A Paradise Built in Hell (24 page)

 

 

 

Society matters. A decade later, in another huge city far to the north, Chicago, an intense heat wave killed more than seven hundred people, twice as many as died in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The city government ignored the problem and then tried to minimize it and then blamed the victims. The majority of the victims were impoverished seniors who died in domiciles without air-conditioning or with inadequate air-conditioning. In his book
Heat Wave
, sociologist Eric Klinenberg looked carefully at who died and why. Though Latinos were nearly a quarter of Chicago’s population, they represented only 2 percent of the deaths, a number much lower than whites as well as African Americans. African Americans in one poor neighborhood were ten times as likely to die as Latinos in the equally impoverished adjoining neighborhood. Klinenberg concluded that the difference was in the quality of the neighborhoods themselves. The highest casualty figures were in a high-crime area losing population and often described as appearing to be “bombed out”—other African American neighborhoods had much lower mortality rates. The adjoining Latino neighborhood with low death rates had “busy streets, heavy commercial activity, residential concentration . . . and relatively low crime.”

He concluded that these factors “promote social contact, collective life, and public engagement in general and provide particular benefits for the elderly, who are more likely to leave home when they are drawn out by nearby amenities.” Those who left their overheated homes for open space or air-conditioned shops, diners, or fast food restaurants or who sought and received help from neighbors were more likely to survive. That is, heat was only one factor in determining who died. Fear and isolation were others, keeping people in their homes even when their homes were unbearable. This too was far from a natural disaster. People lived or died because of the level of social amenities and social space in their neighborhoods—by whether or not the neighborhood itself was also home. “Residents of the most impoverished, abandoned, and dangerous places in Chicago died alone because they lived in social environments that discouraged departures from the safe houses where they had burrowed, and created obstacles to social protection that are absent from more tranquil and prosperous areas.”

In 2003, the avoidable tragedy of the Chicago heat wave was repeated on a vastly larger scale. A spell of broiling weather killed thirty-five thousand people across Europe. In France, where fifteen thousand elderly people died, the deaths were blamed on the isolation of many of the victims, on a society that shuts down regularly in August, so that doctors and family members—and the minister of health—were on vacation as the crisis unfolded, and on society itself. Another kind of disaster comes entirely of this social failure: the famines that have killed so many millions. From the Great Potato Famine in Ireland in the 1840s to many South Asian and African famines of recent decades, the problem has not been absolute scarcity but distribution: there was enough food for all, but social structures kept it out of reach of some. And so they died and die of divisiveness and lack of empathy and altruism (though others were kept alive by such forces, often reaching out from great distances). If a disaster intensifies the conditions of everyday life, then the pleasures of everyday affection and connection become a safety net or survival equipment when things fall apart. In Mexico City, those social ties led first to the rescue, feeding, and sheltering of the damnificados, then to the organizations to defend homes and jobs, but ultimately to a stronger civil society reborn from the earthquake.

M
ore than three thousand years ago, the Chou dynasty defeated the Shang and became rulers of China for almost a thousand years. To justify their usurpation of power, they proposed that rulers rule by
t’ien ming
, the “mandate of heaven.” The principle suggested that earthly rulers are part of the cosmic order, endorsed by the harmony they presumably provide or protect. The word
revolution
in Chinese is
ge ming
;
“ge”
—to strip away—and
“ming”
—the mandate. A revolution not only removes a regime but also tears away its justification for governing. So does a disaster: since the Chou dynasty, earthquakes in China have often been seen as signs that the rulers had lost the mandate of heaven. Even in modern times, many interpreted in this light the death of Chairman Mao two months after the colossal 1976 Tang Shan earthquake killed hundreds of thousands. And the extreme care the Chinese government took after the big 2008 earthquake may have been out of fear of losing credibility and support at a volatile moment when the citizenry and the world were watching closely for callousness and corruption (which were amply present in the badly built schools that killed so many children).

Much about this Chinese worldview seems remote from ours—but disasters in the Western world and present time also threaten the powers that be and often generate change. This is how disaster and revolution come to resemble each other. In some ways a disaster merely brings the existing tensions, conflicts, and tendencies in a society and its government to light or to a crisis point. If the government fails to meet the urgent needs of its people, if it is seen to be self-interested, incompetent, or possessed of interests that serve an elite while sabotaging the well-being of the majority, the upheaval of disaster provides an opportunity to redress this failing that disaster has brought to light. Political scientists A. Cooper Drury and Richard Stuart Olson write, “Disasters overload political systems by multiplying societal demands and empowering new groups on one hand while disarticulating economies and disorganizing governments (as well as revealing their organizational, administrative, and moral deficiencies) on the other.” And as Quarantelli points out, bureaucracies aren’t good at the urgent needs of disaster because they don’t improvise rapidly or well—as do many citizens’ groups, including the emergent groups that arise to meet new needs—and because their priorities are sometimes at odds with those of the citizenry.

This suggests another explanation for why elites, in the term coined by Caron Chess and elaborated by Lee Clarke and Kathleen Tierney, panic. They are being tested most harshly at what they do least well, and suddenly their mandate of heaven, their own legitimacy and power, is in question. Earlier disaster scholars tended to imagine that in natural disaster, all parties share common interests and goals, but contemporary sociologists see disasters as moments when subterranean conflicts emerge into the open. Tierney said, “Elites fear disruption of the social order, challenges to their legitimacy.” Disasters provide both, lavishly.

Often in disaster, the government is at least inadequate to the crisis; not infrequently, it is so disarrayed as to be irrelevant or almost nonexis tent. Some of this is simply scale: a city may have civil servants adequate to respond to an ordinary day of fires, injuries, and accidents, but not when such daily crises are multiplied a thousandfold. Then the citizens are on their own, as they are when bureaucracy and red tape keep institutions from responding urgently enough. In the absence of government, people govern themselves. Everyone from Hobbes to Hollywood filmmakers has assumed this means “law of the jungle” chaos. What in fact takes place is another kind of anarchy, where the citizenry by and large organize and care for themselves. In the immediate aftermath of disaster, government fails as if it had been overthrown and civil society succeeds as though it has revolted: the task of government, usually described as “reestablishing order,” is to take back the city and the power to govern it, as well as to perform practical functions—restoring power, cleaning up rubble. So the more long-term aftermath of disaster is often in some sense a counterrevolution, with varying degrees of success. The possibility that they have been overthrown or, more accurately, rendered irrelevant is a very good reason for elite panic if not for the sometimes vicious acts that ensue.

Of course a government that is reasonably popular and responds reasonably well faces a very different situation. During the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the Bay Area suffered relatively little loss of life because decades of good building codes and enforcement resulted in few vulnerable structures. Where structures collapsed, local volunteers and officials worked well together. The major calamity was the Nimitz Freeway collapse—the elevated structure had been built on soft ground. The first responders, as usual, were the locals—including factory workers who brought heavy equipment and stayed for four days to try to rescue the living and retrieve the dead. The radical group Seeds of Peace set up a kitchen and essential services, and officials joined the effort. There was little to resent about the behavior of the government and virtually no social change as a result, though many hailed the removal of the much-hated Nimitz, which had chopped an inner-city neighborhood in half, and San Francisco’s damaged Embarcadero Freeway, an eyesore hiding the eastern waterfront. Less popular governments and more violent disasters are a volatile combination, however.

The first great modern disaster was the Lisbon earthquake of November 1, 1755, which destroyed much of that capital city of Portugal—and then did far more politically. It was modern, argues disaster sociologist Russell Dynes, because it was widely treated as a natural occurrence rather than a divine manifestation. Nevertheless it led to sweeping change both in Portugal and across Europe. It struck midmorning on a Sunday, when much of the population was at Mass. Stone churches collapsed onto their congregations. The royal palace and many stone mansions crumbled. The ocean pulled back to expose the rubble on the floor of the harbor, and then a tsunami scoured the waterfront portions of the city. Fires began that burned for several days. Tens of thousands died. It was a huge earthquake, centered on the Atlantic floor, estimated at nine on the Richter scale, devastating as far away as Morocco, felt as far away as northern Europe, with tsunami waves that reached Ireland and North Africa.

Pombal, one of the king’s chief ministers, seized more power as the detached King José I and his court moved to tents outside the city. He used that power to modernize Lisbon, update its building codes, and evict the Jesuits with whom he had been battling (in part over how the colonies and their indigenous populations in South America would be governed, in part over how much power the church would have in Portugal). While Pombal battled the Jesuits at home, European intellectuals fought over the meaning of the earthquake abroad. Many argued against the divine theory of disasters or an all-powerful Providence. One, the philosophical writer Voltaire, immediately used the earthquake as the prime evidence against an optimistic worldview in his “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster” and later in his comic novella
Candide.
In the former he began:

The Lisbon earthquake is usually considered to be one of the starting points of the European Enlightenment, a movement away from authority and religiosity toward individual reason—and doubt. Upheaval in disaster can be as immediate as political change, as intangible as ideological shift. A disaster like the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City produced both.

That disasters open the way for change is nowhere more evident than in the earthquake that, thirteen years before the Mexico City quake, devastated Nicaragua’s capital and helped bring on a revolution. Not a large quake in objective terms, it was a shallow one directly beneath the city. It reduced to rubble much of the central city and killed several thousand. A large portion of the population lost homes and jobs. For decades afterward the heart of the city was a vast ruin populated by squatters, a negative monument to loss and politics. Dictator Anastasio Somoza could profit more from developing the urban edge than rebuilding the city center, so he attempted to remake the city for his own purposes. To facilitate doing so, he declared martial law and gripped anew the power he had been on the brink of reluctantly relinquishing after many decades of dictatorial rule—the Somoza dynasty had been in power since 1930.

Gioconda Belli, a daughter of Nicaragua’s elite, a poet, and an early member of the Sandinistas, the group that would overthrow the government after the earthquake, remembers it vividly. “As the earth shakes so does the sense of security,” she recalled thirty-five years later in Los Angeles, where she now lives. “It is such a shock to the system, to the body, and to the sense of place, to the sense of security. All of a sudden a lot of things that you took for granted cease to be for granted and you also realize what is important for you. What fascinated me about the earthquake was how the collective began to function as a whole. Usually it’s very dispersed. And all of the sudden the grief and the pain and the fear and all of that, it kicks in. But what I found fascinating was how people networked and there was no higher authority. We were left to our own devices. And so we all knew we were dependent on each other and everybody helped each other.”

Lavish from her mane of curly hair and rich voice to her many romantic and political involvements, Belli lights up describing what those days were like, still enthused about that social moment, still outraged about Somoza’s actions: “All of a sudden you went from being in your house the night before, going to bed alone in your own little world to being thrown out on the street and mingling with neighbors you might not have said hello to very much or whatever and getting attached to those people, minding them, helping, trying to see what you could do for one another, talking about how you felt. There’s no authority, you kind of stop believing in God for that moment. It’s hard to process that there is a God when you’re living through such horrors: seeing your city go up in flames and all the destruction. So that’s what I remember, that kind of solidarity, and of course what happened was that we began to get—you know, it was December twenty-third at midnight, and we usually celebrate Christmas on the twenty-fourth, so the date was also very emotional. It was a family day. It’s a very Catholic country. Aid began pouring in pretty quickly, but we began to see that the aid was not being channeled appropriately. It was being given to the military and the military families. You could drive on the highway and see outside their houses they had put up tents for their families because everybody was afraid to go indoors, because the aftershocks were quite intense. And also Somoza took over again, he named himself president of the emergency committee. The next day he was in command. You know this greed that decided to show itself, plus the military measures that were taken, the state of siege and curfew and censorship of the press, all of that happened. People basically felt that this government had forsaken them, and that’s when things began to turn.”