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Ever hear of the Lisbon earthquake? — 22 Comments

  1. It’s like the Tower to Heaven. It was too high, so when the ground started to shake, it fell.

    Any Empire that gets too large, cannot sustain its borders, and begins to shrink, will also begin to disappear soon enough.

    It’s action, reaction.

  2. 100,000 of 250,000 is 40% mortality. Try that death rate on in NYC or LA today and see if there aren’t any psychological effects.
    I wonder what Portugal’s total population was in 1755. Two million? it is currently 10 million.
    If LA were similarly stricken today, 1% of the US population would be lost, as would perhaps a trillion dollars in property. Just to keep things to scale.

  3. There are natural events and also events that can now be manufactured, events intended to shatter this age.

    Obama with Congressional support is gutting our military and intentionally weakening our societal ability to respond to foreign aggression. He is facilitating the conditions that will lead to foreign aggression against America.

    He is spending this country into economic collapse. He is severely impeding our nation’s ability to make economic progress.

    He is facilitating social upheaval.

    He is flooding the country with illegals who will place a grave burden upon our economy. Those same illegals present a clear and present danger to the nation’s health.

    He has opened our borders to the infiltration of Islamic terrorists.

    He is flouting the law and undermining the Constitution.

    He with his leftist supporters are using the Executive and Congressional branches of our government to weaken America in order to fundamentally transform it into a Marxist society.

    Natural events can be recovered from in fairly short order. Manufactured events are intended to be impossible to recover from… the “handwriting is on the wall” for those with eyes to see.

  4. Geoffrey Britain:

    My point, however, is that there are natural events (such as the Lisbon earthquake) from which we never recover, because they have more far-reaching effects than physical destruction and loss of life. The west has never recovered from the loss of faith engendered by the earthquake. Of course, the earthquake was not single-handedly responsible for that, but it had a huge effect on it.

  5. neo,

    I’m Portuguese on my father’s side and you, in your prior post brought to my attention the Lisbon Earthquake. Reading this update of that prior post, prompted me to do some more research into the societal conditions just prior to and after the Lisbon Earthquake.

    Just a year prior to the earthquake, an individual as disruptive to Portuguese society as Obama today is to ours, rose to supreme power. The ‘Marquess of Pombal’ was a very harsh prime minister who was given free reign by Joseph I Portugal’s absolute monarch. The historical consensus is that Pombal basically ruled as a dictator in all but name. Pombal ruled in this manner until Joseph I’s death in 1777.

    It is my contention that Portugal’s inability to fully recover from the Lisbon Earthquake had much to do with Pombal and Joseph I’s reign. Pombal’s ruthlessness [executed entire Noble families; men, women, children & grandchildren] in destroying any opposition and Joseph I’s truly ludicrous spending over a long period both before and during Pombal’s reign of terror destroyed Portugal’s former greatness.

    I suspect that natural events rarely, if ever, are the primary factors in a society’s inability to recover from them. The robustness of a society after the natural event determines its ability to recover.

  6. Geoffrey Britain:

    That may indeed all be true, but that’s not what my interest was in the earthquake. What happened in Portugal re the physical recovery and its difficulties was independent, I believe, from the shock of the earthquake itself on European thought and beliefs in Christianity and the Age of Faith as a whole—the shock of the initial facts of it: that it struck disproportionately at the faithful, piously attending church.

  7. Cut off the head of the snake, and the organization falls. With the church’s most famous and respected leaders dead, with their grassroots subordinates and NCOs dead, the organization cannot regenerate very well.

  8. “…caused many to question their previously unshakeable faith in divine providence”

    I believe that the earthquake was one of the inspirations for Voltaire’s Candide

  9. The Lisbon earthquake fatally damaged popular belief in Divine Providence.

    The near universal liberal support for the fascistic Obama has fatally damaged the idea that there can be a decent Left. The traditional assertion that leftists are sincere defenders of individual rights has been shown to be utterly false. This will have long-term consequences for civil society as more and more people cease to regard leftists as fellow Americans.

  10. I head about the Lisbon Quake v from seeing “Candide” ) the Broadway revival when I was in junior high)–but all I actually one about it was that it killed a lot of people and essentially ended a major chunk of Portugal’s ability to colonize, and left her ripe for Napoleon’s picking many years later.

  11. “What happened in Portugal re the physical recovery and its difficulties was independent, I believe, from the shock of the earthquake itself on European thought and beliefs in Christianity and the Age of Faith as a whole–the shock of the initial facts of it: that it struck disproportionately at the faithful, piously attending church.” neo

    “The Lisbon earthquake fatally damaged popular belief in Divine Providence.” pst314

    Not so fast guys. The shock of the earthquake itself on European thought and beliefs in Christianity and the Age of Faith as a whole, may have fatally damaged belief in Divine Providence among those already so inclined.

    As a ‘portugee’ I’m free to take a hard look at my ancestor’s society. Many of those “faithful, piously attending church” were part of a society whose wealth had come from two sources. The slave trade and slave labor (black & Indian) in Brazil’s gold mines. Portugal was heavily involved in the slave trade. Native slave labor in Brazil’s gold mines made Portugal fabulously wealthy.

    Note: The transatlantic slave trade was outlawed by Portugal in 1836, at the same time as other European powers, as a result of British pressure, who had banned the trade in 1808. Slavery within the African Portuguese colonies, however, was not abolished until 1869, following a treaty between United States and Britain for the suppression of the slave trade.

    In 1755, basing an economy upon the selling of slaves and slave labor, while piously sending missionaries to ‘save their souls’ by bringing them to Jesus is blatant hypocrisy. I can’t imagine God being very pleased with the Portuguese of that time.

    One thing that we tend to forget is that the ‘Enlightenment’ and Christianity were often hostile to each other. Many Europeans were already turning away from Christianity before the earthquake struck. For them, the earthquake striking down people ‘piously’ praying in church was likely confirmation of what they already believed.

    Europe knew all of this and a typical reaction among many pious Europeans may not have been to question their faith at all but to assume that the Portuguese had merely reaped what they’d sown. Remember, for everyone but the Portuguese, it happened to the other guy, not to them. And they had no pictures, much less TV and video coverage, so once the initial shock of the news dissipated, I have to question how impactful the earthquake would actually have been.

    Finally, if the “Lisbon earthquake fatally damaged popular belief in Divine Providence” how is the line, “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” explained?

  12. Although enormous natural disasters can change a society’s worldview, as neo-neocon suggests, I’m sympathetic to GB’s view that the really bad disasters are usually accompanied by institutional malfeasance.

    The example of Zimbabwe springs to mind: the country used to be thought of as the “breadbasket of Africa,” but now imports food…and the quantities available don’t meet demand. The autocracy of Mugabe has led to a host of dysfunctions, not least of which is hyperinflation.

    Zimbabwe has no national currency now. They use foreign currency exclusively.

    Every country goes through ups and downs like Zimbabwe’s droughts. Sometimes, the stresses are extreme, as in the case of world wars or pandemics. Their ability to respond to stresses is a function of societal health and the robustness of the nation’s institutions.

  13. I think we all know how thin the veneer is between us and system failure. A couple of years ago, there was this thing about interest rates, and suddenly 1/3 of the population lost their life savings. If we dwell on it, we become immobilized. It was after the Lisbon earthquake that the leader of the country was asked, what should we do? He said, we bury the dead and take care of the living. So yeah, that’s what we do. You want to always keep the worst-case scenarios in the back of your mind, but only in the back, not in the forefront. I think the conservative movement can get a little overwhelmed and even paralyzed thinking about worst-case scenarios.

  14. It’s also worth noting that conservatives have the advantage of being non-utopian. We’re aware that civilization is like those plate-spinning acts on The Ed Sullivan Show, with 15 plates twirling on sticks. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that sooner or later, something’s going to fall. (We may even be able to guess which plate will hit the ground first, but does that even matter?) Dems seem to believe that the plates will always keep spinning, no matter whether we stabilize them or step back and watch them – or even if we bump up against the table. Truth is, it takes an effort and luck to keep things spinning.

  15. Yes, I first learned of the Lisbon earthquake while reading Candide. WRT the 1918 influenza pandemic, I first learned of it from Harpo Marx’s autobiography.

  16. America and its politicians helped ensure Rhodesia became Zimb right now. Yet that’s not taught in the history books, even while Americans clamor for WWII history texts in the defeated nations.

    Another example of American perspective.

  17. “Theologians would focus and speculate on the religious cause and message, seeing the earthquake as a manifestation of divine judgement. Most philosophers rejected that on the grounds that the Alfama, Lisbon’s red-light district, suffered only minor damage.”

    After the San Francisco earthquake in 1906 someone wrote a bit of doggerel:

    “If as some say God spanked the town for being over-frisky

    Why did He burn the churches down and save Hotaling’s whiskey?”

    (Hotaling’s was a prominent liquor warehouse that escaped damage).

  18. Atheists, real ones, have posited that the Throne of God is empty because God is not there or was replaced by the Devil.

    The true believers on the Christian side think the King that rules the Earth is not God, but Satan, and that only the righteous ones will be chosen at Armageddon, to be in God’s Kingdom ruled by Jesus Christ rather than corrupt humans or Satan.

    The theology stuff is at a higher level than what the barely literate consume in tabloids and mass media publications. Most people have significantly different beliefs than the minorities.

  19. Ymarsaker

    “Atheists, real ones, have posited that the Throne of God is empty because God is not there or was replaced by the Devil.”

    What planet?

  20. re: Voltaire and the Lisbon earthquake

    There is an excellent course about Voltaire at The Great Courses by Prof. Alan Charles Kors. (http://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/voltaire-and-the-triumph-of-the-enlightenment.html) From the course guide for lecture 6:

    The Lisbon earthquake [in 1755] and the outbreak of general European war [the Seven Years War in 1756] left him very close to despair. In his Poem on the Lisbon Earthquake (1756), Voltaire reassessed his Leibnizian optimistic philosophy and theology, seeing evil and suffering as inexplicable given an infinitely good God and asserting that suffering humanity requires his love more than God does. This poem produced a furious response from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Letter to Voltaire on Providence accuses Voltaire of attacking the Divinity. Paralyzed in his response for years, Voltaire finally produced it, in his most enduring philosophical tale: Candide, or Optimism (1759). Its essential themes are the irrelevance of abstract metaphysical philosophy, the reality of evil, the unknowability of Providence, and the need to work to alleviate the suffering of the human condition. Candide both reflected and helped produce a major shift in Enlightenment thinking away from theology and toward a humanistic focus on the pains of the human condition. Candide also marks the decisive moment in Voltaire’s life when he becomes, in part to his own surprise, the crusader for “the party of humanity.”

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