I would have been one of those people waving at helicopters from the roof, or drowned in the attic. That neighborhood was completely inundated when the levies failed.
In all fairness to Mr Johnson, he is only returning to traditional values of portent reading. I fully expect the British Parliament to shortly employ an entrails reader. Nature can start publishing reports on the results.
On of our chickens died a couple of days ago. She fell into the garden pond and drowned. I think that might have been an omen in itself. If I’d spatchcocked her for entrails I suspect Mrs Crox might have complained.