Rebecca Solnit: "Altruism in the Face of Disaster"

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.