I’m currently reading Rebecca Solnit’s thoughtful and astonishing book about the human aftermath of disasters. She argues forcefully against the Hobbesian notion that disaster rips back the veneer of society to expose animal panic and animal selfishness, recounting story after story of post-disaster culture-making of the best kind: selfless, creative, effective, and even joyful. Disaster is horrible, and in its aftermath not everyone behaves nobly, but it also breaks through what Walker Percy called the “everydayness” of life, making it possible to see things and people anew
When I ask people about the disasters they have lived through, I find on many faces that retrospective basking as they recount tales of Canadian ice storms, midwestern snow days, New York City blackouts, oppressive heat in southern India, fire in New Mexico, the great earthquake in Mexico City, earlier hurricanes in Louisiana, the economic collapse in Argentina, earthquakes in California and Mexico, and a strange pleasure overall. It was the joy on their faces that surprised me. And with those whom I read rather than spoke to, it was the joy in their words that surprised me. It should not be so, is not so, in the familiar version of what disaster brings, and yet it is there, arising from rubble, from ice, from fire, from storms and floods. The joy matters as a measure of otherwise neglected desires, desires for public life and civil society, for inclusion, purpose, and power. Disasters are, most basically, terrible, tragic, grievous, and no matter what positive side effects and possibilities they produce, they are not to be desired. But by the same measure, those side effects should not be ignored because they arise amid devastation. The desires and possibilities awakened are so powerful they shine even from the wreckage, carnage, and ashes. What happens here is relevant elsewhere. And the point is not to welcome disasters. They do not create these gifts, but they are one avenue through which the gifts arrive. Disasters provide an extraordinary window into social desire and possibility, and what manifests there matters elsewhere, in ordinary times and in other extraordinary times
from A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, p.6, by Rebecca Solnit, 2009