Many are the terrors of the earth...

Boris Johnson (my favourite classically trained conservative politician) has written an article in response to the recent horrific earthquake in Japan and the unfolding situation with its nuclear power plants. I disagree with a lot of what he says, but, as a Latin teacher, I've got to admire the style with which he says it. Here are a few examples:

Whatever happens in the world, whatever the catastrophe, we just have to put ourselves at the centre of the story. In the second millennium BC, there was a huge earthquake and tsunami in the Mediterranean, an event that has been associated with the eruption of Greece's Santorini volcano. It was obvious to the ancients that this must have been to do with mankind - and specifically the misbehaviour of the people of Atlantis, who got uppity and dissed Poseidon. So Poseidon struck back. Of course he did...


I am afraid to say that our manic post hoc ergo propter hoc-ery survives to this day. When Phuket in Thailand was hit by the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, there were a large number of religious nut-jobs - and not only in America - who were convinced that this was some kind of divine vengeance on that town for the alleged immorality of its residents and its reputation for sex tourism. It is always us, us, us. Many are the terrors of the earth, says the chorus in Sophocles, and nothing is more terrible than mankind.

Well, the only good thing about an earthquake and tsunami on this scale is that they remind us that even Sophocles was capable of talking bilge. There are plenty of things more terrifying than man, and they include asteroids, earthquakes, tsunamis and anything else that reminds us that we are tiny blobs of flesh and blood crawling on the thin integument of a sphere of boiling rock and metal, and that there are events in the life of the planet that are simply nothing to do with human action...

The response to the Japan earthquake is to send all the aid and the logistic support that we can. But we don't have to treat this as any kind of verdict on mankind's activities. We don't have to make amends by sacrificing a hecatomb to Poseidon. We don't have to lead 100 garlanded men and maidens to the top of the pyramid and then cut out their beating hearts. We don't have to stop drilling for oil, and we don't have to sacrifice our efforts to provide safe, clean and green nuclear power.