Death and taxes, by the way of Daniel Dafoe, are life’s only certainties— although Nepalis might now justifiably insist on adding earthquakes to the infamous hit list. Those of us who managed to escape with our life and limbs intact (so far) have been cruelly reminded of how our understanding of the world can be shaken upside down in a fistful of seconds. If you can’t trust the ground on which you stand, really, what else can you rely on?
A few things: the alignment of stars, the camera-addled seismologists, the hard lessons of history, and if everything else fails, your truly, the omnipotent newspaper columnists.
With people literally clutching at the straws after the first Great Earthquake in the Bihar-Nepal belt in 1934, soothsayers back then reportedly made a fortune. Among their most famous predictions was that the 8-magnitude quake in 1934 was only a “trailer” of a horrendous movie that would culminate in the “end of Kaliyuga” after a second, even more destructive earthquake.
And if the panic our esteemed astrologers have been able to cause circa 2015 is any guide, we needlessly look down on our uneducated ancestors. Only the messengers of doom have changed. If in 1934 wild rumors spread through word of the mouth, today, all the blame can perhaps be placed at the door of one man: Mark Zukerberg.
Shaking up the standards
The other day, tired of scrolling through the endless stream of expert earthquake commentary on Facebook, I tried to refresh my mind on YouTube, which I normally employ to play the golden oldies.
But greeting me on the homepage was no less an eminence than the 43rd president of the United States, the veritable George Walker Bush.
The same George Bush who made a killing with his imaginary Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq; the same Bush who was honored for his selfless service to the Iraqi people by a single-shoe garland in Baghdad in 2008.
Back in 2003, Colin Powell, his Secretary of the State, had stunned the UN General Assembly, and the rest of the world glued to their TVs, when he brandished a test tube-full of ‘yellow cake’ that Saddam Hussein was supposedly using to build nuclear bombs. As it turned out, the dreaded WMDs, Dubya’s noble excuse for tying to bring democracy to the Iraqi people, had somehow gone AWOL when American forces liberated the desert country.
Seven years after the end of his Iraq adventure, the former governor of Texas is apparently busy in the lecture circuit these days, trying to regale young folks with tales of how luck, that maddeningly fickle mistress, could always fancy you.
Speaking at a commencement ceremony at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas—now uploaded on YouTube for enlightened viewing of the rest of the world—he first congratulated the students who had graduated with high honors. But C-students need not panic, he reassured, “You too can be the president.” The auditorium thundered with peals of laughter.
But seriously, in the real world, much as disasters can strike out of the blue, C-students like Bush can indeed become the President of the United States—provided their parents are mini-monarchs with just the right political connections and truckloads of oil money to push them through Yale and Harvard.
In his 2007 eponymous bestseller statistician and scholar Nassim Nicholas Taleb discusses the The Black Swan, the extreme-impact event that cannot be anticipated, but for which people tend to concoct all kinds of fancy theories to make them explainable after the fact—the royal massacre (2001), 9/11 (2001) and the second Great Earthquake of Nepal (2015) to name a few.
But even thought these events could not have been predicted Taleb believes it’s still possible to build what he calls “robustness” against them.
In our case, that would have entailed retrofitting all buildings in quake-prone regions, demolishing most vulnerable ones, putting in place a swift and reliable emergency response mechanism, better earthquake education, and any number of other things. But that would perhaps be too much to ask of a people traditionally wedded to a debilitating ‘culture of fatalism’ in the immortal words of anthropologist Dor Bahadur Bista.
But hang on! What is the guarantee that Messrs Taleb and Bista are not indulging in the same fallacy of trying to explain away the unexplainable, their judgments also colored by their deeply-held bias? And what’s the guarantee that the supposedly rational analysis of USGS about the probability of new earthquakes in Nepal is any better than the wildest predictions of footloose astrologers? Seismology, after all, is far from precision rocket science as we now know.
Uncertainty is uncomfortable and humans can go to great lengths to avoid that nagging feeling of discomfort. Some of us try to make sense of this inherently unpredictable world by cooking up convenient theories; other lowlifes would, I suspect, try to exploit it to show off their knowledge in preachy newspaper columns.
biswas.baral@gmail.com
