The jailing of six Italian
scientists and
a government official for failing to predict an earthquake has caused uproar in
the scientific community. The men were convicted of manslaughter on the basis
that they failed to give an adequate risk assessment of the 2009 earthquake in
the central Italian city of L’Aquila, which killed 300 people. Outraged by the
court’s verdict, the CEO of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science
wrote to the president of Italy to tell him ‘there is no accepted scientific method
for earthquake prediction that can be reliably used to inform citizens of an
impending disaster’. The verdict is ‘perverse’ and ‘ludicrous’, says the
science journal Nature.
That’s true - the verdict is
perverse. It has a strong whiff of the Middle Ages about it, except instead of
dunking witches for bringing about a harsh winter and destroying crops, we lock
up scientists for failing to foresee a fatal earthquake. But at the same time,
isn’t the verdict also the tragically logical conclusion to the scientific
community’s feverish adoption in recent years of the role of soothsayer,
predictor of the world’s end and proponent of solutions for how to prevent it?
Over the past decade, leading scientists have repositioned themselves as
modern-day diviners, particularly in the climate-change debate, where they
insist that not only can they tell us what the world will look like in 50
years’ time, but also what minute changes all of us must make now if we want
that future world to be different. And their predictions are treated as
unchallengeable credos, as all those awkward, anti-green question-askers who
have been branded ‘deniers’ will know.
In such a climate, is it
really surprising that scientists who fail to predict a natural disaster, who do
not fulfil the role of saviour of mankind that the science community has carved
out for itself, can be demonised? If scientists play God, it’s also possible
for them to be treated as the Devil.
Of course, outrage about the
verdict is justified. These men should never have been arrested, never mind
jailed. The trial effectively criminalised uncertainty, with the prosecution arguing that the men’s information about the
earthquake was ‘generic and ineffective’ and ‘incomplete, imprecise and
contradictory’. The crux of the case was that 29 of those who died in the quake
had intended to leave L’Aquila, following a series of small tremors, but they
were persuaded to stay by a statement given by the government official who has
been jailed, Bernardo De Bernardinis. He said during the tremors period, ‘The
scientific community tells me there is no danger because there is an ongoing
discharge of energy’. This was incorrect - the scientists had actually told De
Bernardinis that the tremors pointed to an increased risk of a quake but it was
impossible to be precise about where or when such a quake might strike. This
was clearly an instance of bad communication between officials and scientists,
and between officials and the public, and it’s highly unfortunate that, in
L’Aquila’s attempts to find someone or something to hold responsible for the
devastating quake, it has all been dragged before a court and held up as
something fatally sinister.
Fundamentally, the
criminalisation of people for failing to predict an earthquake, and potentially
lessen its impact, speaks to Western society’s discomfort with the idea of
accidents or disasters, with the the idea that some things just happen and no
one is responsible. Ours is an era in which we find it very hard to accept that
some events have no logic behind them. And so we continually go on Medieval
hunts for a malevolent force or person who might be blamed for various terrible
things that occur.
Whether it’s quakes in Italy,
flooding in England or tsunamis in Asia, there’s a blame game after every
natural disaster. Religious believers blame sinful mankind, claiming he brought
God’s violent or watery judgement upon us; environmentalists blame polluting
mankind, arguing that our temerity to be industrious has upset ‘Gaia’s
balance’; others blame government officials, accusing them of failing to
safeguard every aspect of society from the whims of nature. In each case, the
impulse to blame is a backward, pre-modern one, fuelled by a belief that some
sentient, probably wicked force either caused a natural disaster or exacerbated
its effects. It is not unlike when, between the fifteenth and seventeenth
centuries, eccentric old women were branded witches and held responsible for,
as one author describes it, ‘[bringing about] years of extreme hardship, in
particular the type of misery related to extreme climatic events’ (1). Today,
too, we seek out individuals or institutions we can blame for extreme events.
Indeed, it is worth comparing
Italian officials’ response to the L’Aquila quake with the response of
Enlightened thinkers to the Great Lisbon Earthquake of November 1755. That
quake, which killed up to 100,000 people, became a key reference point for
Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire, Rousseau and Kant. They wrote about
and argued over it for years. Kant in particular challenged the idea, then a
given, that quakes such as this were acts of divine providence, punishment from
on high for mankind’s errors. That simply didn’t make sense in relation to
Lisbon, a devout Catholic city, in which virtually every church was toppled but
the notorious red-light district was left standing. Kant posited that
earthquakes ‘are not supernatural events’ but rather are natural disasters,
over which we have no control (2). This was a radical, and radically reasoned,
reading of natural events, which challenged the idea that mankind was at the
mercy of some external, watching force. Where the Lisbon quake generated heated
Enlightened debate, the L’Aquila quake gave rise to a rush to apportion blame -
signalling what a crisis of Enlightened thought there is today in comparison
with 250 years ago.
But even as we condemn the
Italian court for jailing these scientists, and Western society for failing to
accept that sometimes disasters just happen, we should also ask whether the
scientific community itself bears some responsibility for how these men have
been treated. Because today, scientists are at the forefront of depicting
natural events as being easily blameable on the behaviour of human beings.
Through its fulsome and ceaseless promotion of the climate-change agenda, the
global scientific community (as it has fashioned itself) continually makes a
simplistic causal link between what men do now and what will befall the planet
in the future - just as a link was made between the behaviour of those Italian
scientists and the quake deaths that followed.
Also, the scientific community
is forever depicting itself as soothsayer, as an almost all-knowing force,
whose predictions of future calamity must not be challenged. When radical green
activists march behind banners declaring ‘We are armed with peer-reviewed
science’, and critics of the environmentalist agenda are slammed for being
‘anti-science’, you can clearly see that science has become a kind of
unquestionable gospel of the future, a respectable version of what Nostradamus
used to do. It isn’t only that court in L’Aquila that demonises uncertainty,
lambasting those seven men for saying things that were ‘incomplete, imprecise,
contradictory’; through the phrase ‘the debate is over’, the scientific
community does the same thing in relation to climate change, frequently
slamming those who seek to inject some healthy uncertainty about the future
into proceedings.
Today it is those who pose as
pro-science who are most likely to treat natural events as being caused by
individuals’ behaviour, and who are most likely to argue that catastrophes can
be predicted and potentially offset through a secular form of eco-penance. They
even claim that earthquakes are caused by climate change, as evidenced in
recent headlines such as ‘Climate change will
shake the earth’. They would probably have blamed the Lisbon quake on
consumerism, just as religious folk blamed it on sin. In such an increasingly
unhinged, pre-Enlightened climate, is it so shocking that scientists who fail
at being seers can be ruthlessly punished?
No comments:
Post a Comment