Rothstein claims that with the Enlightenment the notion that natural disasters represented the justice of the gods and thus sustained the moral order faded, replaced by an amoral randomness and the challenge of understanding causality in natural science terms. He is on more dicy ground in suggesting that the political blame game in the aftermath of the Gulf Coast disaster represents the emergence of a new theodicy which explains why bad things happen to good, or at least innocent, people in terms of the failures of their political leaders.

I have difficulty with this assertion on several grounds. First, this is not a new theme. Only the fundamentalist crazies have been blaming the victims for the human devastation of Katrina, but the myth of the Fisher King, the ruler whose personal moral failure lays waste to the country he rules, is archetypal (and has, BTW, long formed the mythic justification for regicide).

Secondly, we continue to conceive of the impact of public policy decisions as being in the realm of natural causality, not some separate and rarefied moral sphere. The abandonment of wetlands protection, the diversion of public preparedness resources to a specious terrorist threat, the gutting of public works funding for flood protection projects, and the abandonment of the urban poor (in New Orleans and everywhere else) to their own resources are rational, if reprehensible, causal factors for the magnitude of the catastrophe in New Orleans.

But perhaps there is a sense in which this disaster, like others, does represent a human moral failing — that of hubris. Our conceit in insisting on living on lowlying hurricane-ridden coasts, in wildfire and mudslide zones, on earthquake fault lines, on flood plains, at the mercy of increasingly vigorous weather caused by manmade precipitants of climate change, is a moral decision, and should be made deliberately, recognizing that it relies on our dubious interminable belief that we can live at odds with nature and can vanquish natural forces no matter what their fury. Increasingly, that ‘war with nature’ requires the protection of massive public expenditure and institutional support to be sustainable. People need to wake up to realize that, in voting as they did in the last two presidential elections for an administration that inherently believes government should have no role in protecting its citizens against larger forces, they have voted against the safety they need to continue to inhabit dubious environmental niches.