Disasters, 2002, 26(1): 19

Natures Impartiality, Mans Inhumanity:

Reflections on Terrorism and World Crisis
in a Context of Historical Disaster
David Alexander
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Experience isnt interesting till it begins to repeat itself

in fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.
Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart (1938)
Would words like these to peace of mind restore
The natives sad of that disastrous shore?
Grieve not, that others' bliss may overflow,
Your sumptuous palaces are laid thus low;
Your toppled towers shall other hands rebuild;
With multitudes your walls one day be filled;
Your ruin on the North shall wealth bestow,
For general good from partial ills must flow;
You seem as abject to the sovereign power,
As worms which shall your carcasses devour.
Voltaire, Pome sur le Dsastre de Lisbonne (1756)

This paper compares the terrorist outrages of 11 September 2001 in New York City and
Washington to the Lisbon earthquake of 1 November 1755. Both events occurred,
literally out of the blue, at critical junctures in history and both struck at the heart of
large trading networks. Both affected public attitudes towards disaster as, not only did
they cause unparalleled destruction, but they also represented symbolic victories of
chaos over order, and of moral catastrophism over a benign view of human endeavour.
The Lisbon earthquake led to a protracted debate on teleology, which has some
parallels in the debate on technological values in modern society. It remains to be
seen whether there will be parallels in the reconstruction and the ways in which major
disasters are rationalised in the long term. But despite the differences between these
two events which are obviously very large as nearly 250 years of history separate
them and they were the work of different sorts of forces there are lessons to be
learned from the comparison. One of these is that disaster can contribute to a perilous
form of self-absorption and cultural isolation.
Keywords: terrorism, earthquake, disaster, moral philosophy, international relations.

Introduction
The terrorist outrages in New York City and Washington, D.C., on 11 September 2001
were unprecedented in scale, coordination and daring. Yet no single aspect of these
operations was without some kind of a forerunner among events in the recent or distant
Overseas Development Institute, 2002.
Published by Blackwell Publishers, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

David Alexander

past. For instance, in New York a B-25 bomber aircraft crashed into the 79th floor of
the Empire State building in 1945. My aim in this paper is to search the historical
record of disaster for some possible analogues of the events of that fateful day in
September and to consider the lessons that might be learned from historical analysis in
terms of both moral philosophy (Beatley, 1989) and international relations. The event
that I believe offers the most fruitful comparison is the earthquake that struck Lisbon,
Portugal, in 1755. This is not the only historical catastrophe that might help throw light
on the US tragedies, but it is one of the more significant episodes in terms of a number
of striking parallels, as outlined below. First, I shall outline the two events and
describe the subsequent reactions to them. In the case of the US attacks, though the
events are exceedingly well known, it is important to recap them in order to ensure that
the comparative analysis is based on a clear version of the facts. However, the analysis
is necessarily provisional, as at the time of writing less than three months have passed
since the disaster and not all problems of information are fully resolved.

The terrorist attacks of 11 September

At 0845 hrs EDT (US Eastern Daylight Time) on 11 September 2001 a Boeing 767 on
a routine commercial flight was hijacked and deliberately flown into the upper floors of
the north tower of the World Trade Center (WTC) in New Yorks financial district at
the southern end of Manhattan Island. Eighteen minutes later another hijacked 767
crashed into the adjacent south tower. At 1010 hrs a Boeing 757 was flown into the
Pentagon military headquarters in Washington, and at the same time another 757
crashed in a field in rural Pennsylvania, apparently missing the target that the hijackers
aboard it had intended to fly into.
The Boeing 767s have a fuel capacity of 90,770 litres and the 757s 42,680
litres. All had taken off with full tanks only minutes before from airports in the eastern
US. The 265 people aboard the airliners, including all 19 hijackers, died instantly in
the crashes. The jet fuel ignited fierce conflagrations in all three buildings. Fireballs
were injected into each of the 110-storey WTC towers, igniting the 95th103rd floors
of the north tower and the 82nd93rd floors of the south tower. The fire at the
Pentagon burned for many hours but was contained by the massive structure of the
building, which had been designed to resist attack.
The WTC was built of steel beams clad in concrete, with a strong central
column, containing elevator shafts, stairs and utility wells, from which steel beams
radiated outwards to connect with the rest of the load-bearing structure. The fires
overwhelmed sprinkler systems and increased in intensity to 8001,100C. This turned
concrete into powder or soot, and the structural steel first buckled, then melted. Sixtytwo minutes after impact the south tower collapsed, and the north tower followed suit
at 1028 hrs, 103 minutes after it was hit by the first airliner. The towers were designed
to resist the impact of a smaller jet liner, and to retard a fire for two hours (the
calculated evacuation time), but it would have been extremely difficult to build them to
resist the impact, blast and fireball effects of the deliberate attacks that occurred on 11
September.
At least 189 people died in the Pentagon and 2,889 in the WTC, in the latter
case including hundreds of foreigners from a total of 60 countries. The WTC death toll
was limited by early efforts to evacuate this complex of seven buildings, which at peak
times contained as many as 40,000 people. A small proportion of the dead took their
own lives by jumping out of windows in order to avoid being burned in the fire.

Terrorism and World Crisis in a Context of Historical Disaster

Among the dead in New York there were 343 firemen and 78 policemen who rushed to
the scene right after the crashes and in many cases went up the stairs of the towers in
order to rescue people.
The collapses could have been much more destructive if the impacts and fires
had occurred lower down the two towers, which might have made them fall over rather
than subside vertically. As it was, the load shift, which was probably of the order of
100,000 tonnes, led to progressive collapse on to a restricted site. The collapse caused
tremors equivalent to a magnitude 2.3 earthquake. In all, five tall buildings were
entirely destroyed,1 three collapsed partially and 10 suffered major damage. The 1.2
million tonnes of debris at the site formed a compact heap that rendered search-andrescue operations difficult and dangerous. Dust and fires also inhibited the rescue,
which was carried out by relays of up to 1,200 rescue workers.

Early reactions to the US tragedy

It is fair to conclude that the US disasters of 11 September have a greater significance
than comparison of the death toll (about 3,122) and injured (6,408 people, about 500 of
them hospitalised) with other recent disasters would suggest.2 This is because they
have had a disproportionate impact on world affairs, including international relations,
commerce, travel and the military balance of power.
Reactions noted during the aftermath were exceedingly heterogeneous, as one
would expect from a large and pluralistic country. They include the following:
disbelief (normalcy bias, in the sociological jargon, Drabek, 1986: 72), sadness and
depression, shock and disorientation, widespread anxiety and uncertainty, blind
patriotism, patriotism as a focus for solidarity, spontaneous economic conservatism,
religious fundamentalism, suspicion of foreigners, racist outbursts, paralysis of
transport, recrimination for defects of emergency management, manifestations of
pacifism and fear of further attacks. At an official level, serious debate ensued over the
possible restriction of civil liberties resulting from tightened security. On both a
popular and an official level, there was (as is so often the case in disaster) a widespread
need to focus the sense of blame (cf. Bucher, 1957; Olson, 2000): it was firmly directed
at Osama bin Laden and the shadowy Al-Qaeda organisation, although US residents of
non-Western origin also suffered.3 On a positive level, the therapeutic community so
often noted by sociologists in disaster (Barton, 1970) acted to reinforce a sense of
identity with victims and the bereaved, as well as with the nation. But on a less
positive note, such a strong national consensus developed that there was little
opportunity publicly to debate the issues in anything other than a simplified form.4

The Lisbon tragedy

In the mid-1750s Lisbon was a thriving port city and the opulent capital of a colonial
and trading empire that stretched vast distances across the globe. It looked optimistically to the wide expanses of the Atlantic Ocean, which carried its merchantmen,
soldiers and adventurers overseas to feats of prowess and commercial gain.
The morning of Sunday, 1 November 1755, was bright and sunny with a brisk
north-east wind. It was All Saints Day, and at 0940 hrs the people were in church,
where the priests had begun the Gaudemus omnes in Deo. A small foreshock set the
churches swaying and immediately afterwards the first of several huge earthquakes5

David Alexander

brought them crashing down upon the hapless worshippers. Contemporary accounts by
survivors indicate that dense clouds of dust turned the atmosphere black and screams
rent the air.
Altar candles set light to draperies in the churches, blazing hearths ignited the
fallen timbers of houses, and the wind relentlessly fanned the flames. Survivors rushed
into the citys open spaces and down to the waterfront to congregate on the newly built
marble quay, the Cais de Pedra. Seismic liquefaction caused this to plunge into the
estuary and several hundred people were promptly drowned. Twenty minutes after the
first earthquake, the waters drew back and then repeatedly surged on land as three
gigantic tsunami waves coursed up the River Tagus estuary. They attained heights of
1015m in Lisbon.6
It is estimated that 60,000 people, perhaps one in five inhabitants, died when
the earthquake, fire and tsunami razed the city. The catastrophe was not entirely
without precedent, as in 1531 another earthquake and tsunami had destroyed thousands
of Lisbons buildings. This time it was followed by the fires of the auto da f, as the
Inquisition sought culprits among the survivors. They need hardly have bothered:
famine and pestilence reaped a heavy toll among the makeshift camps on the fringes of
the city (Frana, 1983).

Contemporary interpretations
Any disaster should be analysed in relation to the context of its times. The Lisbon
catastrophe took place at a particularly critical juncture in European intellectual life. It
was a moment of tension between opposing views of teleology. Leaving aside the
opportunists and pragmatists, whose Weltanschauung (world-philosophy) was
unchanged by the disaster (they plundered or they invented, as opportunities allowed),
there were two schools of thought. The rationalists were led by Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz, who believed that life was guided by un progres continuel et non interrompu
de plus grands biens (1981), and Alexander Pope (1982) who reasoned, similarly,
that:
All nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
A partial evil, universal good.
Hence, the prevailing 18th-century maxim was whatever is, is right. In fact, natural
philosophy revealed to Pope the all-embracing unity of the world, and to Leibniz such
terrible setbacks as earthquake catastrophes were all part of Gods plan. If that scheme
appeared at times monstrous, Bishop Joseph Butler argued in his book Analogy of
Religion (1893) which was popular at the time of the Lisbon catastrophe, that human
beings could not be expected to comprehend a creation planned on such a colossal
scale.
But as the scholar Clarence Glacken put it:
Complacent attitudes toward the earth as a habitable planet were seriously
undermined by the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. This frightful catastrophe and
the accompanying tsunami dramatized the problem of evil and the role of
physical catastrophe affecting living things indiscriminately; it also raised

Terrorism and World Crisis in a Context of Historical Disaster

questions about the order and harmony on earth and the fitness of the
environment, and the validity of final causes in nature (1967: 521).
In fact, intellectuals and ordinary folk perceived Lisbon as the worst event of its kind
since the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. It began to look very dark indeed.
In his Pome sur le Dsastre de Lisbonne, Voltaire launched a frontal attack
on the tout-est-bien philosophy of Pope and Leibniz:
Say what advantage can result to all,
From wretched Lisbons lamentable fall?
Are you then sure, the power which could create
The universe and fix the laws of fate,
Could not have found for man a proper place,
But earthquakes must destroy the human race?
In Candide, as Glacken put it, Voltaire shoved aside the ... smug optimism in human
affairs, and uncritical assumptions of an inevitable improvement in the course of time
(1967: 527).7 More pragmatically, Johann Sssmilch, chaplain in the Prussian Army
and a founder of the science of demography, whose intellectual influence spread
throughout Europe, saw the Lisbon disaster as Gods way of controlling the relentless
rise of population.8 He was thus a progenitor of Malthusianism before Malthus, the
great economic moraliser. In short, Lisbon plunged Europe into gloom.
Nevertheless, the catastrophe also stimulated a rational pragmatic approach to
earthquakes, as evinced by Immanuel Kant, who speculated on earthquake lights and
animal behaviour, and John Mitchell, the reverend lecturer of Cambridge, who sought
to establish a basis for observational seismology (Alexander, 1989). Yet he did so in
the shadow of his predecessor Robert Hooke, whose lectures, collected 67 years before
the Lisbon disaster, were the first, tentative excursions in observational catastrophism
(1705).

Parallels between the Lisbon and the US disasters

For almost a century, George Santayanas dictum, Those who cannot remember the
past are condemned to repeat it (1998) has elicited controversy. To what extent is
history repetitive? Could it even be a cyclical process? If it repeats itself, is that an
inevitable process or does it reflect the historical ignorance of key participants, who
unwittingly replay the dramas of the past? Or are the apparent repetitions of history
mere coincidences? After all, we construct history from a pot-pourri of selected
evidence and load it with our interpretations, which in their turn are the fruit of
contemporary preoccupations.
With that disclaimer in mind, it is nevertheless possible to trace some parallels
between the Lisbon earthquake of 1 November 1755 and the terrorist attacks of 11
September 2001 in the eastern US. To begin with, they both occurred at a critical
juncture in Western intellectual development. The mid-18th century was an
uncomfortable time of transition in both natural and moral philosophies. It also
presaged a technological revolution which was shortly to cause major upheavals in
Western society. Similarly, the third millennium begins at a time when humanity
struggles to assimilate the technology it has created, which has caused immense
upheavals in the ground rules of human relations. Both disasters affected great

David Alexander

commercial cities with extensive networks of influence abroad. Both dealt a body
blow to trade and prestige, though not a fatal one.
On a smaller scale, some of the physical parallels are remarkable: the intrusion
of disaster into a bright, sunny, tranquil day; the abrupt collapse of large, apparently
solid and immutable buildings; the passage of multiple events and successive waves of
death and destruction; and the clouds of dust that obscured the vision of terrified
survivors.
It remains to be seen whether there will be parallels in the reconstruction. At
the time of writing this (December 2001) it seems possible, though by no means
certain, that there will be. After the Lisbon disaster many buildings were given shear
walls that were designed to resist both excessive seismic displacement and the spread
of fire. Avenues and open spaces were rationally designed (under the cramped
constraints of the site, which is in a valley) to permit safe movement during
emergencies (Davis, 1978). After the collapse of the World Trade Center towers, there
is much talk of limiting the height of tall buildings and improving their emergency
evacuation facilities. Indeed, after years of neglect, conferences are now being held on
this theme. Both would be sensible precautions and, like the Lisbon reconstruction,
would represent a rare incidence of architectural Darwinism, the survival of the fittest
building (Alexander, 2000: 67). But history does not allow us to be very sanguine
about this, as lessons are learned far too rarely in post-disaster reconstruction.
But perhaps the most striking parallel is in contemporary attitudes. Both
events represent a symbolic victory of chaos over order (that was, of course, one of the
objectives of the terrorists in New York and Washington). In this, the world seems to
enter a dark tunnel of fear and uncertainty. Moral catastrophism gains a victory over its
better-disposed adversaries: benignity, utilitarianism, uniformitarianism. Both events
threaten, not merely a world order carefully constructed on the basis of the social and
economic expedients of powerful oligarchies, but also the sense of community which is
the only defence that ordinary people have against the rigours of such a world. After
Lisbon, the prevailing sense of optimism in the human condition suffered a period of
collapse; after the World Trade Center disaster, optimism in the power of technology to
advance human interests faltered, though perhaps temporarily. In synthesis, both
events were stiff reminders that human society is tempered by both progress and
retrogress.

Lessons to be learned from the comparison

The Lisbon earthquake was the result of natural causes and was generally regarded as
impartial, a visitation upon humanity but not a reprisal. The WTC disaster was the
work of human malevolence, fruit of a system of ethics that few of us can begin to
comprehend, but that we universally condemn. In both cases it proved difficult to
resist the temptation to moralise. But in such cases the only moral certainties are those
that are based on highly selective readings of the evidence. In Lisbon, the city fell in
on those who had gone to pay their obsequies to the Creator and the population was
decimated. It was a curious sort of judgement for wickedness, if that is what it was.
Moreover, within 40 years Lisbon had been rebuilt in a flashy, opulent style, with
triumphal arches and monumental buildings: the Enlightenment was back, propelled by
commerce (Frana, 1983; Alexander, 2000: 183).
In 2001, terrorist activities were born of the distress caused by American
foreign policy in the Middle East, with all its inhumanity and inherent contradictions.

Terrorism and World Crisis in a Context of Historical Disaster

Many of the latter stem in turn from the changed alliances of the post-cold war era.
Suddenly, as common causes disappeared, allies turned into enemies. Freedom
fighters, armed, trained and financed by Western concerns, abruptly became the
governments or agents of rogue states. The stock markets of the Western world
financed the activities of those who later on would be branded terrorists,9 while its
armaments industries supplied much of the hardware that they would use to resist any
reprisals.
A disaster on the scale of the collapse of the World Trade Center towers, with
more than 2,800 fatalities, gives rise to such a powerful sense of outrage that it tends to
stifle rational debate about the underlying causes (see note 4). Perhaps in the same
way, the horror of the Lisbon tragedy led to some crude outbursts of moralism about
human wickedness and the propensity of our species to reproduce too freely. In the
modern world, there is a politically driven tendency to couch problems in black-andwhite terms, and to ignore their underlying contradictions. In the Middle East, this is
fuelled by poverty and disadvantage, which prepare the ground for what in the West is
known rather misleadingly as religious fundamentalism. Like the nations of the
Balkans and Caucasus, the Middle Eastern countries (and Afghanistan) are buffer states
that tend to suffer the worst effects of global strategic alliances and enmities. Here the
US and Lisbon catastrophes differ: the former results from the visitation of extraterritorial extremism, the latter results in extremism at home in the form of extraordinary measures and repression in effect martial law amid the ruins of the city.
In the West, periodic disasters have contributed to a self-absorption that some
may regard as an unwitting form of arrogance. Its origins are far older than Lisbon,
1755, its continuity right up to the present day is impressive, and its implications are
profound. As Klaus Meyer-Abich put it:
We see that Eurocentrism is not only a political issue but is rooted in our
modern consciousness. The depth of the roots may explain why occidental
rationality seems even more overwhelming for other cultures than the political
and economic power of the industrialized countries (1997: 178).
One way that the self-absorption might be gauged is in cash flow. Americans donated
about $1.2 billion to funds set up for the victims of the 11 September outrages ($500
million was collected by the American Red Cross alone). In comparison, they donated
$16 million to the appeal that followed the Gujarat earthquake of 26 January 2001. I
believe that this discrepancy reflects both a sense of isolation from the worlds
problems and the well-known proportionate effect of mass media coverage on the scale
of charitable giving, the emotion tax of publicity (Cater, 2001).
Patriotism in the US serves the useful purpose of encouraging unity but is so
often reduced to a form of dogmatic orthodoxy. After 11 September the desire for
unity was so overwhelming that the dogmatism became stifling. As a result, it was
very difficult to conduct an open debate in which the events in New York and
Washington, could be condemned as outrages, but at the same time the overall picture,
including the causes, could be acknowledged to have more complex, less black-andwhite explanations. Patriotism by definition inward looking reinforced the
isolationism, which contributed to a failure to understand, for example, the forms of
pluralism that exist in the Islamic world. In the popular mass media this led to the
development of an us and them mentality, with scarce consideration of who them
might really be. As in the auto da f of the Lisbon aftermath, it fuelled an instinctive
desire to defend the root of Western culture against perceived outside influences. Long,

David Alexander

critical debates on this were published in the UK and US, respectively, in the London
Review of Books (2001, www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n19/) and Z Magazine (2001,
www.zmag.org/znet.htm). They tended to run counter-currently to official
pronouncements and popular sentiment.
In essence, this paper is about the lessons of history. Potentially, these are far
too numerous to be debated in a brief conclusion, though only time will tell which of
them is the most significant. One serious contender for that honour is the question of
pluralism. As described above, the mid-18th century in Europe was a time of great
plurality and intellectual energy (despite the stultifying effects of absolutism), though it
later provoked a backlash of orthodoxy when it began to spawn revolutions. The
lesson is that, in the end, it will be healthier and safer to confront awkward truths with
open debate (namely, to encourage pluralism) than to try to enforce consensus.
Paradoxically, disasters are born in extreme conditions, but reactions to them are most
successful if they are moderate. It would be well to remember this as the war on
terrorism enters its next phase.

Notes
1.
2.
3.

4.
5.

6.

7.
8.
9.

The third to collapse was World Trade Center Building 7, a 47-storey block which fell down
at 1720 hrs on the day of the attacks.
For instance, the Gujarat earthquake of 26 January 2001 killed 19,739, injured 166,836, and
left nearly a million people homeless.
In 150 pages of debate on 11 September that appeared in the US publication Z Magazine
during September and October 2001, the concept of blame appeared 24 times. Fifteen of
these instances referred to US attitudes to other countries: ten of them concerned official
criticism and five referred to popular attitudes. Circumstantial evidence suggests that the
proportion was reversed in the popular press (Z Magazine is not mainstream US news
literature, but is intellectual, pluralistic and radical in character).
The same was true of the death of Princess Diana in 1997. Here the presence of an invisible
grief police seemed to ensure that no one dissented from the national collective anguish
(see Jack et al., 1997).
The first main shock lasted at least three minutes and had an estimated magnitude of 8.75.
Its source was located somewhere in beneath the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and it
affected an area of 1.6 million km. Within the next three hours it was followed by two
other large earthquakes. The seismologist Charles Richter (1958) judged it the largest
earthquake ever registered, and the only one to have reached 9.0 on his magnitude scale
(which, however is inaccurate at very high seismic energy expenditures).
The tsunamis, which reached the coast of Finland, were 4m high in the Caribbean, 2m high
in southern Britain, and in Scotland caused a 70cm seiche to occur on Loch Lomond (Lyell,
19901: 438). About a third of all tsunamis begin as the Lisbon one did with a trough (i.e.
the water draws back) rather than a peak, in which the water flows straight on land
(Habermann, 1995). While this was happening, huge landslides and gravitational
deformations (Sackungen) occurred in the mountains of central Portugal (Pereira, 1988).
Algiers was also severely damaged.
I would argue that the Pax Americana has been pursued with a similar sense of optimism
about the benefits of free trade and representative democracy.
Johann Sssmilch, Die Gttliche Ordnung (The Divine Order, 1741, revised 1765).
The sum of US$2.8 billion was disbursed by the Western powers to the Mojaheddin of
Afghanistan when these forerunners of the Taliban were resisting the Russian invasion of
1979. Furthermore, in May 2001, President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin
Powell announced a grant of $43 million to the Taliban to aid in the reduction of opium
poppy cultivation in Afghanistan (Scheer, 2001).

Terrorism and World Crisis in a Context of Historical Disaster

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Address for correspondence: University of Massachusetts, Morrill Science

Center, 611 North Pleasant Street, Amherst, MA 01003-9297, USA. E-mail:
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