The human earthquake unleashed by nature's flood

Two views from foreign countries:
1. From the Canadian Globe and Mail:
Nasty, Brutish: Society's Net Snaps: Every-man-for-himself ethos serves Americans poorly in times of crisis when people must pull together by Doug Saunders

At one point yesterday, as a helicopter-mounted camera showed a teeming swell of furious, gun-toting Louisiana residents mobbing a busload of supplies, a stunned British TV anchor spoke his mind on the air: "I'm having trouble believing that we're watching the continental United States of America. I mean, it looks like Rwanda."

A complete societal breakdown: Nobody expected that from hurricane Katrina, but that is what seems to have engulfed the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico. The threads that hold society together have unraveled, leaving destruction, looting, violence and desperation.

Americans, who rely on faith and fortune for so many of their most successful endeavors, are beginning to ask how those qualities have failed them so badly. Why is it that in some places struck by catastrophes of similar magnitude, entire societies pull together in enriching acts of mutual assistance, while other societies collapse into self-annihilation?

"Philosophers like John Locke and Thomas Hobbes tried to imagine what a 'state of nature' looked like -- we're now seeing it inside the United States and it's really brutal," says Alan Wolfe, a political scientist at Boston University who has written widely on the fragile foundations of U.S. society. "We're going to have to ask: 'How did we allow this to happen?' ''

In much poorer societies, such as Indonesia and Sri Lanka after the Boxing Day tsunami, or in more polarized societies like Montreal during the 1998 ice storm, scenes of looting, violence and selfish desperation did not occur. But the large U.S. cities of the South have a very different sort of group psychology, in which faith in individual fortune replaces the fixed social roles that keep other places aloft during crises.

In U.S. cities like New Orleans, in the analysis of the American-British organizational psychologist Cary Cooper, social cohesion depends on a shared belief that individual hard work, good luck and God's grace will bring a person out of poverty and into prosperity. But those very qualities can destroy the safety net of mutual support that might otherwise help people in an emergency.

"Fear itself motivates people in the U.S. -- the fear that you could lose everything," Prof. Cooper said in an interview yesterday from his office at the University of Lancaster. "That creates the best in American society, the inventiveness, but the moment the net is pulled out, it becomes a terrible jungle."

Observers have long recognized this tendency to societal breakdown concealed within the mass psychology of U.S. success.

"The moral mandate to achieve success exerts pressure to succeed by fair means, if possible, and by foul means, if necessary," the sociologist Robert Merton wrote in the 1960s. In times of crisis, fair means are too often replaced by foul.

There are exceptions: The extraordinary mass acts of mutual support that followed the Sept. 11 attacks in Lower Manhattan or the floods in the Dakotas, for instance, or the charitable activity that has all but ended the AIDS crisis in the United States.

But historians point to a constant threat of self-destructive breakdowns that seem to dot U.S. history, belying the thin veneer of civility that sits between entrepreneurial prosperity and mass chaos. The individualistic, egalitarian, anti-authoritarian values that have made the United States succeed have always been accompanied by an every-man-for-himself ethos that can destroy the system itself.

2. From the French Liberation:
Every catastrophe operates as an instantaneous revelation of the society it strikes, and Katrina is no exception to this rule. And what it shows in the mirror does not gladden the heart. That a giant should be vulnerable to nature's blows and more fragile than its reputation asserts, the Kobe earthquake already reminded us. But the lesson of New Orleans is darker still.

The hurricane had been forecast with remarkable accuracy by the meteorologists, but the real catastrophe came from the land. The levees that broke were the true cause of the scope of destruction, and that particular failure was human. Controversy immediately broke out over their poor maintenance due to constrictions on public finance, notably federal, in spite of explicit warnings by the technicians charged with these works of art. Katrina is a natural disaster with political implications.

The local "plan Orsec" [French disaster plan - in place for all localities for all predictable disasters] functioned properly for hundreds of thousands of Louisianans, but it also incorporated huge impasses - those with the least were left to fend for themselves (even in the United States, not everyone has a car). The evacuation of hospitals took place in disorder. Even more significant: once the levees burst, the fences of social order also gave way. Hence scenes of looting (notably of armories), but also scattered gunfire. A modern metropolis that sinks under water and into anarchy is a very cruel spectacle for an absolute champion of security like Bush, who, moreover, was already somewhat overtaken by events. Nicely dry in his hideout, Bin Laden must be dying of laughter: American civilian security helicopters getting shot at from the banks of the Mississippi! It will require a long time to pump out the water and soak up the billions of dollars of direct and indirect damage left by Katrina. It will take even more to fill in the crack that has appeared on the face of America.