Fear and Trembling: The Lisbon Earthquake, Effects, and Future Risks

Introduction

In the autumn of 1755, a massive earthquake tore through the wealthy port city of Lisbon, Portugal. It was entirely unexpected, and the effects were devastating. Buildings crumbled, and fallen candles and other sources of open flame set fires which spread rapidly through the ruins. As the shocked and dazed survivors fled the rubble and the flames and made for the Tagus river, they were met by oncoming tsunami that flooded and destroyed the already devastated waterfront sector of the city, and many were drowned. By the end of the day, thousands of people were dead and one of the world’s great cities lay in ruins. But the trauma would extend far beyond that point in time and space. For Lisbon, the task was to “bury the dead and feed the living” (2008: 24), but the event raised further questions for all of Europe. What was one to make of catastrophe on this scale? What did it mean to inhabit a world where such a disaster was possible? And, even more, a question that still resonates today: Could the disaster occur again?

In this paper, I will explore these events and the questions that they raise. I will examine the timeline of the disaster in detail, and I will explore its social and environmental effects, both immediately after the event and in the longer term. I will outline the current scientific understanding of the potential causes of the quake. Finally, I will explore the issue of future risks to the geographical area, and the significance or lack thereof of those risks.

 

Online Roleplaying Games and Gender Issues: Then and Now

Early in the life of the internet, there were many and varying ideas about what it might be used for. Information sharing. Shopping. Education. Social interaction. Pornography. Even games, though what forms any of these things would take was anyone’s guess.

Then, with the advent of MUDs (text-based online roleplaying games), a new phenomenon started appearing. Within these online settings, players would build characters, some highly detailed, and use them to interact with other characters played by people around the world. This seemed straightforward enough (considering), until it was discovered that players would not always select a character whose gender matched their own. Sherry Turkle examines this phenomenon in her book Life on the Screen:

Habitat, a Japanese MUD, has 1.5 million users. Habitat is a MUD operated for profit. Among the registered members of Habitat, there is a ratio of four real-life men to each real-life woman. But inside the MUD the ratio is only three male characters to one female character. In other words, a signifiant number of players, many tens of thousands of them, are virtually cross-dressing. (Turkle, 212)

The reasons behind this, Turkle found, were complex and struck deep at the heart of the way we construct identity. But what about today? If we looked at a similar game, what would we find? Would the reasons for the virtual gender-swapping be different or the same? What would people be getting out of it? How would they enact their adopted gender?

 

Tales We Tell Each Other: Microinteraction and Narratology in the Context of the Internet

Introduction

Tom Hobbes is having a bad day. His face is black and blue from an unexpected blow to the nose. He has been bitten by fire ants. His All-Terrain Vehicle, which he dearly loves, has broken down and he had had no luck repairing it. The setting presented is thus: Tom, dejected and in no little pain, is close to weeping with sheer frustration.

So far there is very little about this picture that appears at all strange or bizarre, or anything more than faintly tragic—unless, that is, you know that Tom Hobbes is on an unidentified island with no known GPS coordinates; that he appeared there spontaneously almost a year ago; that his ATV appeared out of thin air several months ago, and that all his woes are due to the ugly wooden idol sitting a few feet away from him. In addition to this, he will, from the point at which the initial scene ends, speak with several different people and go to two separate locations with two of them. He will go to both these locations simultaneously. All the conversations will, likewise, take place simultaneously and in the same spaces, at least initially, though none of the people who speak to Tom will see each other.

The scenario described above is part of a game played online by many people. Strictly speaking, it is a roleplaying game in that players choose characters through which to interact with each other and their strange and mutually created world. Since this world is strange, it would be tempting to assume that it is unique—but this is untrue. Increasing numbers of people are spending their time in various forms of online, user-created worlds. The structures and rules governing these worlds should therefore be of sociological interest. More particularly, this is a world where rules of microinteraction are adapted to fit an online context free from face to face encounters, and where these adapted rules are further stretched to fit interactions designed to construct a narrative which exists on both the individual and the communal level.

While narrative theory and microinteraction have covered some of the same areas before now, they have not yet been applied to the context of an online roleplaying game. The form of game I will examine is itself unique in the world of online RPGs in the ways in which it mixes narrative and social interaction, and in the ways in which it maintains its own internal consistency. I will examine that consistency and the rules and norms that exist to uphold it, how players overcome issues of time and space both within and without the game, how plots form and are developed, and how the underlying architecture of the narrative constrains and allows certain actions within the game.

First I will outline pertinent work done on microinteraction, narratology, and the study of online and roleplay gaming. I will follow with a description of the research setting and the questions it raises. Finally I will outline the research methods I plan to use.

 

Tests of Courage: “Forced” Rituals and Organized Killing in WWII

Face to Face

Two different settings, two different stories, chilling similarities and some startling differences. In Manchuria, 1941, a group of Japanese soldiers stand facing huddled, terrified Chinese prisoners. At an order from the commanding officer, one of the soldiers steps forward and beheads a prisoner in one smooth, bloody motion. The others follow his example. No one refuses to take part in the slaughter.

In German-occupied Poland, approximately a year later, a battalion of German policemen approach a village in the dark before dawn. On their arrival, their commanding officer announces that every Jew in the village, man, woman, and child, must be shot. And yet, not every policeman shoots. Some slip away. Some find other tasks that involve no killing. No one is punished for his refusal to kill.

It would be reasonable to expect both these examples to proceed in the same way. Both take place in a country occupied by a hostile invading force. Both involve people who were largely seen by the invaders as less than human. Both involve an order to kill. And yet, there are profound differences in these two cases. These differences could be explained through slightly different circumstances and by cultural variances, but I will argue that they can be explained at least in part through Interaction Ritual Theory, through the rituals of solidarity which soldiers in wartime sometimes use to create cohesiveness in their unit, and through frameworks of power and dominance and their effects on the emotions of those who are dominated.

 

Come together… or not

E Pluribus Unum. Out of many, one.

We, as a culture, like the idea of unity. We like it a lot. We have it on our money. We teach it as a value. We promote it in our rhetoric. We have it in the name of our country. We fought a fairly major war over it. Presidents run, however hypocritically, under the promise of “unifying the nation.”

So we like the idea of unity. I doubt anyone you’d ask on the street would say that we don’t want it.

And yet our actions show otherwise, in our history and in how we deal today with people who are different from us, in beliefs or skin color or sex or sexual orientation or just about any other reason we can think of. It’s endless, and endlessly frustrating. “Why can’t we all just get along?” people ask. “Why can’t we just lay our differences aside?”

I have an idea, though it’s probably not fully original: We can’t because we don’t actually want to.

It comes down, I think, to an issue of self-definition. Going back to the earliest beginnings of a recognizable human society, people have defined themselves by what they are not, as much as by what they are. When we are children, we come to an understanding of ourselves through realizing that we are different in myriad small ways from everyone else around us. We define the individuality of our person in terms of separation from others. We arrive at the “I” through the lens of the other; this is one of the founding pillars of symbolic interactionism in sociology. We derive meaning through those around us, but part of that meaning is derived through an understanding that we are not the same as them.

And that gap is bigger or smaller, depending on self-definition.

To define ourselves as individuals is intrinsic to our nature; individualist cultures do it just as much as holistic cultures. To define ourselves in terms of opposition is also intrinsic to our nature; it functions on the small scale with individual people and on the larger scale with social groups. Emile Durkheim observed that the exclusion of others helped tighten group solidarity. Group solidarity is something that we all instinctively strive for–that “unity” that we want so badly. But that unity can therefore never be total. In order for there to be any group definition at all, others must necessarily be left out in the cold. We exclude in order to define. Total unity would render the word itself meaningless.

So I don’t think it’s just that we don’t want to; we can’t. Not with how we currently arrive at self-understanding. People may be able to overcome this on the individual level–many have–but on the group level I don’t believe that it will ever occur, unless there is some sort of deep revolution in the way in which we think about ourselves and other people. Ultimately, a united human race may be a pipe dream, unless that race becomes fully and completely homogeneous, which I believe is also impossible for a whole host of other reasons.

Not that we shouldn’t try anyway.

 

The Decider

“History will decide” is a fundamental truth perverted into an excuse. It is a deep statement about the nature of time and perspective twisted into a statement intended to remove all responsibility from the authors of that history. Taken the way this administration is using it, no one could ever have a sensible opinion about any present events whatsoever. Any judgment calls would be foolish and fruitless. Informed action itself would become impossible. We don’t know how this is going to look ten years from now, so let’s just not have an opinion on it at all.

Screw that.

We are a thinking people with, I believe, divinely-given powers of reasoning. It’s certainly true that many events are viewed differently through the lens of history. It’s also true that real and present wrongs are discernible in the here and now and to fail to act against those wrongs and those perpetrating them is a crime against the divine reason we’ve been given, and against our equally divinely-given sense of justice. These people want to use rhetoric against us, and they want us to think that they take the long view, that they see things on the horizon that their lofty position gives them an advance look at. The rest of us down here on the ground should stay silent and trust their view.

And these people rail against the liberal elite.

Those who take the long view risk missing the view two inches from their faces.

The next time I hear someone justify something with “history will decide” I may have to do something violent. I try to keep this blog relatively clean, compared to my LJ, but “history will decide” is a bullshit excuse spouted by people who have spouted bullshit for so long that they’ve forgotten how to produce anything else.

History is all well and good, fine. Let it decide in the end, and leave the final judgments to the future, but the present is the only place in time which touches eternity, and it is in the present that we’re required to make judgments, to form opinions, to act as best we can for the good of all. Perhaps these people have done that. Then let them say that, and no more idiocy about history, which is something that I question their grasp of in any case.

History does not decide. We do.

 

Veni, Veni, Emmanuel

It’s a familiar story, or at least it starts that way.

Teenage girl gets pregnant. Fiancé is sure it’s not his. They live in a close-knit, conservative, family-oriented community, but he decides to stick with her and marry her anyway. The fact that he made this decision after a visit from an angel isn’t so familiar, but ignore it for now. The point is, he probably isn’t thrilled with this decision. It’s a tough one to make, to agree to be the father of someone else’s baby, particularly in a place where paternity is vitally important.

So they marry, and she’s heavily pregnant with this illegitimate child when the government relocates them temporarily. They have to take a long road trip, with the girl ready to pop any day. It’s a hardship. It’s really inconvenient. But it’s the government, so they go.

They get to where they’re supposed to be. They’re tired and hungry and thirsty, and the girl is extremely pregnant, and the asshole hotel clerk says the place is full up, and they won’t have any luck anywhere else in town. Dude, my wife is pregnant. Well, there’s this barn out back. You can sleep in there if you want. I’ll knock the nightly rate down by half for you.

That night the baby is born. And this is where the story stops being familiar.

Christmas has been sanitized. Christianity in general has been sanitized, but we’ll leave that for now. The point is, people like to overlook things that make them uncomfortable. They like to polish things up, make them respectable. Images of the Nativity are all bright and clean and cozy, with a warm little stable and adoring animals lying in a neat semicircle.

Do you really think it happened like that? Silent Night? Give me a break.

This wasn’t a king’s stable. It probably wasn’t mucked out daily by burly slaves. The straw probably wasn’t the freshest. It was probably full of animal shit. It probably stank. There was probably not an abundance of clean, fresh water. And a baby coming into this environment would probably not have been all quiet and well-behaved, not even the Son of Man. It wouldn’t surprise me if he wailed up a storm.

So here’s what we have: We have an illegitimate child being born to a teenage mother in a dirty stable, far from home. Something tells me this isn’t entirely in keeping with good ol’ American family values.

Then the shepherds show up. You know what shepherds in those days were? Lowest rungs on the social ladder. They were poor hicks. They drank too much. They visited cheap whores. They slept on the ground. They bathed irregularly at best. It’s not unlikely that they did inappropriate things with the sheep when they’d had a few and were feeling especially lonely.

These men were the first to get the news. Out of all the people on Earth, the entire Heavenly Host paid them a visit and told them to go see the baby. The next to pop by were foreign dignitaries. Dignitaries, sure, but foreign, and dignitaries of any kind kneeling down in the shit and the straw to worship an illegitimate child isn’t exactly par for the course. Then the king, who’s kind of a murderous asshole, gets word that something’s rotten in the town of Bethlehem, and he starts killing babies, which everyone seems to feel is a perfectly sensible reaction. And just like that, this bastard child and his mom and baby daddy are refugees.

The point of all this? God does not work in familiar or comfortable ways. God does not even work in ways that make sense. Christianity, as it’s been co-opted by the comfortable and the powerful, likes to forget this under a veneer of respectability. They look at Nativity scenes, but they see none of the reality underneath. They see none of the humanity, and the divinity.

Be not afraid, said the angel. It said it to the shepherds. But Herod reacted with fear and with violence. He was the powerful. He had reason to fear.

There are only two reactions to the Nativity that make sense, and what they are depends on who you are. If you’re the lost, the hungry, the forgotten, the poor, and the oppressed, the reaction is great joy and wonder. If you’re the comfortable and the powerful, the reaction must be awe and terror. Many of us don’t comfortably fit into either of those, and for us the reaction must be more mixed.

But make no mistake: this is not a tame lion.

Christmas should be full of comfort and joy. It should be warm and happy and full of good food and good company and a healthy amount of consumerism. I’m not disputing that in the slightest. But in the darkest moment of night on Christmas Eve, it can’t go amiss to remember that this is a night of change and upset, of the old order being overturned by a new one. Emmanuel–God with us. That’s comforting and profoundly disquieting both at once. In the face of it, our rules and conventions and values are nothing.

What we take comfort in is that this divine bastard child looks to replace them with something better. And never, ever in the way that we would expect.

 

Waiting for the End of the World

No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.
–Mark 13:32

There’s an article in what I believe is the current issue of Rolling Stone, about James Lovelock, the first and biggest proponent of the Gaia theory. For those of you who don’t know, Gaia (named for the Greek goddess of the Earth) is the concept that the world is essentially a self-regulating, self-propagating life generator. The old school of thought about ecology and geologic history held that life on Earth arose simply because the conditions were right: correct distance from the sun, right elements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, water vapor and sunlight, etc. Gaia takes this a step further and says that not only did life arise when the conditions were right, but the biosphere itself makes those conditions more hospitable and keeps them from spinning out of control. Life, indeed, begets life.

It’s an elegant theory, and also a bit of a New Agey one, but that hasn’t stopped it from revolutionizing the way scientists think about ecology and planetary systems as a whole.

Lovelock is concerned. More than concerned. He’s predicting–if not the end of the world–the end of the world as we know it, and within a hundred years. The system is out of control, he says, and the equilibrium is hopelessly unbalanced. The rate of warming has been underestimated, according to him, and within a few decades we’ll see catastrophically rising temperatures as the globe spins off into a warming feedback loop. Refugees will be in the hundreds of millions. Food will become scarce. There will be famine, mass starvation, epidemics like we’ve never seen before as people flood north to escape increasingly hostile environments. In the end, Lovelock says, the world’s population will be whittled down from over six billion to perhaps a few hundred million, scattered about the northernmost points of the continents. Civilization may limp on, but in a vastly altered form. Gaia will eventually heal herself–but far too late to do us good.

This isn’t some far distant prophecy, if you believe him. This is an unimaginable change that will occur in my–and probably your–lifetime.

Well, I feel fine.

A few decades ago, overpopulation exploded as a huge worry. According to Professional Thinking Persons, the world’s population was growing far beyond the planet’s capacity to sustain, and by 2020 we’d all be living on top of each other, with wars over increasingly scarce resources being the order of the day.

Needless to say, this did not happen. Human beings may be short-sighted and self-interested to a horrible degree, but in some cases that’s what saves us. When self-interest takes over, boy do we move. The greatest scientific minds in the world came up with new growing methods, new forms of grain that could thrive in harsher environments and yield more in a harvest. Our technology now is such that we could feed far more people than we do if we had to. That doesn’t save a significant portion of the world today from constant hunger and frequent starvation, but their problem doesn’t lie in overall scarcity. Unfortunately, the issues go far deeper than that. The point is, however, that there’s no telling what we can do when our proverbial asses are against the proverbial wall.

Is global warming occurring too fast even for that? Is Gaia’s revenge inevitable? Well, if we’re all still here in a century, I guess we’ll know.

It’s worth pointing out, perhaps, that apocalypse is always imminent.

Check out Twenty Ways the World Could End, on Discovery Magazine online. Loaded with good stuff. Did you know, for instance, that all the laws of physics in the universe can change in an instant? That’s number three, the collapse of the vacuum. Apparently, very early in the life of the universe, a different form of vacuum existed, one where “empty” space was full of energy; this form was highly unstable and was quickly superseded by the current form, causing a vast release of energy followed by a calmer period. But is this the most stable form of the vacuum? The fact is that no one knows. If a still more stable form exists, it may explode without warning in a kind of chain reaction, drastically altering the fundamental nature of reality. There’s no way of knowing for sure what things would look like after that, but it’s relatively safe to say that it wouldn’t be healthy to go through.

How about the reversal of the magnetic field? Without it, all that stands between us and deadly cosmic radiation is a thin layer of atmosphere, one that would be quickly stripped away by powerful solar winds were the field to collapse (some scientists speculate that this is what happened to Mars). Studies suggest that it’s weakening, possibly in preparation for a polar flip, something that has occurred in geologic history but not in recorded history; no one has any idea what will happen when it does (though the fossil record suggests that living things have come through okay). Still, No One Knows, and that alone is threatening.

What about the Yellowstone caldera? The entirety of Yellowstone National Park is a supervolcano, one so utterly huge that you need to look at aerial maps to see it. Were it to blow, it would decimate the area for two hundred miles around, and ash would bury the land from Vancouver to Denver. The dust thrown up would block out the sun’s light, throwing the globe into a volcanic winter. There would be no escape, nowhere to hide. It would be a disaster the likes of which we have not seen in recorded human history, though something like it occurred in Indonesia seventy-five thousand years ago, and is credited by some with knocking the human population down to about ten thousand people. Sulfuric acid formed in the atmosphere.

Currently, the caldera is filling with liquid magma. The floor of the caldera itself has risen at a record rate in the last few years. This type of supervolcano erupts about once every six hundred thousand years. Guess when the last eruption was.

And then there are all those comets that keep zooming out of the Oort Cloud.

And then there’s the hypernova*.

A hypernova is when a large star skips the supernova stage and collapses directly into a Black Hole. Unimaginably high levels of energy are released; these are some of the brightest events in the universe. Incredibly powerful beams of gamma radiation shoot out at the poles; these beams are very focussed and therefore a planetary body would have to be fantastically unlucky to get caught within one’s path. But unlucky is the operative word. ‘Screwed’ isn’t anywhere near enough to convey how bad this would be.

In our northern hemisphere, it would be as if a massive EMP occurred; all electronics would cease to function. Planes would fall out of the sky. The Aurora Borealis would be visible in broad daylight. Buildings with metal spires would act as conductors, with electricity arcing off their tops. Rail lines would electrify.

In the southern hemisphere things would be much, much worse. Gamma radiation would bathe the surface of the earth. A stunning light show would be followed by mass deaths from radiation poisoning. Large mammals would go first, followed by larger reptiles, ocean life, creatures far under the surface of the sea. Microbes in the soil. Birds would fall dead from the sky. Things would burst into spontaneous flame. The magnetic field itself would be flayed away, leaving the Earth open to scorching solar winds. The Earth itself would cook, baked to death in the throes of a dying star.

Currently, in our neighborhood, there’s Eta Carinae, about eight thousand light years from us. It’s a hypergiant double-star. Guess what it’s an excellent candidate for?

The point of all this, for me, is not fear. I’m concerned, sure, but looking at all this, fear serves little to no point. We might be fine. We might be fucked. The thing, the mind-boggling, amazing, fantastic, wonderful thing, is that in a universe full of this level of uncertainty and entropy and lethal danger… we’re here. Still.

But I am conscious of the fact that every Autumn I’m lucky enough to see is one less left to me.

*A much better-written and fascinating description of the probable Terran effects of a hypernova can be found here. I cribbed most of what I wrote here from it. Shamelessly.

 

Talents

Then the one who had received the one talent came and said, ‘Sir, I knew that you were a hard man, harvesting where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed, so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. See, you have what is yours.’ But his master answered, ‘Evil and lazy slave! So you knew that I harvest where I didn’t sow and gather where I didn’t scatter? Then you should have deposited my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have received my money back with interest! Therefore take the talent from him and give it to the one who has ten. For the one who has will be given more, and he will have more than enough. But the one who does not have, even what he has will be taken from him. And throw that worthless slave into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’
–Matthew 25:14-30

I have a friend. She’s in Kenya right now, going to school and doing research. I should say at this point that while I have been out of the country, I’ve never so completely abandoned my comfort zones and struck out to try to make something. There was moving out of my parents’ house, but I was older than I should have been at the time and I really only left because they made me. Even after leaving, I had support in the form of the man I’m now engaged to, and it was support of both an emotional and a financial nature. While he was happy to do it and while I suppose he has no regrets about it, I can’t help but look back on it now and feel ashamed. I’ve held down jobs before, but the truth is that I’ve never really been in a situation where I was responsible for myself. Now I’m in school and doing very well, but I’m still living largely off of my fiancé, and what remains to be made up is being covered by my parents.

There are times when I feel that I’ve been far too comfortable, and that comfort has brought with it complacency. I’m not stupid. I can work. And yet, there are too many times when I haven’t, because circumstances have not been such that I was forced to. I’ve never had to work a shitty nine to five job. And I’ve never lost anyone close to me, something which my friend has experienced twice over. She has said that her experience of loss is what drives her, that it pushes her to seek to fill her own “god-shaped hole”. But I have no such experience, and perhaps that’s actually a disadvantage in some ways.

I’ve been blessed with great intelligence and great opportunities. People have invested a great deal in me. What returns do I produce? What am I doing with my time and my life? “Going to school” is a good answer and certainly true, but is it good enough? I have time and resources to spare, which I usually put towards leisure and creative activities, but even these are mostly for my own amusement. Some time ago I wrote a short essay defending creative self-amusement, but I’m not sure how far that point can be stretched.

Am I obligated to maximize returns on the investment put in me? Does “I can” equal “I should”? Am I obligated to step outside my own comfort zone in order to make this possible? If life has provided me with no refiner’s fire, should I set one myself?

Sloth is a sin. There’s no question that I’m guilty of it. The only answer is how guilty, and, Luther-like, my answer to that seems to be to assume that I’m as guilty as it’s possible to be. When does that guilt become inappropriate? And where does the action begin?

In the Parable of the Talents, God behaves harshly towards those who don’t make the most of their gifts. At times it seems like that harshness is inescapable, and yet I stay in my zone, too weak or too lazy or too afraid to step out of it.

I have no comforting way to conclude this, except to bring up something else that I read not too long ago: that Christianity fosters a kind of self-loathing that is not and can never be healthy. In a sense this is true; Christianity makes no bones about the darker side of human nature, and while the church has consistently focused too much on this darker side, it would be theologically and intellectually dishonest to deny its existence. Human beings are fallen creatures, warped and misshapen, and there is much in us that is detestable.

But if it’s true, it’s only half of the picture. The end of this cannot be self-loathing. It flies in the face of the heart of what Christians believe: that God so loved the world that He gave His only son up to a criminal’s death, for the sake of all of these fallen, misshapen, detestable creatures; that boundless mercy loves that which is unlovable, and by that love redeems it and makes it worthy. Recognition of this fact must end in joy, not in self-loathing. Guilt only serves to highlight Grace.

So in the end, I suppose all I can do is trust in that Grace, to forgive me if I never go to Kenya, to forgive me if I never make it further than graduate school. I suppose what matters is that I’m trying.

If only the will to walk is really there, He is pleased even with their stumbles.
–C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

 

Hello.

So, I’m not sure what this is, yet. Potentially navel-gazing and that alone. Nevertheless, I feel more and more that I’m having Thoughts about religion, life, love, academics, politics, and other assorted topics that experts on etiquette warn you about not being good topics for discussion at dinner. Livejournal is feeling less and less like a good place for them, because I have this thing where I’m worried that I’m irritating people. So they’re going here.

So if you’re here, you must have at least a morbid interest in my Views on Things. If not, you may be here by mistake and I would like to direct you to The Google.

As far as this immediate moment goes, I’m losing daylight and I think I’ll go for a walk before it’s all gone.