A Paradise Built in Hell (47 page)

Years later, it is hard to weigh the balance. The original catastrophe of Katrina—the lack of an evacuation plan for the poor and frail, the ill-maintained levees—was the result of abandonment of social ties and investments. Yet despite the dire consequences of this social withdrawal, the answer to Katrina on the part of New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin and many others has been more abandonment, more privatization. They made of the catastrophe an opportunity to further conservative goals: they fired every public-school teacher in New Orleans and reinvented the school system as, largely, privatized charter schools less accountable to parents and taxpayers; they closed public housing in the city at a time when the need for homes was desperate, rents were escalating, and the huge projects were some of the most intact housing left in many neighborhoods; they let Charity Hospital, for generations the source of most health care for the poorest, stay dead; reduced public transit by 80 percent; and through lousy management increased the burden of returnees by such acts as demolishing Holy Ground Baptist Church without bothering to contact the pastor or congregation, who were in the process of rebuilding the church. Some of these were fiscal decisions on the part of a hard-hit city, but the desire to privatize the system and shut out the poor was an ideological choice. In countless ways the state and federal government magnified and expanded these losses. In 2008 the billions of dollars of aid supposed to be available to rebuild were just beginning to be released. These were not responses to disaster, but expansions of it.

In the wake of Katrina, New Orleans was full of contrasts. There was a marked one between the volunteers who were free to come and go from the disaster zone and those who were trying to resettle it. But there was a more dramatic conflict between those who believe in civil society and the possibility of a beloved community and those who, along with Hobbes, Le Bon, and a lot of elites who panic, believed that their own selfishness was justified by a selfish world. As the dictionary defines it, a
crisis
is “the point in the progress of a disease when a change takes place which is decisive of recovery or death; also, any marked or sudden change of symptoms, etc.” Almost every disaster is a clash between opposing forces and visions of society. Even Mexico City had losses as well as wins; the ruling party proved as resilient as the communities that organized. And even New Orleans has victories. Some of them are as small as a friendship or a rebuilt church, some as large as new awarenesses and preparedness across the continent.

People were caught unprepared by Katrina—both by the material damage and by the enormity of the elite panic—in ways that will not happen again anytime soon. The disaster discredited a regime at the height of its powers. Citizens and outside volunteers together won many victories, though victory sometimes meant nothing more than keeping at bay the more destructive schemes to reinvent the city for the few. Friendships and alliances were formed across old divides, of which Brad Pitt’s involvement with the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association and the Lower Ninth is only the most extreme example. Much that was tangible and important was achieved, from the clinics in the first days of the disaster to the ongoing reconstruction efforts. But the events of Katrina left many scars—Malik Rahim, for example, was so dismayed by the racism he encountered in the first days after the storm that three years later he was planning to leave the country. He feared a pandemic could bring an even worse response. Beyond that, Katrina’s effects are still unfolding, in a devastated city and its citizens but also in the hearts of the hundreds of thousands of volunteers and in the new coalitions that arose.

This has been a book about disaster’s recent past, but it also has a future, a future where knowledge matters and so do desire and belief.

Who are you? Who are we? The history of disaster demonstrates that most of us are social animals, hungry for connection, as well as for purpose and meaning. It also suggests that if this is who we are, then everyday life in most places is a disaster that disruptions sometimes give us a chance to change. They are a crack in the walls that ordinarily hem us in, and what floods in can be enormously destructive—or creative. Hierarchies and institutions are inadequate to these circumstances; they are often what fails in such crises. Civil society is what succeeds, not only in an emotional demonstration of altruism and mutual aid but also in a practical mustering of creativity and resources to meet the challenges. Only this dispersed force of countless people making countless decisions is adequate to a major crisis. One reason that disasters are threatening to elites is that power devolves to the people on the ground in many ways: it is the neighbors who are the first responders and who assemble the impromptu kitchens and networks to rebuild. And it demonstrates the viability of a dispersed, decentralized system of decision making. Citizens themselves in these moments constitute the government—the acting decision-making body—as democracy has always promised and rarely delivered. Thus disasters often unfold as though a revolution has already taken place.

Two things matter most about these ephemeral moments. First, they demonstrate what is possible or, perhaps more accurately, latent: the resilience and generosity of those around us and their ability to improvise another kind of society. Second, they demonstrate how deeply most of us desire connection, participation, altruism, and purposefulness. Thus the startling joy in disasters. After the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl survived Auschwitz, he concluded that retaining a sense of meaning and purpose was in many cases decisive in who survived and who did not. After 9/11, New Yorker Marshall Berman cited Nietzsche: “Man, the bravest animal and the one most inured to trouble, does not deny suffering per se: he wants it, he even seeks it out, provided it can be given a meaning.” Frankl quotes another version of Nietzsche’s pronouncement: “He who has a
why
to live for can bear almost any
how
.” When Dorothy Day gave up her lover, she gave up an intensely tangible private affection for another, broader love, of God, but also of purposefulness, meaning, involvement, and community, without which she had been miserable even in her ménage. She gave up her
how
for a
why.
The joy in disaster comes, when it comes, from that purposefulness, the immersion in service and survival, and from an affection that is not private and personal but civic: the love of strangers for each other, of a citizen for his or her city, of belonging to a greater whole, of doing the work that matters.

These loves remain largely dormant and unacknowledged in contemporary postindustrial society: this is the way in which everyday life is a disaster. For acted upon, given a role, this is a love that builds society, resilience, community, purpose, and meaning. Private life matters immensely, but the language for prizing eros and domesticity has never been stronger, and the language for public life more atrophied, at least in the mass-media mainstream of the English-speaking world. Around the periphery come crowds of ideas about gift communities, direct and participatory democracy, civil society, urban regeneration, beloved community, joy, and solidarity. People have never reached toward these things in more ways, and the many alternatives being tried out across the country from agriculture to decentralized decision-making systems matter, as do the broader examples around the world from Argentine alternatives and Mexican Zapatismo to greening European cities and solidarity networks stretching from India and South Africa to the West. Beliefs matter nowhere more than in the way citizens in many Latin American nations have been able to seize the moment of disaster and make something of it. It is the ability to describe and cherish the other loves that makes disaster’s moments of mutual aid last. You may be able to rejoice in what you cannot name, but you can’t cultivate it.

As I write, the election and inauguration of Barack Obama still seem extraordinary events. The great paradox is that the most powerful man in the world rose to that position with a vision of collective strength and grassroots power, forces his new role seemed designed to trump or thwart, though he may yet succeed in encouraging them. Or they may refuse to submit even to him. His “yes we can” language of populism and democracy was unlike anything that had appeared on the national stage in a long time. The forces that elected him and rejoiced in that election likewise represented something that had long seemed dormant in American society, a hopefulness, an idealism, a willingness to risk change, and a desire to participate and take power. Not coincidentally, the enormous disaster of the failure of global capital a month before the election played a signficant role in Obama’s triumph, making his pragmatism matter and his promise of change desirable, while the patriotic rhetoric of his Republican rival came to seem increasingly irrelevant.

The election and inauguration of the nation’s first African American president were awash in tears of joy and something deeper than joy, a feeling that ancient wrongs could be righted, that we could, in the phrase of Abraham Lincoln that was everywhere that season, live up to “the better angels of our nature,” a feeling that seemed itself to belong to those angels. The world rejoiced with Americans; there were tears in Kurd istan, Iceland, and Kenya. Obama represented a meaningful departure from the status quo, and the atmosphere he arrived in felt disastrous in its openness to change and its sense of solidarity and possibility. And it was a time of deep economic disaster that promised to lay waste old possibilities and demand new arrangements. To what extent his electorate will keep pace with his promises and their own dreams or subside into disengagement and private life remains to be seen, though it is hard to imagine the moment could last. Yet, like a moment of revolution, it matters, and the world has changed.

Disaster may offer us a glimpse, but the challenge is to make something of it, before or beyond disaster: to recognize and realize these desires and these possibilities in ordinary times. If there are ordinary times ahead. We are entering an era where sudden and slow disaster will become far more powerful and far more common. When I began writing this book in 2007, floods were washing through central England and central Texas; fires raged in Greece, Utah, and California; heat waves baked Hungary and parts of the United States while droughts afflicted other regions; and China faced drought, flood, fire, and heat waves all at once. Peru had been hit by a big earthquake, and the devastation of Pakistan’s 2005 earthquake, the Gulf Coast’s Hurricane Katrina, and the Indian Ocean’s 2004 tsunami were far from over. As I rewrote this book a year later, central China was recovering from the huge Sichuan earthquake of May 12 that killed at least seventy thousand and left millions homeless; Burma’s coastal regions had been devastated by a typhoon (and its people more so by a dictatorship that thwarted most attempts at aid); England and the upper Mississippi had flooded again; Benin, Togo, Ethiopia, Niger, and many other African countries had also flooded, as had the state of Tabasco in Mexico. Madagascar was hit by three cyclones; California had burned again on an epic scale; New Orleans had been sorely tested by another hurricane that had also destroyed or damaged ninety thousand homes in Cuba; people were stranded on their roofs after a hurricane that brought on floods and hundreds of deaths in Haiti and displaced or stranded millions in Texas; and more hurricanes were brewing in an unprecedentedly volatile year of hot storms in the Gulf of Mexico, including another that reached coastal Canada, where my inquiry had begun five years earlier in the wake of Hurricane Juan.

In late 2007 the humanitarian organization Oxfam reported, “Climatic disasters are increasing as temperatures climb and rainfall intensifies. A rise in small- and medium-scale disasters is a particularly worrying trend. Yet even extreme weather need not bring disasters; it is poverty and powerlessness that make people vulnerable. Though more emergency aid is needed, humanitarian response must do more than save lives: it has to link to climate change adaptation and bolster poor people’s livelihoods through social protection and disaster risk reduction approaches.” In speaking of poverty, Oxfam calls for material change, but powerlessness implies more subtle social conditions. What we know about the history of disaster and the plethora of disasters coming calls for obvious infrastructure and systemic changes and specific disaster preparedness. But it also calls for more metaphysical changes—first, to acknowledge how people respond in disasters and to reduce the institutional fear and hostility to the public, then to prepare to incorporate what the disaster scholars call “prosocial” behavior into disaster planning.

The current global economic depression is itself a vast disaster. Grim though it is, it may also be a chance for decentralization, democ ratization, civic engagement, and emergent organizations and ways of coping—or perhaps it is more accurate to say that it may demand these things as means of survival. The more profound preparation for disaster must make a society more like that of disaster utopias in their brief flowering: more flexible and improvisational, more egalitarian and less hierarchical, with more room for meaningful roles and contributions from all members—and with a sense of membership. Civil society is what saves people and creates the immediate conditions for survival—rescue teams, field kitchens, concerned neighbors—and it is a preventative too, as the Chicago heat wave, Cuban hurricanes, and many other disasters have demonstrated.

Already, climate change is shaping up to be as unfair as disasters have ever been, impacting the vulnerable of the tropics, highlands, far north, and coasts while those most responsible for creating the turbulent anthropocene (or human-made) climate era stall on measures to limit and mitigate its effects. It too is a democracy question, about who benefits, who loses, who should decide, and who does. Surviving and maybe even turning back the tide of this pervasive ongoing disaster will require more ability to improvise together, stronger societies, more confidence in each other. It will require a world in which we are each other’s wealth and have each other’s trust. This world can be made possible only by the faith in social possibility that understanding ourselves in past disaster can give us and by the embeddedness in place and society that constitutes a sense of belonging.