People are made of flesh and blood and a miracle fibre called courage.
— Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960 (quote via The Quote Garden.)
The character of an individual, and even of a people, is best identified in periods of adversity. That was one of the things that came up when my students discussed ethics, morality and poverty. With all the talk of how the Japanese people are reacting to last week’s earthquake, with a relative lack of looting and criminality, it is worth visiting Jesse Walker’s article in Reason last year that really looked at how people really respond to disasters. It turns out, that from Haiti to New Orleans to San Fransisco in 1906, people are much more restrained and disciplined than we’re lead to imagine.
Walker reviews Rebecca Solnit’s book “A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster” which points out the “little utopias” that arise in disaster hit communities.
Walker also points out the incongruity between our expectations and actual observations:
It isn’t unusual for a TV reporter to get his facts wrong. It’s rarer for the images that accompany his dispatch to flagrantly contradict what he says. But on January 21, broadcasting in the aftermath of the earthquake that devastated Haiti, CNN correspondent Ivan Watson fretted about “chaotic crowds” as the camera showed people who were calm and patient. When Watson announced that we were watching a “chaotic scramble” onto a rescue ship, this was illustrated by a group of refugees carefully, methodically passing a baby onto the boat.
–Walker (2010): Disaster Utopianism on Reason.com