In the absence of God, blame has become our prevailing religion

London Times ^ | December 31, 2004 | Simon Jenkins

[ejdrapes]

In the absence of God, blame has become our prevailing religion

FIRST COMES the horror, the chilling horror of the disaster. Then comes the craving for statistics, as if to calibrate a response. Then come the anecdotes, the charity and finally the blame. None is so compelling as the blame. Blame somehow softens the horror. It mutates charity into insurance. There will be post mortems aplenty on the Indian Ocean tsunami. That the world could organise a warning system for the Pacific Ocean because it borders Japan and America but not for the poorer Indian Ocean will be deplored. So will the length of time taken to organise relief. If news agencies can reach disasters overnight, why cannot mercy agencies? Why do governments, including Britain’s, not have aircraft with relief supplies on permanent standby when we know that the greatest loss of life often occurs after a disaster? Why does the world wait until now for the United Nations to summon “a meeting” to discuss its response.

The trouble is that having abandoned the concept of the “act of God”, we have also abandoned its secular equivalent, the accident. The great disaster excuses of the past — gods, chance, fortune, original sin — have fled and with them their supporting theology. Having replaced them with free will and human agency, we expect that agency to perform. When it fails to do so it must be declared at fault. Someone must be at fault. We have a craving for someone to sue. Wherever there is a corpse there must be a liability.

Bill Clinton said on Tuesday that “when everybody takes responsibility it is like no one is responsible.” The implication is that somebody must be. But who? Is the British Government responsible for its policy of cheap air fares, which lured so many British tourists to their deaths? Are the aid agencies at fault for bringing medicine but no birth control to Asian countries, thereby inducing them to overpopulate their coasts? Are the world’s rescue services guilty for not getting into position faster when five million people are suddenly at risk of famine, exposure and disease?

In the absence of God, blame has become the prevailing religion of the age. Legal accountability is fast usurping the democratic form. In 2004 Britons have sought blame for the death of David Kelly, for false intelligence dossiers, for famine in Darfur, for political failure in Northern Ireland and for misery on the trains. Sometimes the blame is well placed. There have been resignations and dismissals, name-callings and threats. But the concept of blame permeates every area of life. The compensation culture demands that someone be held responsible for every scrape and tear. It is no longer enough to elect a government and trust it. We seek a continuous accountability.

This blame culture is both a blessing and a curse. My holiday reading has included the new sparkler from the science writer, Jared Diamond. After his ventures into zoology and anthropology, Diamond now turns to ecological disaster in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. He analyses the demise of the Maya, the Chaco, Easter Island, the Greenland Norse and, more recently, the warring Haitians and Rwandans.

In each case short-sightedness led societies to exhaust their natural resources and indulge in reckless fighting over what was left. Archaeologists can watch each society in turn make the same mistakes, usually by chopping down their trees. “What did the man think who cut down the last tree on Easter Island?” asks Diamond. The answer is probably, “which idiot cut down the last but one”. We ridicule these people for ignoring the long-term damage that they were doing to their environment — and thus choosing to fail — but so are we, and indulging in stupid wars into the bargain.

Diamond is clearly of the cataclysmic rather than equilibrium school of ecology. Doom beckons us. We face extinction from global warming and resource depletion. Soon there will be ten people per square yard and only Aids and tsunamis will keep the numbers at bay. Yet like most scientists, Diamond is at a loss when he turns from prediction to plausible prescription. We should, he says, go for sustainability, renewability, peace on Earth and public transport. But as for how to achieve these goals, that is a matter for politicians and “further reading”.

I remain unconvinced that our treatment of planet Earth is terminally catastrophic. More to the point, the short-term warming of the atmosphere appears beyond our power to reverse. If it means a worse standard of living for many poor people, we had better spend our money on alleviating their suffering than on a futile effort to reverse the climate. The same goes for earthquakes.

On the other hand, we have it within our power to call to account the stupidity of rulers. The historian, Barbara Tuchman, remarked that of all the skills mastered by modern human beings, the least advanced is politics. In tracing The March of Folly, from Troy to Vietnam, Tuchman noted the same phenomenon as does Diamond, that leaders repeat the same mistakes. They never learn from history. They are fixed on the short term. Even when they have chosen manifestly the wrong path, pride and idiocy prevents them turning back.

To me the greatest disaster of 2004 was not the Indonesian tsunami but the continuing conflict in Iraq, the bloody endgame of the 9/11 disaster. The upper estimate of deaths in Iraq, 100,000, is eerily similar to that for the tsunami. While the one disaster rates as an act of God and the other an act of man, to whit the President of the United States, to the hapless Iraqis the difference must seem notional. They must feel as impotent in the face of falling bombs and the continuing tidal wave of destruction. The bodies of their loved ones must seem just as dead.

The point of the blame culture is to make us wiser, to teach lessons. The lessons of 2004 should in theory leave us better prepared for the next earthquake or the next terrorist incident. With each disaster, we should know better how to avoid Diamond’s terrible warning against societies that “choose to fail”. We should be better adjusted to the equilibrium of survival. I wonder.

Certainly 2005 is starting impressively. The world is joining together to help the victims of a cataclysm. The outpouring of sympathy and charity is real. Because the prime cause was a natural disaster, there is no one directly to blame and a sense of common cause is easier to generate.

Yet we should remember that the Iraq disaster began in much the same way. The last time the world was similarly united in horror and sympathy was in the second week of September 2001. The attack on the twin towers in New York and elsewhere seemed an event so awful that only the most impassioned response was appropriate. Then as now, many hoped that some good might flow from such evil. The entire world, including almost all Muslim nations, condemned the attack and pledged to help to catch the culprits. Nothing like it must ever be allowed to happen again. Even Yassir Arafat gave blood for the people of New York.

History may yet see the dissipation of that sympathy and support in America’s attacks on and occupation of Islamic states as the last great folly of the 20th century. What might have become a global coalition against terror has been turned instead into a widespread and fanatical anti-Americanism. America and Britain’s overreaction to 9/11 and the reduction of Iraq to anarchy are classics of what Diamond calls a society recklessly “choosing to fail”.

Unlike the tsunami, in the case of Iraq we at least know whom to blame. The war is being waged by two democracies, Britain and America. For its outcome they have only themselves to blame.

[Nathan-1729]

"There are no conservatives among the population that so squalidly squats the Euro-peon Neo-Soviet's off-shore satellite state once know as once-great britain."

I have to disagree. They're not hard to find.

Ironically, she still calls herself a liberal.

Hey, by the way: quit knocking Britain en masse. Would you give me a lifetime on this board greater than a day if I said the same of America?

[Brian Allen]

<< I have to disagree. They're not hard to find. >>

Ah-Hah!

The [One] exception that but emphasizes the rule.

But at least, thank God, you didn't use as your [One] example of the rule maker, the execrable Hong-Kong-Maggie Snatcher, whose definitive claim to an act that both enrichened certain of her family members and several from her cabinet and will live in infamy [Unless you count whacking the poor stupid Argentinians who dared Faulk with her other couple of Islands] is to have presided over the surrendering of seven and a half million once-FRee British-Hong Kong Citizens and all of their wealth and all of their property to the predatory, psychopathologically-hesperophobic Pigking-based pack of lying, looting, thieving, mass-murdering, gangster bastards that so grandiosely calls itself "china."

And for what it's worth, I don't knock once-great britain at all.

I just report -- you decide!

Happy New Year -- Brian

"When right, I shall often be thought wrong by those whose positions will not command a view of the whole ground."

--Thomas Jefferson

[Mr. Silverback]

Also, the Iraq estimate is a fiction, but not as silly as the pre-war UN prediction: 500,000 dead.