Catastrophe theory

“ Suddenly an ominous oppressiveness weighted the atmosphere, and, nature aghast, was as silent as death. Then from toward the south came a seismic wave, the ground trembled, heaved and burst asunder into yawning fissures, towering temples crashed to the ground in fragments, and public buildings and private dwellings were shaken from their foundations in ruinous masses. Fire added to the horror of the catastrophe and no one attempted to stay the conflagration. Terror-stricken, all who survived the sudden disaster strove to escape from the deadly peril to a place of safety. ”

“ I have a premonition of disaster which, though it is no doubt perfectly natural at my age with the last catastrophe almost upon me, seems to be of a penultimate nature, a final human crisis. All that I have heard from Butler about this young man, this colleague of his, disposes me to fear him. ”

“ The parts are all so quietly performed, the catastrophe is so clearly before everybody’s eyes and understanding, that it more resembles a dramatic representation than a mighty event in real life, big perhaps with incalculable consequences. ”

“ The catastrophe seems almost symbolic of the disasters that ever and anon befall the devoted Republic, which from time to time rises phoenix-like from its own ashes, and after having vainly fluttered its wings for a flight into the empyrean, falls back to earth with broken pinion. ”

“ And strangely enough, if there are but few references to the problem in all our rapidly-growing literature, it is not because catastrophies are few. Indeed it would seem that with the advent of the industrial age, disasters grow more frequent every year. [1] Many are small, no doubt, touching but the life of a village or a borough—a broken dyke, a bridge swept out by ice, a caved-in mine. Others again write themselves on the pages of History—an Ohio flood, an Omaha tornado, a Chicago fire, a San Francisco earthquake, a Halifax explosion. ”

“ The catastrophe is not only unique in history, but all the more notable for having befallen, not a single state overrun by powerful barbarians, but a half of the world; and for having been effected by a seemingly trivial agency that sprang from the civilization itself. ”

“ In the presence of a catastrophe, so vast that the imagination reeled as the eye wandered over the mighty paths where the cyclones of fire had swept, social inequalities and race prejudices were ignored. ”

“ Crises often, perhaps most often, precede catastrophies, as when revolutions break. The alternate truth that the catastrophies themselves are re-agents to generate the crisis-situation has not been so commonly noted. Nevertheless the disintegration of the normal by shock and calamity is an increasingly familiar spectacle. ”

“ In brief, the strength, the power, and the manifold phantom voices of the storm are simultaneously and graphically expressed, and the mood and movement, both in duration and completeness of development, exceed those in any of the other numbers. At length, however, after the catastrophe, the force of the storm is broken, the fury of wind and waves subsides, and the receding thunder clouds mutter their 255 baffled rage and threats of deferred destruction more and more faintly as they disappear, and the light of morning breaks upon the scene. ”

“ They looked forward confidently to another such catastrophe, to take place like the preceding, at the close of a cycle, when the sun was to be effaced from the heavens, the human race from the earth, and when the darkness of chaos was to settle on the habitable globe. ”

“ It has been held by many geologists that numerous catastrophes or cataclysms antedated the existence of man. In literature, the final event of a drama is the catastrophe, or denouement. Misfortune ordinarily suggests less of suddenness and violence than calamity or disaster, and is especially applied to that which is lingering or enduring in its effects. ”

“ There is a sense in which the catastrophe is a reflection from the previous card, but not on the side of the symbolism which I have tried to indicate therein. It is more correctly a question of analogy; one is concerned with the fall into the material and animal state, while the other signifies destruction on the intellectual side. ”

“ But the doctrine of periodical catastrophes has not been abandoned by scientific men. When men now speak of the uniformity of nature, they use that term in a very large sense, and even loose sense, as including catastrophes and convulsions of an intense and extensive kind; [133] and, as we shall presently see, the most advanced and exact modern science teaches us to contemplate a grand final catastrophe in which all life will be extinguished on the earth, and the globe itself shall be "ensepulchred in an extinguished sun." ”

“ It is among such extra-social or “stimuli” factors that catastrophe falls as a precipitating agent in social change.
The significance of crisis in social change likewise requires attention, and it will be clarifying to our thought at this point to distinguish carefully between crisis and catastrophe, and to inquire what the nature of the former really is. The word “crisis” is of Greek origin, meaning a point of culmination and separation, an instant when change one way or another is impending. Crises are those critical moments which are, as we say, big with destiny. ”

“ It may well be asked how it can possibly have happened that, in a country so enlightened by science and so distinguished for humanity, an evil of such fearful magnitude, and of such frequent recurrence, should for so long a period have excited but little sympathy, beyond the immediate scene of 60 the catastrophe. ”

“ These are unnecessary disasters, but they may be unavoidable disasters.{v2-594} Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. ”

“ We, therefore, conclude that the function of government in disaster is of primary importance, and that social legislation when forthcoming constitutes an important and deciding influence and is itself in turn enriched by calamity. Brought to the test of comparison with observed facts the statement in the Introduction, that catastrophe is in close association with progress in social legislation receives abundant justification. ”

“ How insistently did He foreshadow the impending chaos, the approaching upheavals, the universal conflagration which, in the concluding years of His life, had only begun to reveal the measure of its force and the significance of its impact on human society?
A co-sharer in the woeful trials and momentary frustrations afflicting the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh; reaping a harvest in His lifetime wholly incommensurate to the sublime, the incessant and strenuous efforts He had exerted; experiencing the initial perturbations of the world-shaking catastrophe in store for an unbelieving humanity ”

“ On the other hand, the advocates of catastrophism, to make good their views, are compelled to invoke forces and actions, both destructive and restorative, of which we have, and can have, no direct knowledge. They endow the whirlwind and the earthquake, the central fire and the rain from heaven, with powers as mighty as ever imagined in fable, and they build up the fragments of a repeatedly shattered world by the intervention of an intermittently active creative power. ”

“ It is surprising rather that we should find any living species represented at all. [244]
"Catastrophes have indeed been supposed, and they are an easy way of getting out of the difficulty; but unfortunately, they are not supported by evidence. Local catastrophes have undoubtedly occurred, as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, of which the effects can be sufficiently seen; but why suppose any universal catastrophe, when the ordinary progress of nature suffices to account for the phenomena? Nature is never brusque. ”

“ But the great hidden teaching of disaster is that the laws of nature are eternal and inexorable; that they move with unerring precision and resistless force. And this truth applies not only to the tremendous powers of the hurricane, the flood and the earthquake, but to economic principles, which are simply a translation into human terms of the laws manifested in inanimate nature. ”

“ I think of the great disaster; of the hours of terror and despair known by millions of people. I think of the thousands and thousands of men, women and children trapped in subways and theaters, trampled to death, butchered, murdered. I visualize the hospitals full of the sick and the dying, the giant liners of the air and of the ocean crashing, colliding, going down into the sea; and I seem to hear the screams and the pitiful prayers for help of the maddened passengers. Tell me, what fate should befall the fiend who would loose such woe and misery on an unsuspecting world? ”

“ Every incident that promotes or retards the catastrophe, must be a part of the principal action. This clears the nature of an episode; which may be defined, “An incident connected with the principal action, but which contributes not either to advance or retard it.” The descent of Æneas into hell doth not advance or retard the catastrophe ”

“ At first the shock of the catastrophe was seen to have been sufficiently terrific to affect every inhabitant of the city. This fact gives peculiar value to the investigation. The more a shock is limited in extent the more its analysis grows in complexity. In such cases consideration must necessarily be given to the frontiers of influence. The chapter describing the shock also found the immediate reaction to have been a fairly general disintegration of social institutions, and of the usual methods of social control—in short, a dissolution of the customary. ”

“ What terrible destruction and ruin! We have read of earthquakes destroying countries, of wars depopulating nations—of volcanoes overwhelming cities, and of empires in ruin; but what would the yawning earthquake, the bellowing volcano, the clang of arms, or a nation's distress, be in comparison to a scene like this? System would be shattered with system; planet madly rush on planet; worlds, with their inhabitants, would be destroyed, and creations crumble into ruins. There would be truly a war of planets, "a wreck of matter and a crash of worlds." ”

“ As matters progress to the climax, as disaster after disaster overtakes human effort, and disintegration descends into the dissolution of law and order, the whole earth will be “filled with violence”. ”

“ Never in history has so great a calamity descended so suddenly upon the Human Family, unless we except the earthquake toppling down cities and submerging a whole coast in a single night. But how small all that has ensued from any such convulsion, compared with the desolation and destruction already produced by this war! ”

“ He then reiterates the view that these deposits of marble and limestones, often forming mountain ranges, could not have been the result of a universal catastrophe, and in a very modern way goes on to specify what the limits of catastrophism are. The only catastrophes which a naturalist can reasonably admit as having taken place are partial or local ones, those dependent on causes acting in isolated places, such as the disturbances which are caused by volcanic eruptions, by earthquakes, by local inundations, by violent storms, etc. ”

“ I told her that in a very short period a great many serious catastrophes, such as frequent earthquakes, great inundations, and similar unfortunate and most terrible events, had shocked the world and buried whole cities, destroyed the lives and fortunes of thousands upon thousands of happy and innocent persons. ”

“ Doctrine of Catastrophes.—I have already shown, in the History of Geology, that the attempts to frame a theory of the earth have brought into view two completely opposite opinions:—one, which represents the course of nature as uniform through all ages, the causes which produce change having had the same intensity in former times which they have at the present day;—the other opinion, which sees, in the present condition of things, evidences of catastrophes;—changes of a more sweeping kind, and produced by more powerful agencies than those which occur in recent times. ”

“ There is an air of fatality about such an incident which reminds one of the revolting accumulation of calamity which renders fire after an earthquake or a railway accident so horrible; or, I may add, a conflagration in an American forest or prairie or on a Russian steppe. We are given to understand—and we scarcely need to be told it—that there is a feeling of despair, a sensation of being hunted by fate, in such circumstances which is, of all human experiences, the most terrible. ”

“ The Epitasis or Working up of the Plot, where the Play grows warmer; the Design or Action of it is drawing on, and you see something promising, that it will come to pass.
"Thirdly. The Catastasis or Counter-turn, which destroys that expectation, embroils the action in new difficulties, and leaves you far distant from that hope in which it found you: as you may have observed in a violent stream, resisted by a narrow passage; it turns round to an eddy, and carries back the waters with more swiftness than it brought them on.
"Lastly. The Catastrophe, which the Grecians call [Greek: desis] ”

“ National cataclysms, such as war, famine, and financial panic are too general in character, and function on too grand a scale for satisfactory treatment, at least until the ground is cleared. It is necessary also to limit this investigation to those social changes which follow upon catastrophies, rather than precede them. For there are social effects which result from living in anticipation of disaster, such as are observable among communities in volcanic areas. ”

“ It should not be forgotten, however, that from one point of view there is a truth in catastrophism which is sometimes overlooked by the advocates of continuity and uniformity. Catastrophism has, as its essential feature, the proposition that the known and existing forces of the earth at one time acted with much greater intensity and violence than they do at present, and they carry down the period of this excessive action to the commencement of the present terrestrial order. ”