Kevin's Reviews > A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster

How we survive disasters by building communities...

The Good:
--5/5 for accessibility and the topic: reviving social imagination, especially for Western default liberals (i.e. cosmopolitan capitalism; Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies)
--The obvious pairing is to consider the different reactions to disasters:
i) Top-down: how capitalist power takes advantage of disasters, see: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
ii) Bottom-up: how the public rebuilds, see this book.

--To justify itself and secure social consent, unaccountable power relies on myths regarding “human nature” (i.e. selfish individuals); furthermore, capitalism has so degraded our expectations of each other that we imagine Thatcher’s proclamation: “There is no alternative!” …how can there be change if we cannot even imagine it? Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
--Disasters are momentary disruptions to the status quo, which provide insight to how people can act in an altered society. Do communities devolve into:
a) violent mobs or ruthless competitive individualists? Rulers and their intelligentsia sure want us to fear this, from Lord of the Flies) to Hollywood dystopia fiction (esp. zombie films), or...
b) do people step up and respond to social needs (more so than during status quo control, which by no coincidence strips the public of autonomy and renders them as passive spectators of the political theatre and mere cogs in the authoritarian capitalist workplace)?
...This book provides case studies that challenge status quo assumptions. Here's a post-COVID quote by Arundhati Roy:

Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

-“The Pandemic Is a Portal” in Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction.

--Could this be the same fervor that war brings, the unleashing of a united noble cause (minus the arbitrary mass murder part, of course...)?
-War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
...can this be harnessed for good? A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency
--Just as provocative, what are the elite's beliefs towards “the masses” during such crises? How do these beliefs affect the elite's responses to regain control, and how does this affect disaster relief and community healing?
--For more accessible intros to unpack the roots of violence and to revive social imagination:
1) David Graeber: challenging the morality of debt, the morality of work ethic, is democracy really just periodic voting for distant politicians?
-The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement
-Debt: The First 5,000 Years
-(for a materialist critique of Graeber's idealism, see here).
-Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
2) Silvia Federici, Nancy Folbre: re-imagining society to value care
-Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto

The Bad/Missing:
--Once we move beyond elitist "human nature" myths (related: Malthusian myths of "overpopulation": Too Many People?: Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis) and agree on utopian ideals, a constant debate between utopian anarchism and more pragmatic forms of real-world socialism is on immediate tactics: how do we defend against violent repression without reproducing violent structures?
i) Global North:
--I tend to assume utopian anarchism is more readily applicable in rich countries where there is more space (esp. for those with privileged through various identities) to practice a wider array of tactics, from protests (which is still an appeal to the authorities) to direct action (Direct Action: An Ethnography) to revolutionary parties (although these have often been purged: Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism).
--Rich countries have more nuanced means of repression (Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky), although violence is still readily available especially towards targeted groups (ex. prison industrial complex).
--Consider the debate on Global North tactics of sabotage/property damage between (a) This Is Not A Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook vs. (b) How to Blow Up a Pipeline
--A minor point: Solnit's writing style can be meandering at times (I found the best case study was saved for last: Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans)
ii) Global South:
--For colonized countries under siege, dire conditions have pushed revolutionary parties to the forefront whereas they have been neutralized in the Global North:
-ex. contradictions in the decolonization project's "united front": The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World and The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South
-Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism
--To prevent a skewed outlook, geopolitical economy should be considered as part of the context, where imperialism is a crucial component. Nonviolence that does not actually challenge the status quo's violent structures is just as guilty of reproducing violent structures.
-ex. Vijay Prashad on imperialist ideological censorship

The Ugly:
--Hierarchical beliefs bringing out the worst in people and the vicious spiral that ensues...

Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders…and millions have been killed because of this obedience…Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty, and starvation, and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves… [and] the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.
-Howard Zinn