Tsunami
Christopher Hitchens
The following Op-Ed is from Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 25, Number 3.
You might think that, by now, people would have become accustomed to the idea of natural catastrophes. We live on a planet that is still cooling and which has fissures and faults in its crust; this much is accepted even by those who think that the globe is only six thousand years old, as well as by those who believe that the earth was "designed" to be this way. Even in such a case, it is to be expected that earthquakes will occur and that, if they occur under the seabed, tidal waves will occur also. Yet two sorts of error are still absolutely commonplace. The first of these is the idiotic belief that seismic events are somehow "timed" to express the will of God. Thus, reasoning back from the effect, people will seriously attempt to guess what sin or which profanity led to the verdict of the tectonic plates. The second error, common even among humanists, is to borrow the same fallacy for satirical purposes and to employ it to disprove a benign deity. Voltaire made this method famous by his writings on the calamitous Lisbon earthquake. How can a just God permit (fill in anything you choose at this point)? In the aftermath of the recent wave action in the Indian Ocean, even the archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williamson, proved himself a latter-day Voltairean by whimpering that he could see how this might shake belief in a friendly creator. Williamson is of course a notorious fool, who does an almost perfect imitation of a bleating and frightened sheep, but even so, one is forced to rub one's eyes in astonishment. Is it possible that a grown man could live so long and still have his personal composure, not to mention his lifetime job description, upset by a large ripple of seawater? Since there were convulsive and volcanic and meteoric events for many, many years before the human species made its appearance on Earth, one can scarcely put oneself in the position of asking God for an explanation of what he did to demolish pterodactyl society, thus rather heartlessly clearing the way for those who came after. But those of us who do not believe in a creator, and who are waiting for further and better results from the Hubble telescope and the clarification of DNA, should not think or speak in a short-term vernacular either. There either is a god or there is not; there is a "design" or not. It has to be admitted at the first that humans do not have the capacity to interpret geological time in any sense-making fashion. It follows from this that it is wrong to attribute disaster or suffering to god, who, if he existed, might very well have fully intended it, for long-term good or for long-term evil or for no reason at all except divine caprice. In ridiculing a pathetic human fallacy, which seeks explanation where none need be sought and which multiplies unnecessary assumptions, one should not mimic primitive ontology in order to challenge it. Better to dispose of the needless assumption altogether. This holds true for everything from Noah's flood to the Holocaust. What struck me, in reading the reports from Sri Lanka, was the mild disgrace of belonging to our imperfectly evolved species in the first place. People who had just seen their neighbors swept away would tell the reporters that they knew a judgment had been coming, because the Christians had used alcohol and meat at Christmas or because . . . well, yet again you can fill in the blanks for yourself. It was interesting, though, to notice that the Buddhists were often the worst. Contentedly patting an image of the chubby lord on her fencepost, a woman told the New York Times that those who were not similarly protected had been erased, while her house was still standing. There were enough such comments, almost identically phrased, to make it seem certain that the Buddhist authorities had been promulgating this consoling and insane and nasty view. That would not surprise me. Sri Lanka's Buddhists were responsible for frightful anti-Tamil attacks in the 1960s, and the first independent president of the country was murdered in public by a Buddhist priest. I strongly recommend that any inquisitive reader get hold of Brian Victoria's admirable book, Zen at War, which details the way in which Zen ideology was used as the training-manual for Emperor Hirohito's chauvinistic and robotic Japanese army. A wide and vague impression exists that so-called Eastern religion is more contemplative, innocuous, and humane than the proselytizing monotheisms of the West. Don't believe a word of this: try asking the children of Indochina who were dumped by their parents for inherited deformities that were attributed to sins in a previous "life." We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and a visiting professor at the New School in New York. His latest collection of essays, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays, has just been published.
