The Flood

 The nation as a whole this week has been gripped by the horrifying scenes at a Texas summer camp inundated by floodwaters. Even Ted Cruz—not someone known for great empathy or moral imagination—seems to have been touched in his humanity during his visit to the disaster scene.

He described what it meant to behold one of the destroyed campers' cabins—and to realize that children had been swept out of their beds in the middle of the night into a raging river. The human brain recoils from contemplating such a tragedy. Cruz himself was overcome with tears. 

I could almost forgive him, in hearing his heartfelt description, for voting just last week for a bill that will eviscerate climate programs designed to make these kinds of disasters less frequent and deadly in future. Almost. 

The apocalyptic scene has something Biblical about it—the heavens were rent wide and it rained for forty days, until the Earth was wholly submerged in the waters. And just like the scriptural Deluge, the disaster raises the same ancient theological question: why? 

In one of his poems in the Canti, Giacomo Leopardi contemplates an ancient funeral monument of a young girl bidding goodbye to her parents. He asks why nature would create life only to destroy it—why it brings life and love only to inflict on innocent people the heartbreak of loss. 

"But perhaps Nature in her operations," Leopardi concludes, "has something other than our welfare in mind." 

One is reminded of Thomas Hardy's sarcasm—in Tess of the d'Urbervilles—on Wordsworth's lines about "Nature's holy plan." Hardy looked about him at the suffering of a poor family and its offspring—even here in picturesque Wessex—and asked what beneficent or intelligible plan was in view. 

The earthquake in Lisbon famously moved Voltaire to similar reflections. To all those philosophers arguing by points too-clever-by-half that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds—he bid: Go, behold the ruins of Lisbon—and then tell me if you still believe it. 

Lord Byron asked the same questions about the Biblical Flood, in his Heaven and Earth: A Mystery, that Voltaire asked about the earthquake—or that we are inclined to ask today about the inundation in Texas. What could justify Jehovah in destroying his own innocent creatures? 

In the culminating scene of the closet drama, one of the mortals condemned to death in the Deluge rushes up to the side of the Ark, and asks one of Noah's sons to spare her child from the raging flood waters: 

Oh let this child embark!
I brought him forth in woe,
But thought it joy
To see him to my bosom clinging so.
Why was he born?
What hath he done—
My unwean'd son—
To move Jehovah's wrath or scorn? 

This is undoubtedly the same question many parents are asking of the heavens this week in Texas. It is the same question that Leopardi asked, in the poem mentioned above: 

O Nature, how, ah how, can your heart allow
such embraces to be loosened,
friend from friend,
brother from brother,
child from father,
lover from lover: one dying,
the other granted life? How can
you make such grief
our fate, that mortals
survive a mortal love? (Kline trans. throughout)

Leopardi, unlike so many others—as we have seen—provided an answer to these questions: 

But Nature
bestows its care on other things,
than our good or ill.

And this—harsh as it may be—must be our own answer too. 

Humanity truly does have nothing to rely on in this cosmos other than itself—that is, one another. If we have any hope for one day being able to tame the flood waters and halt climate change and save ourselves from the impending deluge of the melting sea-ice—it is us, not Jehovah, who will have to save us. 

I understand very well why people feel this is an inadequate answer. I feel it to be inadequate too. Humanity, one feels, is not up to the task. God help whoever has to rely on mere humanity in the face of the raging torrents of Nature. "It's a naked child against a hungry wolf," to quote the poet John Davidson. 

But that's all we have to work with. It's all we've ever had. And perhaps, it is not so much a reason for despair as may at first appear. As the Enlightenment philosopher Volney once put it—in his Ruins of Empires (Eckler trans.):

Yes, man is made the architect of his own destiny; he, himself, hath been the cause of the successes or reverses of his own fortune; and if, on a review of all the pains with which he has tormented his own life, he finds reason to weep over his own weakness or imprudence, yet, considering the beginnings from which he sat out, and the height attained, he has, perhaps, still reason to presume on his strength, and to pride himself on his genius.