One world: Of earthquakes and interdependence
As Americans were complaining about all the snow this winter, arguing about the value of NPR and PBS, and learning that we suffer from an “enlargement of self,” the Japanese were dying by the thousands as solid ground gave way and the sea roiled and raged, consuming whole cities.
The raw, elemental power of nature can shake us from our
preoccupations like nothing else. (Though a few million of us will
obsess about Division 1 basketball over the next few weeks–the men’s
game, of course, never the women’s–elevating it to an importance
that borders on the obscene).
The indiscriminate destruction caused by earthquakes and tsunamis messes with our sense of cosmic justice. It shatters
our romantic views of nature and of divinity–the silliness we often
succumb to when we credit God with a beautiful sunset or a striking
cloud formation. It silences, thankfully, if only for awhile, the bad
theology of Everything Happens for a Reason. (That the Japanese are the
only people to have suffered a nuclear attack and are now at grave risk
for prolonged radiation contamination is a particularly cruel irony that
ought to leave us in stunned silence).
This kind of “natural” devastation also reminds us of how little
control we really have in this life, despite our considerable efforts to
manage, contain, and forestall the unforeseeable. We know this
in personal, intimate ways–a loved one stricken with cancer, say–but we
seem so willing to buy into the lie that as a collective–a nation-state,
say–we can preempt disaster with our cleverness and moral resolve (and a
few billion dollars).
A decade of rhetoric about “homeland security” has trained us to
think that we can make our country safe from outside attack, that,
indeed, we must value and pursue security above all else. Politicians
routinely campaign on such ideas, counting on an edgy, fearful
electorate to latch on to any promise to keep us from harm–no matter how
dubious or contrived.
But life is fragile, peace is always precarious, and the earth itself
no respecter of persons or property. One gigantic wave and whole
populations are decimated; one seismic shift and time itself is altered.
If there’s a lesson in this most recent tragedy (and it’s generally a
bad idea to go looking for one), it’s that humans exist in a complex,
interdependent web of relations with each other and with a planet that
is sometimes inhospitable to our habitation of it. It was as instructive
as it was terrifying to anticipate and track the waves that washed up
on the California coast as the tsunami made its inevitable way westward.
What happened in Japan didn’t stay in Japan.
Because corporations have written the dominant narrative of our
time–that we exist to consume their products and that this is made
possible by the easy flow of capital, goods, services, and labor across
increasingly permeable borders, we might think that it is free market
capitalism which binds us together, making us “one world.” But in fact
the earthquake and tsunami have revealed our common humanity and common
destiny, reminding us that we have always been linked to our
neighbors near and far, and that consumerism won’t save us but
acknowledging our mutual dependence and shared vulerability just might.
Originally posted at Intersections.
