The idea of calamity in a technocratic age

Abstract

The superficial features of the dominant view are not hard to discern, though it requires specialised, lengthy training to contribute to them. There is generally a straightforward acceptance of natural disaster as a result of ‘extremes’ in geophysical processes. The occurrence and essential features of calamity are seen to depend primarily upon the nature of storms, earthquakes, flood, drought. There is a close analogy between the dominant view of hazards and Michel Foucault’s description of how ‘madness’ came to be treated, indeed invented, by the ‘Age of Reason’. Natural calamity in a technocratic society is much the same sort of pivotal dilemma as insanity for the champions of reason. Conceptually and analytically, what the dominant view does is to define the distinctive features of the problem through the language and apparatus of ‘the accident’. Natural ‘calamities’ are, before anything else, severed from the rest of material life by being what the Oxford English Dictionary calls ‘unforeseen contingencies’.

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