Another Tragedy, Another Miracle

Yesterday a small plane, apparently piloted by New York Yankee's pitcher Cory Lidle, crashed into the 30th floor of an apartment building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and fell, burning, to the pavement.

In the course of recounting the story this morning on NPR, a reporter hit both of my pet peeves about the use of language. While people first feared that the crash was a terrorist attack, the reporter intoned, it quickly turned into a story of "personal tragedy." Meanwhile, the two people who were in the apartment that was struck "miraculously" escaped unharmed.

Avoiding Tragedy . . . or Not?

I wrote in my last post that skepticism may be rooted in a desire to avoid tragedy, to the extent that tragedy is the product of stubbornly insisting on the universality and rightness (and righteousness) of what turns out always to be a partial and flawed view of the world.

There is a problem with the desire to avoid tragedy, of course: the easiest way to do it is to just not give a damn about anything. Historically, perhaps stereotypically, skepticism has always seemed to slide into quietism, complete passivity and indifference in the face of whatever happens. How do you know it matters, anyway?

Tragedy Revisited

My recent research into the notions of moral imagination and moral luck has led me to revise (slightly) my previous view of the use and misuse of the term "tragedy."

Tragedies and Miracles

I am increasingly annoyed by the widespread misuse of two words, generally in media accounts of dramatic events - or in dramatic accounts of media events: "tragedy" and "miracle".

In the most precise sense, a miracle is an event so extraordinary as to actually violate a law of nature. If a large building were to levitate in the air before a crowd of reliable and otherwise sane witnesses, that would be a miracle. As a skeptic, I would want to know a lot about those witnesses: extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and all that. But I still respect the word, and want to reserve it for its original use.