Conclusion - The Earthquake Observers - page 264

To Kraus, Suess embodied the shared hubris of science and liberalism.
Kraus failed to recognize the modesty with which nineteenth-century seis-
mologists approached citizens. Far from tolerating “cosmic prattle,” these
scientists took pains to express themselves in the vernaculars of their lay
observers and to preserve even the original idioms of their testimony. Kraus
took no notice when scientists admitted how little they knew. He did not
read the instructions in which they urged observers to gauge their own un-
certainty. To be sure, this was a project of “enlightenment,” yet with only a
superficial resemblance to Kraus's caricatures. For scientists like Suess, Al-
bert Heim, Charles Davison, Harry Wood, and Perry Byerly, enlightenment
required a frank and accurate assessment of the limits that nature posed to
human ambitions. Disasters—floods, earthquakes, avalanches—were cen-
tral to this worldview, as to Kraus's. Suess was, after all, the man credited
with having reintroduced disasters to geohistory. For Suess, as for Kraus, the
need to adjust humanity's sense of scale was an urgent ethical imperative.
It was the task of natural science “to ascertain the place of humanity in the
universe.” 37
The earthquake observers of the nineteenth century succeeded in refram-
ing Kant's question for a scientific age. In the face of the “concept-quake”
that was tearing through the foundations of traditional beliefs, the dialogue
between scientists and citizens offered an intellectual compass. It furnished
no easy answers, but it showed how to pose the questions. Exactly how
much fear of untamed nature did enlightenment call for? Precisely how
much skepticism toward intellectual authority did enlightenment warrant?
In the midst of disaster, who was the model of enlightenment: The Euro-
pean who slipped into “hysteria”? The native of the “savage regions” who
kept her “presence of mind”? The distant scientist counting oscillations on
a seismograph? The bank clerk who reported a northwest-southeast shock?
How, in short, might the experience of enlightenment feel when the ground
itself was adrift?