Given the general tone of approaching end-times, I though this might be an opportune moment to post a few passages from my books and articles that feel applicable to our situation. This bit is from Civilized to Death, and is one of the more optimistic parts of the book. As it turns out, there’s a substantial silver lining to civilizational collapse.
Man is at bottom a dreadful wild animal. We know this wild animal only in the tamed state called civilization and we are therefore shocked by occasional outbreaks of its true nature: but if and when the bolts and bars of the legal order once fall apart and anarchy supervenes it reveals itself for what it is.
—Arthur Schopenhauer
When civilization falls away, we see human nature in the raw. As the authoritarian structures supposedly protecting us from our dark Hobbesian nature collapse into dust and chaos, more often than not, all heaven breaks loose. In A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, Rebecca Solnit documents how human beings from various cultures respond to calamity — not by looting, but by lending a hand. After reviewing the sociological literature and hundreds of personal accounts from disaster survivors, she concluded that “the image of the selfish, panicky, or regressively savage human being in times of disaster has little truth to it.”
Research accumulated over decades of studying how people behave in earthquakes, floods, and bombings shows that human behavior is typically the opposite of what the NPP (Narrative of Perpetual Progress) tells us to expect. “Disaster is sometimes a door back into paradise,” says Solnit, “the paradise at least in which we are who we hope to be, do the work we desire, and are each our sister’s and brother’s keeper.”
While that may sound like Hallmark-card kitsch, Solnit’s conclusions are dangerously subversive. They invert the mainstream neo-Hobbesian narrative concerning human nature and the paternalistic institutions marketed to us as protection from each other and from our own uncivilized impulses. “Remember,” the NPP has insisted for thousands of years, “Homō hominī lupus est—man is wolf to man.” But that’s doubly wrong. In fact, wolves are among the most socially sophisticated, cooperative animals, and the history of human behavior in disaster shows that we are far from brutally selfish creatures who turn on one another the second we think we can get away with it.
Flipping the disaster narrative 180 degrees, Solnit found that “everyday life in most places is a disaster that disruptions sometimes give us a chance to change.” Got that? Up is down, black is white, and earthquakes, tsunamis, and landslides aren’t the true disasters; rather, they’re disruptions to the ongoing, mundane disaster that most of us call “normal life.”
This radical view originated with one of the founders of disaster studies, an American sociologist named Charles E. Fritz. At the end of World War II, Fritz studied the effectiveness of the Allies’ bombing campaigns on the German people. From there, he enrolled at the University of Chicago, becoming director of the Disaster Research Project in 1950. Far from being some kind of fringe thinker, Fritz is a central figure in disaster studies and his conclusions represent standard thinking among disaster sociologists.
Fritz found that natural (and man-made) disasters liberated surviving victims from an oppressive normalcy: “The traditional contrast between ‘normal’ and ‘disaster’ almost always ignores or minimizes [the] recurrent stresses of everyday life and their personal and social effects,” he wrote. “It also ignores a historically consistent and continually growing body of political and social analyses that points to the failure of modern societies to fulfill an individual’s basic human needs for community identity.”
Fritz’s description of spontaneously arising human interaction in disaster bears striking similarity to normal hunter-gatherer life, in that the “widespread sharing of danger, loss, and deprivation produces an intimate, primarily group solidarity.” This sense of community brings together individual and group needs, providing “a feeling of belonging and a sense of unity rarely achieved under normal circumstances.”
Disasters, Fritz concluded, “may be a physical hell, but they result however temporarily in what may be regarded as a kind of social utopia.”
Our primordial cravings for intimate community are thwarted and twisted by the institutions that constitute civilized life. From Rat Park to Monkey Hill to Rikers Island, social conditions can either liberate a social creature’s cooperative nature or twist it into confusion, anger, and violence. Fritz points to the elements of the “social utopia” disaster survivors report: feelings of group solidarity, intimate communication, and physical and emotional support. Is there any question that these feelings are lacking in our normal lives and that we yearn for them with a desperation that warps our thought and behavior? We declare fanatical allegiance to arbitrarily chosen sports teams, bizarre cults or to street gangs that live and die over the sacred color of their hankies. We clamor toward tribalism: anything that promises group identity, mutual protection, and even a faint echo of belonging. We are starved of what our ancestors ate every day of their lives.
If scientists who study human behavior in disasters have determined that people don’t generally panic and turn nasty in real-world crises, why is that story line repeated again and again in the media? Disaster sociologist Kathleen Tierney, who directs the University of Colorado’s Natural Hazards Center, points to “elite panic,” and highlights the political function of the NPP. “Elites fear disruption of the social order, challenges to their legitimacy,” she says. This elite panic is characterized by “fear of social disorder; fear of the poor, minorities and immigrants; obsession with looting and property crime; willingness to resort to deadly force; and actions taken on the basis of rumor.”
The indoctrination starts early. In 2005, Time magazine named William Golding’s Lord of the Flies one of the hundred best English-language novels published since 1923, and it’s been required reading in many American schools since the 1960s. Even if you’ve never read the book, the odds are you’re familiar with the story of what happens to poor Piggy at the hands of some boys gone feral on a deserted island. Lord of the Flies is cited as if it were anthropological evidence that children will become vicious little monsters if adults aren’t around to keep them in line. Hobbes for kids.
This famous fictional account of what would happen if a group of children was left to their own devices outside the protective embrace of civilization is belied by what did happen when a group of boys was swept up in a storm and shipwrecked on a deserted island in 1977. They didn’t break into factions, smear war paint on their faces, or kill the fat kid, as anyone who read Golding’s novel would have expected. Instead, they agreed to stick together, moving about the island only in pairs to ensure nobody would get lost or suffer an accident alone. They organized a rotating system so that some of them were always awake to watch for passing ships. Fifteen months later, two boys on watch spotted a passing boat, and they were all rescued.
This essay reminds me of a song which I wanted to tell you about, Chris, since forever. I never did because it’s in German and we all know that your German teacher was not that inspiring.
I believe you’d really like it, given the things it talks about (for example how ending a relationship is not such a big deal, since they had a wonderful time and the kids are raised by the community anyway)
Today I thought of letting it run through a translator. I only had to fix some minor glitches. Enjoy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTPGpBBwt1w
If you go to https://www.google.com/search?q=k.i.z.+hurra+die+welt+geht+unter+lyrics you'll find a "Translate to English" button (at least it was shown to me) where the German lines are put right beneath the translated ones. Maybe it's easier to follow when the words are parallelized, maybe not.
I wanted to structure text in paragraphs but unfortunately editing here does not allow it. Sorry. Maybe just go to the Google translation for easier reading.
K.I.Z. - Hurra die Welt geht unter ft. Henning May
Clothing is against God
We wear fig leaf
Swinging on lianas over Heinrichplatz
And the old people talk about urban warfare
At the barbecue in the ruins of Deutsche Bank
Birds' nests in a holey neon sign
We warm up by a burning German flag
And when someone sleeps on a park bench
Then only because a girl leans on his arm
Three hours of work a day because that's all it takes
Tonight we'll think of names for stars
Are thanking that bomb 10 years ago
And make love until the sun can see it
Do you remember when we carved on the tables in schools?
Please Lord don't forgive them because they know what they are doing
The sandy beach awaits beneath the paving stones
If not with rap, then with the pump gun
And we sing in the fallout shelter
Hurray, this world is ending! (repeat)
Paradise on the rubble!
Take your bow and arrow, we'll kill a delicacy
There's no more prison, we're grilling on the prison bars
Burnt McDonald's bear witness to our heroic deeds
Since we chased Nestlé out of the fields
Apples taste like apples and tomatoes like tomatoes
And we cook our food in the soldiers' helmets
Do you want a smoke joint?(
Then go pick something in the garden
But our life today can also be endured soberly
Come on, lets do a race in the moss-covered
halls of the Reichstag on office chairs
Our front doors no longer need to have locks
Money turned into confetti and we slept better
For us, a gold bar is the same as a brick
The fireplace is going out, throw in another Bible
The kids are scared because I talk about the Pope
This life is so beautiful, who needs an afterlife?
(echoing) who needs an afterlife?
And we sing in the fallout shelter:
Hurray, this world is ending! (repeat)
Paradise on the rubble!
The cows graze behind us, we smoke Ott, play Talva
Where Potsdamer Platz used to be
When I wake up I'll stroke your hair again
"Darling, I'm going to work, I'll be right back"
We get up when we want, leave when we want
Look how we want, have sex how we want
And not like the church or porn tells us
Baby, the time with you was so wonderful
Yes, it's over again now, but our children don't cry
Because we raise them all together
Do you remember when they wanted to put out the big fire?
That feeling when our passports melted in the flames?
They really thought their shit would last forever
I show the little ones Monopoly, but they don't understand
“A €100 note?”
“What is that supposed to be?”
Why should I take something away from you when we share everything?
And we sing in the fallout shelter
Hurray, this world is ending! (repeat)
Paradise on the rubble!
In 1989, Hurricane Hugo blew through my home city with 90 mph winds. We are a city of trees and about 15% blew down, many of them damaging homes and injuring people. Power and telephone lines were down for 2 weeks in my neighborhood. No lights, no heat, etc. for 14 days. You never saw such neighborly love. People were helping each other every way they could. Late on day 1 we heard a chain saw in our front yard and a neighbor we'd never met was clearing our driveway. After about a week or so, the houses across the street got power back. Those neighbors let the folks on our side run extension cords all the way across the street so we could make coffee, use lights at night and watch a little TV. They invited us over to take hot showers. Honestly, I think people came alive during this little disaster and found meaning in helping each other. People who were here then talk about it to this day. Many of us long for a society where that level of connection and helping each other is the norm, instead of the exception.