Before the Second World War, the Ministry of War confidently predicted what would happen when London was bombed from the air by Nazi planes. There would be, they warned, "a mass outbreak of hysterical neurosis among the civilian population." For every one person injured, there would be dozens who lose their morals or lose the plot. They would howl and they would loot and they would rape. Humans couldn't take it. They would break. They would turn on each other.
The same predictions are made about every disaster -- that once the lid of a tightly policed civilization is knocked off for a second, humans will become beasts. But the opposite is the case. It will sound grotesque to say that we should see reasons for hope as we watch in realtime while the earth is shaken six inches on its axis, tsunamis roar, and nuclear power stations teeter on melt down. But it is true. From this disaster, we can learn something fundamental about our species. It should guide how the Japanese authorities behave today -- and fatally puncture right-wing ideologies based on the belief humans are inherently selfish tomorrow.
The evidence gathered over centuries of disasters, natural and man-made, is overwhelming. The vast majority of people, when a disaster hits, behave in the aftermath as altruists. They organize spontaneously to save their fellow human beings, to share what they have, and to show kindness. They reveal themselves to be better people than they ever expected. When the social scientist Enrico Quarantelli tried to write a thesis how people descend into chaos and panic after disasters, he concluded: "My God! I can't find any instances of it." On the contrary, he wrote, in disasters "the social order does not break down... Co-operative rather than selfish behavior predominates." The Blitz Spirit wasn't unique to London: it is universal.
On April 18th 1906, San Francisco was leveled by an earthquake. Much of the city collapsed, and the rest began to burn. Anna Amelia Holshouser -- a middle-aged journalist -- was thrown out of bed, and then felt her house collapse all around her. She wandered the streets, and found herself sleeping that night in the park. But then the daze wore off, and she did what almost everybody else did: she began to look after the people around her. She knitted tents out of old clothes to house all the children who had lost their parents. She set up a soup kitchen, and the local shop-keepers handed over the goods for free. Hundreds of people gathered there, as they were gathering around similar people across the city. Anna put up a sign that said: "One Touch of Nature Makes the Whole World Kin."
In San Francisco that week, all the city's plumbers began -- unpaid -- to fix the broken pipes, one by one. People organized into committees to put out the fires with buckets and anything they could find. The philosopher William James, who watched, wrote: "Everybody was at work... and the discipline and order were practically perfect." It had been an incredibly divided city, prone to race riots against Chinese immigrants. But not after the disaster struck. San Fransicans handed out food and clothes to astonished Chinese people. A young girl called Dorothy Day watched her mother give away all her clothes to survivors, and wrote: "While the crisis lasted, people loved each other."
They hated what had happened, but they loved what they had become. There are going to be a thousand stories like this from Japan. In her gorgeous book A Paradise Built In Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise In Disaster, Rebecca Solnit shows how this is how almost everybody responds to disaster, across continents and across contexts. When power grids are destroyed and city grids demolished, social grids light up.
This is so cross-cultural -- from Haiti to New Zealand -- that it is probably part of an evolved instinct inherent to our species, and it's not hard to see why. We now know that 60,000 years ago, the entire human race was reduced to a single tribe of 2000 human beings wandering the savannahs of Africa. That was it. That was us. If they -- our ancestors -- didn't have a strong impulse to look out for each other in a crisis, you wouldn't be reading this now.
Yet there are a few examples stubbornly fixed in the popular imagination of people reacting to a natural disaster by becoming primal and vicious. Remember the gangs "marauding" through New Orleans, raping and even cannibalizing people in the Super-Dome after Hurricane Katrina? It turns out they didn't exist. Years of journalistic investigations showed them to be racist fantasies. They didn't happen. Yes, there was some "looting" -- which consisted of starving people breaking into closed and abandoned shops for food. Of course human beings can behave atrociously - but the aftermath of a disaster seems to be the time when it is least likely.
This information is essential for knowing how to respond to disasters. There is a fear that the Japanese government is with-holding information about the dangers of the nuclear meltdown because they don't trust the people to react sensibly and calmly. There is no way of knowing, yet, whether this is true. But understanding this crucial history should guide the government to tell the truth and trust the people. As Solnit puts it: "If you imagine that the public is a danger, you endanger the public." They are the allies of public safety, not its enemy. After the Three Mile Island meltdown in Pennsylvania in 1979, nearly 150,000 people were evacuated. The government was not in charge. Ordinary people spontaneously coordinated it themselves, without panic.
Even inside the World Trade Center on 9/11, people were remarkably orderly and altruistic. The disabled people who worked in the Towers were not abandoned by panicking colleagues. They were all carried out by their workmates -- including people from floors above where the planes hit.
In a disaster, very few people are on-yer-bike individualists grabbing for themselves, and they are regarded as incomprehensible by everybody else. After the 2005 tsunami, the Ayn Rand Institute -- set up by the philosopher-queen of the American right -- issued an appeal entitled: "U.S. Should Not Give To help Tsunami Victims." (This was entirely consistent with her world-view: she said it was immoral to save a drowning person if there was any risk to yourself.) Even the people who every day take this callous view of victims within our own societies -- the poor, the homeless, the ill -- felt the need to distance themselves from this sociopathy.
It's often implied that kindness and generosity are naïve, idealistic fictions that will always be trumped by self-interest and greed. This is at the core of a particular kind of right-wing ideology that has been ascendant for thirty years now. But when the stakes are highest, the opposite is the case. When everything else is stripped away, when the buildings fall and the seas rise, we remember all that really matters is caring for each other.
This raises an obvious question. Can we hold onto this impulse after the disaster passes? Can we spread it? Dorothy Day never forgot how her mother behaved that week in San Francisco - and it inspired her to set up a radical movement to house and empower the poor that continues to this day. Will we remember to hold on to our sense of inspiration?
This is likely to be a century of escalating ecological disasters, since each year we destabilize our climate more, in the face of plain scientific warnings. It's hard to extract any hope from the picture this fact presents us with. But there is some. Alongside this impulse to denial and self-destruction, there is something fundamentally good in us. We are humans. We care about each other. We will -- at the most crucial and final moment -- sacrifice for each other, like the technicians who are trying to prevent the nuclear plant melting down, knowing this is probably personal suicide. That's something to hold onto. Normally, in Northern Japan, the night sky is blocked out by the yellow-orange haze of light pollution. Tonight, huddled together, the people there can see the stars.
Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here or here. You can email him at j.hari [at] independent.co.uk
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And yes, this is what I WANT to believe about humanity. But based on my only relevant personal experiences, I CAN believe this about humanity.
My own small contribution was keeping long-distance service working OUT of SF in the critical first 24 hours after the quake while I frantically trunked emergency circuits from the 555 Pine St. Location to the 611 Folsom St. office while running from the subbasement to the 6th, 11th and 13th floors where my equipment and battery strings were located. My work kept emergency communications operational, saving lives, and kept SF connected to the rest of the nation and world during that time. Throughout that time, there were no reports of looting or crime an the behavior of the Marina district residents was repeated by the residents of West Oakland after the Cypress Structure collapse and in the south bat as well. As a result of my work, I received this:
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Thank you to the author for writing this. I have received a letter from a friend in Japan that describes in beautiful detail exactly what you are talking about. Let's face it folks, human beings are complex creatures. We cause great harm out of ignorance, hatred and greed, but we also have enormous capacities for kindness, generosity and compassion. Why not let that in? Why not see what we can learn from a situation like this? Stories of hope and redemption are much needed in these times.
If people were intrinsically good would the world have the problems it does? Aren't the worst problems caused by people?
"Yes, there was some "looting" -- which consisted of starving people breaking into closed and abandoned shops for food."
Please do not rewrite our history. You weren't here. You obviously were not here. But I was. For days on end I was here, and I promise you that it wasn't just looting for food - not even close. There were plenty of people here stealing ridiculous things that had no reasonable purpose under the circumstances, and it made me so freakin angry - because I knew it would affect the response - which it did. And people died because of that. So please do not rewrite our history, because it makes it harder for us all to learn the lessons it must impart.
That being said, I agree with your basic premise wholeheartedly. Disasters do indeed build communities and bring the best out of most people. That was also quite evident here in the days immediately after Katrina. And yes, I've read Solnit's work - I adore her style, admire her career, and we do have mutual friends. My only qualm with the book you reference is that she referred to us as being in New Orleans Parish. That was cringe-worthy, if only because I'm afraid that some folks who read that error might be dismissive of her because of it. And what she has to say in that book is important. Disasters do build communities.
Ashley in New Orleans
Good article. Was there ever a time of recent, when a disaster hit, that officials said " now is the time to panic?"
The entropy caused by the human economy is a crushing weight on the ecology. When the expansion of the human population plateaus, and green technology is rolled out on a scale to reverse the trend of entropy, the stress on human society will approach zero.
This will be the social equivalent of a superconductive state, with extremely low resistance among people.
August 6, 1945 Hiroshima and August 9, 1945 Nagasaki became the only two cities in human history to experience the horrors and devastation of atomic bombs.
On March 11, 2011 Japan experienced a 9.0 earthquake 81 miles from Japan and a week of powerful tremors. This earthquake destroyed the electric power to Japans 6 nuclear power plants and then the tsumami destroyed 4 of those nuclear power plants backup systems causing meltdowns in 4 of these nuclear power plants.
Never before has a natural disaster caused the destruction of a nuclear power plant and even worse 4 have been damaged at one time.
35% of the earths land area is vulnerable to earthquakes and millions live on or near these earthquake faults and there are nuclear power plants on or near these earthquake faults so it would be prudent for any country having such circumstances to be prepared and in the case of the USA forget about FEMA since it is still run by Brownies and so the states must create their own emergency plans.
there will always be people who for whatever reason (mental illness, genetics, who knows) have no
conscience and delight in the suffering of others, the sociopath. To believe that evil doesn't exist
is naive, but to think that it is rampant everywhere is also naive or maybe a projection of ones own inner turmoil.