A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit

that about two-thirds of the remaining population of San Francisco got their meals in that neighborhood, so the resistance mattered. The difference between citizens feeding themselves and each other and being given food according to a system involving tickets and outside administrators is the difference between independence and dependence, between mutual aid and charity. The providers and the needy had become two different groups, and there was no joy or solidarity in being handed food by people who required you to prove your right to it first.
    After Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, I heard the infamous former Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) director Michael Brown tell a group of disaster experts that business was the best leader of recovery because business had the best interests of the community at heart—a curious statement, to say the least. What all these stories add up to is a picture of men in power who provided some relief and got the city going again but also reinstated the old injustices and discriminations. They acted in their own self-interest as often or more often than in the public interest and sometimes viewed the public as an enemy to be conquered, controlled, and contained. The brief solidarity and harmony ended in part because the business community pitted its interests against those of the majority.
    The destruction of the city by the soldiers’ unskilled use of explosives and prevention of hands-on firefighting is equally serious, and the murders are more serious, far more so than the looting they were supposed to prevent (or the looting that the soldiers also carried out). And the attempt to grab Chinatown was opportunistic plunder on a grand scale. It would be a mistake to portray these men in power as wholly bad. The army supplied tents and worked to make the camps sanitary, during a time of real threat of typhus and cholera—the old diseases of dense population and bad sewage systems. The city fathers worked tirelessly to bring back the city of ordinary institutions as it had existed before the earthquake. But they served themselves first. There’s a philosophical problem at the root of this foul behavior by those in power, particularly when contrasted with that of so many of the ordinary people. The best person to address it is the philosopher who wandered inquiringly through the ruins the day of the earthquake.

WILLIAM JAMES’S MORAL EQUIVALENTS
    “ W hat difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true?” asked William James in his second lecture on pragmatism, the philosophical approach he and a few other American philosophers developed at the turn of the twentieth century. The question is an important one to bring to bear on disaster response. If the military notion that San Franciscans were a mob on the brink of mayhem were true, the right response to disaster was authoritarian, armed, and aggressive. If the main psychosocial consequence of disaster was a “millennial good fellowship,” then a very different and much milder response was appropriate, the response that Officer Schmitt, Mrs. Holshouser, and others offer. At stake in disaster is the question of human nature.
    The term itself has fallen out of fashion. It implies a fixed essence, a universal and stable inner self, but if you concede that there are many human natures, shaped by culture and circumstance, that each of us contains multitudes, then the majority of human natures on display in disaster may not suggest who we are ordinarily or always, but they do suggest who we could be and tend to be in these circumstances. There are at least two tendencies on display in disasters, Funston’s fear that bred conflict and Jacobson’s solidarity that generated joy. The response to disaster depends in part on who you are—a journalist has different duties than a general—but who you become is also an outgrowth of what you believe. Funston believed in authority,