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Soulquakes

Posted: Tuesday January 18, 2005 12:27 AM EST

By Palden Jenkins Glastonbury, England

Page 1 of 2 pages for this article  1 2 >

The people of Aceh and the Indian Ocean have gone through a terrible disaster, and the world has gone through a quake and tsunami of the collective soul. This disaster was vast yet localised - unless the recently-observed geophysical effect of the quake on the Earth's inclination and rotation has a noticeable global effect. But in the collective psyche it has been global - a Richter Nine soulquake in which structures turn to rubble. 9/11 was perhaps a Seven, and that was shocking enough.

What is historic and definitive about traumas like this is that, when they happen, the deeper collective psyche convulses, breaks out and vents itself. It roars through the public domain and abruptly redefines the agenda. When all-that-we-hold-good-and-true grates and rips, the constituent bits of our worlds are wrenched around and everything is reshuffled. Everything suddenly looks different. People start doing abnormal things, like caring for others' welfare and feeling solidarity with utter strangers.

It's a global near-death experience. The sacrifice of so many souls to the clutches of death sharpens collective awareness, overriding the secure, regularised reality that normally keeps us ticking. It renders people grateful to be alive, overwriting our assumed sense of possessing an inherent right to life.

There's another characteristic common to near-death experiences. The threat of death renders things starkly clear, rearranging priorities and perspectives. Some things become blitzingly important, as if they should always have been like that. Other things lose relevance, upstaged by the immensity of what has just struck. The future starts from that point.

The disaster has brought many things clearer into focus. It struck several centres of ongoing, dirty conflict. Aceh, before the earthquake, was already in a dismal state, suffering deprivation and repression with outbursts of independence war. This conflict has been long, brutal and kept well away from the eyes of the world. It's another oil war and self-determination war, and Indonesian and international business, oil and military interests, and we consumers too, all have a stake. This was a powderkeg waiting to go boom.

Then there was southern Thailand - a simmering self-determination conflict of southern Thai Muslims against mainstream Thai Buddhists. There was Sri Lanka - a longstanding conflict between Tamils and Sinhalese costing 64,000 lives over 20 years. There was Somalia, stricken with warlordism. These cannot be passed off as simple ethnic quarrels - behind them lurk the manoeuvrings of individuals, arms, terror and corporate interests, politics, propaganda, corruption and ideology. The tsunami's effect is to flood them out and change the political landscape. Are the earthquake gods saying something about conflict?

Then there is the big question of rich and poor, and the levelling effect of the disaster. We've seen prosperous Western tourists dying alongside simple village folk. We've seen patterns of charitable donation reflecting the values more than the wealth of donors. This tsunami has pounded at all boundaries, making us vulnerable, aware of how much we need each other.

Two notable observations came out amongst all the news-feed: that animals in affected areas and the 'primitive' peoples of the Andaman Islands sustained relatively little damage. They moved out of danger a day or two before the disaster struck. What do they know that we don't? Does this point to plain old unscientific intuition, so unpopular in our day?

Then there is 'being in the right place at the right time'. When mere minutes make a big difference, who is standing where at the moment of impact becomes a life-or-death matter. This 'karmic' element, and the intricacy of the 'chance occurrences' and crucial momentary decisions recounted in the accounts of survivors, alludes to a strangely awesome, intricate power. This is apocalyptic, especially since 'apocalypse' involves revelation, things presenting themselves as they are, irrespective of how we might believe or want them to be.

In my last book (1) I wrote about the schizoid development of the collective psyche in our time. Double standards, such as making big promises and then failing to deliver aid, arise from humanity's current predicament: we want change as long as nothing really changes. Deep down, we are more genuinely civilised and humane than we are in everyday life and official culture. This leads to crises followed by acute bursts of conscience and insight, mediated by events. Suddenly we become more generous, compassionate, forgiving and understanding.

This is the real humanity coming through, stripped of protective armour. If there is divine intent here, surely this is one of its key purposes. Disasters are horrific and also bring out the best in people. Soulquakes shake us, revealing a bigger order of things. Even in gory scenes, the angels are close. Death has a way of doing this. It punctuates the sentences and paragraphs that make up history, unveiling new futures.

The Lisbon earthquake of 1755, with 60,000 dead, is thought to have sparked the European Enlightenment, and the Black Death of the 1340s is regarded as the beginning of an historic shift toward the modern world. The Tangshan earthquake of 1976, killing 255,000, brought the end of the Maoist era in China. These crises shook up existing ways and beliefs. Does today's disaster mark an historic watershed - and toward what?

All the talk is about aid being sent to the disaster zone, but is this aid one-way? Disaster-victims have unwittingly given us a massive level-shift and wake-up call, a gift beyond measure. This aid arrived in our own disaster-zones faster than our aid reached theirs. For we live in emotional deserts where suffering is long and slow, sophisticatedly contained and denied. Perhaps the developing world, socially and culturally, is developing us.

The open question is whether the sacrifice of all those lives will be worth it in the end. Will it connect the conflicting sides of our mass psyche? To continue the geological analogy: earthquakes represent a relaxation of geophysical tensions, and soulquakes could represent a release of tectonic tensions in the world psyche. This disaster has pointed firmly at human conflict. The collective unconscious has stated something quite clear.

We'll see multiple secondary effects. The tsunami has washed much further than its physical reach. In my own area of focus, the Holy Land, people in the streets of Ramallah and Tel Aviv have also been emotionally hit, and it re-casts their situation in a different light. There will be a shift of international attention away from crisis-points like this. This might permit atrocities while the world isn't looking, or it might catalyse homegrown breakthroughs and resolution. Or simply accelerate movement and precipitate issues.

Today there are markedly fewer conflicts than in the 20th Century - the bad scenes in Iraq give a false impression. What reduces conflict is a pragmatic public desire to get on with other things. The world is awash with weaponry, yet the historic tide is ebbing slowly away from war. There are notable exceptions and xenophobia is alive and well, yet human empathy is also broadening and deepening. We have our differences, but we're increasingly aware we are stuck in this flimsy boat together.

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