Hubris and Humility

The word around these parts is “rebuild.”  And it’s inspiring, much of the time.  People who have made their homes in high mountain canyons, because they have sought refuge, solitude, and a taste of freedom – they’re not going to let anyone take that dream away from them.  And even though this kind of disaster isn’t supposed to come around very often, they’ll spit into the wind and try it again.

Here’s what troubles me, though.  There are over 200 miles of roads in these Rocky Mountains that were actually damaged to the point that they cannot be used, or absolutely swept away, along with millions of tons of rock and gravel and reinforced concrete that lay under them.  There are some 150 bridges, I’ve heard unofficially, that will have to be rebuilt.  These were built based upon what was learned from the last horrible floods of 1976, when a flash flood shot down the Big Thompson Canyon and killed a lot of people in a very short, few minutes.  The bridges, roads, and the support underneath these roads were all, or most, built with the Big Thompson flood clearly in view.  They were built to withstand another Big Thompson flood.  And I have some sense that they might have been able to do just that.  Only this flood was bigger.  It was not expected that there would be another flood bigger than the one in 1976 for at least 100 years, when bridges are in need of replacement, I guess.  So, they built these to withstand anything shy of the 1976 tragedy.  But people are calling this flood a “1000 year flood.”

What troubles me is that when I talk to engineers about whether there is a limit to what engineering can do, whether there might be storms that NO AMOUNT OF ENGINEERING and construction might be able to withstand, I am not getting any answers.  It’s almost as if those of us molded by Modernity have so ingrained in us the illusion that the human being is the center of the universe, and that our right and ability is to bring creation to heel, and that we will always find a solution no matter what the problem, that we will always triumph in the end. . . we are so infected by this disease that when, a mere 37 years after what people called the most horrible flood in western history, and after the very best science knew to do to protect that same strip of turf from it ever happening again, the roads and man-made walls were torn and tossed away like beach toys, we assume there is no limit to what we can control and overcome.

What I wish I was hearing is a good dose of humility and honesty.  We may have to build bridges that we cannot guarantee beyond certain limits of creation forces.  We may not be able to afford 150 top of the line, state of the art bridges that might survive a next catastrophe at the cost of billions of dollars; and they might not. We obviously have no clue when the next one will take place. I think everyone’s too afraid to say it out loud, because it goes against the way we’ve been taught to respond to catastrophes.  That is, “We’re in control!  We’ll get it right the next time.”  And that’s why much of the finger pointing at global warming as the real culprit in all of this alarms me, too.  This may indeed be related to the usage of fossil fuels, and we may have the ability to put a dent in how that is impacting the globe.  But the frightening thing to me is that that very  drive feeds in all of us the same lie that we have far more control than we actually do.

Hubris is a dangerous thing in all of us.  We think more highly of ourselves than we ought.  After I hear too much of that attitude, I seek out a meeting I attend regularly around here where the issue is the mess they have made of their lives because of pride, and the answer is the currency of humility by which they have seen their lives returned to happiness, joy and freedom.