What is Worth Saving in the Flood?
Four in the morning, and the Valdarno dam engineers were still awake.
“Should we discharge the dam?”
“Do you see how much water is piling up? We have to. The dam will burst if we don’t. ”
Thus they discharged it. The newly freed waters rushed thirty miles an hour towards Florence, Italy, where the city’s inhabitants slept, largely unaware of the coming destruction. By seven-thirty a.m., the floodwaters arrived.
The waters burst into churches, art galleries, jewelry stores, and homes. They destroyed buildings, flooded army barracks, and suffocated the young and sick. In many places, the waters morphed into a disgusting sludge of water, mud, and black, greasy oil from broken boiler tanks. The flood churned, infiltrating everything it could—not listening to the cries of the families who had lost their homes, businesses, and livelihoods—only listening to the laws of gravity.
It was eight p.m. when the floodwaters began to recede, but enough damage had been done. The flood— known as the 1966 flood of the Arno—left thirty-five dead and damaged millions of manuscripts, books, paintings, and other works of art. Fortunately, many recognized the importance of restoring the deeply historical Renaissance city and quickly came to help. The support was widespread. Jacqueline Onassis (JFK’s wife) chaired a U.S. committee to repair frescoes around the city; some Germans repaired the Bardini museum’s musical instruments; the armory of Vienna restored the Bargello museum’s arms and armor; even Picasso auctioned one of his paintings and devoted the proceeds to general restoration efforts.
But most strikingly, thousands of volunteers, including hundreds of international students, volunteered their time to dig through six hundred thousand tons of mud to retrieve and clean historical treasures. This outpouring of support is comparable to the recent Central Texas floods in July 2025—but most of the effort for Florence did not go to humanitarian aid. Why, then, did so many people feel the desire to dig through heavy, stinky, and occasionally dangerous mud, just to recover and restore these antiquated things?
These volunteers—perhaps unconsciously—recognized that conservation does not only feel satisfying, but is in fact morally good. The volunteers could have used their time to further their own self-interest by relaxing or working, but instead decided to conserve the damaged works for future generations they would never meet.
That choice embodies the moral virtues of self-restraint and compassion. Their action aligns with natural law: it is fitting to protect what is good, especially if it is vulnerable to loss. Scripture deepens our moral obligation to conserve. "The earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it. The world and all its people belong to him."¹ We are called to steward what belongs to God, not to exploit or neglect it.
But this does not mean we should only focus on restoring the physical terrain of the earth. We should also seek to conserve human-created beautiful things that reflect God’s glory.
How can we, in our daily lives, find valuable things that we should conserve? Well, most people use some form of social media, whether it’s YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, X (Twitter), etc. These platforms are entertaining and very popular, and because of that, there is a deluge of new content being created all the time. Every minute, over 500 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube, ~16,000 videos are published to TikTok, and 350,000 tweets are posted on X.
Some of this content (that which educates and inspires) is undoubtedly useful. But most of the content is short, ephemeral content meant only to entertain users as they scroll through their algorithmically- customized infinite feed. Examples include videos on fashion trends and tweets on celebrity drama. The social media companies push this content because they know it will maximize their profits. The more entertaining and addicting content the algorithm serves to the user, the longer the user will stay online, which results in increased revenue for the company.
But this ephemeral content is not fulfilling for the human soul. This is not surprising. Scrolling dispenses occasional dopamine to you every couple minutes, but does not give meaningful satisfaction after the scrolling session is done. Also, the lack of involvement in the activity and the constant switching of attention makes it difficult for you to remember the content you consumed. Once you scroll past something, it is unlikely to ever resurface on your feed, because the content is low-quality and not worth conserving.
Therefore, the problem with consuming ephemeral content is two-fold: it is not deeply fulfilling and by giving it your attention, you encourage production of more ephemeral content.
What’s the solution, then? One possibility is to divert at least some of your attention away from social media, which is designed to shove low-quality, ephemeral content at you, and towards genuinely good works. Read old books from Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson instead of reading tweets. Watch classic movies instead of short TikTok videos. It is not a requirement that genuinely good works must be old. However, works that are old and still relevant today have stood the test of time and are more likely to be of reasonably good quality.
We should recognize we are ultimately minor characters in the scope of God’s grand narrative, and that devoting more attention to good works helps conserve works that reflect the glory of God.
The flood of the Arno volunteers were referred to as the “Mud Angels” for their tireless efforts in cleaning and restoration. In 1996, the mayor of Florence at the time gave an interview on the effects of the flood thirty years later. He said about the flood:
"[W]hile we [were] working away with our hands in the mud we gradually realised…that we were not working for ourselves but for the Florence of our grandchildren. In other words, what we were doing was dictated by the desire to give back…to future generations, so that it could be used for the spiritual growth of people who perhaps had yet to be born."
—Mario Primicerio
May we have the same selflessness and concern for future generations as the Mud Angels did. It is unlikely that we will have the opportunity to rescue and restore historical artifacts from a historic flood, but we should do our best to conserve great works in our daily lives.
¹ Psalm 24:1