A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster

The chapter opens with a description of the first of 57 consecutive nights during which Germany bombed London during World War II. Prior to the bombing, politicians had worried about the effects of bombing like this on the public’s mental well-being; it was assumed that they would panic. Mass shelters were discouraged, and small-group shelters were promoted. Despite this, Londoners began flocking to the metro stations underground, and eventually the authorities were forced to install bunks and sanitation units to accommodate the growing numbers.

Many Londoners reported a dissolved sense of boundaries between strangers, a general sense of resoluteness, and, while there was fear, a sense of hardened toughness. One young woman, after being bombed, reported “pure and flawless happiness” (155), which Solnit proposes is because being bombed was like a near-death experience in which the value of life is put into stark relief.

Charles Fritz, an American stationed in England, wrote an essay on citizens’ morale during the war, describing a nation of “gloriously happy people, enjoying life to the fullest” (157). After the war, he earned a degree in sociology and became director of the University of Chicago’s Disaster Research Project, which sought to understand how citizens were reacting to the Cold War and the threat of nuclear war. Fritz was optimistic about citizens’ ability to handle disaster-like scenarios. He refuted the belief that in disasters people tend to riot and act selfishly or to become so helpless that they require outside help.

Fritz’s work came during the height of the Cold War, when the military believed citizen panic during a nuclear bombing could pose at least as much of a danger as the bombing itself. Citizens were encouraged to build family bomb shelters in their backyards rather than Soviet-style collective ones. The government did little to build shelters; as Solnit says, “destruction was the government’s job, survival the citizen’s” (165). Citizens balked at these private shelters, remarkable in a time when “collective solutions and solidarities smacked communism” (168).

One of Fritz’s most radical arguments is that “everyday life is already a disaster of sorts, one from which actual disaster liberates us” (161). Disasters can restore the community identity that is diminished in modern society and offer “temporary solutions” for the chronic loneliness and suffering of modern life. Disasters demand focus on the present, pose problems with straightforward solutions, require collective thinking, and temporarily alleviate worries about the future. Importantly, in disaster, “threats and dangers to the society come from outside the system” and have clear causes (163). Most other crises “arise within the system” (152), and their source is harder to identify and agree upon.

Solnit then asks how the feeling of solidarity that arises in disaster can be harnessed outside of disaster settings. She cites firefighters and practicing members of religious groups. She finishes the chapter by discussing how religion is a “practice” of turning one’s self “into something more adequate to the circumstances we face, more able to respond with grace and generosity, to achieve less temporary liberation” (173). Religious communities often emphasize the connection of all things, altruism, and the cultivation in everyday life of the qualities that are most needed in disaster.

Solnit writes that contemporary language “speaks of the effects of disaster entirely as trauma” (177). For Buddhists, however, suffering is inevitable, and the question becomes what to make of suffering rather than how to avoid it. Solnit writes that “disaster could be called a crash course in Buddhist principles of compassion” (178), connectedness, the present moment, and embracing uncertainty. Religion more broadly can help “to achieve some of disaster’s fruits without its damage and loss” by cultivating the community spirit that can make disaster so liberating (178).

This chapter opens with short descriptions of several disaster action films, which display panic and mob behavior and, often, attempts to suppress the public’s knowledge of a disaster to avoid mob behavior. These films, like news media, feed the notion that mobs arise in disaster. Fritz’s colleague, Enrico Quarantelli, writes that though fear is (reasonably) present in disaster, outright panic is rare. Films rely on the background of the unruly mob to make the hero look good in contrast—composed, attractive, and capable. Films often, correctly, portray bureaucracy as clunky and inept. They often, however, “portray the problem as resulting from the human beings involved rather than the social systems in which they operate” (168).

In a twist on the usual narrative of an unruly mob of common people, sociologist Kathleen Tierney proposes the notion of elite panic, in which the wealthy grow irrationally fearful of losing their power in the face of disaster. This fear is manifested in an “obsession with looting and property crime” and “willingness to use deadly force” (190).

Sociologists who have researched disasters advocate for an “open society based on trust in which people are free to exercise their capacities for improvisation, altruism, and solidarity” in disaster settings (191). This idea is further reinforced by a story of Milwaukee’s 1894 smallpox outbreak, in which the elite were permitted to self-quarantine, but the poor were forcibly taken to hospitals. This unequal treatment led people to hide cases from the authorities and riot against forcible removal. In New York’s 1947 smallpox outbreak, by contrast, people were treated as allies; in those conditions, it was seen as a civic duty to get vaccinated, and public compliance was high. Still, elite panic is a common reaction to disaster. In fearing the public, elites often ending up endangering the public.