John M. Shanahan once called civilization, “a thin veneer over barbarianism.” It is a quote that is finding a great deal of use this week to describe the fall of New Orleans. If Katrina is not the catalyst of the collapse, it is at least a harbinger of things to come. It is a preview of what follows from the catastrophic breakdown of hierarchical society. In New Orleans, we see a glimpse of what awaits every city, and likely in our lifetimes. It is a dark and terrible tribulation–the greatest horror that any animal has ever had to face, wherein humanity will answer for 10,000 years of tyranny and despotism. But even in the darkest hour, hope endures.

The breakdown of hierarchical power in New Orleans was as immediate as it was complete. Rival gangs waited out the storm to war against one another for the ruins. The Superdome and convention center became a Darwinian hell of rape, murder, suicide and filth, with people preying upon one another without fear of punishment or retaliation.

Women spoke of the terror they felt as gangs of thieves and rapists roamed the streets and temporary shelters night after night, plucking victims — some of them children — at whim and with no fear of police intervention.

“They took what they wanted and nobody stopped them,” said Tanika James, 27, who was among a large group of refugees who arrived in Baton Rouge and other parts of Louisiana on Friday. “It was the most scared I (have) been.”

…

“There were bodies floating everywhere. Lots of them. Some had bullets in them,” Davis said, as he described his escape from a neighborhood that was immersed in more than 10 feet (3 metres) of water earlier this week.¹

The ocean took back what three centuries of New Orleanians had tried to take from it. A 3-foot shark was sighted in the flooded streets. With the overwhelming stench of the dead and mildew, the swampy bowl of New Orleans has become a public health nightmare of truly epidemic proportions.

And through it all, the very worst of human nature–looting, murder, rape….

It is a reality so stark and undeniable it has destroyed the usual spin machines of 24-hour cable news. CNN provided a list of the “disconnects” between reporting and reality in New Orleans in Katrina’s wake. When Sean Hannity of “Hannity & Colmes” asked for some “perspective” when Shepard Smith implied that the government had left the poor of New Orleans to die, Smith replied, “This is perspective! This is all the perspective you need!”² Jack Shafer offered a piece for Slate on the various breakdowns at CNN with, “Rebellion of the Talking Heads.”

The scrapbook of history accords but a few pages to each decade, and it is already clear that the pages devoted to this one will be grisly. There will be pictures of bodies falling from the twin towers, beheaded kidnapping victims in Iraq and corpses still floating in the waterways of New Orleans five days after the disaster that caused them.

It’s already clear this will be known as the grueling decade, the Hobbesian decade. Americans have had to acknowledge dark realities that it is not in our nature to readily acknowledge: the thin veneer of civilization, the elemental violence in human nature, the lurking ferocity of the environment, the limitations on what we can plan and know, the cumbersome reactions of bureaucracies, the uncertain progress good makes over evil.

As a result, it is beginning to feel a bit like the 1970’s, another decade in which people lost faith in their institutions and lost a sense of confidence about the future.³

The American Scene has dubbed Katrina, “The Anti-9/11“:

On September 11, there was little looting, no violence, tremendous unity. As I woke up this morning, in New Orleans they were suspending the evacuation because people were shooting at the helicopters.

On September 11, there was Rudy Giuliani, covered with ash and projecting authority. With Katrina, we’ve had Kathleen Blanco and Ray Nagin, projecting grief and confusion and uncertainty - and our President, playing the guitar.

On September 11, everyone was equal in death - stockbrokers and secretaries, lawyers and waiters, firemen and soldiers. With Katrina, the lines of race and class seem much, much brighter.

On September 11, someone had done it to us, and we could hit back. With Katrina, there’s no revenge or justice, only misery.

In a sense - and I don’t mean to be flip about this at all - 9/11 was a tragedy well-suited to the neoconservative vision, and Katrina is better suited to a paleoconservative view of the world. The fall of the twin towers was a nightmare, but the lessons of that dreadful day felt bracing - that America was still a great and united country; that we had been too long asleep while threats gathered; that the time had come to put aside irony and drift and experience a new birth of resolve and martial vigor. 9/11 allowed people, and especially writers (myself included), to strike quasi-Churchillian poses, tell “hard truths” and talk tough about what needed to be done to defeat our enemies. It made us feel awful, but it also made us good about ourselves.

Whereas the only lessons of Katrina are that life is dark and death is everywhere, that nature isn’t our friend and that Americans, too, can behave like savages under duress, and that all the blessings of liberalism and democracy and capitalism can’t protect us from the worst. There’s nothing we can do, except give money and pray, and there’s no lesson to be learned - except, perhaps, be careful where and how you build your cities.

But the comparison between Katrina and 9/11 is flawed, as Shepherd Bliss points out:

In contrast to New Orleans, after the terrorist attacks on New York of Sept. 11, 2001, and this year in London, people pulled together. Good local leadership helped. Those attacks, of course, were not as devastating as Hurricane Katrina on a whole city, but their surprise and shock values were high. A hurricane attacking New Orleans was no surprise. New Orleans leading newspaper, the Times-Picayune, National Public Radio, and the New York Times all had major articles three years ago about the vulnerability of New Orleans to being flooded.

A commenter at the Oil Drum makes the point even more sharply:

I’ve heard many comparisons now between 9/11 - New York, and Katrina - New Orleans, and quite frankly am shocked that anyone would dare compare the two.

9/11, as horrific as it was, displaced far fewer from their homes. It did not destroy New York City. Emergency responders did not have all their homes destroyed or made inaccessible.

The vast majority of the people in the region got to go home and sleep that night, and every night to follow. The local A+P store was still open; you could still pop in to 7-11 for some cream for the morning coffee; still get TV and radio reception and tune into HBO if somehow you could put the event aside for a few hours.

The two events are not comparable.

If NYC had been struck a blow as bad as New Orleans, you can be sure there’d be riots in the streets, looting, and worse.

Yet, soldiers entering New Orleans were more surprised by what they didn’t find:

But when they arrived, they did not find marauding mobs. They did not come under fire. They found people who had lost everything in the storm and, since then, their dignity.

The troops were part of the Superdome team that came to town before the hurricane. For days, they had been cut off from news reports, sleeping and working among the refugees and the vicious rumor mill at the Superdome.

Their Superdome duties left them with a terrible image of the city. They knew that out on the streets, a police officer had been shot in the head, that looting was widespread, that snipers were taking shots even at boaters trying to rescue victims from rooftops and attics.

Now assigned to patrol the streets, they headed for the New Orleans Convention Center, in the city’s central business district. Many had wads of tobacco in their bottom lip and emitted long, dense streams of spittle into the streets below.

Their mission was to establish a command post at the center, which officials have increasingly turned their attention to, particularly as the evacuation of the Superdome nears its end. They would then build a staging area to bring in food and water. Finally, they would send in teams to seize control of a massive and lawless facility.

The troops braced for the worst.⁴

Days after the flood, a New York reporter wrote:

I saw persons take watches from dead men’s jackets and brutally tore finger-rings from the hands of women. The ruffians also climbed into the overturned houses and ransacked the rooms, taking whatever they thought valuable.

But, as a clever poster at MetaFilter pointed out, “the flood” in this case wasn’t in New Orleans–it was much closer to us here at Anthropik, in Johnstown.

Are we exaggerating the violence of New Orleans to match our self-loathing, Hobbesian vision of ourselves? Am I doing precisely the opposite, trying to downplay the obvious evidence in order to maintain a rosy-colored picture of humanity? It is impossible for me to say; I am not there. I can only rely on what others tell me.

I do know this–when a man tortures a pit bull to make him a fierce fighter, and then that pit bull mauls a child, we do not blame it on the inherently violent nature of dogs. We blame it on the man who tortured the pit bull to make him violent. New Orleans was a poor city even before Katrina. Those who remained were the poorest of the poor. We have become a people dependent on hierarchy. It has abused us so that we cannot live without it. We can no longer remember what “freedom” even means; all we can dream is to one day be the oppressor, rather than the oppressed. It is the sick fantasy of a slave beaten too hard, locked away too long, so that he no longer remembers what gentleness is, can no longer recollect the light.

The failure of our government to deal with this crisis is painfully evident for all to see. Recriminations have reverberated across the political spectrum, but already the have begun to settle into partisan camps. Liberals picked the easiest and most common sense target in George Bush; others have placed the blame at the feet of Mayor Nagin. This will likely continue to play out for some time with all the reason and decorum we’ve come to expect from modern American political discourse, but it seems we will once again only learn half the lesson.

This is what the State founds itself on. Precisely this kind of scenario. “Obey us, serve us, and we will protect you in times of catastrophe”; that is the social contract, that is the Faustian deal we strike with Leviathan. It is for that, that we sell ourselves to oppressors and tyrants, and shackle our lives, our futures, our souls to the will of the State. All we have asked in return is its protection from catastrophe. Now catastrophe has come, and the protection of the State is nowhere to be found.

The failures of federal, state and local governments to deal with this issue are obvious to everyone now. Yet we persist in the delusion that someone else might have done it better. In 10,000 years of civilization, Leviathan has an unbroken record of broken promises. The State cannot protect us from anything. It could not protect us from 9/11, it could not protect us from Katrina, it cannot protect us from the worse ravages to come–global warming, peak oil, and the end of civilization.

That is what we see in New Orleans, the lies of Leviathan laid bare for all to see. Yet we see something else, as well:

In the absence of information and outside assistance, groups of rich and poor banded together in the French Quarter, forming “tribes” and dividing up the labor. As some went down to the river to do the wash, others remained behind to protect property. In a bar, a bartender put near-perfect stitches into the torn ear of a robbery victim.

While mold and contagion grew in the muck that engulfed most of the city, something else sprouted in this most decadent of American neighborhoods — humanity.

“Some people became animals,” Vasilioas Tryphonas said Sunday morning as he sipped a hot beer in Johnny White’s Sports Bar on Bourbon Street. “We became more civilized.”

…

Police came through commandeering drivable vehicles and siphoning gas. Officials took over a hotel and ejected the guests.

An officer pumped his shotgun at a group trying to return to their hotel on Chartres Street.

“This is our block,” he said, pointing the gun down a side street. “Go that way.”

Jack Jones, a retired oil rig worker, bought a huge generator and stocked up on gasoline. But after hearing automatic gunfire on the next block one night, he became too afraid to use it — for fear of drawing attention.

Still, he continues to boil his clothes in vinegar and dip water out of neighbors’ pools for toilet flushing and bathing.

“They may have to shoot me to get me out of here,” he said. “I’m much better off here than anyplace they might take me.”

Many in outlying areas consider the Quarter a playground for the rich and complain that the place gets special attention.

Yes, wealthy people feasted on steak and quaffed warm champagne in the days after the storm. But many who stayed behind were the working poor — residents of the cramped spaces above the restaurants and shops.

Tired of waiting for trucks to come with food and water, residents turned to each other.

Johnny White’s is famous for never closing, even during a hurricane. The doors don’t even have locks.

Since the storm, it has become more than a bar. Along with the warm beer and shots, the bartenders passed out scrounged military Meals Ready to Eat and bottled water to the people who drive the mule carts, bus the tables and hawk the T-shirts that keep the Quarter’s economy humming.

“It’s our community center,” said Marcie Ramsey, 33, whom Katrina promoted from graveyard shift bartender to acting manager.

For some, the bar has also become a hospital.

Tryphonas, who restores buildings in the Quarter, left the neighborhood briefly Saturday. Someone hit in the head with a 2-by-4 and stole his last $5.

When Tryphonas showed up at Johnny White’s with his left ear split in two, Joseph Bellomy — a customer pressed into service as a bartender — put a wooden spoon between Tryphonas’ teeth and used a needle and thread to sew it up. Military medics who later looked at Bellomy’s handiwork decided to simply bandage the ear.

“That’s my savior,” Tryphonas said, raising his beer in salute to the former Air Force medical assistant.⁵

It is in times of crisis that our true nature is revealed. It is easy to go along in times of prosperity and plenty; it is in times of crisis that necessity strips us of our masks and lays bare our truth for all to see. And what truth has Katrina laid bare for us? That the victims of hierarchy cannot persist without her? Possibly. But more than that, it has revealed that hierarchy predates upon us, predicated upon a lie. It shows us that Leviathan cannot protect us, that when catastrophe befalls us, Leviathan will fail. It shows us that hierarchy, domination, coercion, all fail.

But it also shows us that in catastrophe, people turn to one another, and to the only thing that really works–tribes. It shows us that tribes endure. While your hierarchy fails, our tribes endure. It shows us that hope endures. And humanity–humanity endures.

Sources

¹ Paul Simao, “Survivors describe week of horror in New Orleans,” Reuters, 3 September 2005, 8:57 PM ET [ Back ]

² Quicktime clip [ Back ]

³ David Brooks, “The Bursting Point,” The New York Times, 4 September 2005. [ Back ]

⁴ Scott Gold, “Met by Depair, not Violence,” Los Angeles Times, 3 September 2005 [ Back ]

⁵ Allen G. Breed, “French Quarter Holdouts Create ‘Tribes’,” Associated Press, 4 September 2005, 7:59 PM ET [ Back ]