Timothy Garton Ash (The Guardian): It always lies below

[Jack Rabbit]

From The Guardian Unlimited (London)
Dated Thursday September 8

It always lies below
A hurricane produces anarchy. Decivilisation is not as far away as we like to think
By Timothy Garton Ash

Before our attention wanders on to the next headline story, let's learn Katrina's big lesson. This is not about the incompetence of the Bush administration, the scandalous neglect of poor black people in America, or our unpreparedness for major natural disasters - though all of those apply. Katrina's big lesson is that the crust of civilisation on which we tread is always wafer thin. One tremor, and you've fallen through, scratching and gouging for your life like a wild dog.

You think the looting, rape and armed terror that emerged within hours in New Orleans would never happen in nice, civilised Europe? Think again. It happened here, all over our continent only 60 years ago. Read the memoirs of Holocaust and gulag survivors, Norman Lewis's account of Naples in 1944, or the recently republished anonymous diary of a German woman in Berlin in 1945. It happened again in Bosnia just 10 years ago. And that wasn't even the force majeure of a natural disaster. Europe's were man-made hurricanes.

The basic point is the same: remove the elementary staples of organised, civilised life - food, shelter, drinkable water, minimal personal security - and we go back within hours to a Hobbesian state of nature, a war of all against all. Some people, some of the time, behave with heroic solidarity; most people, most of the time, engage in a ruthless fight for individual and genetic survival. A few become temporary angels, most revert to being apes.

The word civilisation, in one of its earliest senses, referred to the process of human animals being civilised - by which we mean, I suppose, achieving a mutual recognition of human dignity, or at least accepting in principle the desirability of such a recognition. (As the slave-owning Thomas Jefferson did, even if he failed to practise what he preached.) Reading Jack London the other day, I came across an unusual word: decivilisation. The opposite process, that is, the one by which people cease to be civilised and become barbaric. Katrina tells us about the ever-present possibility of decivilisation.

Read more

[belle]

1. Well, that's true. Then again...

the people who have shitloads of money and comforts and STILL have the morals of wild fucking animals--no, worse, machines--in charge, they don't exactly help us to be our bestest selves, in or out of a crisis, now do they?

[Briar]

2. All this is true

but he is still wrong. This is about the incompetence of the Bush regime, and more it is about the failure of the free market to prodice an inclusive, just society. Garton Ash is always inclined to make excuses for the American Empire.

[Jack Rabbit]

4. I disagree

I am reading your post (my apologies if I am reading it wrong) as:

This Professor Ash's piece is about the incompetence of the Bush regime, and more it the actual story is about the failure of the free market to produce an inclusive, just society.

Professor Ash is far too good a historian to believe that five short years of mere incompetence, even at the level of the Bush regime, is going to destroy what he calls "civilization" ("by which we mean, I suppose, achieving a mutual recognition of human dignity, or at least accepting in principle the desirability of such a recognition.")

America has always been a nation of contradictions. Democracy is an ideal, but not only do we not practice it, but build impediments to it. In the early days of the republic, we condoned slavery; slavery, especially slavery built on a presumption of racial supremacy, is as about as anti-democratic an institution as can be. Some would argue that capitalism is anti-democratic, but the defenders of capitalism can at least say that in America there is nothing to stop one from being a capitalist or from advancing within the capitalist structure. As long as there was real opportunity for upward mobility, economic inequality was tolerated.

Those days may be in America's past.

You are right to state that the free market has failed to produce an "inclusive, just" (i.e., democratic) society. For decades, America has seen wealth become more maldistributed. It was sometime in the 1980s that we finally reached a point where the middle class became a minority in America. Reagan, whose policies exacerbated the problem, was President at the time; however, the trend had been going on for some time before that. Clinton managed to slow the trend in the nineties, but he was unable to reverse it.

Americans are tolerating this situation because they see many of society's losers as undeserving and believe that they, as individuals, are deserving and will eventually reap the rewards of hard work. Most Americans still believe in opportunity and upward mobility.

That is a crock of steer manure.

Fortunes are based on fortunes. Wealth is not being created, but accumulated and consolidated. Industries are run by fewer and more homogeneous hands.

Political influence is used by the elites to consolidate their wealth and ward off threats to it. If one's fortunes are tied to fossil fuel, one does not want competition from renewable energy technology. Since government could promote that technology by committing to it just as government helped build the high tech industry by committing to going to the Moon, the elites do all they can to make sure that the government is run by those who will not promote the competing technology.

In this kind of environment, there are fewer fortunes to be made and those fortunes that are established are simply protected. That provides little opportunity for upward mobility.

This means that there are more losers in America than there have been any time since before World War II. As long as Americans continue to cling to the bygone days of opportunity and upward mobility, Americans will continue to see those losers as undeserving and something apart from most of us.

Hurricane Katrina is a symptom, not the disease. Professor Ash recognizes that.

[Briar]

7. I meant

Garton Ash is wrong to say that the Katrina catastrophe is not about the incompetence of the Bush regime.

I agree with you that it is about the failure of the free market to produce an inclusive and just society.

However I think it is also about the incompetence of the current administration and I hope the democrats will not withhold criticism of this incompetence at the same time as (I hope) they will argue for a social market instead of the lethal free market which Bush and his ilk promote.

[Cassandra]

3. Also in the LATimes as "The thin veneer of civilization"

I like this line:
"The sick, infirm, elderly, women and children are left behind in the stampede. Dark-suited men, with advanced degrees and impeccable table manners, elbow aside the competition, get their boarding passes and then retreat into a corner, avoiding other people's gaze — the gorilla who got the banana. All this just to avoid a night at the Holiday Inn in Des Moines."

[bemildred]

5. Well enough, but

It seems to me that "the war or all against all" is largely
the basis of economic and political theory in the USA, or we
are doing our level best to get there anyway.

Nevertheless the "war of all against all" is poppycock, always
has been, although a useful talking point. The war of "us" against
"them" is more like it, humans have always been intensely social
and dependent on the societies they live in. Individuality is great,
but individual humans live short lives and leave little behind them.

You can make a good argument that it is precisely the divisive
"fuck you Jack, I've got mine" social and economic dogma of the USA
that has lead to our precipitate decline these last few decades.

I do find it interesting that advocates of radical self-interest,
Ayn Randians and economic libertarians, always seem to feel that
they themselves are the pick of the litter.

[Jack Rabbit]

6. Agreed

That's downfall of libertarianism Ayn Rand's ojectivism. Human beings are at once individual and acquisitive animals (as they say and as some extreme forms of Marxism deny) but also a social being who cannot survive as an individual without banding together with his fellows.

If Howard Roark doesn't think so, just let him try to build the Fountainhead by himself with his own two hands. People like him need us more than we need him.

The decline of America may very well be due to this culture of selfishness. It is noteworthy that America's hey day may very well be thought of as that between the end of World War II and the onset of the Vietnam War, the foundation for which was laid by the New Deal.