Tsunami, Symbolism

The death toll in the Indian Ocean tsunami continues to rise to staggering levels.

We're all still in the fact-gathering stage -- trying to take in and process the most basic information about what happened.

Well, not entirely.

On the second full day of U.S. news coverage, it's already clear that this disaster -- like past disasters -- is already well on the way toward its second life.  Soon it will be, not a horrible thing in itself, but an enormous blank canvas for a vast array of political and social agendas.

It's already starting.  Here's techno-libertarian Glenn Reynolds, following up yesterday's piece about the role of economic development in safeguarding populations, with a new one.  His focus today -- the role of new warning technologies, and the need for new ways of thinking about and processing information.

Governments tend to like to act based on information from trusted channels, rather than dynamically processing it.

Reynolds links to this Belmont Club posting, which notes that the natural world is not necessarily a benign, beneficent place:

The Internet, space based sensors, biohazard threat detection, the exoatmospheric interception of earthbound objects  -- are all things deemed at one time or another as a waste of money by the more enlightened,  but which may yet provide the margin for survival in a day unforeseen or unimagined. More important than the the specific technologies themselves is the watchful and precautionary mindset which created them. For some, the world is not and was never a paradaisal Gaia but a dangerous place filled with peril both natural and man-made. On the days we forget the ocean is there to remind us.

The Belmont Club, in turn, links to these letters from the Sydney Morning Herald, which draw predictable guns vs. butter distinctions:

It seems inappropriate to be arguing over Boxing Day sales while thousands of our neighbours have been killed. It is a sad and grim reminder of how vulnerable we are to the force of nature. A pity our army is busy fighting America's immoral war when they should be providing assistance to the affected areas.

Fine -- except that, as this Australian military officer points out, the military is not only responding, it's the arm of government best equipped to respond in the early stages.

Since I've been focused recently on the Christmas Wars, I was struck yesterday by the contrast between our domestic values-based "crisis" and an actual physical one, with tens of thousands of lives at stake.  And so it was even more striking to come home to the new issue of The New Yorker, where Malcolm Gladwell reviews Jared Diamond's new book, "Collapse" -- the thesis of which is that, while we're all busy devoting all our attention to cultural coherence, we're ignoring the physical crises that are really what doom civilizations.

Diamond's signal example, according to Gladwell, is of the Viking colonies on Greenland.  Conventional wisdom has it that the colonies were wiped out by the Little Ice Age.  Not so, says Diamond -- the Vikings in fact starved to death because they refused to compromise their European Christian cultural identity and imitate the local Inuit, who ate fish.  From the review:

When archeologists looked through the ruins of the Western Settlement, they found plenty of the big wooden objects that were so valuable in Greenland—crucifixes, bowls, furniture, doors, roof timbers—which meant that the end came too quickly for anyone to do any scavenging. And, when the archeologists looked at the animal bones left in the debris, they found the bones of newborn calves, meaning that the Norse, in that final winter, had given up on the future. They found toe bones from cows, equal to the number of cow spaces in the barn, meaning that the Norse ate their cattle down to the hoofs, and they found the bones of dogs covered with knife marks, meaning that, in the end, they had to eat their pets. But not fish bones, of course. Right up until they starved to death, the Norse never lost sight of what they stood for.

I read that and I said to myself, ah, there's my point exactly -- we're all caught up in our culture wars and we don't even see the real threats, which are external threats -- Islamists, epidemics, natural disasters...

A fine teaching story -- except that this morning, I turned to Andrew Sullivan's site and found that guest-blogger Ross Douthat has called into question Diamond's whole thesis, arguing that there's no Christian prohibition against eating fish.  I'm not sure that's what Diamond is suggesting -- his point seems to be that it was out of a more particular kind of cultural coherence ("we're not like those Inuit people over there") that the Vikings starved themselves to death.

Except that maybe they didn't.  Douhat also links to Matthew Yglesias, who cites both cultural and scientific evidence that the Vikings were scarfing down fish in a major way.

So the Diamond hypothesis may be revolutionary -- or it may be an alternative mythology, a counter-shot in the culture wars that says that cultural coherence is fatal.  Speaking personally -- I mistrust cultural coherence, and like to be grounded in physical realities -- so I liked Diamond on the Vikings, in the same way that I thought the Tsunami was among many other things a powerful corrective to the hand-wringing over the supposed great crisis of the day -- the de-Christianization of America.  But is Diamond right?  Maybe, maybe not.

All of which proves what, exactly?  Only this -- that everything you read is agenda-driven, and that it's impossible to take in facts, or interpret them, except through the filter of your favorite worldview.  Everything out there is a fact in itself, and a metaphor for what your commentator-of-the-moment already thought and always wanted to say.

The tsunami is a horrible fact.  It's also a lens through which you can watch everyone's political and cultural sensibilities playing out.

In this as in all things -- read, interpret, try to understand.  But keep the mechanisms in mind.  And bring many, many, many grains of salt.

UPDATE:  Yglesias investigates further, and reports that the Norse in Greenland, while fish-eaters, may have committed suicide-by-cultural-cohesion nevertheless.

ADDITIONAL UPDATE: More on the tsunami as blank slate here.