A Paradise Built in Hell (17 page)

A bomb fell two streets away. Another landed nearer as they raced inside, came near enough to buffet her with waves “like bathing in a rough sea.” She found herself clutching the floor as if to keep from falling while dust was everywhere, her mouth was full of plaster, and Mr. R yelled out contradictory orders to stay still and do something. The house was wrecked, the front door jammed, and so they climbed out a broken window. When people around them responded with anxiety to their blood-streaked, dusty appearances, she realized, “I might have been hurt! Somehow, right up to that minute I had taken everything for granted, in a queer, brainless way, as if it was all perfectly ordinary.” She was taken in by a neighbor who plied her with blankets and a hot-water bottle “for the shock,” and when she said she wasn’t in shock her hostess “referred darkly to ‘
delayed
shock.’ ” And then she was left alone: “I lay there feeling indescribably happy and triumphant. ‘I’ve been bombed!’ I kept saying to myself, over and over again—trying the phrase on, like a new dress, to see how it fitted.” She concluded, “It seems a terrible thing to say, when many people must have been killed and injured last night; but never in my whole life have I ever experienced such
pure and flawless happiness
.”

She was young, she’d survived with her love by her side, and she had fifty-five more nights of bombing to endure before London became only an intermittent target, but time and war did not change her memory. Thirty-five years later Harrisson, the Mass-Observation researcher who had surveyed response to the Blitz as it unfolded, followed up on her story. She had recently become a grandmother, and she looked back on her night of being bombed as a “peak experience—a sense of triumph and happiness” that she compared to the “experience of having a baby.” Near-death experiences and encounters with one’s own mortality are often clarifying, tools with which to cut away inessentials and cleave to the essence of life and purpose. Illnesses and accidents can produce the same reinvigorated gratitude and appetite.

After that night of heavy bombing, residents of West Ham, a slum neighborhood near the brightly burning London docks, were evacuated to a local school and told to wait for buses. The buses went to the wrong location one day, arrived during an air raid the next, so the evacuation was postponed, and the night after that the school was bombed and an unknown number—perhaps as many as four hundred—of men, women, and children were blown up. There were many Blitzes, some terrible, some fatal, at least one ecstatic. It seems to be because the virtues of the Blitz were so exaggerated that the counterversions have been so fierce in denouncing the positive aspects as myth. But they did exist, in the firsthand accounts of the moment and not only in propaganda, though they existed alongside privation, injustice, fear, loss, and death. The ways that war differs from disaster matter, but the similarities can be illuminating. And the Blitz stands alone as almost the only time when the way that most people behave in disaster has been highlighted rather than missed, though it was highlighted as something specific to wartime or to Britain rather than the way things usually go.

A young Missouri-born soldier with a degree in sociology, Charles E. Fritz, was in Britain during the war. “As a captain in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II, I was stationed at several different air bases and command centers throughout England from 1943 to 1946,” he wrote toward the end of his life. His words appear as the preface to his major statement on disaster, a riveting challenge to all conventional wisdom that was written in 1961 and never published (though it was released in 1996 as a university paper, a landmark the world passed by without noticing). By the time he arrived, Britain was five years into a war; there were chronic shortages of food, clothing, and housing; and tens of thousands of Americans had just arrived to further overstretch its resources. “Under those conditions, one might expect to find a nation of panicky, war weary people, embittered by the death and injuries to their family members and friends, resentful over their prolonged life style deprivations, anxious and disillusioned about the future, and, more generally, exhibiting personal and social behaviors indicating a state of low morale and esprit de corps. Instead, what one found was a nation of gloriously happy people, enjoying life to the fullest, exhibiting a sense of gaiety and love of life that was truly remarkable.” Fritz had a splendid time, in part because “my access to British family life was greatly enhanced during those years by my courtship and subsequent marriage to Patricia Ware, a resident of Bath, England, who worked throughout the war as a nursery school teacher.” Bath was heavily bombed too.

At the end of the war, Fritz was assigned to the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, which prepared a monumental study on the effectiveness of the aerial bombing of Germany’s civilians. The Germans had not been “demoralized” to any profound degree either, despite atrocities far worse than any England had endured, such as the firebombing that one night turned Dresden into an inferno in which more than twenty-five thousand people died. The study Fritz worked on concluded, “Under ruthless Nazi control they showed surprising resistance to the terror and hardships of repeated air attack, to the destruction of their homes and belongings, and to the conditions under which they were reduced to live. Their morale, their belief in ultimate victory or satisfactory compromise, and their confidence in their leaders declined, but they continued to work efficiently as long as the physical means of production remained. The power of a police state over its people cannot be underestimated.” The aplomb of the British under bombardment was attributed to special national characteristics that became a matter of pride; the resoluteness of the Germans was attributed to grim subjugation. Fritz noted that their surveys revealed that “people living in heavily bombed cities had significantly higher morale than people in the lightly bombed cities” and that “neither organic neurologic disease nor psychiatric disorders can be attributed to nor are they conditioned by the air attacks.” From there the survey went to Japan without him and reached similar conclusions about bombing’s psychological effects there.

After his discharge, Fritz entered the University of Chicago to pursue graduate work in sociology and in 1950 became associate director of the Disaster Research Project of the university’s National Opinion Research Center, the first organization to systematically study human behavior in disaster. The cold war had come quick on the heels of the world war, and the U.S. government was assembling a vast nuclear arsenal and worrying about how its own population would react in a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. These cold-war fears were the impetus for the earliest systematic studies of behavior in disasters, and such nuclear-related studies were commissioned into the 1960s. Since other than Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 there were no urban nuclear calamities to study, the method was to look at natural and domestic disasters and extrapolate. Thus began the little-known and remarkable field of disaster studies. At first, graduate students in psychology and anthropology were employed along with young sociologists like Fritz, but the sociologists soon took the lead and have ever since largely owned the field—and largely been ignored, despite their extraordinary conclusions. That is, they have had an influence on disaster preparedness and planning in some places and at some levels, but their conclusions have had little effect on the media, public opinion, and the bureaucrats and politicians responsible for developing disaster-response plans.

The initial expectations were grim; as with the British authorities twenty years earlier, the military commissioners wanted to know more about “Herd Reaction, Panic, Emergence of Leaders, and Recommendations for Guidance and Control of Masses.” Writes one of the pioneering sociologists, “From oral histories obtained later from key officials involved, it is obvious that there was a strong belief [on the part of the Office of Civilian Defense] that the reaction would not be a good one, that there would be widespread ‘panic’ and a breakdown of the social order.” The premise was that people were sheep, except when they were wolves, and the solution was to find out how best to herd them. But the sociologists would stand all this on its head. None was more glowing about the results than Fritz.

His conclusions began to appear in 1954, and a few more essays followed in 1957, but he hit his stride in 1961. That year, in an essay in a textbook on “the sociology of deviant behavior and social disorganization,” he summed up his conclusions from the research he had conducted and directed throughout the 1950s. Like the long, unpublished report from the same year, it strikes a wholly new note, or rather picks up where William James had left off (and quotes James and Prince), but does so from the basis of methodical investigation of dozens of disasters. He described the conventional beliefs that in disaster “there are mass panics and wild stampedes. People trample one another and lose all sense of concern for their fellows. After panic has subsided—so the popular image suggests—many people are hysterical, or so stunned that they are helpless. Others turn to looting, pillaging, or other forms of selfish, exploitative behavior. The aftermath is widespread immorality, social conflict, and mental derangement.” Later, he described another stereotype: “that disasters render people a dazed and helpless mass completely dependent on outside aid for guidance and organization.”

Those beliefs have yet to die. Naomi Klein’s 2007 book
The Shock Doctrine
is a trenchant investigation of how economic policies benefiting elites are thrust upon people in times of crisis. But it describes those people in all the old, unexamined terms and sees the aftermath of disaster as an opportunity for conquest from above rather than a contest of power whose outcome is sometimes populist or even revolutionary. She speaks of disasters as creating “these malleable moments, when we are psychologically unmoored and physically uprooted” and describes one recent disaster as being akin to torture in producing “profound disorientation, extreme fear and anxiety, and collective regression.” It’s a surprisingly disempowering portrait from the Left and one that echoes the fears of the prewar British authorities, the apparent product of assumptions rather than research. In a public talk when the book appeared she said that in extreme crises “we no longer know who or where we are. We become like children, we look for daddies.” If only she had read Fritz. But his treasure was buried 650 pages deep in a dreary textbook on deviancy and in a manuscript first released thirty-five years after it was written. His essays are essentially two versions of the same manifesto, though the unpublished one goes further in its conclusions. These conclusions have become standard thinking among disaster sociologists, though few put it as boldly as Fritz. Half a century later, his work conveys the thrill of a redemptive discovery, and though later sociologists have tamped down a little his exuberant optimism, they have largely confirmed his insights.

Fritz’s first radical premise is that everyday life is already a disaster of sorts, one from which actual disaster liberates us. He points out that people suffer and die daily, though in ordinary times, they do so privately, separately. And he writes, “The traditional contrast between ‘normal’ and ‘disaster’ almost always ignores or minimizes these recurrent stresses of everyday life and their personal and social effects. It also ignores a historically consistent and continually growing body of political and social analyses that points to the failure of modern societies to fulfill an individual’s basic human needs for community identity.”

Later he describes more specifically how this community identity is fed during disaster: “The widespread sharing of danger, loss, and deprivation produces an intimate, primarily group solidarity among the survivors, which overcomes social isolation, provides a channel for intimate communication and expression, and provides a major source of physical and emotional support and reassurance. . . . The ‘outsider’ becomes an ‘insider,’ the ‘marginal man’ a ‘central man.’ People are thus able to perceive, with a clarity never before possible, a set of underlying basic values to which all people subscribe. They realize that collective action is necessary for these values to be maintained and that individual and group goals are inextricably merged. This merging of individual and societal needs provides a feeling of belonging and a sense of unity rarely achieved under normal circumstances.”

In other words, disaster offers temporary solutions to the alienations and isolations of everyday life: “Thus while the natural or human forces that created or precipitated the disaster appear hostile and punishing, the people who survive become more friendly, sympathetic, and helpful than in normal times. The categorical approach to human beings is curbed and the sympathetic approach enlarged. In this sense, disasters may be a physical hell, but they result however temporarily in what may be regarded as a kind of social utopia.” What someone like Pauline Jacobson discovered as personal experience in the 1906 earthquake, Fritz affirmed as a general principle. He goes on to describe other ways disaster alters the psyche. He declares, “Disasters provide a temporary liberation from the worries, inhibitions, and anxieties associated with the past and future because they force people to concentrate their full attention on immediate moment-to-moment, day-to-day needs within the context of the present realities.” They provide relief from that web of old griefs, habits, assumptions, and fears in which we are ordinarily caught: the effects are as psychological as they are practical. Temporary liberation is, again, strong language, and Fritz was bold in pressing his case for redemptive disaster.

Disasters, unlike everyday troubles but quite a bit like wars, pose straightforward problems to which solutions can be taken in the form of straighforward actions: “An essential feature of disaster is that the threats and dangers to the society come from outside the system and their causes can usually be clearly perceived and specified. This contrasts with many other crises where the threats arise within the system and it is difficult to isolate and identify a widely agreed-upon cause.” The ability to address directly and clearly the troubles at hand provides a satisfaction hard to find in other times. Disaster loosens attachments to routine and convention: “Disaster provides a form of societal shock which disrupts habitual, institutionalized patterns of behavior and renders people amenable to social and personal change.” Fritz sheds light on life during disaster, but the shadows cast on it are those of everyday life—of the alienation not just from each other but also from tangible solutions, heroic roles, and chances to begin anew that disaster provides. His essays hint that disaster is relatively easy, at least in knowing what to do and who to be. It is everyday life that is hard, with its complications and ambiguities, its problems to which no easy solution can be found, its conflicts between people because of economics and ideologies that become relatively insignificant in crisis.