In the past, disasters had a divine origin: a cruel and insatiable God punished Humanity with floods, fires and earthquakes, which humans, blamed, suffered as deserved punishments.
The 1755 earthquake in Lisbon inspired Voltaire’s Enlightenment criticism of this idea of men’s guilt for the evils of Nature. Would the sins in Lisbon be so much more scandalous than those in Paris? But the scientific and naturalistic conception of disasters came to remove something essential for our mourning: the existence of a culprit, a scapegoat, to bear the evil in the world.
The climate crisis of the so-called Anthropocene, the scientific verification of the relationship between Humanity’s industrial progress and the worsening of climate situations, has come to offer us a more rational explanation, but one that demands from us a greater civilizational transformation than the remission of all sins before God would be.
The truth is that, in the face of natural disasters, closer and smaller causes can be found, which help us find more obvious culprits: we built on old riverbeds, on the edge of the seas, on unstable cliffs, and the lack of prevention of climatic phenomena, which year after year increase their destructive force, has worsened the losses and damages.
It is fair that divine Providence has come to replace the improvidence of men and the guilt of sins due to failures in foresight and planning, the weakness of construction materials and other more concrete and material causes.
But the guilt and the protests, however fair they may be, should not hide from us the wave of solidarity that these floods and windstorms, with all their dramatic losses, have raised in our society, so worked that it has been ideologically in the sense of a selfish and possessive individualism, but which was able to bring the victims the attention and help possible in the first moments.
Local authorities knew how to be at the forefront of emergencies, from the smallest parish council to the largest councils, such as Leiria and Coimbra. And the State has shown that, contrary to some neoliberalism extremists, it is really needed.
But who gives back to the people the work and life that the bad weather stole from them? Who restores life to those who died on a river road? There is a core of unpredictability in the tragedy, which we can, with the strength of reason and science, combat, but which we will never eliminate from our horizon.
We are such small animals of the earth, in the words of Camões…
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