Another world is possible — and a disaster may be just the thing to get us there.

If I can claim to have had a political education, it certainly wasn’t of a systematic sort. This is not to say, however, that it was haphazard or inconsistent. Rather, politics in my family was kind of like an heirloom soup tureen that sits on a cabinet shelf  — unassumingly present, and ready to be taken out when the occasion called for it.

My parents were of the kind of progressives seldom seen these days — more yippie than hippie, more punch than crunch. The typical issues concerned them. They protested the Vietnam War and the panoply of social injustices, and didn’t trouble themselves too much with turning on, tuning in or dropping out. (My mother somehow managed to make it through the sixties without ever sampling pot. She truly didn’t inhale. Ever.) To this day my father prides himself on the fact that he first registered to vote with the Socialist Workers’ party. And, though he’s no one’s Bolshevik these days, he does preserve a bit of the old radical, albeit in a more subdued form. A muted Red, you might say.

My parents’ campus radicalism was curtailed by the arrival of a new member of the household in the person of yours truly. Parental responsibilities began to take precedent over political action. Day care trumped sit-ins; pediatricians stole the limelight from political activists. But such heady ferment was subsiding for the nation generally. I was born just as the sun was setting on acid rock but hadn’t quite risen on stadium rock — before Jefferson Airplane had fully transitioned to Jefferson Starship, you might say. And, as we all know, it wasn’t until 1984 that, after the prolonged midnight of the Ford and Carter years, President Ronald Reagan proclaimed that it was indeed “morning in America” once again.

Morning always deals most cruelly with those who stay up late partying the night before, wishing away the dawn. For his part, my father still gets his political dander up at the very mention of Ronald Reagan. Reagan, my father was convinced, managed to ruin the United States by one deft and devastatingly effective rhetorical trick — getting the electorate, or at least a statistical majority of it, to believe that government was a Leviathan of the most antagonistic sort, interdicting individual citizens’ entrepreneurial  impulse and aborting prosperity.

There might be a note of rueful envy in my father’s pronouncement, a sort of grudging admiration for the Goldwaterian revolution Reagan managed to cement. After all, Reagan heralded from a minority, ultra-right faction of the Republican party, one which abode but uneasily the industrialist–patrician demesne the party had for so long been. Reagan’s ascendancy couldn’t help but awe radicals on the other end of the spectrum, being as it was an manifestation of their own political aspirations reflected in a glass darkly, one which took less than twenty years to realize.

Of course, Reagan and his cohorts commandeered the ship of state only with the intention of running it aground and dismantling it for scrap. And this is what galled my father particularly. If my political education, such as it was, had any sort of cornerstone principle, it’s that, as my father maintained time and again, government can serves as a bulwark against the predations of unfettered capitalism, if not as a mechanism of positive change. This conviction of course implies that government as an institution is in itself indifferent (were it a character in Dungeons & Dragons, its alignment would perhaps be “neutral good”), but in the hands of people of good will or ill becomes an instrument of that will.

If there’s anything to regret about disasters, it’s that the remarkable communities which spring up during them are all too quickly folded back into the status quo.

Such a notion, I discovered later in life, was utterly demolished by the French historian of ideas Michel Foucault. His bald pate rose serenely above the froth of such fatuous political notions and stilled it. The very idea of government is an expression of power, and irremediably so, because power remains for Foucault immutably a priori. History properly recounted is, then, simply a matter of who’s exercising power and who’s having it exercised on them — or, to borrow one of Slovenian theorist Slavoj Žižek’s favorite jokes, which he himself lifts from Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 film To Be or Not to Be, a matter of who’s doing the concentrating and who’s doing the camping. On the world stage, actors and roles might change, but the mise en scène endures unaltered.

The white-hot fervor of soixant-huitard radicalism Foucault plunged into the icy bath of his analysis, and in so doing precipitated a second stage in my political development, a shift or Kehre from a rather orthodox Marxist stance to one perhaps best described as a sort of left libertarianism. My father brought me to an awareness of the state, and Foucault taught me to distrust it. And frankly, Marxists’ reliance on the state is a little too … well … total for me. One of the most brilliant (and cantankerous) Leftist critics of Marx, anarchist Murray Bookchin, puts the deficiencies of Marxian socialism best:

Hierarchy, sexism and renunciation do not disappear with “democratic centralism,” a “revolutionary leadership,” a “worker’s state,” and a “planned economy.” On the contrary, hierarchy, sexism, and renunciation function all the more effectively if centralism appears to be “democratic,” if leaders appear to be “revolutionaries,” if the state appears to belong to the “workers,” and if commodity production appears to be “planned.” Insofar as the socialist project fails to note the very existence of these elements, much less their vicious role, the “revolution” itself becomes a façade for counterrevolution. Marx’s vision notwithstanding, what tends to “wither away” after this kind of “revolution” is not the state but the very consciousness of domination.

Structures of domination remain such regardless of whether Peter’s running the show, or Paul. Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

But what’s one to choose as an alternative? Bookchin naturally prescribes anarchism, but anarchism can seem an unpalatable option, conjuring as it does images of gutter punks and political assassins. Moreover, to choose anarchism is to condemn oneself to an eternal recurrence of defiant yet ultimately ineffectual gestures — smashing Starbucks’ storefront windows, U-locking one’s neck to sequoias, or what have you. Or so I used to think. This recent piece by Bill McKibben (gated), author of Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, has led me to reevaluate my somewhat noncommittal affinity (if this isn’t an oxymoron) for anarchism.

Appearing in the November 5, 2009  issue of The New York Review of Books, McKibben’s piece reviews journalist Rebecca Solnit’s latest book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, which, as the title suggests, chronicles those moments when a cataclysmic event such as a fire or earthquake shakes the citizenry from its dogmatic slumber and forces them into novel way of relating. As McKibben puts it:

[Solnit] doesn’t long for disasters — they are, she writes, “most basically terrible, tragic, grievous.” But they are not just that. As she proves with inspired historiography, disasters often produce remarkable temporary communities—paradises of a sort amid the rubble, where people, acting on their own and without direction from the authorities, manage to provide for each other.

People’s responses to emergencies, Solnit insists, are quite unlike their popular representations in film and television. Seldom in such situations does one encounter mindless panic or a Hobbesian war of each against each, but, rather, quite the opposite. People take initiative, often revealing talents or virtues perhaps they themselves didn’t even know they had. Certainly such situations have their opportunists, profiteers and other scoundrels. More often than not, however, individuals taken to be villains under ordinary circumstances show themselves as heroes in extraordinary. McKibben relates Solnit’s account of financial executives, paragons of selfishness and class enemies if there ever were any, calmly handing strangers into stairwells as jet fuel burned just stories above or below them. (The disaster in question was, of course, the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City.)

Calamity amity: disasters engender unlikely utopias.

Solnit’s thesis is that it’s safer to bank on people’s keeping it together in extreme circumstances than on their coming unglued — unless the people in question happen to be the power elite, that is. McKibben makes a special point of highlighting Solnit’s revelation that no disaster is quite so devastating as it is for the great and the good. The spontaneous cooperation which arises in emergency situations presents a direct challenge to their power, serving as a sort of object lesson of the latter’s superfluity. “Governments and their ancillary institutions like the Red Cross are well equipped to handle small disasters, and can be effective in larger ones too — the Asian tsunami of 2004 was one example, and Solnit describes Icelanders evacuating volcano-threatened villages, and the much-larger-scale example of Cuba, which has weathered an endless string of hurricanes (Katrina included) with minimal loss of life because of well-conducted evacuations,” McKibben writes:

But in many cases, the powerful do seem to come slightly unhinged. The existing order is “being tested at what it does least well,” while community groups are suddenly emerging to fill the vacuum. This leads to what a number of sociologists have called “elite panic,” which Solnit compares to the fear of Chinese emperors that they would lose the “mandate of heaven.” Think of the scorn with which the victims of Katrina greeted President Bush when he finally made his way to New Orleans. Think of the way his approval ratings slumped, never to recover. It is no accident that governments usually describe what they are doing in the wake of disasters as “reestablishing order.”

The order in need of reestablishing after disasters, it goes without saying, is the elites’ order, one replete with manifold modes of domination. But in the interim, before such order is reestablished, workaday folks glimpse the power that resides in them alone, one which the dominant culture typically short-circuits with its constant exhortations to earn and spend. It’s as if principles of anarchism — not theoretical anarchism, but a practical, functioning sort — are inscribed in the human genome. Indeed, if there’s anything to regret about disasters, its that the remarkable communities (Solnit goes so far as to call them “utopian”) which spring up during them are all too quickly folded back into the status quo. Yet, short-lived as these communities are, they endure long enough to make me believe that there’s something behind the stenciled graffiti I so often see emblazoned on walls, park benches and sidewalks: Another world is possible.

Anton would love to hear from you. Drop him a line at generationbubble [at] gmail [dot] com.

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