Home » Ever heard of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755?

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Ever heard of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755? — 17 Comments

  1. My first exposure to the Lisbon earthquake was in reading Volatire’s Candide, where Dr. Pangloss claims that all are for the best- including the Lisbon earthquake.

  2. Having mentioned the flu, I remember reading about the earthquake, but where and when I do not recall. I grew up in Missouri, and read about the 1811 quake. Makes a lot of difference when it hits a sparsely settled area, rather than it would now that the area is well-populated. And it would mess up the river traffic.

  3. My father was 12 years old in 1918. He got the flu and the city put a quarantine sign on the house and later that day a horse drawn wagon came around and stopped at homes with the quarantine sign and they took away the person who was sick. The dead were laid in the back and the still living were seated up front. They took the living to the “pest house” and the dead to a burial site. My father was one of the lucky ones and after a few days he was able to go home. I heard that story many times and remember wondering who was the genius who came up with the name “pest house”, and always thought the job of the wagon driver must have been hard to fill.

  4. [the Lisbon earthquake] “was a cataclysmic event” and “precipitated a loss of faith in faith itself”…”The psychological and philosophical effects were profound:”…”There are natural events that particularly resonate with the ethos of an age and help to shatter it”…”The earthquake struck not only at the city and its inhabitants, but at the attitude of optimism that had characterized the first half of that century, and caused many to question their previously unshakeable faith in divine providence, advancing the Enlightenment”…

    The Lisbon earthquake, so psychologically impactive upon Europe and, no doubt its colonies, occurred just 20 years before the American revolution.

    While it can’t fairly be said to have led to the American revolution, it may well have led to preparing the ground for our revolution, in that it impacted the confidence of Europe in its heretofore ‘certain faith’.

    There are indeed “unforeseeable and uncontrollable events that help determine human destiny”, boy do we need one now.

  5. I suggest a small change in “praying in six magnificent cathedrals” and “Lisbon’s great cathedrals.” Replace “cathedrals” with “churches.”

    A cathedral is the bishop’s church, so there is only one to a diocese. A basilica is a church with special privileges; there can be any number of them, for example, Rome. St. Peter’s is a basilica, but it is not a cathedral.

  6. I’m not so sure we can legitimately seperate events as natural vs man made. We are after all creatures of and from the Earth.

    We think as individuals, but the political tsunami of sorts that has swept through America the last 50 years was not the fault of any one person or even one group. One could possibly argue that it was the natural progression of prosperity’s effects on the psychology of human beings.

    We don’t normally think of humans as herd creatures that engage in mindless stampedes. But the reality may be, that’s exactly what we are.

  7. SteveH,

    No ‘legitimate separation’ between the Lisbon earthquake and the attack at Pearl Harbor? Really? We are simply and solely our physical bodies?

    Prosperity naturally progresses to socialism?

    Certainly humans are susceptible to acting as “herd creatures that engage in mindless stampedes”. Yet the evidence for individualism is at least as great.

    Does it have to be one or the other?

  8. GB, I don’t know. I’m just asking the question i suppose. I just see these events, and if i didn’t exist or you didn’t exist as individuals, the wave toward socialism would have occured anyway. Maybe like a tide that can’t be stopped even if man created the tide?

  9. SteveH,

    I suspect that the ‘wave toward socialism’ is a result of the rise of Nietzsche’s nihilism and the post-modernist movement. Both posit that there is no such thing as objective reality, only subjective opinion. That everything is relative and that there is no such thing as objective truth. (they avoid things like gravity, which is certainly an objective ‘truth’)

    The left’s acceptance of post-modernism springs from a psychological condition known as ‘arrested development’ the left’s arguments spring from the infantile protest; “That’s not fair!” and the immature juvenile’s view that their opinion is as valid as any others.

    Ironically, it was Europe’s prosperity that led to individuals like Marx looking at the disparity between the haves and have not’s and, failing to understand the natural mechanisms responsible for that phenomena and their absolute necessity, he condemned and rejected Capitalism, which of course is simply an economic system in harmony with natural economic laws. But Marx, a contemporary of Nietschke, also embraced nihilism and so rejected the very concept of ‘natural’ economic laws.

    The result of Europe and later the American left embracing nihilism and post-modernism’s tenets is the concomitant rejection of a Supreme being. Which of course eliminates any reason to believe in an afterlife.

    Which in turn leads the left to conclude that there is only the here and now, on this planet. Lacking belief in an afterlife and confronting life’s essential ‘unfairness’ presents the leftist with but two choices; depression and acceptance that ‘life sucks and then you die’ or a determination to do something about it, that people must be persuaded if possible but forced when necessary, to comply with the strictures they believe will make the world a better place.

    Ironically, in liberals trying to essentially create a utopia, they are really trying to create a heaven on earth, which of course is the only condition in which ‘unfairness’ is absent.

    Given the essential unfairness of life, it’s an impossible goal of course but that factual objection is rejected both because the ‘journey toward the paradise of a utopia’ gives their lives meaning and because for liberals, the alternative is to accept that “life sucks and then you die”.

    The left is literally ‘at war’ with reality.

    To compound the irony, liberals all and ideological leftists, fail to understand not only the necessity but the advantage of life’s essential unfairness.

    Without life’s essential ‘unfairness’ there would be no individual mutation and biological evolution would be impossible. Intellectual, musical and other forms of ‘genius’ would be unknown. Without the ‘unfairness’ of personal wealth, the fulcrum upon which societal opportunity is leveraged would not exist, which is why economic systems that forbid private property fail.

  10. The chapter on the Lisbon earthquake in Candide is one of the few pieces of literature that ever made me laugh out loud. Having said that, it was fascinating and a bit depressing to read what is basically an account of how upper class Europeans had to come to grips with the fact that a philosophy they’d invested so much in couldn’t hold up to reality.

  11. Beside the influenza epidemic, the Lisbon earthquake, and the Yangtze flood of 1931, I think the polio “epidemic” of the ’30s to the first half of the ’50s (FDR got it back in the ’20s as an adult) has had a surprisingly small impact in the popular memory and in art and literature. It was not just the deaths and the crippling of children and teens but the fear in the hearts of parents that should be better remembered. I know Philip Roth’s last novel was about polio in the ’40s and I remember seeing the disease dealt with in an episode of the Walton’s, but I can’t recall much else about it in the popular culture.

  12. I vaguely remember standing in line as a young child in the mid-50’s to get a polio shot. There were two strong emotional undercurrents active within the crowd, strong enough that even a young child noticed and even now remembers.

    Firstly, that this was something the adults took very seriously and second, the palpable sense of relief, that we now had the Salk vaccine, which prevented one from getting a dread disease.

    I also remember a general attitude prevalent at that time, a false optimism that soon, medical science would solve all of man’s common ills.

    I think its the aspect of prevention, that this was something that no longer needed to be feared and, that false optimism, that led to the “surprisingly small impact in the popular memory and in art and literature” you correctly note.

  13. I well remember fellow school children who’d been struck by polio — in the 1960s.

    Leakers, if you will.

    BTW, the famous vaccines did NOT function as advertised. Namely, they didn’t stop you from getting the disease.

    That’s why there were still some ‘leakers’ that suffered even a generation after Salk.

    The way the vaccine really worked was kept a public secret by the medical profession: it stopped an infected person from re-transmitting the disease.

    Hence, the government pressure to have everyone, especially the children, ‘immunized.’

    In fact, it offers no immunity at all.

    But, when all of society is vaccinated, the parasite/ virus can’t jump to a new host and the epidemic abruptly stops.

    The very nature of the vaccine, and its downside, has many omitting it. The current scheme is to mass inoculate for polio only upon its recurrence.

    The cure for polio is one of the few instances where the coercive power of big government actually paid dividends.

    The downside is that our betters think that such results can be replicated across all government policies.

    Such is not so.

  14. Folks, I’m surprised that this commentariat is unaware that Central/ aka the First Directorate of the KGB et. seq. was actively behind the debasement of Western culture — democracy in particular.

    Their term of art was:”Active Measures

    The decline of the West was not sui generis, not at all.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gnpCqsXE8g

    ======

    Please, please stop imagining that the flow of social events in the West was self-directed, random motion or based upon some astrological events.

    I’ll snap-shot Feminism, an exemplar of Central’s command of today’s PC narrative.

    {

    The First Directorate prioritized Feminism as a cultural weapon against marriage and babies – and Western Culture, generally.

    It was not an accident that this or that Feminist icon gained her prominence. The KGB, literally, ran around buying up her political tome, so much so that she rose high on the NY Times list of top selling books.

    From such prominence, she was then able to command radio and PBS airtime to spew her lesbian philosophy of life.

    [ For what is Feminism but lesbianism, the way of the lesbian to make her way in the world, a world filled with the hated enemy and rival: men. ]

    So now we have cohorts of women who are living their priorities — as lesbian see them.

    Not surprisingly, marriage, family and childbirth are not any kind of priority.

    In a nutshell: Feminism is a war on husbands; bare toleration of men as draft-laborers.

    Such perverted ‘norms’ now flood the cable channels and broadcasts.

    Since Reagan, the European segment of the American polity has plunged from 90% down towards 65%. It’s headed much, much lower. This vast transformation is primarily due to unmarried European American women.

    They’re either having bastards or marrying too late.

    Hence, their total fertility ratio is way below replacement — while open borders has non-European American women flooding in — if only to have anchor babies.

  15. The Lisbon Earthquake marks the date in Oliver Wendell Holmes’s poem about the Deacon’s wonderful hundred-year shay. That’s where I learned of it. “It was on that terrible earthquake day/That the Deacon finished his one-horse shay.”

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