Rebecca Solnit: "Altruism in the Face of Disaster"

[tim]

I went to hear Rebecca Solnit speak tonight at the First UU Church in Portland. The topic was "Altruism in the Face of Disaster"; an ill-timed bridge lift meant I missed the beginning, but what I did catch made me regret having been late. Her overall message is that as a general rule, people behave very well during disasters; not only do they seem to have an innate idea of what needs to be done on a practical level to tend to the sick and keep kids safe, they also have all the right underlying motivations. Yes, she said, sometimes people do behave badly, but most of those people are the elites: she described a phenomenon of "elite panic" where people in power withhold information (as was done during the Virginia Tech shootings and after the Three Mile Island disaster) because they're afraid that others -- you know, those poor, uneducated, un-elite others -- will panic if given that information. It turns out that average people don't panic, and the information-hiding practiced by elites is, itself, worse than the effects of what those elites fear. She talked about the "Hobbesian" inclinations of those in power and how their belief that the public will instantly flip out and do horrible things to each other (but probably, particularly, to those in power) can be, to put it mildly, counterproductive.

Disasters, then, suggest what human nature essentially is: it's good. I can't do justice to her recounting of the kinds of community feeling that sprung up in areas affected by Katrina, but suffice it to say that while it is in some people's interests for you to believe that your fellow humans are essentially shitty (not you, of course, you're a great person, and should reward yourself for being great by purchasing a new 2011 model SUV) it's not in your interests to believe that. I liked the connections that she drew between the form of humanity that is revealed in disasters -- what she described as the re-awakening of civil society -- and the despair that capitalism and its accompanying privatization of every aspect of human life induce. People, she said, long for things beyond what capitalism has proven good at providing (at least to a few people) -- comfort, ease, safety. Those things are good up to a point, but what people really want is to be part of something beyond themselves, to be citizens, to participate in the lives of their communities. Those aspects of life have been nearly erased for a lot of Americans in the day-to-day, working meaningless jobs and being told there are no structures for you to find a place in other than family and romantic life -- the despair is so thick that a disaster, with its restoration of meaningful work and purpose, becomes welcome.

Another interesting point she made was that on 9/11/2001, the military proved itself to be completely useless; all of the military infrastructure, the supposedly highly trained experts at protecting US national security were completely unable to protect the country from attack. The only people who did prove themselves useful were the passengers on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. It made me think about how even self-professed liberals pay lots of lip service to the idea that of course we need armed forces to protect the country's security -- do they do anything that couldn't apparently be done by a bunch of out-of-shape, untrained random people on an airplane?

On the Internet I've run into a few survivalists -- folks who were convinced that as peak oil approached, it was important to get your shit (and more importantly, your guns) together as the era of scarce resources advanced and as other people would be lining up to fight you and take all your things. Solnit talked about how in the '60s, suburban Americans were encouraged to build private bomb shelters (along with the despair of privatization that went along with top-down-driven flight to the suburbs came a privatization of survival), and there were all these popular media images asking whether you would allow the neighbors into your bomb shelter, and nervous jokes about fighting it out with your friends for the last can of food. She said that most people who had the means to do it actually declined to build those bomb shelters, because most people didn't want to survive a nuclear war just to enjoy that kind of survival -- just to be forced into the position of having to deny sustenance or shelter to your friends and neighbors in order to preserve your own life. Most people quietly decided that survival wouldn't be worth it. Given a few people I've encountered who were really, really attached to the idea of surviving a disaster with their own lives and those of their family intact, but while actively maintaining the ability to fend off anyone else who tried to encroach (violently, if necessary), it makes me wonder just what is sensible.

Finally, in response to a question where she was asked "how do we access these hidden reserves of strength that humans have without a disaster having to happen?", she pointed out that people volunteer to do altruistic things all the time -- it's the shitty things that you have to pay them to do. "There are no volunteer programs to destroy the environment. Nobody goes to war for free. Nobody builds nuclear weapons out of charity," she said. I thought that was a strong point. Among my peer group, it seems pretty popular to believe that the masses of people are stupid, inconsiderate, potentially violent, and destructive. Not us, of course, we're cool. Politically, wars get justified by appealing to humanity's inherently violent nature. But (as Barbara Ehrenreich pointed out), if war is so ingrained into the essential nature of humans, why has conscription ever been necessary? Why would people try so hard to get out of serving in a war if bloodthirstiness is a defining quality of being human? What Solnit pointed out is that the things people choose to do for free, for the sake of satisfaction, are overwhelmingly, good, pro-social things; people do fucked-up things like building nuclear weapons because they're getting a paycheck.

So I'll be thinking about resistance: about resisting the Hobbesian characterization of human nature that gets sold to us by both liberals and conservatives, and about resisting the despair arising from privatization. I would also like to figure out how to resurrect public life without a disaster happening first. One thing I don't know the answer to is, given that people respond so well to disasters, and given that America is an ongoing disaster of poverty, racism, and structural violence, why so few people seem to be responding to that one.

Comments

[winterkoninkje]

I didn't say it wouldn't be bad, my point was that one should ask truly: would it be? Personally I'm quite glad they didn't. But the reason isn't because Nazis=Evil. Any time someone equates a group of people with being Evil, they stop thinking because clearly Evil is Evil; and if they do stop to think, they are cowed with threats of "You're with us, or you're Evil!". This mentality has been the source of countless acts of violence and injustice, often against people whose only crime was being a minority. Yes, the Nazis committed heinous acts and we should hold them accountable for them and, I think, we were right in using the force necessary to stop those crimes. But that does not make Nazis into Evil beings undeserving the honor and respect we accord to other living beings. Many of the soldiers in Germany's army were not acting out of their own beliefs, but were often themselves the victim of mob mentality. The environment leading to complicit involvement with brutality is well documented by studies like the Stanford prison experiment, and the ways that people can become wrapped up in fervor is discussed in books like The Logic of Evil (documenting the uprising of the Nazi party) and Underground (documenting the sarin gas attacks by religious terrorists in Tokyo). And all too often we overlook our own brutality because we're too busy pointing fingers. Is our torture of Arabs and our complicity in a form of genocide any less despicable because we are the aggressors? Was the Oklahoma bombing any less of a terrorist act because McVeigh and Nichols did it for a militant Christianity? Was the American roundup and internment of the Japanese during WWII any more justified than the Germans' internment camps? We are no saints. While I believe that the Allies winning WWII has resulted in less suffering than were the Axis to have won, and therefore it is best that we won, this belief is not axiomatic and is not posited without reservations.

[winterkoninkje]

Having visited Hirosima and seeing not only the destruction wrought by the US, from the first Western-style building in Japan that served as the city centre, to the numerous school children who died of radiation after helping rescue survivors of the initial blast--- but also the ways in which the Japanese have chosen to respond to it, not with resentment nor hatred but with a vibrant spirit devoted to nuclear disarmament and worldwide peace--- that changes your perspective on a few things.