Hurricanes as non-sequiturs
I was working on my new book today, but having trouble getting the hurricanes off my mind. I was thinking that, in terms of story, an event like a hurricane typically appears either as the main conflict (your basic man vs. nature plot -- e.g. The Perfect Storm), as a plot device in a larger plot (e.g. Key Largo) or as one of a series of trials which the characters must surmount (e.g. The River).
But for the hundreds of thousands of people made homeless (and worse) by the weather this year (not to mention those hit by the tsunami last December), the hurricane is none of those. It's just something that happens to them; it doesn't serve a narrative purpose. For many, I think it's unlikely to really change their lives and make them something they weren't before. I'll bet that five years from now most of the people made homeless by the hurricane are in the same socioeconomic status they were in before the storm -- of course, I'm just guessing, but that would be interesting to find out eventually.
Part of what I'm getting at is how insulated we are from what actually happens in the world. Not only insulated by modern society (for example, you lose your house, get financing and insurance payments, move into another house, get a job similar to the one you had before, and go on with your life) but by larger forces in society. The hurricanes are unlikely to change the fact that we live in a consumer society dominated by large corporations and global trade. The hurricanes are unlikely to -- by whatever means -- make people form cooperatives and live in a less consumeristic way, trade their lives as consumers for lives as peace activists, stop eating junk food and all do yoga, or change the nature of public education in society.
In fact, I have the feeling that the more life is disrupted by an event that is essentially a nonsequitur -- a storm, a hurricane, an earthquake -- the more people want to go back to the way things were before. They just aren't enough to truly disrupt the status quo.
Look at the areas devastated by the tsunami in December. Did the tsunami make the people of Sri Lanka stop the civil war and try to live in peace? No, not for more than a couple of weeks. Did the tsunami make the government (or people) of Thailand create programs to raise up the poorest and make the society more democratic? No, things are exactly the way they were before; the emphasis is on rebuilding the tourist industry. Did the tsunami (or the catastrophic flooding in Mumbai two months ago) suddenly make the caste system of India disappear? No, no change at all. Yes, you have hundreds of thousands dead, millions homeless, and a fathomless amount of infrastructure destroyed -- yet society remains the same.
So while the hurricanes are terrible and exciting events, chances are in the end they will change nothing at all. That's what I mean when I say people are isolated from reality. We can trust that no matter what happens -- short of a major war -- things will remain the same. Thus events like hurricanes and earthquakes are, in the end, meaningless.
And the same can be said for an event like Sep. 11, 2001, after which everyone went around repeating the phrase "Everything has changed." Well, one thing did change: The U.S. became a country that invades other countries without being attacked, and a country that tortures prisoners of war. And that does change me, in a moral and ethical sense. But I still drive to work, get a latte, do my job, go home, watch the ballgame on TV -- and if terrorists invaded my workplace this minute, or a tornado hit, killing everyone but me, a year or two from now I would be doing exactly the same. Only the name of the company on my paychecks would be different.
4 comments:
But I think you are wrong. For the people affected by the catastrophic event - disaster or war - it does change their ability for social cohesion and trust. It damages people individually. violence & the potential for the breakdown of society are sort of a bad meme, one that is very contagious. Even if you aren't personally losing any privilege (yet) or being thrown in jail etc.
Yes, but... What I meant to say was that for most of the people who were affected by the hurricanes, a few years from now their lives will be exactly the same -- unless, of course, they have been permanently harmed physically or mentally.
You say that catastrophes damage people's "ability for social cohesion and trust." There's an interesting and very apt essay by Rebecca Solnit in the October Harper's in which she discusses this very subject -- how people react to disasters. But to the contrary, she cites examples that people react to disasters by pulling together and coming out of their anti-communitarian me-first bubbles; they help each other rather than wait for the authorities to help (and sometimes despite the authorities' efforts, as you no doubt saw in Houston). She also says that this effect fades as the disaster recedes and "ordinary" life becomes possible again. Everything returns to normal.
That was my point, though I skipped the part about citizens helping one another. I guess the challenge is to try to get people to feel and behave in that communitarian way without first having their town destroyed -- or, perhaps, to convince them that the consumeristic individualism which keeps them from acting in a communitarian way is the same thing as having their community destroyed.
Hmm, but to go even further.... if that were true, then societies would tend to become very much the same, and I'm not convinced at all that's true. i.e. government changes, wars, conquests, time passing.... I think what you're saying implies some kind of natural status quo.
so "people" have an anti-communitarian me-first bubble... but, again, not necessarily, right? which people & when? i'm trying to push my own response further here... when I talk about violence, too, i'm assuming a particular model of the role of violence in society which ...obviously through any reading of history or anthropology, is also not a given. Hmmm.
I agree that wars and conquests do bring radical changes -- but little short of that. And with globalization, societies are becoming more and more like each other.
> so "people" have an anti-communitarian me-first bubble...
> but, again, not necessarily, right? which people & when?
Not you, of all people, with your communitarian arrangements, and your willingness to drop everything and help others, and your confidence in the first place that you can help.
But most people do raise barriers with their cars and their isolated suburban lives. Most people don't know their neighbors... I've lived in my house ten years and I hardly know my neighbors' names. If there was an earthquake, we'd all come out of our houses and help each other, but then it goes back to normal.
Wars and conquests, as you say, do truly shake up societies. They cause massive and permanent displacement of populations, for better or worse. Now that's a change. Hurricanes and earthquakes are just not big enough, apocalyptic as they may seem while the dust is still settling.
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