Natural disaster

I’ve been away for a couple of weeks, and have nothing useful to say on the human suffering a continent away, in New Orleans. In that respect, though in nothing else concerning this issue, I am at one with the European press, whose expressions of Schadenfreude in place of human sympathy are laid out here by the BBC. What I find indecent about this sort of reasoning is not its obduracy – there are many issues on which I am obdurate too – as its inaptness. There may be lassitude in the federal response to natural disaster, but that is not the same as culpability, and still less is it culpability for the failings the critics invariably cite.

What is the point of saying, for example, as Jon Snow did on Channel 4 News, “How ironic that the world’s No 1 polluter is now reaping the ‘rewards’ that so many have warned would flow”? You might just as well in this context cite failings of Government (a local politics hamstrung by lobbies), or of federalism (a system with a dual chain of command entailed that both were inadequate). But these are unlikely to be the points made on Channel 4. Introspective recrimination where there is either no human perpetrator (Hurricane Katrina) or where the perpetrator is not us (9/11) is a peculiarly destructive impulse. As the sociologist Frank Furedi (not someone I often sympathise with) says in this commonsensical article, from the BBC News Online magazine, about responsibility for natural disasters:

Instead of a powerful story that we can learn from there is a risk that we will become disoriented by an obsession to blame.