Progress in Wake of Horror

Occasionally, mother nature tosses her hat into the ring. In those instances, the third party of politics, the unanticipated guest, the impossible lottery, makes its move. I am talking about natural disasters; those catastrophic events that we unfortunate living organisms have little ability to create or destroy.

In comes the hurricane, or the sandstorm, or the blizzard, to slap the chess pieces from the board and watch us fumble around as we come to our senses. These moments come to both destroy the other players, and to even the scoreboard. For truly, if one army is losing to another, a thunderstorm on the battlefield may provide them with the time they need to retreat, or construct stronger defenses in anticipation of their advancing foes.

Famines, droughts, pandemics…They all represent moments in which most of the soldiers stop and try to regain their balance. They do not occur often, but when they do, they remind us that Earth can inflict casualties if it wants to. And what’s more, it tends to result in greater cooperation among those that it effects.

When a natural disaster of great magnitude strikes, the human race in the effected area typically gathers itself together, and, tossing differences aside, works together to solve the crisis. At least, this is how it usually and ideally should work. In fact, this can be seen in all manners of disasters.

All great conflicts and tragedies do carry a benefit of some sort, it would seem. The First World War, for example, was a horrific event of history that saw the deaths of millions. And yet, at the conclusion of this great conflict, untold numbers of factories and cooperations that had been pumping out resources for the struggle could now turn to a civilian theatre. Because things were being produced in mass for the war effort, once the Great War ended, there was a new rush of innovations and machines to make life better for the average citizen. (Granted, the Great Depression of the 1930s would follow, but there is no such thing as progress without setback).

Then take the United Nations, for instance. If the nations of the world were not getting into occasional conflicts of various magnitudes, and if not for the tragedy of World War Two, this great organization would not have come about. Because it exists, as I write this book now, we live in the most peaceful and prosperous era ever in the entirety of history. It may be hard to believe that after watching the news and so forth, but as I write this, we are the most privileged of any others who have come before us, and we are generally getting better.

The United Nations also lends aid in the event of natural disasters: pandemics, famines, hurricanes, floods…And it lends aid in human-caused tragedies: oil spills, endangerment of specimen, genocides…If not for the tragedy of warfare, all of these grand benefits provided by the United Nations would not have become a reality. Other events of tragedy have yielded some unanticipated benefits as well. And although many if not all of these instances would have been better off not occurring, they did at least carry that simple yield.

The shock of the Holocaust led to the creation of the human rights doctrines. The tragedy of the sinking of the R.M.S. Titanic yielded greater safety precautions for sea travel. The studies that led to the nuclear bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki opened the door to the benefits of nuclear power. Once more I would like to affirm that these events were horrible atrocities that should never have occurred, and that the benefits of them occurring were simply unintended yet unavoidable side effects of the horror.

In this way, in the way that destruction’s wake is progress, humankind can be merciful. Nature is merciless, but humans can be merciful. Our ability to communicate, and to reason, sets us in some ways apart from the lore and rabble of the uneducated and unreasoned masses of the rest of nature’s specimen. We may not be apart from nature, but we can define our own little segment in the grand whole of the shape.