Cain calls to mind one of the most important questions about human nature: “Are we beholden to each other, must we take care of each other, or is it every man for himself?” (3). Solnit points out, “when God asks Cain where his brother is, Cain asks back ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’” (3). Mainstream media portrayals of selfish violence in times of disaster appear, Solnit argues, as early as Genesis. Where altruism arises, Solnit argues, is between neighbors–no matter how diverse. In her Prelude, Solnit discusses disaster’s ability to level any socioeconomic divide by quite literally leveling any property or means of centralized aid. Solnit argues that, despite the moral touchstones within Western society that demand humans are inherently self-serving or selfish beings, something arises that looks like altruism when disaster strikes. Not an easy task, Solnit’s argument is framed around critical disaster theory and personal experience and interviews that Solnit herself did while visiting the ad hoc disaster relief agencies after the Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast. Copyright © 2009 by Rebecca Solnit.Solnit begins her 2009 book discussing the essential nature of humanity.
Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit. This is the paradise entered through hell.
The loss of power, the disaster in the modern sense, is an affliction, but the reappearance of those old heavens is its opposite.
But the constellations of solidarity, altruism, and improvisation are within most of us and reappear at these times. However beautiful the stars of a suddenly visible night sky, few nowadays could find their way by them. In its place appears a reversion to improvised, collaborative, cooperative, and local society. You can think of the current social order as something akin to this artificial light: another kind of power that fails in disaster. On the warm night of August 15, 2003, the Milky Way could be seen in New York City, a heavenly realm long lost to view until the blackout that hit the Northeast that afternoon. In these disaster-struck cities, people suddenly found themselves under the canopy of stars still visible in small and remote places. In some of the disasters of the twentieth century-the big northeastern blackouts in 19, the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area, 2005’s Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast-the loss of electrical power meant that the light pollution blotting out the night sky vanished. It originally suggested misfortune due to astrologically generated trouble, as in the blues musician Albert King’s classic “Born Under a Bad Sign.” The word disaster comes from the Latin compound of dis- or away, without, and astro, star or planet literally, without a star.
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