Lessons Learned? Disasters, Rapid Change and Globalization

Abstract
Comparing the two tsunamis of Lisbon in 1775 and of Asia in 2004, the article
analyses the different paradigmatic interpretations of ‘‘Western’’ religious and secular
causality. Based on the rational concept of risk making and risk taking, the need to
accept failures and their consequences is discussed, as well as the responsibility to
develop human strategies for disaster prevention and to foster living conditions which
may avoid large-scale suffering