The Culture Of Calamity

 

 This is the title of a book I read a few years ago, The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America. At the time I was interested in our fascination with disasters. It has an interesting evolution beginning with the San Francisco earthquake in 1906.

Page 115: "One woman was sure that the disaster had brought San Franciscans a little closer to Jesus. All artificial restraints of our civilization fell away with the earthquake's shocks. Every man was his brother's keeper. People reached out across cultural distinctions and experienced a powerful union of concern. A quiver of compassion a harmony of interest. One man helped an Italian he did not know and was later assisted by a stranger. This he thought was evidence of the sweet kinship of suffering. For a few days at least wrote Charles Keeler, the millennium had come to San Francisco. The brotherhood of man was not a misty ideal but a beautiful reality. Cast and creed were thrown to the winds. There were no rich and poor, no capitalists and laborers, no oppressed and oppressors, all extraneous things were gone, and the greatness of human hearts, meeting a common loss. Facing a common peril and buoyed up by a common hope was sublime but did San Franciscans really want to dwell indefinitely in this state of happy anarchy? Not really. It was fun to imagine a nation without distinctions and conflicts. But few among the upper classes were willing to give up the privileges these distinctions gave them."

So it's a party for a while--it's the Woodstock effect: it lasts for about 48 to 72 hours and then people see the reality of it. This goes back to the 1966 Robert Ardrey book, The Territorial Imperative, and the equation: amity=enmity +hazard: people come together after a catastrophe--for a little while, but the effects aren't lasting: people resort to their own selfishness. They are effusive with compassion until they feel fear for their own security. Pouring over imagery of disasters is actually a kind of pornography.

What was also interesting is the "safety valve" function of being entranced by spectacle (a kind of escapist entertainment) and the Coney Island effect of it being like an amusement park where people go for release. The San Francisco earthquake supplied a similar release, but ultimately also became a profit center, just as YouTube places (horribly unrelated) ads in the middle of videos of people suffering through disasters. Things haven't changed at all. Progressives promote compassion, but it is always the Woodstock effect--about three days of it then it's back to the grind. We all want to believe otherwise, but the collective unconscious remains dangerously "radioactive".

The book also discusses what Susan Sontag termed as "heroism of vision"--the idea that the media had a role to play in appearing to be compassionate or that it was a tool of compassion--that if we could harness the power in media that it would improve society and be able to control the future more effectively. This is the same idea that was behind social media, particularly Twitter during the Arab Spring: we have this new technology that's going to give us democracy or it's used for the promotion of democratic values and we've seen that that has backfired. All this stuff backfires. We're just putting too much faith in technology, particularly new media.