Monday, September 9, 2013

Cultural roles of tectonism in the modern world

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498514279/Impact-of-Tectonic-Activity-on-Ancient-Civilizations-Recurrent-Shakeups-Tenacity-Resilience-and-Change


Cultural roles of tectonism in the modern world

This post has been revised and incorporated in a published book (Aug. 2015; link above)

Eric R. Force (eforce@email.arizona.edu)

A strong spatial relation has been established in previous weblog posts between “great ancient civilizations” of the old world and various active faults along the southern boundary of the Eurasian tectonic plate (1).  This would seem strange in view of the seismic disadvantages such locations carry.  However, the relation is probabilistically far too strong, and shows far too many allied phenomena, to be coincidental.  Only a few factors have the right structure to influence the dynamics of the relation, and among these is a forced pace of cultural change in response to tectonic activity.  Whatever the complete explanation(s), it is fairly clear that some relationship of cultural complexity with tectonic activity existed in antiquity—for at least three thousand years of our history.
The relation is less obvious in the medieval period and seems vanished after the Renaissance.  These discontinuities were described and discussed separately (2). 
But it’s of immediate importance to know whether the ancient relation has any relevance to us in the modern world.  Is it just a peculiar and obscure feature of a long-dead era, manifested by a particular type of culture in a particular part of the world?  Or does the ancient relation provide a fortuitous window that allows us to see something basic about mankind’s cultures, something that is revealed most clearly in a snapshot of previous cultural stages?  If the latter is true, we should expect some manifestations in our modern world, and in retrospect I think there are some fairly obvious ones (3).
The following sections describe the treatment of tectonism by the fields of philosophy, economics, and psychology, followed by its real-world modern impact on politics and religion, and the potential for better including tectonism in anthropology.

Philosophy
For this purpose, discussion of the “modern era” has to begin in the Age of Enlightenment, as all the threads of subsequent discussion begin with its philosophies and diverge from there.  More specifically, it begins with the “Lisbon” earthquake (4) of 1755.  At the time all but a few “naturalists” agreed that this event was caused by God.  Abroad there was a tendency to think it was God’s comment on the Inquisition, but in Portugal almost all prelates preached that it was God’s comment on their parishioners’ sins (5).
Even more specifically, this discussion begins with Voltaire’s reaction to the Lisbon earthquake.  He published a poem about the disaster almost immediately, and the novel Candide shortly after (6), ridiculing a prevailing view of the time (presented most fully by the German philosopher Leibnitz) that “this is the best of all possible worlds” (7).  In other words Voltaire used the Lisbon earthquake to address the question of evil in the world. 
Voltaire’s commentary immediately sparked discussion and responses from all quarters of the European world.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, still a relatively young man who had recently introduced the “noble savage” idea, pointed out that the main trouble with earthquakes was man’s insistence on building cities.    Immanuel Kant, an even younger man, published three papers about the place of earthquakes in the order of nature, and mankind’s reliance on that order (8).  And as with other earthquakes, theologians such as John Wesley all had something to say.
The popularity of Candide, however, had in the meantime washed over all Europe.  Many people who had acquiesced in attributing to divine will all events whether natural or human, were reluctant to do so afterward.—and thus Candide became a potent vehicle for the Age of Enlightenment.
Later in his life Kant himself was more troubled with the problem of evil in the world, but said that earthquakes and other demonstrations of nature’s power are necessary to fire human imaginations, and inspire “sublime” human responses that attempt to emulate that power (9). 
The general change in attitudes, however, endured long past the influence of individual philosophers. Certainly the Lisbon earthquake remained in the western world’s folklore for a long time, as shown by Oliver Wendell Holmes’ poem “The Deacon’s Masterpiece” written a century later.  But more important, the way people think had changed, away from explanations of nature based on divine will.
In Lisbon itself, the efforts of the Marquis de Pombal to forge ahead with the reconstruction of the city, armed with dictatorial powers, made its mark on practical minds elsewhere (10).  It is this that left the most lasting trace on the real world of economics and politics, as we will see.

Economics
An economic approach to earthquakes began to diverge from philosophy in the work of John Stuart Mill, who is still respected in both fields.   In his influential “Principles of Political Economy” of 1848 (11) he remarked in a section called “why countries recover rapidly from a state of devastation” that observers should not be so surprised that recovery can be rapid, because only the product of a short interval of production is destroyed. 
This theme was repeated and developed by economists over the following century; San Francisco’s rapid recovery from its earthquake of 1906 was noted, along with that of other cities from their fires. By 1946 Lewis Mumford was discussing how a city devastated by WWII could take advantage of its situation, by which time planners in Warsaw had already put this idea to work (12).  Joseph Schumpeter introduced the term “creative destruction” in 1950 to refer to a desired continual renewal of capital, requiring continual destruction of outmoded parts.  Schumpeter’s followers have pointed out that natural disasters are part of and accelerate this process (13).  His phrase is still current among today’s economic theorists; it was repeated quite often by Alan Greenspan as chairman of the US Federal Reserve.  The 2011 earthquakes in NE Japan have produced economic predictions of long-term benefit in the popular-economic media, much of it referring to studies elsewhere (14).
A corollary use of these concepts is in city planning.  Several recent works cover the opportunity after disasters such as earthquakes to better order cities that have been allowed to grow haphazardly or to rot away (15). As we’ve seen, this tradition includes Lisbon but began even earlier (16), and continues with current thought about Christchurch (17). 

Psychology
The divergence between philosophical and psychological consideration of tectonic activity in the modern world centers on William James, a philosopher often said to have founded modern psychology.  As with our philosophical discussion, James’ entrance begins with a concrete event; he was in San Francisco for its 1906 earthquake.  James’ theory of moral equivalents had already included the thought that stressful events such as disasters were necessary to align the instincts into a more civilized pathway.  And his own reaction to the earthquake and his observations of the behavior of others convinced him that such events awaken parts of the psyche that lie dormant until necessary for survival and recovery (18). Several authors made parallel observations at the time (19), but this theme in the psychological literature has faded away in favor of psychological treatment of disaster victims on one hand and the psychology of entertainment on the other.  Ironically James’ thoughts were kept alive via political journalism, first in the person of Walter Lippman, an ardent student of James’ work.  Lippman continued to point out the galvanizing effect of disasters on cultures, and popular media occasionally resurrect the theme (20).

The collected works of several of the authors treated here runs to whole bookshelves if not entire bookcases, so perhaps it’s not surprising that their thoughts pertinent to tectonic activity, which may be only a few paragraphs, has been neglected.  But it’s interesting that prominent thinkers throughout our era have noticed creative cultural aspects of earthquakes and other disasters.
Now perhaps it’s time to move out of the realm of literature and into the real worlds of politics, popular religion, demographics, etc.   Political response to disaster has varied according to varying conditions of leadership and resources, but some would consider it positive in the long term in examples like San Francisco, where extensive reorganization as well as rebuilding occurred (21).  Political change resulting from earthquakes is especially common where ruling classes refuse to respond.  Such was the case in 1972 in Managua; the nascent Sandinista party was more responsive than Somosa’s regime (22).   Another recent example is Mexico City after its 1985 earthquake, where entrenched political and bureaucratic powers were unable to look beyond their own interests in response, to the extent that local citizens’ groups appointed themselves and directed recovery.  When these groups proved effective, they retained power (23).
Of course an obvious political response to disasters such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions comes in the entire bureaucracies created to deal with them, such as the Federal Emergency Management Administration in the United States, and similar organizations elsewhere.  The point of such entities, however, is to ameliorate negative impacts.  Another political response, specific to earthquakes, has been enactment of building codes that minimize damage, leading to entire new aspects of architecture. 
Popular religion showed discontinuities due to tectonism in the ancient world, and this has proved to be the case in the modern world also.  Perhaps the most graphic example is provided by the surge in Islamic fundamentalism that resulted from the eruption and resulting tsunami of Krakatoa in 1883 (24).  Another example came in Japan with the 1923 Kanto earthquake, which led via imposition of martial law to a mixture of chauvinistic religion, racism, and militarism (25).  Religion in colonial New England was molded by the Mathers, father and son, taking advantage of anxiety about the local earthquakes of 1638, 1727, and 1755 .  Such religious changes resemble religious discontinuities in antiquity (26).
Demographically, an impact of tectonism on the distribution of today’s more technologically advanced populations is apparent from an image of our world at night.  Tectonic boundaries commonly correspond with brightness, notably in some areas—California, Japan, Java—that became culturally complex mostly after the period of antiquity.  Apparently the Pacific rim has become the primary tectonically-active locus of cultural complexification, taking the place once held by the southern boundary of the Eurasian plate.
The field of anthropology has only recently grasped the opportunity to incorporate tectonism into its literature, except as short-term disaster response, preparedness, post-traumatic stress disorder.  Aspects treating volcanism (27) and the compilations of Oliver-Smith and Hoffman (28) are conspicuous exceptions, but deal with disasters of all sorts together.  However, the newly popular field of resilience theory (29) has the right structure for comprehensive analysis, and I fully expect anthropology to take the lead role it should have in this respect. 

Tectonism ranges alongside many other events in molding modern directions.  We can conclude that tectonic activity especially earthquakes impact the modern world in long-term ways that are clear in aggregate, but subtle enough to escape overt or concentrated notice. The resemblance to individual changes in the ancient world in response to tectonic events is remarkable in a few cases (30).  Overall, the resemblance is enough to suppose that the trend toward cultural complexity observable in antiquity over several thousand years may have manifestations in our societies also. 
In some ways it’s easier in antiquity to label such directions as “positive,” as we only see eventual cultural results.  In the modern world we know many of the names of individual victims along the way, and “positive” trends are therefore ambiguous, especially where they depend on the observer’s value system.  But the literature and event responses listed above certainly do describe accelerations of the pace of change toward what an anthropologist would call cultural complexity.
The documented spatial correspondence of tectonism and cultural complexity may be robust in antiquity, but the world has changed a great deal over the nearly two thousand years since the close of that era.  In our modern world we could only expect to see dim images of the processes then at work.  It appears, however, that those images certainly are there, and the structure of their occurrence in the context of cultural change is basically the same as in antiquity.  In the modern world we get a better sense of the cultural dynamics than we get in antiquity—despite the efforts of Herodotus, Thucydides, and their peers-- and this could be a valuable tool in understanding the ancient pattern.  For the question I originally posed, the resemblances between ancient and modern cultural patterns in response to tectonism is a powerful clue that a forced pace of cultural change is a strong component of any explanation for the observed spatial relationship between tectonic activity and the distribution of ancient civilizations.
For people scanning today’s headlines, though, the significance of this posting may take a different direction:  in both the ancient and modern worlds the power of tectonic activity has commonly accelerated cultural change.  This change has ultimately become constructive in cultures that had certain resources, a choice of options, and proper leadership.  The evidence in the ancient world consists of the distribution of the most complex cultures, the archaeology of their sites, and snippets of pertinent history.  To this we in the modern world can add the literatures of economics, psychology, philosophy, and anthropology. Political, religious, and demographic corollaries are clear.   It appears the dynamics may actually be the same in the ancient and modern eras, and if so combining the information from both could lead to a better understanding of current events.



Notes
1. Published as Force, 2008; Force and McFadgen 2010
2. Oct. 16, 2013
3. For the following summaries of “modern” discussion of this subject, scattered through the literatures of several disparate disciplines, I need to acknowledge the introduction to it that the work of Kevin Rozario provides (Rozario 2007).  This volume is the main source for unattributed background information.
 I would like to thank Jim Bliss, Bruce McFadgen, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, and Ned Brown, who spotted important pertinent literature, and acknowledge several people who helped improve this posting—Victoria Brandon, Alastair Gill, Jennifer Dodge, Jane Force, Steve Miller, Germaine Shames, and especially the late John Dohrenwend.  
                    4. Actually this earthquake was centered on a fracture zone at sea off the SW corner of Portugal (de Boer and Sanders 2005) on the boundary between the Eurasian and African plates.
                   5. From Kendrick 1957, Rozario 2007, and deBoer and Sanders 2005.  Such discussion followed each of many earthquakes, some of them preceding that of Lisbon, such as those of London in 1750 and New England in 1638, 1727, and earlier in 1755.  The latter three were marked by religious interpretations from the Mathers, father and son, and many revival meetings.
                   6. And of course Leonard Bernstein wrote a provocative musical of this title in 1956.  Voltaire built into Candide many other sorts of horrors that were occurring at the time, some entirely manmade. 
                   7. Gottfried Wilhelm Liebnitz, (1646-1716). To be fair, Leibnitz had said that God created this world with an optimal ratio of good and evil and refrained from meddling thereafter.  Also a victim of Voltaire’s satire was Alexander Pope’s epic poem Essay on Man.
                   8. Kendrick 1957.  The link with fault movement still lay far beyond Kant in the future, however. 
                   9. Kant’s Critique of Judgment of 1790, in the section “As nature regarded as might.” Even Johann Goethe, only six years old at the time of the Lisbon earthquake, nevertheless records impressions of it in his autobiography.
                  10. Kendrick 1957; Tobriner 1980; Rozario 2007
                  11. Mills’ complete title continues “with some applications to social philosophy”, thus covering almost all the bases available at the time.
                  12. Mumford 1946 re blitz in UK, and Vale and Campanella, 2005 describing planning in Warsaw concurrently with Nazi destruction. 
                  13. Cuaresma et al. 2008 is a good example.
                  14. For example, Skidmore and Toya 2002.  Popular-economic predictions of potential eventual benefits of a disaster, and consequent observations, have a history that certainly goes back to the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 (reviewed by Rozario 2007).
                  15.  For example Rosen 1986 and Smith 1990.  An emphasis on provision of open space is provided by Allan and Bryant (2010).
                  16. Tobriner 1980
                  17. Reviewed by McFadgen (2013)
                  18. James’ essays appear in various forms in different compendiums.  The most pertinent post-earthquake essay is entitled “On some mental effects of the earthquake”; the most pertinent pre-earthquake is “The moral equivalent of war.”
                  19. Including Gertrude Atherton and Simon Patten.  The psychology of severe aftershocks seems not to have been described for this seminal earthquake, and one can imagine that a population’s determination to recover can be severely undermined by aftershocks. 
                  20.  Reviewed also by Rozario (2005). Indeed as I write this (Sept. 8. ’13), the New York Times (p. SR1) contains an essay “Value of Suffering” following disasters, and the World Bank news for Dec. 26, 2012 is claiming net positives in infrastructure for the Haitian earthquake. Personally, I’d like to forgo both disasters and suffering, thanks.
                 21. Winchester 2006, de Boer and Sanders 2005
                 22. de Boer and Sanders 2005.
                 23. Garcia-Acosta 2002; Davis 2005
                 24. Winchester 2003.  Winchester 2006 makes a less persuasive but similar claim about religious aftermaths of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
                 25. Cultural change in Japan has often been catalyzed by earthquakes, but fortunately the changes have generally been in other directions than in 1923.
                 26. Force and McFadgen 2010, 2012, and postings of Aug. 29, 2013 and May 18, 2014
                 27. Balmuth et al. 2005 (see especially therein Plunket, P., and Urunuela, G., Cultural responses to risk and disaster: an example from the slopes of the Popocatepetl volcano in central Mexico) and Sheets and Grayson 1979 (see especially therein Nolan, M. L., Impact of Paracutin on five communities). 
                28. Hoffman and Oliver-Smith 2002, and Oliver-Smith and Hoffman 1999 (note especially therein Dyer, C. L. The Phoenix effect in post-disaster recovery). Oliver-Smith 1979 creates a vivid picture of tectonic-anthropology connections.  For archaeologic emphasis, Reycraft and Bawden 2000, Hegmon 2008.  
               29. See for example Gunderson and Holling 2002.  Resilience theory is now being applied to archaeology (e.g. Redman and Kinzig, 2003, Hegman 2008), and we may yet see anthropological analysis of tectonism in antiquity. For related archaeologic emphases, Reycraft and Bawden 2000.   Oliver-Smith 1979 creates a vivid picture of a modern tectonic-anthropology connections.
                30. For example, compare descriptions of Corinth in AD 410 with Krakatoa, or Sparta in 464-5 BC with Managua or Mexico City



References
            Allan, P. and Bryant, M., 2010, The critical role of open space in earthquake recovery: a case study:  Proceedings of the New Zealand Society of Earthquake Engineering Conference, Wellington, New Zealand.
Balmuth, M. S., Chester, D. K., and Johnston, P. A., eds., 2005, Cultural responses to the volcanic landscape: the Mediterranean and beyond: Archaeological Institute of America, Colloquia and conference papers #8.
Cuaresma, J. C., Hlouskova, J., and Obersteiner, M., 2008, Natural disasters as creative destruction? Evidence from developing countries: Economic Inquiry v. 46, p. 214-226.
Davis, D. E., 2005, Reverberations: Mexico City’s 1985 earthquake and the transformation of the capital, in Vale and Campanella, p. 255-280.
de Boer, J. Z., and Sanders, D. T., 2005, Earthquakes in human history: Princeton, Princeton Press.
Force, E. R., 2008, Tectonic environments of ancient civilizations in the Eastern hemisphere:  Geoarchaeology v. 23, p. 644-653
Force, E. R., and McFadgen, B. G., 2010, Tectonic environments of ancient civilizations: opportunities for archaeoseismological and anthropological studies:  Geological Society of America Special Paper 471 (Ancient Earthquakes) p. 21-28
------, 2012, Influences of active tectonism on human development: a review and Neolithic example: American Geophysical Union Monograph 198 (Climates, Landscapes, and Civilisations), p. 195-202.
Garcia-Acosta, V., 2002, Historical disaster research, in Hoffman and Oliver-Smith
Gunderson, L. H., and Holling, C. S., eds., 2002, Panarchy: understanding transformations in human and natural systems:  Washington D. C., Island Press
Hegmon, M. and others, 2008, Social transformation and its human costs in the prehistoric U.S. southwest:  American Anthropologist v. 110, p. 313-324.
Hoffman, S. A., and Oliver-Smith, A., eds., 2002, Catastrophe and culture: the anthropology of disaster: Santa Fe, American School of American Research
Kendrick, T. D., 1957, The Lisbon earthquake:  Philadelphia, Lippincott.
McFadgen, B., 2013, Archaeology and history of seismic events: is the past a key to the future?:  New Zealand Institute of Surveyors.
Mumford, Lewis, 1946, City development: studies in renewal and development: New York, Harcourt Brace.
Oliver-Smith, A., 1979, Post-disaster consensus and conflict in a traditional society: the 1970 avalanche of Yungay, Peru:  Mass Emergencies v. 4, p. 39-52.
Oliver-Smith, A., and Hoffman, S. M., eds, 1999, The angry earth: disaster in anthropological perspective:  New York, Routledge
Redman, C L, and Kinzig, A. P., 2003, Resilience of past landscapes: resilience theory, society, and the longue duree:  Conservation Ecology, v. 7, p 14-32
Reycraft, R. M., and Bawden, G., eds, 2000, Environmental disaster and the archaeology of human response:  Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, Anthropological Paper 7 (Albuquerque)
Rosen, C. M., 1986, The limits of power: great fires and the process of city growth in America: Cambridge, Cambridge U.
Rozario, Kevin, 2005, Making progress: disaster narratives and the art of optimism in modern America, in Vale and Campanella, p. 27-54
-----, 2007, The culture of calamity: disaster and the making of modern America:  Chicago, U. Chicago
Sheets, P. D., and Grayson, D. K., eds, 1979, Volcanic activity and human ecology:  New York, Academic Press.
Skidmore, M., and Toya, H., 2002, Do natural disasters promote long-term growth?:  Economic Inquiry, v. 40, p. 664-687.
Smith, Neil, 1990, Uneven development: nature, capital, and the production of space: Cambridge MA, Basil Blackwell
Tobriner, S., 1980, Earthquakes and planning in the 17th and 18th centuries: Journal of Architectural Education, v. 33, p. 11-15.
Vale, L. J., and Campanella, T. J., eds., 2005, The resilient city: Oxford, Oxford U.  See “Introduction: The cities rise again” p. 3-26 and “Conclusion: Axioms of resilience” , p. 335-356 for their own contributions.
Winchester, Simon, 2003, Krakatoa: the day the world exploded, August 27, 1883: Viking
------ , 2006, A crack in the edge of the world: America and the great California earthquake of 1906