A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster

“When God asks Cain where his brother is, Cain asks back, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ He is refusing to say what God already knows: that the spilled blood of Abel cries out from the ground that has absorbed it.” 

Solnit’s biblical references begin with the book of Genesis in the opening of her book. Here, she uses references familiar to many readers to illustrate the point that a just society is one in which we are all our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. Cain’s refusal to take responsibility for his brother’s death is used to illustrate that contemporary society encourages citizens to look out only for themselves, a “private” perspective with little sense of collective responsibility. By invoking the Bible, Solnit uses a familiar moral authority to make arguments that some would consider radical.

“Horrible in itself, disaster is sometimes a door back into paradise, the paradise at least in which we are who we hope to be, do the work we desire, and are each our sister’s and brother’s keeper.” 

As Solnit demonstrates repeatedly, disaster settings can bring out people’s best selves. The aid networks that spontaneously form and the cooperative spirit that governs them constitute a “paradise” for Solnit. In moments of large-scale crisis, the usual state of affairs is so shaken up that people have the chance to be what Kropotkin and Solnit would consider their natural, gregarious, and cooperative selves.

“These accounts demonstrate that the citizens any paradise would need—the people who are brave enough, resourceful enough, and generous enough—already exist.” 

Regular citizens such as Anna Holshouser and Tobin Mueller demonstrate the frequency with which people are quick to help in times of crisis and to demonstrate care and love for each other and for their community. This phenomenon suggests that most people have this goodness within them, and it is brought out and suppressed by circumstance. It is not people who prevent utopia from emerging but oppressive systems and authorities.

“If paradise now arises in hell, it’s because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way.” 

The “usual order” suppresses people’s natural, altruistic tendencies, which constitute “paradise.” The self-forming aid systems and acts of kindness common in disaster demonstrate that the systems that usually govern our lives are coercive and make us worse versions of ourselves. They tend to separate us and value private life over public engagement. When those systems break or are suspended, new values and ways of relating to each other come to the fore, and we see the joy and importance of belonging to a community.

“Utopia is in trouble these days. Many no longer believe that a better world, as opposed to a better life, is possible, and the rhetoric of private well-being trumps public good.” 

Solnit implies here that utopia is an inherently communal concept, concerning society rather than individual lives. Instead of fighting for utopic visions of community, people nowadays tend to work towards improving their own private lives. This retreat into the private sphere is part of a broader trend towards privatization that Solnit highlights throughout the book—of public goods, the economy, and social life.

“The elite often believe that if they themselves are not in control, the situation is out of control and in their fear take repressive measures that become secondary disasters.” 

This quote alludes to the notion of “elite panic,” which suggests that authorities and elite members of society tend to act irrationally and fearfully in disaster. They fear the loss of their power and legitimacy and sometimes resort to violence to maintain control. Because they view the “masses” as inherently chaotic and dangerous, they often meet this expected violence with actual violence. In doing so, they in many cases make disasters far worse, such as when victims of Hurricane Katrina were unable to leave the flooded area because authorities thought they were too dangerous, or when General Funston called in the army to prevent looting and manage chaos, leading to the deaths of many more citizens, most of whom were acting selflessly to aid one another.

“It’s tempting to ask why if you fed your neighbors during the time of the earthquake and fire, you didn’t do so before or after.” 

In disasters, people widely report a feeling of solidarity and empathy that did not exist at other times. This is partially because disaster imparts a sense of shared destiny that normal life obscures. In a disaster, everyone shares an uncertain future, and social trust is needed more than ever. Additionally, when people are led to ask why they did not take care of each other before the disaster, it may indicate that they are permanently changed for the better, and their kindness may last after the disaster.

“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.” 

Solnit characterizes charity as top-down giving that usually enforces a hierarchy between the givers and the needy. It bureaucratizes the distribution of resources, creates dependence, and removes people’s agency in creating and defining the structures that support them and their communities. By contrast, mutual aid is often informal, improvised, and run directly by those who benefit from it. It is reciprocal, lacks distinct hierarchy, and tends to be joyous and empowering.

“The implication was that the proper sphere of human activity is personal, that there is no legitimate reason to engage with public life, that the very act of engaging is juvenile, blindly emotional, a transference of the real sources of passion.”

The privatization of “desire and imagination that Solnit describes in the introduction discourages engagement in public and political life (22). This effect is visible in the approach of mainstream therapy, including Freudianism. In it, the issues a person experiences, even if they have to do with the wider community, are always related back to their family and personal life or childhood, as if a desire to be politically active is symptomatic of a personal issue or deficiency. This view delegitimizes social desire and the value of community in personal well-being.

“The human being you recognize in reading, for example, Tom Paine’s Rights of Man or Nelson Mandela’s autobiography is far larger than this creature of family and erotic life. That being has a soul, ethics, ideals, a chance at heroism, at shaping history, a set of motivations based on principles.” 

Widely admired figures like Thomas Paine and Nelson Mandela display a sense of identity and duty that goes beyond personal and family life. This public, citizen’s identity visible in well-known figures is present, if perhaps dormant, in each of us. Solnit encourages the reader to resist the privatization of the spirit that makes us apathetic to what happens in our communities and illustrates the benefits of developing a public identity.

“What is the moral equivalent of war—not the equivalent of its carnage, its xenophobias, its savagery—but its urgency, its meaning, its solidarity? What else generates what he called the ‘civic temperament’?” 

Philosopher William James wrote his essay “The Moral Equivalent of War” with the understanding that war met a need for meaning in society: It garnered collective support for a single cause, promoted pride and togetherness, and elicited extreme joy. James, however, was a staunch anti-imperialist and sought ways to fulfill war’s function in a moral way. This could take the form of a youth corps in which every young person is conscripted to work towards the good of their nation and community. Later, he found that disaster curiously fed this need, albeit in a short-lived and hard-to-institutionalize way.

“We need meaning and purpose in order to survive, and need them so profoundly we sometimes choose them over survival.” 

Here, Solnit indirectly explains why people give their lives for a cause in war or sacrifice themselves to save others. A sense of duty to a greater cause, or meaning, can sometimes take over in such a strong way that we give our own lives for the good of the community. This can only happen if we value the community that we are a part of, whether an army or a neighborhood, enough to give ourselves over for its well-being.

“Many religious practices also emphasize the importance of recognizing the connectedness of all things and the deep ties we all have to communities, from the congregation of the faithful to all beings everywhere. In so doing, they inculcate as everyday practice the mutual aid and altruism that disaster sometimes suddenly delivers.” 

The importance of community is one way in which disaster and religion are similar. Religiosity can cultivate one’s sense of shared identity, belonging, and connection to a community and a wider world. As Solnit explains, religious practice can also function to refine the self into being more capable of responding gracefully to challenging situations, like disaster. This response often involves practicing altruism and developing a sense of care for all beings. Disasters can bring out and put these qualities to use.

“The conundrum we call human nature readily rises to the occasion of a crisis and as readily slacks off when the living is easy.” 

Here, Solnit addresses the malleability of human nature, explaining how it changes according to circumstance. She also addresses the role of struggle in bringing out the better parts of human nature. Crisis can highlight the important things in life, make us compassionate, and encourage bravery and altruism. However, when all of life is going well, we can lapse into complacency and lose sight of a greater vision for humanity.

“Heroes are necessary because the rest of us are awful—selfish or malicious or boiling over with emotion and utterly unclear on what to do or too frightened to do it.” 

Solnit explains the role of heroes in action movies. Since the “mob” of ordinary citizens is depicted so negatively, the hero stands out as one of the few to have retained his composure, thus appearing almost superhuman. If the people were depicted as equally calm, rational, and capable, there would be very little story and certainly less drama. Films have relied on this trope of the unruly, panicking mob despite insistence from sociologists that it is not reflective of reality.

“In fact Hollywood movies are to actual disasters as described by sociologists something of a looking-glass world.”

Hollywood disaster movies tend to depict the heroes as the only ones behaving rationally, while the masses panic and loot. In actual disasters, as sociologists have observed, it is the elites who panic, while the “masses” coordinate resourcefully to help each other. This distortion of the narrative reinforces the interests and legitimacy of elites and minimizes the importance and effectiveness of citizens in disaster settings. These films also fit neatly into a narrative of a masculine, rational hero whose power and virtue are highlighted against the chaos of a panicking public.

“From their decades of meticulous research, most of the disaster sociologists have delineated a worldview in which civil society triumphs and existing institutions often fail during disaster.” 

Despite the insistence of scholars, the media, elites, and the mainstream narrative of disaster get it wrong. Careful research and first-hand accounts have demonstrated that people behave cooperatively and in a highly effective manner during disaster, while traditional bureaucracy is clunky and inept. The fact that this narrative has persisted for decades despite disaster scholars’ research shows how deeply the narrative is entrenched, and how much it serves elites.

“Disaster’s message that anything could happen is not so far away from revolution’s exhortation that everything is possible. Revolutions beget a similar moment when the very air you breathe seems to pour out of a luminous future, when the people all around you are brothers and sisters, when you feel an extraordinary strength.” 

Solnit compares revolution and disaster, describing both as moments in which a sense of togetherness and optimism prevail. Both mark an end to normalcy and open space for new possibilities in how we live. Disaster’s similarity to revolution can help answer the underlying question in this book—of why people behave with such joy in disasters when their worlds have been greatly altered. Most of the time, people are unsatisfied with their “privatized” lives, and both disaster and revolution fill the unmet need for public community life.

“When the plane that hit the Pentagon and the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania are looked at side by side, they reveal two different conceptions of national defense: one model is authoritarian, centralized, top-down; the other, operating in a civil frame, is distributed and egalitarian.” 

In comparing these two incidents, both part of 9/11, Solnit highlights not only the differences in structure between top-down and distributed defense, but also the difference in effectiveness between these two models. The chapter describes several incidents in which improvised citizen responses were far more effective than clumsy, bureaucratic, or top-down ones. In the case of the plane crashes, the citizens aboard the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania quickly improvised an ambush of the hijackers that led the plane to crash in a field rather than an important site. The army, meanwhile, a symbol of top-down brute force and power, was unable to divert the plane that hit the Pentagon. While Solnit does not doubt the need for defense, she implies that it should be reshaped to be more adaptable and effective.

“What difference would it make if we were blasé about property and passionate about human life?” 

In asking this question, Solnit references pragmatist philosopher William James. This question invites us to consider how the actions of authorities would be different if they had different priorities. Most likely, aid would have gotten to Katrina victims more quickly, and the media would not have covered “looting” with such enthusiasm, focusing instead on people’s suffering. Soldiers would not have shot innocent survivors of the San Francisco earthquake for requisitioning supplies, and factory owners in Mexico would have rescued their employees instead of their machinery. Solnit’s implicit argument is that our attitudes and beliefs make a huge difference in our actions, and that changing them could help us create the paradise that is glimpsed throughout the book.

“Looting is an inflammatory, inexact word that might best be excised from the English language.” 

Looting, for Solnit, lumps together opportunistic stealing with requisitioning of supplies in an emergency. The media use this term more often to describe the actions of Black people, while white people are granted the term “gathering supplies.” The word has also become charged with the assumption of wanton, self-serving behavior reminiscent of Le Bon and Hobbes’s ideas about how people behave when order breaks down.

“Like elites when they panic, racists imagine again and again that without them utter savagery would break out, so that their own homicidal violence is in defense of civilization and the preservation of order.” 

Both racists and elites hold contempt for those they consider beneath them, whether the poor or the non-white (or both). These groups are believed to be violent, dangerous, and savage—held in place and “civilized” only through exterior force. This fear and hostility results in violence in anticipation of a threat that rarely manifests. Elites and racists also both value order and the status quo above human life.

“It started out with shotguns on a front porch, transformed into young medics bicycling through the streets offering assistance to anyone and everyone who wanted it, and it ended up as dozens of relief and reconstruction projects around the city and thousands of volunteers.” 

Here, Solnit gives a clean narrative of events that greatly simplifies what occurred in New Orleans after Katrina. In this version, behavior in the city goes progressively from bad to good, beginning with vigilante violence and murders and ending with love and aid from all around the world. Through this simplified narrative, Solnit describes one instance of paradise emerging from hell and the spontaneous nature of true mutual aid and community.