A Paradise Built in Hell (15 page)

That an Anglican priest like Samuel Prince was familiar with the writings of a self-proclaimed “revolutionist” shows how much more mainstream the political philosophy of anarchy was a century ago. William James mentioned anarchists offhandedly in his writings, and Dorothy Day was deeply influenced by the anarchist thinkers and activists so visible in her youth and was herself one in many ways. Among the many strains of radical thought in their time, anarchism was an important one. The mainstream has forgotten it now, though it was never an ideology like state socialism or Marxism. Rather, many anarchists argue that they have merely described and analyzed the ancient and widespread ways people organized themselves for millennia, with an emphasis on equality and liberty for all. They were not inventing anything new but reclaiming something ancient.

This is why what happens in disasters matters for political philosophy: the hierarchies, administrations, and institutions—the social structure—tend to fall apart, but what results tends to be anarchy in Kropotkin’s sense of people coming together in freely chosen cooperation rather than the media’s sense of disorderly savagery. The debate is at least as old as the English Civil Wars that prompted the timid authoritarian Thomas Hobbes to imagine that the only alternative to chaos was a strong central authority. A precursor to the Social Darwinists, Hobbes argued from the premise that the primordial human condition was a war fought by each against each, so brutal and incessant that it was impossible to develop industry or even agriculture or the arts while that condition persisted. It’s this description that culminates in his famous epithet “And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” It was a fiction to which he brought to bear another fiction, that of the social contract by which men agree to submit to rules and a presiding authority, surrendering their right to ravage each other for the sake of their own safety. The contract was not a bond of affection or identification, not a culture or religion binding together a civilization, only a convenience. Men in his view, as in that of many other European writers of the period, are stark, blank, mechanical creatures, windup soldiers social only by strategy and not by nature.

What is curious for a modern reader about the society imagined by Hobbes and then the social Darwinists is that it appears to consist entirely of unaffiliated men. The relationships between lovers, spouses, parents and children, siblings, kinfolk, friends, colleagues, and compatriots are absent, though those are clearly among the more ancient rather than modern aspects of human life. The world they imagine looks something like an old-fashioned business district during a working day, when countless people venture out to do economic battle with each other. But even those people are formed into corporations and firms whose internal cooperation is as or more important to their functioning than external competition. In the Halifax explosion, the Lloyd family undermines that of Hobbes just because it acts like a family: two parents and seven children wait for one more child in a ruined house in a dangerous place. The soldier who drives them forth with a gun perhaps does illustrate the Hobbesian coersive order, or perhaps illustrates that such an order can seem a lot like the selfish disorder it’s supposed to have replaced. But on 9/11, even near Wall Street, the employees of the big brokerage firms acted with mutual aid and more.

Three hundred and fifty years after Hobbes, the biobehavioral scientists Shelley E. Taylor and Laura Cousino Klein concluded that contrary to the longtime assumption about how human beings respond to danger, women in particular often gather together to share concerns and abilities. They conclude that “this ‘tend-and-befriend’ pattern is a sharp contrast to the ‘fight-or-flight’ behavior pattern that has long been considered the principal responses to stress by both men and women. For women, that didn’t quite make any sense from an evolutionary standpoint. It’s a rare female of any species that would leave her baby to fend for itself while she physically takes on an aggressor. Females are more likely to protect their children and bond with other females who can help provide protection in the process.” In other words, crises and stresses often strengthen social bonds rather than breed competition and isolation.

It’s worth remembering that as the solitary Hobbes was writing
Leviathan
, the Diggers were staking their claim to live collectively in England. The Diggers were a small group of poor rural people who in 1649 moved onto common land and began to cultivate it by hand to grow subsistence crops—hence their name Diggers—and to build shelters from the forest wood. Theirs was a supremely practical gesture—the majority of these peasants were hungry and displaced, though their spokesperson was the educated visionary Gerard Winstanley. A handful of other groups of Diggers arose elsewhere in England. As claimants to a few small parcels of land, they posed a minor threat to the local gentry, but as radically democratic utopians questioning the legitimacy of the current order, they posed a major one to state and hierarchy. They argued on biblical grounds against the dividing up of the public land into private plots in that era when the commons was trickling into the hands of the wealthy. They proposed instead communal ownership and “working together, and feeding together as Sons of one Father, members of one Family; not one Lording over another, but all looking upon each other as equals in the Creation.” The Diggers’ original name had been the True Levellers, after the derogatory name for other rural rebels who wanted to level society. That these anarchic rebels appeared at exactly the same time that Hobbes argued that only an authoritarian state saves us from our own savagery suggests that his answers to crisis were far from inevitable conclusions.

One of the more amusing recent manifestations of Hobbes came as entertainment, starting with the 2000 American television series
Survivor
(modeled after a 1997 Swedish version that was also wildly successful). The shows seemed to reference
Lord of the Flies
and other epics of savage regression and primordial competition, but merely dropping a bunch of people in a remote location and asking them to cope might have produced uneventful cooperation or unpredictable improvisation. Instead, the show’s creators and directors divided the cast into teams. The teams competed with each other for rewards. Eliminating fellow members was one of the competitive games they were obliged to play to increase insecurity and drama within teams. The goal was to produce a single winner rather than a surviving society, a competitive pyramid rather than a party of cooperation. Toiling for food and shelter was overshadowed by the scramble to win out in a wholly gratuitous competition based on arbitrary rules. Capitalism is based on the idea that there is not enough to go around, and the rules for
Survivor
built scarcity and competition and winners and losers into the system. These people were not in the wilderness but living under an arbitrary autocratic regime that might as well have been Los Angeles or London. The producers pretended we were seeing raw human nature in crisis conditions but stacked the deck carefully to produce Hobbesian behavior—or rather marketplace behavior, which amounts to the same thing here.

Another way to put it: the premise is that these people were surviving a disaster that consisted of being stranded in a remote place without the usual resources. They were in fact surviving a very different disaster that consisted of the social order enforced upon them from above and outside. Which is to say that the shows were in many ways an accurate model of the way things are, but from inside rather than outside the systems that usually contain us. We are nearly all forced to play arbitrary and competitive games that pit us against each other, and the consequences can be dire. A recent story on water in the arid nation of Yemen on the tip of the Arabian peninsula concludes, “Yemen’s experience offers a cautionary tale that shows the limits of free-market solutions to environmental problems. Instead of conserving water as it becomes scarcer and more precious, more and more Yemenis are rushing faster and faster to extract it from the earth and capture it from rains for profit, pushing the country toward an ecological nightmare.” The country is in danger of running out of water completely because a competitive market system has replaced the traditional cooperative regulation of water. Pure competition is in this situation a disaster, as it is less dramatically in many others.

Dissent from Hobbes came long before Kropotkin and far more powerfully than the suppressed arguments of the Diggers. Few believed more fervently that we could do without government than the revolutionist Thomas Paine, igniter of the American Revolution, critic of the elite that steered that revolution away from true liberty for all, and enthusiast for the French Revolution before that went more brutally astray. In the 1791 book inspired by that latter insurrection,
The Rights of Man
, he described how well people actually functioned when the institutional structure vanished during that heady period when there was no longer a British government and not yet an American government. He wrote that during the two years of war with Britain “and for a longer period in several of the American States, there were no established forms of government. . . . Yet during this interval, order and harmony were preserved as inviolate as in any country in Europe. . . . The instant formal government is abolished, society begins to act. A general association takes place, and common interest produces common security. So far is it from being true, as has been pretended, that the abolition of any formal government is the dissolution of society, that it acts by a contrary impulse, and brings the latter the closer together.” It’s a revolutionary statement: government represses the potential strength of civil society. He concludes confidently, “In short, man is so naturally a creature of society, that it is almost impossible to put him out of it.” In other words, human beings are gregarious, cooperative animals who need no authority to make them so; it is their nature.

Almost any of us would, when asked, answer that the societies of the industrialized world are capitalist—based on a model of competition and scarcity—but they are by no means wholly so. The radical economists J. K. Gibson-Graham (two women writing under one name) portray our society as an iceberg, with competitive capitalist practices visible above the waterline and below all kinds of relations of aid and cooperation by families, friends, neighbors, churches, cooperatives, volunteers, and voluntary organizations from softball leagues to labor unions, along with activities outside the market, under the table, bartered labor and goods, and more, a bustling network of uncommercial enterprise. Kropotkin’s mutual-aid tribes, clans, and villages never went away entirely, even among us, here and now.

In disaster, as Samuel Prince himself noted, they become visible and important. People in a disaster zone temporarily function by entirely different rules, but even those far away often become generous with gifts of time, goods, and money. You can argue about whether these other economies constitute a subversive underworld or a prop to the official free-market economy, but they exist everywhere and they keep alive much that would otherwise die out. The same argument could be made that in disaster the altruism and mutual aid of fellow city dwellers and of those from afar relieve the state of its duty to take care of its citizens. If you believe in such a duty—and neither anarchists nor conservatives do. Perhaps the most important point here is that a shadow or underground economy that could be measured in emotion as well as effect comes into the light in disaster.

 

 

 

In his
Catastrophe and Social Change
, Prince wanted to argue that disaster led to change. In Mexico City, the subject of the next section of this book, it did lead to or at least catalyze profound and lasting social and political change. But the change that matters is not down the road, the end of a chain reaction. It is present immediately, instantly, when people demonstrate resourcefulness, altruism, improvisational ability, and kindness. A disaster produces chaos immediately, but the people hit by that chaos usually improvise a fleeting order that is more like one of Kropotkin’s mutual-aid societies than it is like the society that existed before the explosion or the earthquake or the fire. It liberates people to revert to a latent sense of self and principle, one more generous, braver, and more resourceful than what we ordinarily see.

 

 

 

Kropotkin’s
Mutual Aid
argues beautifully that cooperation rather than competition can be key to survival. It does not explain desires that go deeper than survival. When the sailor grabbed the Mi’kmaq child and ran with it into the forest before the
Mont Blanc
exploded, there was nothing mutual about it. He was increasing his own risk for a stranger of another race and region. When the doctors and nurses crowded onto the trains, the same was true. And when Vincent Coleman rushed back into the telegraph office where he died, he could expect no direct or personal return, any more than could Harold Floyd, giving his life to make crucial phone calls. In the Halifax explosion, as in most disasters, some people risked their lives and sometimes gave them for others, and they gave of themselves in ways that would never be reciprocated. Some elements of this may last—for example, with the Halifax orphans who were cared for by relatives and strangers for years afterward.

Any configuration of humanity in disaster needs to include altruism as well as solidarity. Such altruism is present throughout ordinary life as well in the huge numbers of everyday volunteers feeding the hungry and caring for the sick and solitary and lonely, whether that means driving people to medical appointments (networks of such drivers exist across the United States), staffing soup kitchens, delivering Meals-on-Wheels, becoming Big Brothers and Big Sisters, tutoring at-risk youth, reading to the blind, caring for the aged, writing to prisoners, and far more, the kinds of support that organizations like Day’s Catholic Worker specialize in. Such activity does much to mitigate the cruelties of a competitive system. There are amusing arguments to prove that it is all really self-serving in some obscure evolutionary capacity, but the most that can be said is that in taking care of others such altruists are taking care of their sense of self, their ideals, and their hopes for society.