A Paradise Built in Hell (18 page)

Fritz’s 1950s disaster research was prompted by the threat of an all-out nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, in which major cities and regions would be devastated and irradiated. Both sides wanted to believe that the apocalypse was survivable, by sheltering the population from radioactive fallout, if not direct hits, and preparing to rebuild everything afterward. The expectations at the time of Fritz’s early work were grim, as grim as those of British officials before the Blitz. As the Truman-era Project East River put it, “The prevention and control of panics in time of attack are important tasks of civil defense. For the possibility always occurs that where people panic under attack, more death and injury may occur from that cause than from the direct effects of military weapons.” In other words, the civilian population potentially posed a greater threat to each other and their own country than did the enemy’s nuclear arsenal—an astonishingly grim conclusion, and one often repeated.

For more than a dozen years, the United States strongly encouraged its citizens to build their own fallout shelters. The idea was that after a nuclear war, survival would require sheltering for days, weeks, or months from the radiation before you surfaced to rebuild civilization. Some community shelters were constructed, and subterranean spaces were sometimes adapted to such use. Lavish, fully equipped large-scale shelters were built for the federal government’s elected officials and key bureaucrats, who were convinced their own survival was crucial even as they gambled on everyone else’s. While Soviets built collective shelters, American citizens were encouraged to build their own: destruction was the government’s job, survival the citizen’s. But the public stalled before the moral quandaries private shelters represented. The burning question was this: if you built a shelter for yourself and your family—an option available largely to families with backyards, not city dwellers or the poor—would you let the neighbors in?

During the aftermath of the 1961 U.S.-U.S.S.R. confrontation over Berlin, as the cold war threatened to become hot, this other moral crisis captured the national imagination. That fall, an episode of the television show
The Twilight Zone
featured a false alarm in which “the thin veneer” of civilization was once again ripped away as neighbors became enemies in a scramble for survival.
Time
magazine ran a scathing story on survival-by-any-means shelter owners titled “Gun Thy Neighbor” that opens with the quote: “ ‘When I get my shelter finished, I’m going to mount a machine gun at the hatch to keep the neighbors out if the bomb falls.’ ” The would-be gunman from suburban Chicago was an exception, though, as was the Jesuit priest who tried to craft a theology of every-man-for-himself (or his family) survival. Las Vegas’s civil defense leader provoked widespread outrage when he proposed assembling a five-thousand-man militia to keep bombed-out refugees from California from flooding the desert town. Preparing for this vision of war meant preparing to go to war against the neighbors in their hour of desperation. Twenty years later, one historian concluded that “slowly but surely millions of Americans were coming to the conclusion that private fallout shelters were morally indefensible.”

It was a remarkable moment upon which few remarked: ordinary citizens balked at taking steps for their own survival at others’ expense, even in a time of great fear of nuclear war and suspicion that collective solutions and solidarities smacked communism. Dorothy Day and the pacifist Catholic Worker community refused to participate in the statewide civil defense drills that began in New York in 1955. Instead they showed up defiantly at Manhattan’s city hall while everyone else went underground. Day was sometimes arrested, sometimes ignored, during her group’s annual public refusal to cooperate, until 1961, when two thousand people showed up to protest and the drills came to an end. This collective mulishness is one small beginning of the great upheaval that decade would bring. And this defiant altruism goes beyond mutual aid and evolutionary arguments: these citizens found that refusing such aid to neighbors was so distasteful they could not shop for survival on those terms, even while their leaders gambled with the lives of all humanity.

After the two little-seen landmark essays of 1961, Fritz himself largely disappeared from view for the rest of his working life. A lieutenant colonel in the army reserves, he went to work on military subjects, starting with the Institute for Defense Analysis. His collaborator on those pioneering studies of disaster, Enrico Quarantelli, recalls that he investigated the likely effects of bombing North Vietnam and, unsurprisingly, reached the same conclusions the World War II studies had. “The indirect effects [of] the bombing on the will of the North Vietnamese to continue fighting and on their leaders’ appraisal of the prospective gains and costs of maintaining the present policy have not shown themselves in any tangible way,” declared one report Fritz researched (declassified in 1996). Much of his work during that era remains classified, though he also led disaster research for the National Academy of Science and in that capacity wielded considerable influence on the developing field of disaster studies.

Perhaps the greatest damper in his paper on disaster and mental health is this statement: “The emergence of this community of sufferers is posited as a universal feature of disasters where the survivors are permitted to interact freely and to make an unimpeded social adjustment to disaster.” Often they are not permitted to do so, and the communities Fritz imagined as homogenous and united may have been more complicated—think of the Chinese in 1906 San Francisco, of Koreans and socialists in Japan’s 1923 Kanto earthquake, of the fact that many civil defense administrators in the American South advocated or planned for segregated fallout shelters. During the 2007 San Diego fires, preexisting animosity toward illegal immigrants prompted authorities to single out Spanish-speaking and Latino-appearing victims of the fire to deny them services and supplies and arrest and deport those who were undocumented when they sought refuge in the stadium and other sites provided. In Texas, similar plans to check legal status in disaster have been decried by disaster sociologists, since such measures would prevent people from evacuating or seeking services crucial to their survival. Most societies have such divides, and disaster can undermine or magnify them.

Contemporary disaster scholars speak of vulnerability—of the ways that disasters find existing frailties and weaknesses in the system and pry them open to victimize some more than others. In this respect, disaster does not democratize. Even if there is a shining moment of equalization, the values and discriminations of the old society reappear in the aftermath. Who gets shelter, supplies, aid, and sympathy is a political and cultural decision in which old biases surface. Even when malice is absent, middle-class people who maintain extensive documentation and are good at maneuvering through bureacracies do better at getting compensation. (For example, in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, aid was given to one family per house in the farmworker town of Watson ville, although poor Latino families often doubled and tripled up, while chronically homeless San Franciscans were not offered hotel rooms as suddenly homeless denizens of the affluent Marina District were.) Stories of relief administrators with a bias as to who is deserving are common. Such situations prompt outrage that the changed world did not last, that the old wrongs and divides come creeping back. That the old order was unjust means that disasters do not equally affect all members of a region to begin with: think of the frailty of mobile homes in parts of the country regularly hit by hurricanes and tornadoes, of who lives in the flood plains, of how fire departments—as geographer Mike Davis points out in his landmark “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn”—often go to extraordinary lengths to put out fires in remote but affluent areas while neglecting inner-city slums.

The ability to act on one’s own behalf, to enter a community of mutual aid rather than become a castout or a recipient of charity, matters immensely. Fritz describes the satisfaction and the power that comes from membership and agency—and they don’t always come. Another, later sociologist, Kai Erickson, studied in depth a rural community in the coal-mining country of West Virginia destroyed in 1972 when a mine dam of black water broke open to roar down their valley. The torrent killed many residents and swept away most of the homes. He speaks of the euphorias and utopias mentioned in other disasters only to say that no such effects were felt at Buffalo Creek. One reason is that no community converged; people were uprooted and isolated, many of them permanently, and much of the rescue work was done by uniformed outsiders. No sense of power or solidarity was gained in the aftermath, and the aid was not mutual. Toxic and technological disasters in particular breed this kind of “corrosive community,” as doubts and divides multiply over the years. All this means only that the effects Fritz celebrates are not universal to either every disaster or for everyone in any disaster. But the Blitz was as real as the Buffalo Creek flood, and the effects Fritz describes matter, both for the particular moment and for the window they open onto desire and possibility.

 

 

 

Disasters without redemptive moments raise the question of redemptive moments without disaster. Many pasts and some presents have provided a more simple, urgent, and cohesive life for individuals and communities. Hunter-gatherers and others who live close to the bone daily experience risk and daily remake the circumstances of their survival. They are bound together by an urgent necessity that is also a satisfaction. This is the clan and village life that Kropotkin celebrated. Though it is easy to romanticize such ways of life and to forget that they impose limitations on choice, pleasure, privacy, ease, and the individuality that is both our privilege and wound, it also reminds us that if life was in some sense once always a disaster, it must have been so in Fritz’s sense, in which peril came accompanied by solidarity and urgency. There are good reasons we left behind that existence, but we left behind with it something essential, the forces that bind us to each other, to the moment, and to an inherent sense of purpose. The recovery of this purpose and closeness without crisis or pressure is the great contemporary task of being human. Or perhaps the dawning era of economic and environmental disasters will solve the conundrum for us more harshly.

In contemporary life, firefighters in particular seem to have work that is absorbing, affirming—both in the regular encounters with death and the value of the work—and generative of enormous camaraderie and solidarity, else they would not undertake such danger for what is so often a mediocre salary at best. There are other professions providing such rewards and depth. And things other than professions. Recreational activities—notably the dangerous and demanding ones: white-water raft ing, mountaineering—also expose people to danger, require close-knit teams, demand all attention be fixed on the present, and affirm ability and skill again and again. Though the pleasures attributed to such activities are most often within the realm of sports and scenic wonder, the most important ones are more social and psychological. Sports teams for both participants and fans bind people together in moments of intense uncertainty, even if only a goal or a run is at stake and the community is as virtual as the screaming fans on a TV screen.

We devote much of our lives to achieving certainty, safety, and comfort, but with them often comes ennui and a sense of meaninglessness; the meaning is in the struggle, or can be, and one of the complex questions for those who need not struggle for basic survival is how to engage passionately with goals and needs that keep such drive alive—the search for meaning that Viktor Frankl wrote about after Auschwitz. Much in the marketplace urges us toward safety, comfort, and luxury—they can be bought—but purpose and meaning are less commodifiable phenomena, and a quest for them often sends seekers against the current of their society. Fritz spoke of “the failure of modern societies to fulfill an individual’s basic human needs for community identity.” It is only because calamities provide as a side effect what is often unavailable otherwise that they become what he calls “social utopias.” In a society where immediacy, belonging, and purposefulness are already ubiquitous, a disaster would be only a disaster. As for those close-to-the-bone hunter-gatherer societies, you can imagine life in them as an ongoing disaster of sorts, one in which there is much risk, much struggle, much strain, much need for cooperation, and much reward; we have traded that reward for ease, safety, and individualism. And the other, slower, less-visible disasters of alienation and anomie. Not that we bargained it away individually; larger decisions with unseen cumulative effects were undertaken collectively and sometimes steered by powers whose interests are not ours—as can be seen by the institutional alarm almost every time we do agglomerate as a civil society.

And then there’s religion. Congregations in temples, synagogues, churches, and mosques form a tangible community of sorts, reaffirmed weekly. Whatever one’s beliefs, regular attendance can convey both a sense of membership in that human society and a support network in times of crisis. But this is religion as another group to belong to rather than as a practice and set of beliefs. Religious beliefs can generate many kinds of reaction to disaster. In early modern Europe and other parts of the world—and for some in contemporary North America—disasters are regarded as God’s punishment, which makes the emotional response profoundly different. Resourcefulness, altruism, let alone joy in those circumstances, could be seen as contrary to God’s will, and such a religious interpretation can depress what in other circumstances are common responses. Early American Puritans sometimes considered disasters to be heaven-sent because they cleared away material goods and thereby materialism.