As floods swept through central Texas last week, killing at least 120 people and leaving more than 170 missing, many were shocked to discover that in the United States of America in 2025, there are still forces greater than those Silicon Valley can produce.

That’s a hard pill to swallow for people who see themselves as masters of a very modern universe. Floodplain mapping, weather models, engineered levees, and all the advanced technology of the National Weather Service couldn’t prevent the Guadalupe River from rising nearly 30 feet in less than an hour, overwhelming camps, homes, and entire communities.

We believed we had innovated our way past our vulnerabilities to the kinds of catastrophes that plagued the ancients in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Before last week, death by flash flood felt very early Mesopotamia, not 21st-century America — even in an area known as “Flash Flood Alley.”

It was humbling enough to accept that we couldn’t control the effects of the weather, but then we demonstrated that we couldn’t control ourselves either. Responses by many to the Texas tragedy were as primitive and unenlightened as those of our ancestors who blamed the destruction of Pompeii on the gods’ dissatisfaction with the local priests. Human nature remains the same across time — we haven’t conquered it any more than we have Mother Nature, in spite of our great civilizational achievements.

A Houston mayoral appointee to the city’s Food Insecurity Board, Sade Perkins, sounded like she was living in 2025 B.C.E. when she went full tribalist in a TikTok video she posted after the floods. She noted the race of the Mystic campers still unaccounted for and advised her listeners of other races to “keep that in mind before you all get out there and put on your rain boots and go find these girls.” 

Ms. Perkins’s ancestors in ancient Ur probably wouldn’t have crossed the river to help struggling farmers from a neighboring city-state either. She couldn’t shed that ideological inheritance of “us vs. them” long enough to feel untainted empathy for 8-year-olds, but she knows how to upload a video. Technology moves forward, but human nature doesn’t.

A Houston-based pediatrician, Christina B. Propst, posted her decidedly unevolved view — shared by many of history’s greatest religious fanatics — that God punishes human beings who don’t adhere to the orthodoxy that the religious fanatic has decided is the Lord’s will. “Kerr County MAGA voted to gut FEMA. They deny climate change. May they get what they voted for. Bless their hearts,” Dr. Propst wrote. She must be a student of Herodotus, who claimed the god Poseidon sent a tsunami to punish the ancient Persians for their particular version of climate-change denialism.

Then there are those who seem “possessed” by the Trump Derangement Demon much in the same way the girls of 17th-century Salem, Massachusetts, were animated by the devil when they accused others of doing Satan’s bidding. Self-exiled celebrity Rosie O’Donnell, journalist George Stephanopoulos, and Senator Murphy of Connecticut did everything but convulse, Betty Parris-style, when pointing the finger at President Trump, blaming his policy decisions for the death and destruction in Texas. Senator Schumer called for an investigation into any links between the president’s budget cuts and the National Weather Service’s response to the floods. 

Others are simply possessed by the spirit of plain old greed — an ancient human flaw for which no one has ever found a cure. Kerrville’s city manager, Dalton Rice, reported in a press conference that his office has been inundated with reports about scammers exploiting victims’ families for profit. Geoffrey Chaucer knew these people’s forebears well in the 14th century and wrote about them in “The Canterbury Tales” — the Pardoner who peddled fake relics to grieving families and the Friar who sold absolution to the desperate. There is nothing new under the sun.

The floods in Texas were first and foremost a tragedy resulting in the loss of innocent life.

They were also a check on our societal hubris — we can manipulate viruses, produce nuclear energy, and build drones the size of mosquitoes, yet we can’t stop the rain.

Finally, they were a bitter reminder that the most advanced civilizations are still filled with people responding to fear stimuli like they did during the Bronze Age. The difference between us and them may just be smartphones and Starbucks.