Human hubris

In the aftermath of the devastation that Hurricane Katrina wreaked on New Orleans, it was impossible not to wonder why God had ordained that particular chain of events. Many evangelicals were quick to conclude that the hurricane must have been God's instrument of judgment on a city with particularly visible sins.

I have no idea whether that was the case--God hasn't shared His thinking with me. But I am a little hesitant to label New Orleans as more deserving of judgment than other cities just because it hosts a bawdy festival each year.

Still, I did come away from the Katrina disaster with one troubling question: How did it come about that a major city grew up sandwiched between a huge lake and a huge river on land that essentially lies in a pit below sea level? I heard it said that the United States must have a major city at the mouth of the Mississippi because of all the trade goods that move down the river for export. That certainly makes sense. But did that city have to be built behind levees that (being human things) were prone to fail, bringing death, destruction, and abject misery? I cannot imagine that no one thought through this possible problem. But if that is the case, no one seems to have cared enough to say anything--or there was a misplaced confidence in human ability to hold back the water, no matter what might come. In other words, the flood of New Orleans may have been made possible by human hubris, that tendency of our race to believe that man is the measure of all things, that we have control of our destiny, and that we can overcome all by the power of our will.

I can't help but wonder whether such hubris was truly at work in New Orleans and, if Katrina was the instrument of God's judgment, whether there was a connection.

I don't think we have to look far to find much clearer evidences of human hubris at work. In my humble opinion, the plans to build a new, record-tall skyscraper on the site of the World Trade Center towers in New York is prideful arrogance. Sure, it would be nice to poke a finger in the eye of Islamofascists, but do we really need to set up a new target full of civilian workers? Another example would be the rebuilding of beachfront homes after they have been washed away in a storm. You can't get much more arrogant than to RE-build on sand.

And is there not a vein of human hubris in our insistence on building great cities atop an earthquake zone in California? Everyone seems to acknowledge that a major quake will come, but the thinking seems to be that we can so build that damage will be minimal. The assumption seems to be that the cities along the fault line simply must grow, at whatever risk. Just this weekend I happened across this article:

ALISO VIEJO, Calif. (AP) - Traffic is so bad along the eastern rim of Los Angeles' suburban ring that regional planners are considering the once unthinkable - an 11-mile tunnel through a mountain range in earthquake country.

Critics question the logic of building a multibillion-dollar project in a region so prone to earthquakes that an alternate proposal for a double-decker highway was deemed too dangerous. The tunnel would begin barely a mile from a fault that produced a 6.0-magnitude earthquake about a century ago.

"It's absolutely absurd to have a tunnel 700 feet below ground in earthquake country," said Cathryn DeYoung, mayor of Laguna Niguel and a vocal opponent. "I mean, would you want to be in that tunnel?"

Planners are due to make a decision in mid November on whether to pursue the project.

The proposal for what would be the world's second-longest road tunnel would create a new path between sprawling inland suburbs and Orange County, which has become one of Southern California's fastest-growing job centers.

Such a project could cost up to $9 billion and take 25 years.

Doesn't this seem patently silly? Sure the traffic is bad. But there seems to be a fear that bad traffic will cause people to move elsewhere, and that just can't be allowed to happen. The city of man must wax greater and greater, and the risk of earthquakes be damned.

I hope and pray we will come to our senses before another disaster sets us wondering whether we have witnessed God's judgment once again.

GtG