The Moment of Danger - The Earthquake Observers - page 116

1846 novel Dombey and Son, in which the disaster site is compared to an
earthquake zone. Comparing a technological catastrophe to a natural di-
saster hints at the Victorians' sense of the uncomfortable proximity between
industrial progress and ruin. Henry Adams drew a similar comparison in
1904, “Every day Nature violently revolted, causing so-called accidents with
enormous destruction of property and life, while plainly laughing at man,
who helplessly groaned and shrieked and shuddered, but never for a single
instant could stop. The railways alone approached the carnage of war; auto-
mobiles and fire-arms ravaged society, until an earthquake became almost
a nervous relaxation.” 23 it seems, then, that the emergence of the concept
of traumatic shock depended on comparisons between the psychic effects
of natural disasters and of military and industrial violence. The spread of
industrial technologies did not eclipse Europeans' sense of vulnerability to
elemental nature. On the contrary, Victorians' anxiety about the psychic ef-
fects of industrialization reflected in part their understanding of the psychic
effects of natural forces.
Criminology and Cosmic Crisis
According to Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, the Great War dem-
onstrated that civilization's enemy was no longer external nature, but the
unmasterable forces of man's inner nature. And yet the question of the geo-
physical determinants of civilization versus barbarism still loomed large
in the interwar era. 24 Even after 1918, social scientists continued to study
geophysical conditions as determinants of social breakdown.
studies of the social effects of earthquakes had helped shape the emerg-
ing field of criminology in pre-1914 Europe. Lombroso's Crime, Its Causes
and Remedies of 1899 had opened with two chapters on meteorological,
climatic, and geological factors in the “etiology” of crime. 25 in the aftermath
of the Messina earthquake of 1908, as the state struggled to impose order,
italian jurists had theorized a relationship between sovereignty and emer-
gency that anticipated a pivotal concept of twentieth-century legal theory. 26
The swiss psychiatrist Eduard stierlin found the Messina disaster “of the
greatest interest” as an opportunity “to compare how the frightful event af-
fected survivors of such different races and social classes.” 27 Two opposing
tendencies were identified in the social response to earthquakes. As Cesare
Lombroso wrote of the situation in Messina in his Archivio di Antropologia
Criminale: “As for the effect on the moral sense, one may say that in this
terrible catastrophe it was exaggerated in one direction or the other, as if