Post-apocalyptic speculation is terribly fun. It’s
wide-open. There’s really nothing to go on, except previous post-apocalyptic
fantasies. The apocalypse hasn’t happened yet. Or has it?
In January 2020 I wrote a first draft of a post-nuclear war
apocalypse story. It’s a tired old sixties theme, OK. But there are hundreds
of nuclear warheads sitting in menace on fuming locked-and-loaded
transcontinental missiles right now, today, ready to fire at will. A politician’s
sweaty little finger can pull the trigger any time. We’ve almost forgotten
about them. As I was writing, Covid-19 hit. The nuke menace is pushed farther
into the background, seemingly in the past.
But only seemingly. I fear nukes more than climate change or pandemics. A rapid nuclear exchange could occur, that in one day would kill many millions and efface our current global civilization.
So I persisted working on my story. I imagined the usual scenes of panic, flight, looting, hoarding. Then I happened to read an article by Lauren Groff on “preppers” in the March 2020 Harper’s. The preppers are groups preparing themselves to survive after the apocalypse, whatever causes it. They focus acquiring guns and ammo much more than, say, being healthy and fit in preparation for apocalypse. They seem mainly worried about defending themselves from mass humanity going berserk. Groff says humanity wouldn’t do that.
If there’s never been an apocalypse, how would she know? Well, big disasters, if big enough, are a lot like the apocalypse, and they have been studied. The social aftermaths of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent flooding of New Orleans, and the obliteration of Hiroshima have been studied, among others. The results have been well-documented but aren’t well known. The studies were done just after the disasters were no longer news.
The results are surprising. People directly affected by disaster don’t panic. At first many are stunned, startled. But after that, they don’t panic, they don’t riot, and they usually don’t “loot.” What they do is emerge from their damaged buildings and quickly start gathering together and helping each other. Ad hoc organizations, like soup kitchens and rescue teams, spring up. Mutual aid rules the day, with altruism not far behind. Rather than fleeing disaster zones, the usual phenomenon is a convergence of people coming to help out.
Where panic often occurs is among the powers that be, who are usually some distance from the actual disaster zone. Governments lose touch with what’s happening. They fear losing control. They learn of people in the affected areas distributing food from warehouses and damaged stores, often with the owners’ permission, but this is seen as “looting.” The government says they are “out of control.” They send in the troops, who only make things worse.
This is not speculation. Groff’s Harper’s article on preppers references Rebecca Solnit’s masterful 2009 book A Paradise Built from Hell – The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. Solnit did in-depth research on five major disasters, including the major twentieth century earthquakes in San Francisco (1906) and Mexico City (1985), the destruction of Halifax (1917) when three megatons of high explosives on an ammunition ship went off (the largest man-made explosion to that date), the 9/11 New York attacks (2001), and Hurricane Katrina and its ensuing floods (2005). Her book presents vivid eyewitness accounts and scholarly research she gathered on these and other large-scale disasters, which testify that people naturally come together, overlook differences and self-organize to help themselves and others in disasters, displaying both mutual aid and altruism (two different things), and this is the overwhelming social response in such circumstances. Her research included visits to each of the five places to interview survivors and their descendants, and she spent weeks on the ground in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, over multiple visits. She also unearthed a seldom-referenced body of work in a sub-specialty called disaster sociology, including notably work by Charles Fritz, a sociologist who surveyed the civilian response on the ground after World War II bombings in Europe and Hiroshima.1 Fritz established the Disaster Research Project at the University of Chicago, and later moved to the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware, which continues the work.
Each of the disasters Solnit researched had the emergence of mutual aid and other empathetic responses in common. Each aftermath had its unique aspects. For example, the San Francisco 1906 earthquake had a particularly lively set of neighborhood kitchens as spontaneous food distribution, but also a particularly vicious and illegal reaction by federal troops and local police. The 1985 Mexico City earthquake was notable for the emergence of civil society, which was a concept consciously discussed and promoted as an alternative to government power. Equally notable was the continuation and strengthening of non-governmental civil society after the earthquake, which continues to play an important role in Mexican society today. Hurricane Katrina is described as “not a disaster, but a catastrophe.” The physical disaster was far worse than the others because it lasted so long: after the hurricane came the floods which continued for weeks. Not only was the government’s reaction misguided and oppressive to the hardest hit, there was a strong surge of vigilantism which killed many. New Orleans post-Katrina also highlighted the divergence that occurs between reality and the media’s presentation and popular understanding of the course of events. The rabid, racist, and lethal vigilantism was never widely reported, while the reported crime and looting of the poor black population was largely fiction. Solnit was on the ground for this. “If the facts don’t fit the beliefs, murders in plain view can go largely unnoticed,” she reports.
Solnit says, “In the absence of government, people govern themselves. Everyone from Hobbes to Hollywood filmmakers has assumed this means ‘law of the jungle’ chaos. What in fact takes place is another kind of anarchy, where the citizenry by and large organize and care for themselves. In the immediate aftermath of disaster, government fails as if it had been overthrown and civil society succeeds as though it has revolted: the task of government, usually described as ‘reestablishing order,’ is to take back the city and the power to govern it, as well as to perform practical functions- restoring power, cleaning up rubble.”
Ryan Christopher’s Civilized to Death – The Price of Progress (2019) gives us an understanding of how humans lived and cooperated to meet the challenges of their environment before there was a state or civilization. This gives us a baseline for what we might revert to when the state and civilization suddenly disappear in a big disaster, or after the apocalypse. Ryan explodes the idea, expressed by Hobbes in 1651 that primitive human life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” It’s widely assumed today to be the condition of homo sapiens’ lives since the origin of the species, “at least three hundred thousand years ago,” until the introduction of agriculture and the political state. He cites scientists who’ve shown that the hunter-gatherer (aka forager) life, which homo sapiens lived for about 95% of its existence, was not solitary, nasty, brutish, or short, and its poorness was only in reference to our present civilization’s pathological and unequally distributed excesses.
With regard to brutish and solitary, evidence shows foragers organized into highly cooperative groups of 150 or less who generally did not compete either within or between groups. These conclusions come partly from archaeology but mostly from studies of over 100 small surviving hunter-gatherer societies observed over the past century. The dog-eat-dog “law of the jungle” never really was.
The rise of agriculture was an adaptive response to environmental conditions at the end of the last ice age, not upward progress from a nasty brutish primal condition. It did not result in better lives. Studies of modern day foragers show plentiful calories and protein, and the variety in their diet, made possible by their mobility, provided robustness to weather vagaries. Skeletal remains of ancient foragers show that they “faced occasional hunger but not extended starvation.”
But only seemingly. I fear nukes more than climate change or pandemics. A rapid nuclear exchange could occur, that in one day would kill many millions and efface our current global civilization.
So I persisted working on my story. I imagined the usual scenes of panic, flight, looting, hoarding. Then I happened to read an article by Lauren Groff on “preppers” in the March 2020 Harper’s. The preppers are groups preparing themselves to survive after the apocalypse, whatever causes it. They focus acquiring guns and ammo much more than, say, being healthy and fit in preparation for apocalypse. They seem mainly worried about defending themselves from mass humanity going berserk. Groff says humanity wouldn’t do that.
If there’s never been an apocalypse, how would she know? Well, big disasters, if big enough, are a lot like the apocalypse, and they have been studied. The social aftermaths of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent flooding of New Orleans, and the obliteration of Hiroshima have been studied, among others. The results have been well-documented but aren’t well known. The studies were done just after the disasters were no longer news.
The results are surprising. People directly affected by disaster don’t panic. At first many are stunned, startled. But after that, they don’t panic, they don’t riot, and they usually don’t “loot.” What they do is emerge from their damaged buildings and quickly start gathering together and helping each other. Ad hoc organizations, like soup kitchens and rescue teams, spring up. Mutual aid rules the day, with altruism not far behind. Rather than fleeing disaster zones, the usual phenomenon is a convergence of people coming to help out.
Where panic often occurs is among the powers that be, who are usually some distance from the actual disaster zone. Governments lose touch with what’s happening. They fear losing control. They learn of people in the affected areas distributing food from warehouses and damaged stores, often with the owners’ permission, but this is seen as “looting.” The government says they are “out of control.” They send in the troops, who only make things worse.
This is not speculation. Groff’s Harper’s article on preppers references Rebecca Solnit’s masterful 2009 book A Paradise Built from Hell – The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. Solnit did in-depth research on five major disasters, including the major twentieth century earthquakes in San Francisco (1906) and Mexico City (1985), the destruction of Halifax (1917) when three megatons of high explosives on an ammunition ship went off (the largest man-made explosion to that date), the 9/11 New York attacks (2001), and Hurricane Katrina and its ensuing floods (2005). Her book presents vivid eyewitness accounts and scholarly research she gathered on these and other large-scale disasters, which testify that people naturally come together, overlook differences and self-organize to help themselves and others in disasters, displaying both mutual aid and altruism (two different things), and this is the overwhelming social response in such circumstances. Her research included visits to each of the five places to interview survivors and their descendants, and she spent weeks on the ground in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, over multiple visits. She also unearthed a seldom-referenced body of work in a sub-specialty called disaster sociology, including notably work by Charles Fritz, a sociologist who surveyed the civilian response on the ground after World War II bombings in Europe and Hiroshima.1 Fritz established the Disaster Research Project at the University of Chicago, and later moved to the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware, which continues the work.
Each of the disasters Solnit researched had the emergence of mutual aid and other empathetic responses in common. Each aftermath had its unique aspects. For example, the San Francisco 1906 earthquake had a particularly lively set of neighborhood kitchens as spontaneous food distribution, but also a particularly vicious and illegal reaction by federal troops and local police. The 1985 Mexico City earthquake was notable for the emergence of civil society, which was a concept consciously discussed and promoted as an alternative to government power. Equally notable was the continuation and strengthening of non-governmental civil society after the earthquake, which continues to play an important role in Mexican society today. Hurricane Katrina is described as “not a disaster, but a catastrophe.” The physical disaster was far worse than the others because it lasted so long: after the hurricane came the floods which continued for weeks. Not only was the government’s reaction misguided and oppressive to the hardest hit, there was a strong surge of vigilantism which killed many. New Orleans post-Katrina also highlighted the divergence that occurs between reality and the media’s presentation and popular understanding of the course of events. The rabid, racist, and lethal vigilantism was never widely reported, while the reported crime and looting of the poor black population was largely fiction. Solnit was on the ground for this. “If the facts don’t fit the beliefs, murders in plain view can go largely unnoticed,” she reports.
Solnit says, “In the absence of government, people govern themselves. Everyone from Hobbes to Hollywood filmmakers has assumed this means ‘law of the jungle’ chaos. What in fact takes place is another kind of anarchy, where the citizenry by and large organize and care for themselves. In the immediate aftermath of disaster, government fails as if it had been overthrown and civil society succeeds as though it has revolted: the task of government, usually described as ‘reestablishing order,’ is to take back the city and the power to govern it, as well as to perform practical functions- restoring power, cleaning up rubble.”
Ryan Christopher’s Civilized to Death – The Price of Progress (2019) gives us an understanding of how humans lived and cooperated to meet the challenges of their environment before there was a state or civilization. This gives us a baseline for what we might revert to when the state and civilization suddenly disappear in a big disaster, or after the apocalypse. Ryan explodes the idea, expressed by Hobbes in 1651 that primitive human life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” It’s widely assumed today to be the condition of homo sapiens’ lives since the origin of the species, “at least three hundred thousand years ago,” until the introduction of agriculture and the political state. He cites scientists who’ve shown that the hunter-gatherer (aka forager) life, which homo sapiens lived for about 95% of its existence, was not solitary, nasty, brutish, or short, and its poorness was only in reference to our present civilization’s pathological and unequally distributed excesses.
With regard to brutish and solitary, evidence shows foragers organized into highly cooperative groups of 150 or less who generally did not compete either within or between groups. These conclusions come partly from archaeology but mostly from studies of over 100 small surviving hunter-gatherer societies observed over the past century. The dog-eat-dog “law of the jungle” never really was.
The rise of agriculture was an adaptive response to environmental conditions at the end of the last ice age, not upward progress from a nasty brutish primal condition. It did not result in better lives. Studies of modern day foragers show plentiful calories and protein, and the variety in their diet, made possible by their mobility, provided robustness to weather vagaries. Skeletal remains of ancient foragers show that they “faced occasional hunger but not extended starvation.”
Ryan cites, among others, a
“powerfully argued” 2001 paper by Richerson, Boyd and Bettinger.2
It is a fascinating paper. It
traces the environmental forces that drove the development and spread of
agriculture in the Holocene epoch, which is roughly the past 11,000 years.
Humans evolved from more primitive hominins in the Pleistocene, the roughly 2 ½
million year ice age that immediately preceded the Holocene. They conclude
agriculture could never have developed during the Pleistocene, no matter how
smart we were, because the environment changed so drastically so often. Then, during the Holocene, in which more stable and warmer
climate conditions have prevailed, agriculture thrived, feeding larger
populations, albeit not necessarily more healthy and happy ones. Unfortunately,
they also conclude that, however healthful and well-adapted we are naturally to
a hunter-gatherer way of life, that way of life could not support anything like
today’s world population. They suggest agriculture is “compulsory” during the
Holocene, since it outcompetes foraging in land use efficiency. But their
conclusion does not imply the necessity of oligarchical social organization,
which often accompanies agricultural production. David Graeber and David
Wengrow’s 2018 paper How to Change the Course of
Human History3
cites other archaeological and anthropological evidence that early agricultural
societies could thrive with more egalitarian organizations than those in early
Holocene Mesopotamia and South America that are better known. So while
agriculture may be necessary for large human populations to thrive, the social
organization needed to implement it is flexible. We are not bound by historical
inevitability to live with elite classes and suffering masses, in order to have
efficient agriculture and industry.
In his conclusion, Ryan's Civilized to Death references Rebecca Solnit’s book and Charles Fritz’s studies of disaster victims, which show how “When civilization falls away, we catch a glimpse of human nature in the raw.” And that nature is socially egalitarian, physically mobile, and psychologically grateful for what is received from nature.
These works give us some idea of how any surviving humanity might behave in the immediate aftermath of a global apocalypse, and in their following struggles to adapt and survive. Their stories might not make for rip-roaring Mad Max movie scripts, but reality might provide more satisfying stories in the long run.
In his conclusion, Ryan's Civilized to Death references Rebecca Solnit’s book and Charles Fritz’s studies of disaster victims, which show how “When civilization falls away, we catch a glimpse of human nature in the raw.” And that nature is socially egalitarian, physically mobile, and psychologically grateful for what is received from nature.
These works give us some idea of how any surviving humanity might behave in the immediate aftermath of a global apocalypse, and in their following struggles to adapt and survive. Their stories might not make for rip-roaring Mad Max movie scripts, but reality might provide more satisfying stories in the long run.
[1]
See Fritz, Charles, Disasters and Mental Health: Therapeutic Principles
Drawn from Disaster Studies, University of Delaware Disaster Research
Center, 1996, available at https://mutualaiddisasterrelief.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Disasters-and-Mental-Health-Therapeutic-Principles-Drawn-From-Disaster-Studies.pdf
[2]
Richerson et. al. Was Agriculture Impossible During the Pleistocene but
Mandatory During the Holocene? A Climate Change Hypothesis, American
Antiquity, Vol. 66, No. 3 (Jul., 2001), pp. 387-411, available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/2694241
[3] Graeber and Wengrow, How to Change the Course of Human History, Eurozine, March 2, 2018. https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-history/
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