Hurricanes and Mastery

A number of friends have asked me to write something about the present condition and future prospects of New Orleans---a city I lived in for twelve years, know fairly well, and for which I still harbor a certain abiding affection. I've refrained so far. There is probably enough being said on that subject already, even though an enormous portion of it is inaccurate, suffering from a strained and self-induced dreaminess that afflicts most of what's written about New Orleans, a suspension of disbelief that recalls Oscar Wilde's famous definition of sentimentality as "the bank holiday of cynicism." It is interesting, and indicative, that there is no sober, scholarly, and clear-eyed book on the history of New Orleans, even though there is material for dozens of them. It is as if there is a national agreement that we will pretend that New Orleans really is what the glossy travel literature says it is. No one really wants the Mardi Gras mask to come off.

Let me add that I write this as one who genuinely loves the city, though more for its gritty, everyday blue-collar virtues than for its celebrated domestic architecture, its Creole pretentiousness, and its rather dull and unspontaneous parading of its putative naughtiness.

But more on New Orleans another time. What has struck me more forcibly has been the near-instantaneous eruption of a hysterically intense version of the blame game in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Much of this, of course, is nakedly partisan, and directed at the President for political purposes. But the litany of complaints is most impressive. The storm itself was caused by global warming, which Bush has failed to address, and by the erosion of the south Louisiana wetlands, which has been caused by the doings of his fat-cat developer friends. The break in the 17th Street Canal levee was caused by inadequate Federal spending, including a cut in the most recent budget for the Army Corps of Engineers. The violence in the streets, as well as the human disasters at the Superdome and Convention Center, and on the rooftops of the submerged Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish, were caused by an inadequate Federal response, stemming from National Guard troops having been deployed in Iraq and from incompetent management of FEMA, not to mention FEMA's having been placed under the Department of Homeland Security, marking the Bush administration's overemphasis upon terrorism, to the exclusion of natural disaster relief. And so on.

Try, for a moment, to set aside the partisan environment in which these charges have arisen. Let me stipulate, for the sake of argument, that it is possible that all or some of these criticisms have some validity. And let me stipulate, too, that it's entirely possible that the same partisan criticisms would have been levelled at Bill Clinton, or some other Democratic president, had he been in office during this disaster. The good or evil of any particular extant party in this is not my point. (For what it is worth, my years in New Orleans incline me to believe that municipal and state officials make more plausible villains than the Feds. But let us leave that aside also.)

What I find interesting, though, has been the instant, reflexive resort to the belief, and accusation, that SOMEONE IS TO BLAME for this. Someone can and must be held accountable for this vast calamity. This, it seems to me, is a powerful confirmation of something that I have argued in the pages of Touchstone before: that the increase in our mastery over the physical terms of our existence will not make us happier or more content, and may even lead to chronic political and social instability and unease, precisely because of the unsatisfiable expectations it generates.

It has often been argued that an individual's attraction to conspiracy theories, far from being a sign of irrationality, is a sign of hyperrationality, of an insistence that great events in the world cannot ever proceed by chance or without human direction. The historian Gordon Wood wrote a brilliant essay a number of years ago, arguing that "the paranoid style" in politics was partly a product of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, with their insistence upon the rational intelligibility and orderliness of events, and upon the human ability to exercise control over them.

It is not so farfetched an idea, though I would place it in a continuum with the practice of magic and other prerational antecedents, including most pagan and animistic religions, which have similar aims. It is quite natural for us humans to wish to control events, and control our world---and natural to believe that, if we are not in control, someone else is. There may even be an element of the scapegoat mechanism, as described by Rene Girard, operating in such matters, reestablishing social order by displacing the sins of the community onto a sacrificial head.

Yet I cannot recall a case quite like this one, in which the tacit assumption was made so widely, so angrily and self-righteously, and so completely implausibly, that the destructive effects of this enormous storm could be, and should have been, prevented---or if not entirely prevented, at least greatly mitigated. If one were today rewriting Candide, the mocked Pangloss figure would be the one who says, "Well, these things happen, and one should learn to accept them gracefully. Although we cannot control our world, we can at least strive to do our best, and understand that there are risks in living below sea level in a hurricane-prone region." And he would be ridden out of town on a rail, by an angry mob. The extension of our power means an extension of our culpability. (Which in practice means that competing groups will be searching for ways to transfer exclusive culpability to one another, one of the reasons why the competition for "victim" status can be so intense in our culture, since being a victim is the surest way to certify one's right to offload one's culpability. We are seeing some of this in the aftermath of Katrina.)

Again, I make no particular judgments about this particular event. We will know more about what really happened in a few weeks or so. But many people will not care about the specifics; the important thing will be that SOMEONE IS TO BLAME. This points to an increasingly familiar pattern of expectation, which only grows as our scientific knowledge and technological wizardry grow. It parallels our society's growing rage at a medical system, including the pharmaceutical industry, that has been remarkably skillful, and more skillful in each passing year, in successfully addressing a range of diseases and conditions that were formerly thought to be untreatable. But modern medicine cannot banish the existence of risk. Which is why the system is all too often a casualty of the very expectations it raises. There is a sense in which, the more things become mastered, the more intolerable are those remaining areas in which our mastery is not yet complete. This parallels very neatly the observation made by Tocqueville that times of revolutionary upheaval occur when social expectations are rising, and that the growth of social equality in America would exacerbate, rather than relieve, Americans' sense of class injury and class resentment. This is less of a paradox than it seems at first glance.

I'm not predicting a revolution. Nor am I counseling fatalism or Gelassenheit. But I do think we would do well to recognize that much of the intense and free-floating anger and unhappiness that pervade so much of our prosperous world may derive precisely from the expectations that our successes in mastering our physical environment have generated. The effects of the hurricane would be much easier to live with, were we not so intent upon convincing ourselves that some human culprits caused it. We might want to pause and reflect upon how little mastery we really have---least of all, of ourselves.

Comments

[MarcV]

Good post.

My family just got around to watching the movie "Seabiscuit" last night. I was struck by the similarities of the effects of the Great Depression and the effects of Hurricane Katrina: people moving west, out of jobs, looking to relief organizations for a meal and shelter.

Back then it took years for the country to get back on its feet. Today we expect government to have all of the relief wrapped up in a neat tidy package, air-dropped the next morning with the resultant happy smiles of people eating a hot meal, all displayed on CNN. I hope this episode will open up the eyes of people to realize that we cannot rely on government to save us, that it's neighbor helping neighbor.

[dilys]

Excellent call, the Rene Girard allusion!

There is in business and military operations something called an "after-action review" (developed by the USArmy and HBS' Learning Organizations). Its purpose is to learn what worked and what didn't, and what to aim for next time. A simple algorithm, it is designed to elicit a timeline and array of facts. Finger-pointing rather than fact-clarification is sternly condemned not only as noise, but as poison to the entire process and even the subsequent improvements.

If media and citizens don't get clear on the distinction between after-action review of this mess, and politicized blame, we'll probably just go back to sleep. Spinning, politicizing, and obscuring facts is strong evidence of dangerous ill will, and I hope the country will call The Blame Game on account of The Rain. On the other hand, none of this should be put to rest until the facts surface.

[Jenna]

May I suggest, also, that the thinking patterns ingrained in the culture by our constant consumption of mass entertainment are partly to blame for the unrealistic expectations, both in controlling the storm and in the timeliness/efficiency of the rescue efforts? What I mean is this. When all of a person's perceptions on life events are shaped by watching television and movies - where everything is wrapped up neatly in a 60-minute, or, at most, a 2-hour story arc - that's how that person expects reality to behave. The build-up, the drama and tension, the struggle...and then the resolution. A person forgets that, in real life, the doctors don't have all the answers, and that the patient dies. The police don't catch the murderer. The army squadron loses the battle. You don't necessarily escape the fire, the car accident, the flood. There's not always a hero to come to the rescue.

I guarantee we'll see that pattern played out in large scale over the next few weeks in the news media. Now that the New Orleans evacuation is over, the "drama/tension" part of the story will wind down. The stress next will be on the heartwarming anecdotes of people settling into shelters, families reunited, the wonderful things our celebrity "heroes" did to help. And then the story will fade away, replaced by the next big thing.

And, in the meantime, the reality of the human toll will have just begun.

[Barb]

What about the realistic expectation that there could have been a plan for evacuating the poorer districts that could not evacuate themselves? That there should have been extra water provided for the Superdome or any other refuge selected. People were told to "be patient," when they had already suffered three to four days without drinking water. Was Tsunami relief this slow in coming?
The media people could get there. Why couldn't the relief agencies?

[S.K. Davis]

Right after the tsunami last winter, there were plenty of complaints that the response of the U.S. government was inexcusably slow. It doesn't surprise me that we've forgotten that in the deluge of complaints about the perceived lack of efficiency during this disaster. It'd be almost amusing if it weren't so exasperating.

The hurricane hit just over a week ago. Have we already forgotten that the civic infrastructure in New Orleans and the rest of the gulf region was almost completely destroyed--including the water supply system? Do we really not understand that it is intrinically easier to move a few reporters with TV equipment around than it is to find ways to transport not only thousands of military personnel and other relief workers, but the enormous quantities of water, food, and other supplies needed by tens of thousands of people? How do you drive trucks over washed-out interstate highways? How do you dock ships when the docks are smashed to smithereens? Is it possible for any government to justify the logistics and expense that would be involved in routinely storehousing supplies for hundreds of thousands of people, just in case it's needed instantaneously?

And have we really forgotten that, even with the best of planning (which I'm not saying happened this time), some things just plain go wrong?

[Ann Church]

Excellent comments regarding the Blame Game currently running amuck in America. What a voice of sanity in a hysterical national fit of outrage! Our heightened expectations of technology are indeed a big cause, especially since we so often forget technology is the tool of people--even with the most advanced gadgets it is PEOPLE who make good, indifferent, or bad use of them.

Two comments: I agree with Jenna that mass consumed "entertainment" contributes HEAVILY to this kind of mass hysteria. Not only in our impossible-life-threatening-problems-resolved-in-60-minutes-or-less-expectations, but also our being accustom to prepackaged story lines complete with good guys and bad guys and attractive and sentimental/moralistic happy endings.

But I think also the prevalence of 24 hour news coverage ITSELF contributes. Seeing scenes of destruction and suffering and chaos not just for a half an hour in the evening but all day, during lunch, work, in the middle of the night... People get hooked and watch for hours becoming more distraught. Of course, being distraught is a healthy reaction to suffering of others, but it seems that we "feed" on it in a sick sort of way.

Two: You touched on culpability, but I think that is a huge underlying issue for most Americans as well. It seems that although most secular Americans have banished old-style guilt for personal sins to the dustbin of "ancient obsession", guilt is still with us. Only the guilt is rarely spoken of openly, and it is usually the vague, unspoken social kind.

Sometimes the frantic reaction of folks to televised tragedy smacks of survivor guilt. That others are suffering, even though we had NOTHING to do with the disaster and in no way were responsible, makes us feel "compelled" to "do something". It almost sounds like we want to purge our vague but strong guilty feelings of ...what? Being fortunate, not suffering as others do? Not being prepared on Day Two with water and hot meals sitting on platforms in the affected areas???

How much more sane and refreshing is the traditional Christian view. We only need feel guilty for what we are ACTUALLY GUILTY OF--personal sins against those we live with every day. Yet, at the same time we are quick to reach out in compassion to the suffering, not because we need to "make ourselves feel better" by getting rid of vague feelings of nagging guilt, but because we truly love our neighbor.

And towards those in authority who might not have responded with "perfect" alacrity or efficiency, we are compassionate as well: knowing that we might have innocently made the same mistakes (or even sins, if they were sins)!

[Wilfred McClay]

I don't know whether or not it's appropriate for me to do this, but I just want to thank each of you for your comments. I will probably revise these blog comments into a longer piece for the magazine, and your observations, criticisms, and suggestions (and encouragement) have been VERY helpful. I am repeatedly astonished, pleasantly so, at the intelligence of TOUCHSTONE's readers.

[Jenna]

Mr. McClay,

Ah, but intelligent readers must first have literate and thoughtfully presented material, like Touchstone, to read.

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