“natural” disasters as bad faith
according to sartre, bad faith manifests in either the flight from freedom or the exaggeration of the same. so-called natural disasters are, clearly, moments at which the forces of “nature” interact with the forces of social organization. last year, a massive hurricane slammed cuba, but thanks to their collectively-organized evacuations and sheltering, no one died. forces of nature + cuban communism = no natural disaster.
christian parenti has recently demonstrated that the so-called evacuation of new orleans was classical laissez-faire free-marketeering, in which an announcement was made and all were expected to flee individually. forces of nature + free market = death of poor (black). this shouldn’t really be surprising to anyone, since it is precisely the sort of outcome predicted by all neoclassical economic formulae (i.e. unemployment, provision of social goods like health care, etc.). parenti certainly misses the point in a lot of ways, as this “invisible hand” was, in effect, overdetermined by race: race helped to determine to whom the free market applied (note the images of heroic airlifting of elderly whites from a retirement home, while already-evacuated elderly blacks die on the floor of the football stadium). moreover, the characterization of “looting” is fairly explicitly color-coded (see image below). but parenti’s point holds regarding social organization, and we can add sartre to the equation. the claim that such events are purely “natural” is a fucking joke, and patently bad faith, since it is an attempt to hide the extent of human freedom (in this case, human responsibility/guilt). and this is a powerful tool of reaction. “natural”-ness, in terms of disasters, thereby sits comfortably alongside genetics in masking human agency in the present era.
as a side note, thucydides has some interesting insights into the non-naturalness of disasters like drought and plague in the pelopponesian war.
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The situation in New Orleans also illustrates the inherent destructive nature of mere capitalism. Despite the fact that there was plenty of warning the death toll is huge (and of course colour coded). This should give food for thought for those who believe that when warning fails to prevent a disaster it is a sign of “conspiracy” (9/11 being a prime example). There is no need for conspiracy to explain all this: just capitalism.
Comment by No conspiracy, just capitalism @ 9/4/2005 2:49 am
Hi Guys.
I don’t think I understand the main thrust of this post.
Nor do I get the comment about “inherent destructive nature of mere capitalism” when you’re discussing the inherent destructive nature of nature, instead.
I am not convinced socialist governments are innately more capable at dealing with natural disasters than more avowedly capitalists ones. While inept emergency planning may be to blame, I think you can find just as much evidence for this in the histories of soviet Russia or Communist China as in the US.
Geo, you grandly claim in regards to Cuba in 2004, that, “thanks to their collectively-organized evacuations and sheltering, no one died”
Err…according to Wikipedia, Hurricane Charley killed 4 Cubans and 10 Americans in September 2004. You can’t compare Hurricane Charley easily to Katrina. This year’s hurricane hit the Gulf Coast regions of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama far more intensely than the 2004 hurricane season.
Comment by Jake @ 9/5/2005 2:59 am
this has nothing much to do with the innate qualities of state socialism. the example merely shows the non-naturalness of such disasters, since it emphasizes diametrically opposed ways of dealing with them. in this particular instance, the US adopted a “free-market” approach to evacuation, but it should be clear that i disagree with the deterministic implications of this claim (since it was racially-overdetermined). the point was to get on to a bad faith claim: that all this talk of “natural disasters” (which you unfortunately reproduce in you attempt to reduce the event to pure nature) is a flight from freedom, and ultimately a flight from responsibility (and in this case, a mask for racism).
sorry for messing up the numbers, but the point wasn’t about numbers. it is about the potential for massive casualties, which was clearly the case with Charley. it’s silly to argue that the storms weren’t comparable: Charley hit Cuba as a category 3, admittedly, but with winds of 120 mph, which was only about 10-15 mph slower than Katrina. Moreover, it hit Havana directly, which is a much larger city than New Orleans. the point is that social organization contributed directly to the maximization of death in new orleans, just as it had played a role in minimizing death in havana.
an interesting quote from a harvard professor who was there to observe in havana: “It was a loss of life, but small compared to what could have happened if it had not been such good preparation and such good awareness … Something else interesting being there as a foreigner was this huge sense of getting ready, getting prepared, and we’re going to do anything within our reach to prevent loss of life. And after the hurricane, it was, well now, let’s reconstruct what’s been damaged and let’s continue to be organized. Undoubtedly the hurricane was used to provide a sense of social cohesion.”
Comment by geo @ 9/5/2005 9:58 am
ok - here’s the reason for some of my confusion: i was actually thinking about hurricane ivan, which didn’t hit havana, but rather pinar del rio (the western bit of cuba). ivan was a category 5 hurricane with 165 mph winds, and it destroyed more than 20,000 houses, but there were no fatalities in cuba (as compared with 92 fatalities elsewhere. good coverage is available here: http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2005/09/1719154.php
Comment by geo @ 9/5/2005 11:33 am
Fair enough Geo, but you seem in your comments to be making a slightly different argument to that your original post.
Your argument: � the point is that social organization contributed directly to the maximization of death� is, perhaps, a truism, but I still am at a loss as to how it helps us understand anything any better?
I mean, it is also a truism to say that the poor are always the worst affected by any natural disaster.
You could argue settlement patterns affected casualties just as much. New Orleans contains a massive lake, is surrounded by a river and under sea level. Most of Louisiana and the Florida basin were pretty much uninhabitable a couple of hundred years ago. They are thus pecularily vulnerable to flood damage. That is why easy comparisons with Cuba tell you little.
You seem to be claiming social organisation is the only variable that would affect casualty numbers, or something close to that.
As I mentioned, poor organisation of the relief effort isn’t an automatic consequence of the way society works, so much as the more superficial arrangement of government. This post pretty much chimes in with my own opinion on that topic:
http://www.stalinism.com/shot-by-both-sides/full_post.asp?pid=1361
And I am afraid I have no idea what “it should be clear that i disagree with the deterministic implications of this claim (since it was racially-overdetermined)� means.
Comment by Jake @ 9/6/2005 9:21 am