Responsible for the Wind

By Crispin Sartwell

 

If there is one cosmic lesson to be drawn from events like Hurricane Katrina, it is that the world is morally blank. It kills or caresses without regard to what we want or what we deserve.  It is an event, not an agent.

    No fact of our experience is more evident, is more richly or continuously affirmed. And no fact of our experience is as hard to face or as elaborately falsified.

     It took about ten minutes for people - such as former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal, wring in Salon - to start blaming the Bush administration: for global warming that supposedly caused Katrina, for ignoring the Army Corps of Engineers when they warned of dangers to the levy system, and just for being generally bad people. But any serious attempt to grapple with the causation of this event would take into account the entire history of the Mississippi river basin and the development along it. It would take into account the selection of the site of New Orleans  and the historical poverty and corruption of the city and state governments. It would take into account the incomprehensibly complex set of atmospheric events that created Katrina and determined its route.

     Blaming Bush for the weather is a symptom of the monomania of some of Bush's opponents, but it's also an attempt to give the world as a whole some sort of moral content. It's an attack on the administration, but also a perverse worship of it, an animistic attribution of powers tantamount to omnipotence. The view is bizarre, but it yields the satisfying sense that the world displays a comprehensible moral order.

    There will now be commissions of investigation. Memos will come to light predicting the event with uncanny prescience. Somebody will resign. Of course, a thousand disasters were being predicted simultaneously, and any event is predictable, given that it has actually occurred. But the point of various investigations will be to return us to a moral universe, to reconstruct the howling blank destruction of the wind as an arena of agency.

    The idea of political responsibility for hurricanes is a humanized version of the religious impulse to chalk up events like Katrina to God's will. One preacher apparently said it was God's wrath at the American south for its slavery. Others no doubt will preach New Orleans as Sodom, just as they preached that the AIDS epidemic or 9.11 represented God's judgment against someone.

   Such views make the world satisfying in some sense, but they also make God into a kind of indiscriminate terrorist. They show our desperation for meaning by essentially abandoning any pretense of God's benevolence. For, whomever God is judging, drowning whole regions - killing children and pets and preachers alike - is hardly a technique that omniscience and omnipotence would select for sorting the sinners from the saints.

    The religious scepticism associated with enlightenment figures such as Hume and Voltaire was in part instigated by the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which killed as many as 100,000 people. The arbitrariness with which the universe dealt out suffering and death compromised the moral comprehensibility of the world.

    But the humanism of these figures - their optimism about the efficacy of human action in a universe from which God had absconded, can mutate into a delusion of human or at least state omniscience and omnipotence, in which any event can be attributed to agency.

    Calling the Bush administration to account for the hurricane is a religious expression. But if deep inside you regard the government as a god, you're going to be very disappointed with its performance.

    The impulse to assign responsibility - whether to God or Dick Cheney - ill becomes us.  It is cowardly. The hard and honest response is to face the amorality of the world and to take care of each other as best we can.