Chapter 1 Introduction: Disasters, Crises, and Catastrophes

Angelus Novus

‘The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what is smashed. But a storm is blowing up from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while a pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress,’

Paul Klee’s monoprint (an oil transfer with watercolour on paper) of the angel of history is the jacket cover for this study of catastrophe. Walter Benjamin (1892 – 1940) bought the monoprint in 1921 for 1,000 marks. His friend Gershom Scholem has given an intimate account of the importance of the picture for Benjamin’s life in an essay ‘Walter Benjamin and his Angel’ in Jews and Judaism in Crisis (Dannhauser, 1976). In fact, Benjamin had intended to create a journal in the 1920s called Angelus Novus. I dwell on this image at this stage to grasp the significance of the tradition in Judaism of writing on Talmudic angels of which Benjamin was well aware (Handelman, 1991). The theme of messianic hope in Judaism is an important theme running through this account of modern catastrophes. The theme of messianism also illustrates the significant gap that existed between the secular Marxism of the Frankfurt Centre during Benjamin’s involvement in the research group. There is, as I show in subsequent chapters, an important overlap between the secular-Marxist hope for a society based on equality and mutual respect and the Jewish-Christian hope for a world to come.

Benjamin committed suicide, escaping from the advancing Wehrmacht, and carrying the Klee painting with him, at Port Bou on the French-Spanish border. The work of Benjamin and other members of the Frankfurt School plays an important part in this study of catastrophes. As Jewish victims of fascism, their theories have played an important role in many critical responses to the Holocaust, Auschwitz, modern technological, militarism, capitalist development and Enlightenment ideas on the inevitability of progress. Any theory of catastrophe will have to take the legacy of the Frankfurt School seriously, especially Benjamin’s relationship to messianic visions of time and Marxist views on revolutionary disruptions to history.

When a contemporary author announces that he or she is writing a book about catastrophes, a common response may be to condemn all such authors as pessimistic ‘doom sayers’. In many circumstances, as a sign of hope, this may be an apt response. However, the crises of recent years are numerous, global, and overwhelming. We may expect to see many volumes appearing with titles referring to catastrophe. I mention two here. In catastrophes: views from natural and human sciences, Andreas Hoppe (2019) conflates a variety of different, if related, concepts: hazards, disasters, crises and catastrophes. One aspect of my approach is to avoid what can be regarded as conceptual promiscuity. Hazards – such as a foggy morning – are not equivalent to catastrophes. Another volume which is much closer to my project is Heinrich August Winkler (2015) The Age of Catastrophe 1914 – 1945. This volume, which was published in Germany in 2011, is volume II of a more expansive project on the history of Germany in the context of European history. Winkler is a distinguished German historian and volume II concerns the catastrophe of two world wars and their consequences for Germany. More precisely he considers the struggle between democratic and authoritarian politics in German society. His research therefore addresses the idea of political catastrophe with reference to Germany and more broadly the European continent. His research question is, to what extent democratic polities can accommodate the endless political struggles between left and right without descending into civil war.

My approach is not confined to political catastrophe. My approach to catastrophes was initially written in response to and in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, which overshadowed my research from the early months of 2019 until the late Autumn of 2022. The WHO report in 2022 claimed that 150,000 million people had died as a result of the pandemic. Government data showed that life expectancy in the United States had declined by 2.7 years from records collected between 2019 – 2020, which was the lowest since 1966. As the pandemic unfolded, other catastrophes were developing. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the threat of nuclear war were, by any definition, a catastrophe of tragic proportions. As I worked towards a conclusion, there was further evidence of a climate catastrophe as southern Europe suffered from drought conditions and much of Pakistan was under water.

Although writing this volume has been a depressing experience, I need to declare at the beginning my commitment to the view that the aim of life is human happiness. In making this statement, I realize that happiness is essentially difficult to define and for many difficult to achieve (Turner and Contreras-Vejar, 2018). The idea was much discussed by Aristotle and by Christian theologians like St. Augustine. It was the central notion behind the utilitarian philosophy of political theorists such as Jeremy Bentham (1748 – 1832), who promoted the idea that the aim of government is the ‘greatest happiness of the greatest number’. Although the contexts or ‘regimes’ of happiness have varied over time, it remains the goal of human activity if it is understood in broad terms as including health, personal security, companionship, and longevity. The achievement of happiness is without question challenged by the diverse disasters, crises, and catastrophes I describe in this volume. For that very reason, the quest for happiness becomes more intense for this generation and perhaps even more so for the next generation. Also, for that reason, we need to take seriously the question of inter-generational justice, which is another theme running through my account. Can we hand over a world to the next generation that is intact and does not seriously disadvantage them as a result, for example, of climate change?

A catastrophe tends to produce many additional catastrophic consequences. Perhaps I can be allowed to use the medical term ‘sequelae’ – the subsequent conditions that follow an original injury or infection – to describe the ways in which one catastrophe produces many subsequent crises or catastrophes. The catastrophic invasion of Ukraine has its sequelae by creating a world shortage of grain which may result in famine in the poor countries of Africa and Asia. Famines often create conditions for the spread of disease, resulting in a catastrophic loss of population, economic decline, and scarcity. The combined effect will create the conditions that contribute to civil unrest and political instability (Homer-Dixon, 1999). The multiple sequelae of catastrophe threaten to result in social and political chaos. In my conclusion, I look at the possible options between optimism and pessimism in the face of the burden of troublesome times.

There have been various influential publications on state failure such as Why Nations Fail (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2012) and others on why nations collapse (Diamond, 2005). There has also been a growing literature on the potential risks that could bring about the extinction of the human species (Bostrom and Cirkovic, 2008; Leslie, 1996; Ord, 2020; Reese, 2003). These studies, that are primarily by natural scientists rather than by social scientists, have considered a range of potential threats that might presage the end of humans: natural catastrophes, thermo-nuclear war, terrorism, biological weapons, totalitarianism, advanced nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and social collapse. Their broad conclusion is that the threat of natural disasters, while real, is unlikely to bring about a sustained crisis, let alone human extinction. They also assume that the other threats, such as social, technological, biological, and military ones, are clearly troublesome, but unlikely to constitute conditions that cannot be managed and contained at some level. These volumes on extinction were based on research or publication dates before the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2019 and the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Alongside these catastrophes, there has been growing authoritarianism in modern politics. This combination – pandemic, war, famine – has historically been the basis for disease. A combination of catastrophes in 2022 – 2023 may well produce a deeper global crisis that was not fully anticipated by earlier studies of catastrophe that in retrospect look overly optimistic.

A more comprehensive, but equally pessimistic appraisal of our future, was explored by Vaclav Smil (2008) in Global Catastrophes and Trends. Smil sought to avoid a static analysis of catastrophe by looking at a projection of fifty years. His basic argument proposed that critical discontinuities often occur as low probabilities, while there are recurrent or persistent issues such as earthquakes or...