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.
After the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl survived the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz, he asked himself what distinguished those who made it from those who didn’t. He argued that finding and holding meaning matters most. He spoke of “a will to meaning in contrast to the pleasure principle (or as we could also term it, the will to pleasure) on which Freudian psychoanalysis is centered, as well as in contrast to the will to power.” Many were murdered outright, but in the harsh conditions of the camp those who lost their sense of purpose more readily died; those who had something to live for struggled and sometimes survived. Frankl concluded that it is “a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equlibrium or, as it is called in biology, ‘homeostasis,’ i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him. . . . If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load which is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together.”
The evolutionary argument for altruism could draw from Frankl to argue that we need meaning and purpose in order to survive, and need them so profoundly we sometimes choose them over survival. The act of so doing bequeaths that meaning and purpose to the community at large—the moral equivalent of war that is already with us in myriad ways. Thus it is that a sacrificed hero is said to be immortal—which is sometimes a sentimental lie, sometimes a truth about the way a society is built out of such acts. In them, a more expansive idea of what it means to be human survives, and with it a stronger sense of society, those things that are killed by cowardice and selfishness. Or you could argue with Kropotkin that for those who feel a deep enough sense of connection to the larger community, sacrificing themselves to ensure its well-being makes perfect sense. The argument is often made that parents, particularly mothers, will sacrifice themselves to save their children. The usual explanation is about genetic survival, but a larger sense of social survival motivates the heroism seen in Halifax. Either way, it defines us as members of a larger whole.
The Halifax explosion was both a particularly hideous disaster and a particularly clear-cut example of such generosity beyond reason. And certainly there is more mutual aid and more than mutual aid in everyday life than has been accounted for. The real question is not why this brief paradise of mutual aid and altruism appears but rather why it is ordinarily overwhelmed by another world order—not eradicated, for it never ceases to exist quietly, but we miss it at the best of times, most of us, and feel bleak or lonely for its lack. Disaster, along with moments of social upheaval, is when the shackles of conventional belief and role fall away and the possibilities open up.
FROM THE BLITZ AND THE BOMB TO VIETNAM
The Blitz
On September 7, 1940, flashes lit up the darkness of wartime London and the first of fifty-seven consecutive nights of aerial attack by the Luftwaffe began. The sky buzzed with fighter and bomber planes, the latter of which dropped more than a thousand bombs and incendiary devices, causing 250 acres near the London docks to burn, and igniting forty other major fires. The initial bombs targeted industrial areas, but during the Blitz, homes, shops, churches, offices, factories, warehouses, streets, and buses would be smashed and splintered, Buck ingham Palace would be hit while the king and queen were in residence, and a vast archipelago of craters began to dimple the city. Civilian air-raid wardens would try to guide their neighborhood’s denizens to safety; the newly formed civilian fire squads would rush to put out the fires, knowing that the bombers would use the flames as targets for another round; and ambulance teams would make their way to the sites that had been hit. Spotter lights raked the night sky; antiaircraft fire rattled. Over the course of the war about sixty thousand British civilians were killed in the attack on their island, and tens of thousands of buildings were destroyed. About half of the total losses in buildings and lives were in the London area, where more than eight thousand tons of bombs fell, and only a small percentage of buildings survived unscathed.
Military and government officials had worried for decades about how the civilian public would react to an air war and presumed they would react appallingly. As social scientist R. W. Titmuss summarized in 1950, “The experts foretold a mass outbreak of hysterical neurosis among the civilian population. . . . Under this strain, many people would regress to an earlier level of needs and desires. They would behave like frightened and unsatisfied children.” Eighteen “eminent psychiatrists . . . privately warned in 1938 that in the coming war three psychiatric casualties could be expected for every one physical.” By one estimate, this would have meant three to four million mental cases within months of the beginning of the Blitz. Certainly those directing the bombing raids on both Britain and Germany (and later, Japan) believed that the onslaughts would have profound psychological impact with important strategic consequences, and so the bombing campaigns were immense, taking a huge toll in human life—of both civilians and bomber crews—and city structures.
Benito Mussolini himself wrote, “Once a raid has been experienced false alarms are incessant and a state of panic remains in which work comes to a standstill.” Churchill worried that a helpless, hopeless public would overwhelm the army with the chaos of their neediness. The historian Mark Connelly adds, “The British working class was thought to be particularly susceptible to panic and disillusionment in the face of an aerial onslaught. . . . When it came to shelters, the government considered it best to protect people in small groups. Communal shelters, it was argued, would create conditions for an agitator’s field day. It would also encourage a ‘deep shelter’ mentality, leading people to become molelike tunnel dwellers who would never resume their jobs in vital war industries.”
People did take to the tunnels, despite the discouragement, and did so communally. The London public began buying tickets to ride the Underground system but went down there only to shelter overnight. “Thousands more turn the tube stations into vast dormitories every night—a kind of lie-down strike which at first perplexed the authorities, who could not think what to do with passengers who paid their threehapence and then proceeded to encamp quietly on the platforms,” wrote the journalist Mollie Panter-Downs in 1940. “The latest semiofficial ruling is that the practice can be continued. The
Ministries of Transport and Home Security, however, have appealed to the public not to use the tube as a shelter except in cases of urgent necessity. The urgent necessity of many of the sleepers who doss down on the platforms nightly is that they no longer have homes to go to.” They had been bombed out. Eventually, those in charge were obliged to install bunks, sanitation facilities, and more, though the Underground never held more than a small percentage of the London area’s eight million. People found reassurance in the deep-underground station platforms and in proximity to others, though photographs from the time make it clear the concrete labyrinths were neither particularly comfortable nor clean. Some spread out to camp in forests, caves, and the countryside outside London. Many became so inured to falling bombs they chose to stay home and chance death for a good night’s sleep. Connelly says, “The people’s role in their own defense and destiny was downplayed in order to stress an old-fashioned division of leaders and led.”
When unfamiliar explosions went off near the Bethnal Green Underground entrance, hurrying people slipped on a wet, dimly lit stairway and fell atop each other—and 173 were suffocated, including 62 children. (This was due not to panic or selfishness but to the poor design of the place and the physics of tightly packed crowds: those in the back cannot see what trouble is up front, and any movement is amplified and extended by the mass of people—as happens annually in the crush during the hajj in Mecca nowadays.) That story was long suppressed. There was trauma, crime, and opportunism, and people knew it—but most people endured the bombings without losing their minds, principles, or sense of purpose. Despite early fears, Churchill and the government found the idea of unshakable British morale useful and made much of it. A 1940 film showing the nocturnal bombing, the defense, and citizens in the morning carrying on daily life amid craters, rubble, and shattered windows was titled London Can Take It. It featured an American voice-over saying in tough tones, “The army of the people swings into action” and “There is no panic, no fear, no despair. London can take it.” In recent years, the story of their resolve has been challenged from the left as right-wing propaganda, though the resoluteness can be spun many ways: as superior national disposition, as patriotic dedication, or as resilience that had nothing to do with nationalism, nationality, or deference.
A Paradise Built in Hell Page 12