When will humans help each other?

The book review of A Paradise Built in Hell in The New York Times. In the picture, a disabled woman is rescued during Hurricane Katrina.

In his journals, Jack Kerouac recalled riding on a bus through North Dakota in 1949, when snow and ice brought the highway to a halt. From a nearby town came “crews of eager young men” who “pitched in” through the “attritive, swirling, arctic-­like night.” Kerouac was struck by their selflessness, their willingness to help strangers of whom they had “no need.” “Where in the effete-thinking East,” he wrote, “would men work for others, for nothing, at midnight in howling freezing gales?” He concluded with a koan of sorts. “Men work against each other only when it is safe to abandon men — only when and where.”

Kerouac was, in essence, asking a favorite question of social psychologists: Under what conditions are people willing to help others? Urbanites, or the social dynamics of urbanism, have been particularly implicated in these inquiries, whether by “diffusion of responsibility” — the more people who are around, the less any one person feels compelled to act — or “information overload,” the idea that city people must filter and limit what they take in, including appeals for help.

But every so often comes a moment when the normal rules of life are suspended, when some kind of force brings suffering, deprivation or, at the very least, extreme inconvenience. Given the normal travails of city life, one might reasonably expect the social fabric to rend. But ask any New Yorker about, say, the blackout of 2003, and you’re likely to get not a shudder of horror but wistful reminiscences about people spontaneously directing traffic when the signals went dark.

As Rebecca Solnit documents in “A Paradise Built in Hell,” a landmark work that gives an impassioned challenge to the social meaning of disasters, this same sort of positive feeling has emerged in far more precarious circumstances, from the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 to Hurricane Katrina. Disasters, for Solnit, do not merely put us in view of apocalypse, but provide glimpses of utopia. They do not merely destroy, but create. “Disasters are extraordinarily generative,” she writes. As the prevailing order — which she elliptically characterizes as advanced global capitalism, full of anomie and isolation — collapses, another order takes shape: “In its place appears a reversion to improvised, collaborative, cooperative and local society.” These “disaster communities” represent something akin to the role William James claimed for “the Utopian dreams” of social justice: “They help to break the general reign of hardness, and are slow leavens of a better order.”

Solnit is an exemplar of that perpetually endangered species, the free-ranging public intellectual, bound to no institution or academic orthodoxy. As in her previous works — most notably “River of Shadows,” a study of the photographer Eadweard Muybridge that opens out into a consideration of time, motion and the American West — there is here a wonderful confluence of unexpected connections. And so we find James, teaching at Stanford University at the time of the 1906 earthquake, wading into the rubble. He was struck by two things: one was the “rapidity of the improvisation of order out of chaos”; the second was that “the pathetic way of feeling great disasters belongs rather to the point of view of people at a distance.”

But the heroism of ordinary people is only part of Solnit’s study. The larger, and more troubling, questions that emerge in “A Paradise Built in Hell” concern our tendency to assume that people will not act this way and the official responses that come out of this belief.

A meta-narrative governing official response to the various disasters Solnit examines, from the industrial explosion that devastated Halifax in 1917 to the Mexico City earthquake of 1985 to New York on 9/11, is that cities wracked by disaster need to be protected from rampaging mobs, that government needs to suppress the panicked masses and save the day. But as Solnit illustrates, through an absorbing study of the academic subfield of “disaster sociology,” these Hobbesian (and Holly­wood) beliefs are seldom true.

First, official emergency responders are rarely the first people to respond to an emergency. Second, the central command-and-control model often misinterprets the reality on the ground. Third, the hero motif neglects the role of social capital, a soft-power variable that is played down in disaster management but which might help answer such interesting questions as why Cuba, in contrast to its neighbors (including the United States), responds so well to hurricanes, or why the 2003 New York City blackout was calm while its 1977 equivalent was not.

Lastly, there’s the panic myth. A sociologist who set out to research panic in disasters found it was a “vanishingly rare phenomenon,” with cooperation and rational behavior the norm. More typically, panic comes from the top — hence the reaction of officials during the Three Mile Island evacuation: “They’re afraid people are going to panic,” another disaster scholar notes, “so they hold the information close to the vest about how much trouble the reactor is in,” putting the public in greater danger. A weightier charge by the disaster sociologists, one echoed by Solnit, is that “elites fear disruption of the social order, challenges to their legitimacy.” Thus, Solnit argues, the official response in 1906 San Francisco — where the subsequent fire caused more damage than the quake — kept volunteers “who might have supplied the power to fight the fire by hand” away, relying instead on “reckless technological tactics.” In the aftermath of Katrina, there were myriad accounts of paramedics being kept from delivering necessary medical care in various parts of the city because of false reports of violence. Whether this was elites defending against challenges to their legitimacy or simple incompetence is unclear; as Solnit observes, the “monolith of the state” is actually a collection of agencies whose coordination may be illusory.

A particular problem in modern disasters is that many people get information from a different kind of first responder: the media. Solnit argues that the exaggerated accounts of lawlessness in New Orleans, circulated in Mobius fashion by elected leaders and some reporters, obscured — and even discouraged — the far more common acts of altruism. Her description of looting as mostly vital “requisitioning” may be optimistic, but she is right to question the moral calculus that seems so often to put property in front of people in disasters. For all the talk of violent mobs, she argues that “no evidence exists that anyone was shot or killed by the supposed gangs,” and in one of the most unsettling sections, she cites testimony from self-styled white vigilantes who boasted of killing African-Americans. This may or may not be true, but for many it is the myths of the Superdome that endure.

For all its power, “A Paradise Built in Hell” leaves a number of questions unresolved. How are disaster communities, here romantically depicted as harbingers of utopia, different from other forms of spontaneous and deeply felt community operating under real or perceived duress, from combat units to millenarian cults? If the worst events can bring out the best in people, why can’t that impulse be sustained in everyday life? As Solnit notes, “the real question is not why this brief paradise of mutual aid and altruism appears but rather why it is ordinarily overwhelmed by another world order.” Is it, as Solnit too glancingly notes, the “conundrum we call human nature”? In a fascinating aside, she considers the traditional Carnival, described by Mikhail Bakhtin as the “temporary liberation . . . from the established order,” and compares it to the communities created in disaster. As heady as it can be, would Carnival feel so energizing if it were the norm, and not the brief subversion of that norm?