A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit

She poses this as a corrective to Klein, whose argument she calls “surprisingly disempowering.” In fact the two forces can be seen as dialectical drives unleashed by catastrophe.

Solnit describes how disaster can lead to the opposite: citizens remaking society in a more integrated, communitarian mode. Klein outlines how authoritarian governments, backed by conservative economists, utilize disaster to force privatization and unjust social reforms. In some ways this book completes the picture painted by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine. In fact, the paradoxical joy many people find in tragic disasters suggests what’s normally lacking: “In a society in which participation, agency, purposefulness and freedom are all adequately present,” she writes, “a disaster would only be a disaster.” If it is in our nature to be deeply other-directed, then our increasingly individualistic, privatized culture is thwarting our deepest and best selves. This insight is more radical than it might seem. Are we, at core, selfish, greedy savages? Or are we cooperative, self-sacrificing nurturers? Solnit believes the response of ordinary citizens to catastrophe suggests the latter. This makes the question of human nature critical. Increasingly, environmentalists are turning away from considering humans and the environment separately. What disaster reveals, she argues, is the human longing for purpose and meaning - needs unfulfilled by a life devoted to getting and spending.

Her examples inspire, not as a stirring catalogue of good-doing but as a thoughtful assessment of what the human response to disaster can tell us about our political and social structures. Her book tells the stories of ordinary people who respond to extraordinary situations in what might seem like extraordinary ways - but are actually, according to Solnit’s argument, quite typical. I picked up Paradise with trepidation born of jingoistic overload.įortunately, Solnit is too keen a thinker to fall prey to sentiment. I did: I live four blocks north of the World Trade Center site and was evacuated from my home for over a month. Those who lived through any of the more recent events may cringe, anticipating bromides on human goodness and the American spirit. Here she investigates the startlingly egalitarian community responses to a range of natural and manmade disasters, focusing largely on the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the 1917 Halifax ship explosion, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina. But she is typically lauded for clear-eyed, incisive analysis, not soft-focus uplift. Not that Solnit, an award-winning cultural critic, is a pessimist. THE TITLE OF Rebecca Solnit’s new book sounds uncharacteristically inspirational.

A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit