By Edward Tick
Originally printed in the MARCH-APRIL 2006 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Tick, Edward. "When the Bull Kicks and the Dragon Roars: ON HURRICANES." Quest 94.2 (MARCH-APRIL 2006):63-66.
What forces and processes might be emerging through the recent titanic visits from nature in the form of hurricanes, earthquakes, and typhoons?
The ancient Minoans, whose civilization was the last of the Great Goddess cultures, believed that a giant bull lived beneath the sea. When their Mediterranean homeland experienced destructive earthquakes, volcanoes, or storms, it was a sign to the Minoans that they had fallen out of balance with nature and the cosmos. In order to demand the human community to restore balance in its relationship to the natural world, the bull beneath the sea kicked and raged, resulting in the storms.
In Chinese and Vietnamese mythologies, the Jade Emperor, in a manner similar to Zeus and Jehovah in Western traditions, ruled from his heavenly palace where he was in charge of administering justice in the cosmos. When he viewed bad leadership among mortals, the emperor could order the dragon, the spirit who ruled the waters, to send or withhold rains and winds, causing flooding, hurricanes, or drought. In these ways the celestial emperor tried to influence earthly rulers to oversee their policies with compassion, honesty, and generosity and to correct their mistakes.
And in our Western tradition, the Bible indicates that the destructive powers of nature can be used by the Divine to punish, correct, or test mortals. For example, the ten plagues were sent upon Pharaoh and the Egyptians in order to convince them to free the Israelite slaves. The plagues unleashed the destructive powers of nature in the form of extremes—too many frogs, gnats, flies, locusts, animal and human ailments, and destructive storms. Reminiscent of recent hurricanes, Exodus tells us that one plague consisted of a terrible storm in which thunder, hail, and fire rained upon the earth "such as had never been in all the land." It struck down "both man and beast, and . . . every plant . . . and shattered every tree"
Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma hit the Gulf Coast 3,500 years after Minoan civilization disappeared and as long since Asian Bronze Age rice farmers beat their drums to call the dragon or ancient Israelites saw the divine hand in devastating storms. In his belated address to the American people in Katrina's aftermath, George W. Bush called the hurricane "a cruel and wasteful storm." He characterized survivors as people "looking for meaning in a tragedy that appears so blind and random." Citing the Chicago fire, San Francisco earthquake, and Depression-era dustbowl, he declared, "Every time, the people of this land have come back from fire, flood, and storm to build anew, and to build better than we had before." He promised to spare no expense in this rebuilding. And he summarized a core Western belief: "Americans have never left our destiny to the whims of nature, and we will not start now."
At the same time as our president sounded these defiant words in New Orleans, around the planet nature showed her imbalance. An earthquake in Pakistan killed tens of thousands of people. Mudslides in Guatemala buried villages. Two typhoons, the Pacific Ocean's equivalent of hurricanes, hit Vietnam's coast and China's offshore islands about the same time as Katerina hit here, cutting a swath of ruin across northern Vietnam and into Laos. Typhoons Khanun and Damrey, known simply as Storm number 7 in Vietnam, washed away many thousands of hectares of rice fields and tens of thousands of homes. Schools and classrooms collapsed. River levies and dams were destroyed. Scores of people were killed when a flood swept through a small commune in Yen Bai Province; sixty-five people were lost from one small farming village alone. In a tragedy the entire nation mourned, in a commune in Phu Tho Province, one six year-old boy lost his parents, grandparents, and all siblings.
The suffering and loss caused by these recent cataclysms forces us to look again at our relation to nature and the Divine. In the West, political and media commentators often personify such imbalances, labeling them as furious, cruel, or random, insinuating that nature itself is malevolent toward us. Ancient and modern American philosophies present a sharp contrast in the interpretation of nature, our proper relationship to it, and the causes of events like these.
New Orleans, America's busiest port city, is built on unstable and terrain that is below sea level and has been reclaimed by the ocean innumerable times in earth history. Early explorers claimed that this site was too inhospitable and for human habitation. In contrast, the capital of Minoan civilization was served by a busy but small port built on the northern coast of Crete, the site of modern-day Iraklion. For protection from natural and human dangers, the great palace and city of Knossos was built three miles inland from its port.
These simple facts demonstrate both spiritual and practical differences between ancient, earth-based philosophies and our modern worldview. People who know the sea and the weather also know the mutability of the planet and of living beings, including us. They intimately know all the elements—earth, air, fire, water. They know that each is necessary to our survival and can be our friend. Each contains potent forces that, when unbalanced through disrespect or misuse, or through imposed or unnatural controls that attempt to bend it to our will, can erupt and cause serious disturbances in our individual bodies and minds, our cultures, and our environment. People who respect and understand the powers of the sea and the earth would not build great and populous cities or locate the majority of their fuel refineries on volatile coastlines. Rather, people with earth wisdom and holistic awareness would preserve and protect their coastlines and work with rather than in opposition to nature for the sake of the earth and its creatures' health and well-being.
Traditional earth-based civilizations did not think of nature as whimsical or random but intelligent and patterned. Confucianism taught that the cosmos and its heavenly bodies were all born out of the body of the original being P'an Ku; when he died his flesh became the earth. Lao Tzu asked, "Can you keep clear in your mind the four quarters of earth and not interfere?" And Plato taught that the key to healing any system from individual to society was to bring friendship and reconciliation back to those elements that had fallen into conflict. Earth-based peoples knew that we must study and respect the forces of nature, shape our personal and collective lives in harmony with them, and correct our lives when we fall out of harmony.
In the earth-based view, nature is just nature, doing what nature does. The sea sometimes erupts; the earth sometimes quakes. These powers are inherent in the earth, just as its beauty and serenity are. We cannot know when or where eruption might occur; any of us may be caught in it, demonstrating life's preciousness and fragility. Reflecting on the recent storms, Vuong Toan Nam, a young man from the countryside studying in Hanoi said, "Now in Vietnam we do not have a new hurricane, but who can know what is coming tomorrow?"
Though nature may treat individuals as expendable or appear to strike arbitrarily its grand patterns and inner laws are not cruel, random, or whimsical. They only look that way to our anthropocentric view that values our oceanfront restaurants, amusement parks, high-rise condos, and summer homes more highly than the health of our waters, dunes, marshes, and wildlife. This consciousness evaluates an event primarily from an egocentric position: how does it affect me rather than the whole and the future?
Holistic healing for individuals, and for humanity at large, cannot be separated from the health of the planet. As the ecological-medicine movement argues, the entire earth is ailing and must be our "patient," our focus of concern. The precautionary principle, championed by Carolyn Raffensperger, executive director of the Science and Environmental Health Network, argues that we must extend the healing imperative of "First, do no harm" to our entire planet. All living systems, whether of an individual or the planet, are breathing, communicating, interactive wholes. We must not take any actions that purposely harm any part of that whole, even if those actions are meant to stop something else that may be harmful. If we do, we will inevitably hurt the functioning and health of the whole.
We are not just dealing with philosophical matters. Mythic and spiritual approaches view natural cataclysms as responses or counterbalances to how we are living our relationship to nature. They are meant to offer us a pragmatic philosophy, demonstrating how we can live good lives. Thus we can also view the great contrast between East and West and its commentary on how we live with nature and each other by examining the differing ways that China and Vietnam responded to their typhoons in comparison to the United States' Katrina aftermath.
It is much remarked that our government failed to offer effective disaster relief after the string of hurricanes battered the American southern coast. Over one thousand people died in Katrina and the region is devastated, with losses totaling many billions of dollars. Summarizing the aftermath of the typhoons in southeast Asia, the worst in a decade for Vietnam and in three for China, Workers World reported that "both countries managed to carry out efficient, rapid and large-scale evacuations of their populations without the astounding traffic jams or . . . abandonment of the poor, elderly, ill and people of color that so characterized the Hurricane Katrina crisis." The report wonders how "an economically poor country like Viet Nam and a rapidly developing country like China succeed in this area when the most powerful . . . failed so dramatically? The answer is priorities and organization."
Though these typhoons did result in over 100 deaths, using public service equipment of every kind, China evacuated 1.8 million people and Vietnam 300,000; 35,000 boats were secured. Immediate efforts were made to rescue every person, who was in danger, including the poor. Immediate supplies and medical relief were delivered to millions. The military were used as national guard are meant to be—to rescue the stranded, repair dikes, clean up the aftermath, and rebuild homes.
Poor countries successfully responded to the same kind of natural disaster that tore gaping holes in America's self-image and social fabric. The painfully inadequate American response revealed a cruel underlying class system whereby the availability of resources are based one's wealth. In contrast, the much older social systems from the East evolved long ago to address the essential Confucian question: how can we best get along? They are based in principles of cooperation and acceptance and the everyday wisdom developed from millennia of experiencing nature's patterns and cycles. Based upon Buddhist principles of acceptance of what is, and Confucian pragmatics of caring for all in an orderly and fair society, these cultures tended their afflicted people far better than we did with our far greater resources. Neither the wealth, the oratory, nor the persona of power rescue, tend, heal and hold the commonweal together. Rather, it is done with love, inclusiveness, fairness, and generosity. Extending these toward all constitutes true democracy.
We do not know to what extent the many severe storms of our era are due to global warming or natural cycles. But we do know that we have just experienced the worst storm season since record keeping began. We know that we are severely interrupting the natural cycles and that the body of our Mother Earth is poisoned, disturbed, heating up, and out of harmony. And we know that, unlike the Minoans, we design and build cities in arrogant opposition to nature rather than in harmony with her.
We must grieve and mercifully tend the great loss and suffering caused by the hurricanes. And we should be humbled by it as we are humbled by the illnesses and deaths of our friends and loved ones. To oppose nature, in individual or collective lives, is to guarantee that we will be stricken again and our suffering will increase manyfold.
But if the great bull or the dragon is bringing storms to correct our imbalanced ways, why are so many of the world's poorest regions being devastated and its poorest peoples ravaged? Why do they not just hit the world's capitals and corporate headquarters where decisions are made to control, consume, and pollute without regard?
We discover a terrible double meaning in Jesus' declaration that the meek shall inherit the earth. The poor are usually closest to the earth, fishing and working it, drawing their sustenance directly from it. Or they live in the inner cities, with fewest resources and no means of escape. The most vulnerable will suffer the most, demonstrating the ancient wisdom that rulers must be just, compassionate, and generous. If they are not, their people will inevitably suffer.
Nature is democratic. She does not differentiate the good and the bad among us. She demonstrates that we share a common fate. Observing the worldwide devastation from global warming must teach us that we have not yet truly learned that we are one planet, that how we live on our side of the globe does indeed, to the point of life and death, shape the lives of our impoverished neighbors on the far side. And enlightened, compassionate, and responsible leadership is essential.
We can view our recent calamities through mythic eyes. Tran Dinh Song, a tour leader and teacher of literature and languages in Vietnam, observed, "Confucian teachings declare that if a ruler is not good the country under his reign may be punished by nature. We cannot miss the fact that a great many hurricanes have attacked the United States during the Bush administration. From the standpoint of Asian philosophies, this may not be accidental but what the ancients meant by visits from the dragon sent by the Jade Emperor." From the holistic and the traditional view, people and their rulers are inseparable; for better and for worse, the values, character, and actions of one will always affect the other.
We are challenged to learn and grow from all that afflicts us. But so much of our way of life is designed as protection from nature and fate. African healer and teacher Maladoma Some observed that initiation is possible not just during expected life passages, but during any life crisis. Whenever we are put through an ordeal we have the possibility of maturing and gaining wisdom. But, Some argued, when we are unduly protected from the ordeal—for example, when our insurance pays to replace everything that we have lost—then we are in danger of not learning of gaining no insight or wisdom from our travails. Life and nature send their trials, but part of our tragedy is that we remain unchanged by them.
So rebuild New Orleans. Restore homes, lives, hope—but not in the same old ways that oppose nature. Not by throwing billions of dollars at the region with no transformative vision so that we make it the same as it was before only, as President Bush promised, "better than ever." Not so that we can continue to resist nature's inevitable surges and oppose its patterns and laws with our own technology-driven arrogance. To envision a future that heals us, "better" must mean wiser, more compassionate, respectful, and cooperative toward the environment, more generous, loving, and protective toward the poor, and more concerned with creating life-sustaining community for people and ecosystems.
We cannot merely replace New Orleans with the fantasy that nothing has changed. Politically we speak of living in a post-9-11 world. Similarly, we must consider what it means to live in a post-Katrina world as well. We must ask, ecologically and politically, socially and spiritually, what that world looks like, what its rules and patterns are, what kind of leadership and society we must shape to live well in it.
We must accept and grieve that the New Orleans we knew and loved is gone. And we must learn our lessons in life's most difficult classrooms. Minoan civilization was eventually destroyed when the great volcano on Santorini spewed forth what was perhaps the largest such explosion in human history. All we build will eventually fall. But the New Orleans we know and love was destroyed less than three hundred years after its founding, while Minoan civilization lasted two millennia.