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Responses to big disasters
By Tom Vanderbilt |
September 6, 2009, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
AS Rebecca Solnit documents in "A Paradise Built in Hell," a landmark work that gives an impassioned challenge to the social meaning of disasters, positive feelings emerge in precarious circumstances, from the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 to Hurricane Katrina.
Disasters, for Solnit, do not merely put us in view of apocalypse, but provide glimpses of utopia. They do not just destroy, but create.
"Disasters are extraordinarily generative," she writes. As the prevailing order -- which she elliptically characterizes as advanced global capitalism, full of anomie and isolation -- collapses, another order takes shape: "In its place appears a reversion to improvised, collaborative, cooperative and local society."
These "disaster communities" represent something akin to the role William James claimed for "the utopian dreams" of social justice: "They help to break the general reign of hardness, and are slow leavens of a better order."
Solnit is an exemplar of that perpetually endangered species, the free-ranging public intellectual, bound to no institution or academic orthodoxy. As in her previous works -- most notably "River of Shadows," a study of the photographer Eadweard Muybridge that opens out into a consideration of time, motion and the American West -- there is here a wonderful confluence of unexpected connections.
And so we find James, teaching at Stanford University at the time of the 1906 earthquake, wading into the rubble. He was struck by two things: one was the "rapidity of the improvisation of order out of chaos;" the second was that "the pathetic way of feeling great disasters belongs rather to the point of view of people at a distance."
But the heroism of ordinary people is only part of Solnit's study. The larger, and more troubling, questions that emerge in "A Paradise Built in Hell" concern our tendency to assume that people will not act this way and the official responses that come out of this belief.
A meta-narrative governing official response to the various disasters Solnit examines, from the industrial explosion that devastated Halifax in 1917 to the Mexico City earthquake of 1985 to New York on 9/11, is that cities wracked by disaster need to be protected from rampaging mobs, that government needs to suppress the panicked masses.
But as Solnit illustrates, through an absorbing study of the academic subfield of "disaster sociology," these Hobbesian (and Hollywood) beliefs are seldom true.
For all its power, the book leaves a number of questions unresolved. How are disaster communities different from other forms of spontaneous community operating under real or perceived duress, from combat units to millenarian cults? If the worst can bring out the best in people, why can't that impulse be sustained in everyday life?
Disasters, for Solnit, do not merely put us in view of apocalypse, but provide glimpses of utopia. They do not just destroy, but create.
"Disasters are extraordinarily generative," she writes. As the prevailing order -- which she elliptically characterizes as advanced global capitalism, full of anomie and isolation -- collapses, another order takes shape: "In its place appears a reversion to improvised, collaborative, cooperative and local society."
These "disaster communities" represent something akin to the role William James claimed for "the utopian dreams" of social justice: "They help to break the general reign of hardness, and are slow leavens of a better order."
Solnit is an exemplar of that perpetually endangered species, the free-ranging public intellectual, bound to no institution or academic orthodoxy. As in her previous works -- most notably "River of Shadows," a study of the photographer Eadweard Muybridge that opens out into a consideration of time, motion and the American West -- there is here a wonderful confluence of unexpected connections.
And so we find James, teaching at Stanford University at the time of the 1906 earthquake, wading into the rubble. He was struck by two things: one was the "rapidity of the improvisation of order out of chaos;" the second was that "the pathetic way of feeling great disasters belongs rather to the point of view of people at a distance."
But the heroism of ordinary people is only part of Solnit's study. The larger, and more troubling, questions that emerge in "A Paradise Built in Hell" concern our tendency to assume that people will not act this way and the official responses that come out of this belief.
A meta-narrative governing official response to the various disasters Solnit examines, from the industrial explosion that devastated Halifax in 1917 to the Mexico City earthquake of 1985 to New York on 9/11, is that cities wracked by disaster need to be protected from rampaging mobs, that government needs to suppress the panicked masses.
But as Solnit illustrates, through an absorbing study of the academic subfield of "disaster sociology," these Hobbesian (and Hollywood) beliefs are seldom true.
For all its power, the book leaves a number of questions unresolved. How are disaster communities different from other forms of spontaneous community operating under real or perceived duress, from combat units to millenarian cults? If the worst can bring out the best in people, why can't that impulse be sustained in everyday life?
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