A Paradise Built in Hell, by Rebecca Solnit

Author: Rebecca Solnit. Review by Helen Porter

Ten years before Rutger Bregman’s Humankind (see review 14 August 2020) Rebecca Solnit pre-figured his view of human nature as fundamentally kind and co-operative by analysing our response to catastrophe. It chimes well with our desire to recognise ‘that of God in everyone’.

She looks at six disasters, from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake to 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, in each case demolishing the myth that people reverted to feral selfishness. In fact, when disaster strikes, people turn to (rather than turn on) their neighbours. Spontaneously, instinctively, people exhibit remarkable selflessness, and remarkable creativity, in setting up community self-help. This breaks through barriers of class, religion and race. When all are levelled by the literal levelling of their homes, people share whatever is saveable: clothes, food, and comfort, and others rush to provide help.

The section on the San Francisco earthquake includes a chapter on Dorothy Day, whose life was shaped by the event. In the 1930s she wrote ‘What I remember most plainly about the earthquake was the human warmth and kindliness of everyone afterwards… People came in their night clothes; there were new born babies. Mother and all our neighbors were busy from morning to night cooking hot meals. They gave away every extra garment they possessed. They stripped themselves to the bone in giving, forgetful of the morrow. While the crisis lasted, people loved each other.’

Solnit points out that our ‘individual therapy culture’, so necessary and valuable at times, can also ignore the value of community involvement. Watch anyone in the caring professions: people will do good, automatically, instinctively, if given the chance. This may be part of their job descriptions, but even this allows them to express the best of themselves. Others sometimes need the space, the opportunity, and the confidence to do likewise. Disasters show that when we act with no time to think, it reveals who we really are.

The spontaneous and inventive response of ordinary people produces effective community self help. But, when the authorities finally get their act together, these initiatives are often deliberately shut down. This response is the result of the myth, often led by news reporting, of the looting, trampling mob. This was seen most shamefully in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: rumours of savagery, later disproven, meant offers of help were turned away because certain areas were declared unsafe.

In each case it is the instinctive response of individuals and groups that confirms our capacity for good and for working in community; not charity but exchange, not just giving out but getting back from the chance to work together and help each other. We do right to trust in that community capacity and in the goodness of the individual in the moment of need.

---

Comments

Please login to add a comment