The Upside of Armageddon

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.

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Image: Dreamersia

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.