The veneer of civilization: utterly removed

National Review, Sept 26, 2005 by Theodore Dalrymple

THE French socialist philosopher who was much ridiculed by Marx as a sentimental petit-bourgeois moralist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, is now remembered mainly for his aphorism, so good that he repeated it many times, "Property is theft." But in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the reverse of this celebrated but preposterous dictum has actually become true: Theft is property.

Pictures of the looting that followed the devastation in New Orleans have been flashed around the world. Everyone is, or at least pretends to be, shocked and horrified, as if the breakdown of law and order couldn't happen here, wherever here happens to be. Smugness is, after all, one of the most pleasant of feelings; but for myself, I have very little doubt that it could, and would, happen where I live, in Britain, under the same or similar conditions. New Orleans shows us in the starkest possible way the reality of the thin blue line that protects us from barbarism and mob rule.

Of course, an unknown proportion of the looting must have arisen from genuine need and desperation. Who among us would not help himself to food and water if he and his family were hungry and thirsty, and there were no other source of such essentials to hand?

But the pictures that have been printed in the world's newspapers are not those of people maddened by hunger and thirst, but those of people wading through water clutching boxes of goods that are clearly not for immediate consumption. There are pictures of people standing outside stores, apparently discussing what to take and how to transport it, and of men loading the trunks of cars with a dozen cartons of nonessentials. They are thinking ahead, to when the normal economy reestablishes itself, and the goods that they have stolen will have a monetary value once more.

Moreover, desperation for food and drink hardly explains why rescue helicopters should have been fired at, and a pediatric hospital attacked by a gang on the lookout for whatever it could find. The fact is--or perhaps I should more modestly say that it is likely--that the conditions brought about by Hurricane Katrina actually suit a ruthless element of society that wants to prolong them a little, to protect its unaccustomed power and freedom to extort. In conditions of anarchy, a crude and violent order, based upon brute force and psychopathic ruthlessness, soon establishes itself, which regards philanthropy not as a friend but as an enemy and a threat.

Is it enough just to sit back and sigh that human nature was ever thus, and that what has happened in New Orleans is exactly what any attentive reader of William Golding's Lord of the Flies would have predicted? In that book, you might remember, a group of English schoolchildren, all from good and civilized homes, is cast ashore on an isolated tropical island without adult supervision. Before long, a kind of savage order exerts itself, with the most ruthless rising to positions of leadership. In other words, take external constraint away from even the most civilized (as the English still prided themselves on being in 1954, when the book was published), and savagery results because raw human nature decrees that it should.

Yet this is perhaps a little too easy and falsely comforting. After all, even in New Orleans, most of the people left in the city after the hurricane had devastated it were not looters, at least not of items carried off wholesale for future sale. The roaming gangs that so complicated the rescue effort, and that preyed on people more unfortunate than they, were a comparatively small proportion of the population. While it is true that all of us who were born with original sin (or whatever you want to call man's fundamental natural flaws) are capable of savagery in the right circumstances, by no means all of us immediately lose our veneer of civilization in conditions of adversity, however great. Aveneer may be thin, but this makes it more, not less, precious, and its upkeep more, not less, important.

Moreover, there is a very uncomfortable question that we have a duty to ask: Is the kind of behavior seen in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina inevitable after a natural disaster of such proportions? If it isn't, what does this tell us about New Orleans, the United States, and any other place--such as, I believe, Britain--where the same conduct would have made itself evident?

The experience of foreign survivors of the tsunami that caused such fatal damage throughout coastal Southeast Asia, and that of those who survived the hurricane in New Orleans, have been very different, or at least very differently reported. I suspect that the difference in reported experience is real rather than a journalistic artifact.

The survivors of the tsunami reported their terror at the size and destructive force of the wave, of course, but in no instance that I recall did they mention having been robbed by other survivors, let along going in fear of armed gangs. And there were no reports after the recent floods in Bombay, which produced destruction of homes and caused death on a scale not so very different from the hurricane in New Orleans, of looting or other forms of public disorder.