Disaster is an inevitable consequence of the vulnerability of life. Most natural disasters are caused by coincidence: bad weather, volcanic activity, lightning. Due to our anthropo-centric thinking however, we all have the tendency to associate natural disaster with human failure. Noah’s Flood needed to wash away the sin of mankind. In the Middle Ages, epidemic plagues were caused by people collaborating with the forces of Evil. You would think that in our scientific paradigm, we could classify our recent flood disaster as a meteorological coincidence and not as a result of human sin? No, we still like blaming our fellow human beings. "The politicians didn’t see this coming." "Neither did the scientists." "China is pumping too much carbon dioxide in the sky" (but we still buy their products). This happens in a society which believes it has everything under control.
The same happens in organisations. When an ICT incident happens in a company, it is not the hacker who is blamed, it is the company internal ICT security officer. Don’t forget we live in a meritocracy and in the delusion of immanent justice. If something bad happens, someone must have done something wrong. This delusion makes us associate the most 'natural' (in this case externally caused) disasters with the bad behaviour of our fellow human beings.
Nobody seems to argue that this bad weather was simply not foreseeable and that our hydrological infrastructure is not ready for such quantities of water. Measures were taken, but not sufficiently. That doesn’t mean it is someone’s individual fault. Even collectively, we can’t really predict what the infrastructure priorities should be. Only our hubris assures us we can anticipate all catastrophes and work out the perfect policy against them. I don't suggest we shouldn't worry about the climate, on the contrary: the principle of precaution should always prevail. But we should not amalgamate bad weather and climate change.
I refer to
my earlier blogs “Stop
the Blame Game” and "Don't Watch the News".
1 comment:
It even exists in other cultures, called Karma. But most people have learnt from catastrophes. They don't build houses in known flooding areas or build expensive dikes (deltawerken), take measures against tsunami's, evacuate neighbourhoods of volcano's, ... Life is a continuous improvement, unless you are stuck in inflexible medieval beliefs like fundamentalists.
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