Tsunami (Book Review)

In Chapter 3, Dupuy focuses on the twin moral catastrophes of the 20^th century (Auschwitz and Hiroshima) as well as the tragedy of 9/11. Shifting from theodicy to anthropodicy, Dupuy exposes the human foundations of moral evil, using Rousseau’s terminology. Readers familiar with René Girard will see mimetic desire at work in Rousseau’s amour-propre, the human desire for recognition at the expense of others. Girardians will also recognize the scapegoat mechanism in Dupuy’s analysis of Rousseau, when he says, “Rousseau demystified…metaphysical evil by revealing its anthropological foundation: order is built up on the backs of scapegoats” (36). By highlighting the violent potential within amour-propre, Dupuy shows how Adolf Eichmann’s psychological stability in carrying out the Final Solution should make us all concerned about the myopic ways that we carry out our own daily tasks while the silent tsunamis of preventable disease claim millions of innocent lives. In Dupuy’s exposition of Hannah Arendt and her analysis of the Nazi war criminal, the reader can start to see the troubling ways in which Auschwitz is everywhere and Eichmann is everyone. Jewish philosopher Günther Anders punctuates this point by linking Auschwitz with Hiroshima, a connection that does not deflate the monstrous horror of the Holocaust but rather reveals the terrifying atrocity of the bombing. Dupuy demonstrates the moral danger in trying to justify the use of the nuclear weapon as a “necessary evil,” and he agrees with Anders who insists that humanity entered its final chapter of existence when the US bombed Hiroshima.

The metaphor of the tsunami emerges again as Dupuy explores how the boundaries between moral and natural catastrophes have become blurred in the human imagination and language. According to Anders, survivors of Hiroshima refer to the bombing as a tsunami while Jewish people generally prefer the term Shoah when referring to the Holocaust. The Hebrew word Shoah refers to a destructive catastrophe (i.e. tsunami), and it is preferred since the word Holocaust is a religious term that means “whole burnt offering,” thus implying that six million Jews were sacrificed to a bloodthirsty deity. The concept of Holocaust as religious offering brings up a third category of victim: the sacrificial victim, which Dupuy explores in Chapter 4. He employs the insights of Girard, who equates all violence with the sacred so that all victims of violence become understood as sacrificial, and religious language serves as an effective way to project human violence onto God. So for Dupuy, the three classes of victims (natural, moral, religious) become conflated into one and the language of religious sacrifice and natural catastrophe reveals the human propensity to avoid responsibility. “It is time,” Dupuy concludes, “to abandon the tsunami as a universal metaphor for catastrophe” (58).

A Short Treatise is short indeed, but its 61 pages pack a powerful metaphysical punch. Dupuy expects his readers to have a sufficient grasp of the history of Western philosophy, as he cites Heidegger, Rawls, Pope, Kant, Marx, Hegel, Jaspers, Neiman, and others along with the philosophers mentioned above. He also draws from the Bible, the Talmud, Greek myth, and writers such as Shakespeare, Goethe, and Borges. When he summarizes the ideas of particular philosophers, the reader may find it challenging to discern whether Dupuy is affirming or critiquing these ideas. He himself recognizes this potential misunderstanding when he writes, “Up to this point I may have given the impression that I take the side of Voltaire against Rousseau. Nothing could be farther from the truth” (33). Chapter titles like “The Naturalization of Evil” (Chapter 3) and section headings like “Mourning for the Future” (2) and “The Confusion of Victims” (52) are helpful guides for the reader in following the thread of his argument, which can sometimes become obscured in the maze of metaphysical detours. Again, Dupuy himself acknowledges this difficulty when he asks rhetorically, “Have I lost the thread of my argument here?” A question that he quickly follows with the reassuring, “Not at all!” (36). The five-page appendix titled “Japan, 2011” (which addresses the Fukushima nuclear disaster) and the ten pages of endnotes at the end of the book reveal several other philosophical detours that, although fascinating, would have obfuscated the flow of his argument if they were included in the main text. Although some endnotes were added by the translator Malcolm B. DeBevoise, one endnote exhibits Dupuy’s levity even in the midst of weighty matters. In Chapter 1, when discussing the justice that humanity owes to generations not yet born, he adds the following joke: “Following a lecture someone in the audience asks, ‘How long did you say it would be before the sun burned the Earth to a crisp?’ On hearing the reply, ‘Six billion years,’ the questioner sighs in relief: ‘Thank God for that, I thought you said six million’” (69).

In this book, which was first published in France in 2005 and then made available in English in 2015, the prophetic Dupuy specifically warns of “novel strains of infectious disease” as a threat to human civilization (9). As I write this review in August 2020, the global coronavirus death toll exceeds 700,000. Many of the national leaders (and many of us) who still seem caught off guard by this virus would have likely dismissed Dupuy as an “alarmist” five years ago. Also, while writing this review, I learned of the massive explosion in Lebanon that has claimed at least a hundred human lives and wounded thousands. Although the cause of the explosion is currently unknown, the disaster sadly underscores Dupuy’s conclusion: “The human race has no need of tsunamis to destroy itself” (18). In light of the fact that we are currently living in a reality that Dupuy predicted, we would do well to heed his other warnings, including his admonition that the present catastrophe will pale “in comparison with the cataclysm that we are preparing for ourselves by poisoning the atmosphere of our planet” (18).

In Chapter 1, titled “Genesis,” Dupuy offers a parable about the biblical Noah written by Günther Anders in which Noah warns people about the flood by clothing himself in sackcloth and ashes on the city streets and grieving as if the catastrophe has already wiped out humanity and any memory thereof. According to the parable, this form of enlightened doomsaying proves to be effective because a carpenter and a roofer later approach Noah in his home and say, “Let us help you build the ark so that it may become false” (3). As August 6, 2020 marks the 75^th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, which sealed the destructive fate of humanity, Dupuy urges us to help make that future false.