Our local newspaper reported the other day that Sharon Stone, actress, had opined that the Sichuan earthquake was due to "bad karma," accumulated because of the Chinese government's oppression of Tibet. It's nice to see that stupidity isn't confined to one segment of the political spectrum. I'm sure you remember when some evangelical preachers attributed Hurricane Katrina to the sinful lives of the residents of New Orleans. Didn't the liberals just scream at that one? I'll bet that Ms. Stone found it just terrible that those fundamentalists were "blaming the victims."
I don't believe that natural disasters are retribution for human behavior, nor that they can be averted by prayer or sacrifice. In some cases, as when an earthquake causes a dam to break, human actions may serve to aggravate the effects of a natural disaster. And, where human actions produce physical effects, such as increased levels of carbon in the atmosphere, there may be physical consequences. But volcanoes erupt due to the build-up of magma pressure under vents, hurricanes are caused by a particular weather pattern over warm ocean waters, and earthquakes are caused by tectonic stress along fault lines. The Sichuan earthquake was due to India's inexorable northward movement (at the rate of about 5 cm per year) pressing against the rocks underlying western China.
There are two lines of reasoning here, one positive and one negative. In the first place, we have adequate explanations for natural disasters. The force of India's collision with the Asian landmass is well-known, and has been strong enough to produce the Himalaya Mountains and the Hindu Kush. The existence of faults in Sichuan is also well known. (I might note that the numerous landslides along stream beds, creating temporary dams, indicate that the earthquake struck along established fault lines. Streams tend to follow faults.) Since this earthquake, like Hurricane Katrina and the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, can be explained by well-established causes, there isn't any room for an explanation based upon the vices of the inhabitants or the excesses of the government.
On the other hand, even if we weren't entirely sure of the causes of such events, there is no mechanism by which vice, political oppression, or religious ceremonies could affect them. "Bad karma" is a nice way of saying that, if there were justice in the world, the Chinese government has earned a substantial amount of retribution. But the concept of "karma," like the afterlife, has been developed precisely because there is no justice in the world. There is plenty of empirical evidence that good and pious communities have suffered from natural disasters, while sinks of vice and debauchery have enjoyed immunity. The universe is morally neutral, and our petty moral considerations have no bearing on physical events.
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.
Glenn A Knight
In my study
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3 comments:
In my current study of Buddhism, I have run into the repeated assertion by Buddhist authors that "karma" has been misinterpreted and misused by western authors.
"Karma" is not a result, it is a cause. Every action has effects. Those actions are Karma, not the effects.
I agree with the general proposition that the suffering associated with natural disasters is a result of karma. It is a causal chain of events that leads to earthquakes and floods. It is also causal that people tend to like to live near sources of water. A decision to locate a village next to a body of water is a karmic act that will render the village susceptible to floods on occasion. Of course, locating a village 100 miles away from any water is likely to result in starvation.
As long as humans like to eat and grow crops that require water and continue to live near these resources, there will continue to be both life and occasional disasters. No more karma than that.
In order to make a claim that a certain result was caused by bad karma, a causal chain must be shown between the action and the result. Mistreating people in a certain region is likely to cause mistrust, rebellions, crime, etc. That is the result of the "bad karma" of the Chinese government toward Tibet. I fail to see any causal connection between mistreating someone and an earthquake or hurricane.
Sharon Stone understands neither Karma nor causality.
One sees a similar kind of "reasoning" after many natural disasters. On the first Sunday after a tornado has demolished their little mid-western town, the survivors gather near the wreckage of their church to thank God for sparing them.
Wait a minute. If God really cared for or about them, wouldn't He have diverted the tornado to a more sinful locale? Perhaps God is just testing them, as in the case of Job. Or maybe He's bored and wants to see what happens when He stomps on the anthill.
It seems to me that a more rational religious response to a tornado would be for the survivors to shake their fists at the sky and say, "Look you, we're not gonna take any more of this crap! One more like that and every last one of us will convert to Hinduism!"
Seriously, no one seems to be able to discern the difference between correlation and causation; I've found it nearly impossible to explain, even to highly educated people.
Therefore, if something bad happens to someone other than me, then God or karma or whatever must have caused it to punish them. Indeed, if something bad didn't happen to me, then God or karma or whatever must have protected me. QED
I've been away too long. I'm having to warm up my fingers before getting into responding to these comments.
If all that "karma" means is that people sometimes build their houses on floodplains, so that they are eventually flooded out, it's a pretty empty concept. It is pretty obvious, and requires no spiritual dimension or artifact, that when you throw stones into the air you need to watch where they land.
If, on the other hand, as Sharon Stone suggests (and she is, by the way, using "karma" as a causal principle), bad actions lead to natural disaster, then this is just another example of the religious effort to find justice where there is none.
That is, they have cyclones in Bangladesh, where the government is incompetent, but not particularly evil. Hurricanes (our word for cyclones) hit the various islands of the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, and various Gulf States without regard to the piety or sinfulness of the inhabitants.
Lloyd points out that correlation is not causation. Even before we get to that point, we need to recognize that there is no correlation between evil-doing and natural disaster; hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, and earthquakes occur randomly with respect to the spiritual states of their victims.
The apparent correlation is due to our emphasizing the juxtapositions of events that conform to our previously held ideas, and ignoring the events that are inconsistent with our beliefs.
Attributing causal power to the evil (or good) actions of people also lightly skips over the question of which actions are evil. Sharon Stone doesn't like the way the government of Myanmar acts; some evangelicals identified New Orleans as a center of sinful activity. On the other hand, why would karma, or God, add to the distress of the suffering people of Burma, while doing no damage to the government, if the cyclone was a response to evil? And why did all the fine, church-going folk of New Orleans getted flooded out, right along with the strippers and table dancers?
So, as far as I can tell, there is no particular correlation between human behavior, as evaluated by this or that group, and the occurrence of natural disasters. Sometimes your luck just runs out.
Lloyd is quite correct, though. Even if I had data to show that 99% of all hurricanes struck cities with brothels and ginmills (which, of course, they do, because virtually every city on earth has its share of whorehouses and blind pigs), that would not prove that the presence of the wicked establishments caused the hurricanes.
When you have a correlation between A and B, there are four possible explanations:
A caused B (evil causes disasters)
B caused A (disasters cause evil)
A and B are both caused by some third common factor
A and B track together without any causal connection
In the case of sin and disasters, I think we're into the third case. We ignore, after all, hurricanes that don't strike human settlements. We defined natural disaster by their negative effects on humans. So, natural disasters, by definition, always strike human settlements. And human settlements always incorporate some behavior that someone believes to be sinful.
As far as I can tell, it's just as silly to say that bad karma caused Cyclone Nargis, as to assert that Basin Street partying caused Hurricane Katrina, or that prayer caused a hurricane to spare Virginia Beach.
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