I'm kinda tired, and mostly lurking, but I did want to say how nice it was, in the interview, to hear Hayes and Solnit just toss the term "mutual aid" back and forth a few times like it's something people say every day. They don't, but I do think about it a lot, and have ever since reading Kropotkin's Mutual Aid about a zillion years ago. That book changed the way I looked at mammals and other animals, and groups of us all, and what "success" means in the survival of a species.
Listening to the interview, and having read the first couple of chapters of Solnit's book, it's all right there: cooperation being the go-to, the auto-pilot reaction of so many because it fucking makes sense, and the other knee jerk reaction of fear and suspicion, of fucking things up because you go overboard in your anxiety about what might happen.
It's not that terrible things never happen. They do, sometimes cruel, sometimes just slimy, often both. But I think, more often than not, people act out of mutual aid. It would be nice to harness that wonderful energy more often.
Nora Roberts' Chronicles of the One series starts with a plague that kills of much of the world population as well as bringing magic into the world; it shows different reactions from cooperative groups and government as well as being a fun read - not too romancy
Jeanne B's comment reminded me of another not-totally-dystopian novel, The Earth Abides by George Stewart (1949) - I'll let Wiki do the summary thing, but two notes, the first one kind of a side-note: they use DDT on everything after the disaster; clearly the harmful effects weren't well known at the time this was written. It's kind of like reading about women smoking while pregnant in old novels; it rankles, but of COURSE that's how it would be!
Earth Abides is a 1949 post-apocalyptic science fiction novel by American writer George R. Stewart. The novel tells the story of the fall of civilization from deadly disease and its rebirth. The story is set in the United States in the 1940s in Berkeley, California and told by a character, Isherwood Williams, who emerges from isolation in the mountains to find almost everyone dead.Earth Abides won the inaugural International Fantasy Award in 1951. It was included in Locus Magazine's list of best All Time Science Fiction in 1987 and 1998[2] and was a nominee to be entered into the Prometheus Hall of Fame.[3] In November 1950, it was adapted for the CBS radio program Escape as a two-part drama starring John Dehner.I'm glad I visited the wiki page; I didn't know about the awards or the radio program.
Anyway, note numero two: When the main character first emerges from the mountains to find the wreck of civilization, you think "oh this is going to be marauding bands, turf wars, zombies maybe!" and there is some of that (no zombies, sorry). But as he makes his way around the Bay Area, he discovers a rather large number of people, and they mostly band together to make things work. But ultimately the humans at the center of the story just make things work, by cooperating with each other, adapting, extemporizing, re-creating.
Ok, note number three: towards the end of the book, as the main character's grandkids and their friends are starting come into adulthood, the character goes through a depression as he realizes that the great artifacts of his fallen civilization - libraries, for instance - really don't mean much to the kids. As much as he wants to pass this great treasure to them, it just doesn't matter much in their world. It's an interesting tone at the close of the novel.
I love that movie. It is totally out of genre-comfort-zone for me (monsters, fear, rednecks) and yet totally IN my comfort zone because of the humor and the cooperation between the oddball characters. That whole scene in the desert when they are rock-hopping is awesome.
We actually got along very well with our downstairs neighbors - for a few days, anyway. We cooked outside and shared what we had. Sadly, after the era of good feelings passed things descended back to the way they were - but it was pleasant for a minute.
1) What surprised you in the interview? What's going to stick with you?
One surprise was Solnit's point "that everyday life is a kind of disaster of alienation and meaninglessness for so many people, and actual disasters, this sudden transformation and upending of everyday relations and systems, often liberates people from that. They suddenly have everything in common with the neighbors who are experiencing the same things." It's not like I didn't already intuit this in some fashion, but I had not previously seen it so well put. It's one of those points in a piece when you see it and think, "Yes, of course, that's exactly right, I never thought of it that way before."
Another surprise was the account of a half-million people being extemporaneously evacuated by boat out of lower Manhattan on 9/11. I did not know that had happened.
What I hope will stick with me is the reminder that people are often decent and will do the right thing because that is the thing they want to do.
2) What do you think of Solnit's suggestion that people in a disaster tend to be more cooperative than competitive?
I think she's right, and she presents the evidence.
3) What about her point about authorities' tendency to make things worse by trying to reimpose "order"? What warnings does that suggest for liberal lovers of Big Gummint?
"Order" and "Assistance" are two different things. They can overlap, to a broader mutual good, or they can generate an interference pattern that cancels out both order and assistance. They are manifestations of technology, in the broad sense of technology as the structured application of techniques, and as technology, they are independently intrinsically neither good nor bad, but depend upon how they are employed by people to determine if their effect is going to be for the good or bad.
4) How do you see Solnit's ideas playing out in the current pandemic?
Spot on. One point she makes, though not as explicitly as I'm about to, is how the great majority of us are wage-slaves, and this pandemic is forcing us to think about how those shackles are to be broken and cast aside.
5) What other stuff have you read/watched that looks at similar themes? Particularly, can you think of any post-apocalyptic fictions where instead of a Walking Dead hellscape where fellow survivors are as deadly as the zombies, people do the mutual aid thing?
I got nothing, but I got this: I think there's hope for us, and I insist on it.
Among the many things from the interview that I will remember is:
And people often think of my book as being entirely about these really socially positive things, but it's about the successes of civil society, with notable exceptions, including the racists in Hurricane Katrina, but also about the many kinds of failure of institutional authority and elites in moments like this.(emphasis added)
Which seems self-evident but like many issues still needs to be emphasized occasionally.
If by Libya you are referring to 2011, then you are implicitly setting up Qadhafi's dictatorship as "orderly", which is the kind of move that usually the State Department makes for pro-US dictatorships.
And people didn't run around shooting each other in Moldova, unless you're referring to Transnistria?
Seriously, I read the two "Parable" books at the beginning of the pandemic and I couldn't sleep for fear of imaginary rape/arson gangs and my child being stolen by fascist mobs for a week.
I'd have paid to see that. Once, IRL, I happened across 50+ ducks feasting on a scattering of birdseed or whatever about 6 feet across. I rounded the corner only to see a similarly sized mass of ducks on the run to do battle with them. A car pulled in and scattered them all before battle could commence, dammit. It would have been glorious.
Curiosity: I'm sure your training deals with how to identify and work with local leaders. Care to share some of that with us? Darker times may be coming.
I'm kinda tired, and mostly lurking, but I did want to say how nice it was, in the interview, to hear Hayes and Solnit just toss the term "mutual aid" back and forth a few times like it's something people say every day. They don't, but I do think about it a lot, and have ever since reading Kropotkin's Mutual Aid about a zillion years ago. That book changed the way I looked at mammals and other animals, and groups of us all, and what "success" means in the survival of a species.
Listening to the interview, and having read the first couple of chapters of Solnit's book, it's all right there: cooperation being the go-to, the auto-pilot reaction of so many because it fucking makes sense, and the other knee jerk reaction of fear and suspicion, of fucking things up because you go overboard in your anxiety about what might happen.
It's not that terrible things never happen. They do, sometimes cruel, sometimes just slimy, often both. But I think, more often than not, people act out of mutual aid. It would be nice to harness that wonderful energy more often.
Nora Roberts' Chronicles of the One series starts with a plague that kills of much of the world population as well as bringing magic into the world; it shows different reactions from cooperative groups and government as well as being a fun read - not too romancy
Jeanne B's comment reminded me of another not-totally-dystopian novel, The Earth Abides by George Stewart (1949) - I'll let Wiki do the summary thing, but two notes, the first one kind of a side-note: they use DDT on everything after the disaster; clearly the harmful effects weren't well known at the time this was written. It's kind of like reading about women smoking while pregnant in old novels; it rankles, but of COURSE that's how it would be!
Earth Abides is a 1949 post-apocalyptic science fiction novel by American writer George R. Stewart. The novel tells the story of the fall of civilization from deadly disease and its rebirth. The story is set in the United States in the 1940s in Berkeley, California and told by a character, Isherwood Williams, who emerges from isolation in the mountains to find almost everyone dead.Earth Abides won the inaugural International Fantasy Award in 1951. It was included in Locus Magazine's list of best All Time Science Fiction in 1987 and 1998[2] and was a nominee to be entered into the Prometheus Hall of Fame.[3] In November 1950, it was adapted for the CBS radio program Escape as a two-part drama starring John Dehner.I'm glad I visited the wiki page; I didn't know about the awards or the radio program.
Anyway, note numero two: When the main character first emerges from the mountains to find the wreck of civilization, you think "oh this is going to be marauding bands, turf wars, zombies maybe!" and there is some of that (no zombies, sorry). But as he makes his way around the Bay Area, he discovers a rather large number of people, and they mostly band together to make things work. But ultimately the humans at the center of the story just make things work, by cooperating with each other, adapting, extemporizing, re-creating.
Ok, note number three: towards the end of the book, as the main character's grandkids and their friends are starting come into adulthood, the character goes through a depression as he realizes that the great artifacts of his fallen civilization - libraries, for instance - really don't mean much to the kids. As much as he wants to pass this great treasure to them, it just doesn't matter much in their world. It's an interesting tone at the close of the novel.
I love that movie. It is totally out of genre-comfort-zone for me (monsters, fear, rednecks) and yet totally IN my comfort zone because of the humor and the cooperation between the oddball characters. That whole scene in the desert when they are rock-hopping is awesome.
We actually got along very well with our downstairs neighbors - for a few days, anyway. We cooked outside and shared what we had. Sadly, after the era of good feelings passed things descended back to the way they were - but it was pleasant for a minute.
Wow! If that's "all" respect, I'd hate to hear "no" respect!
Me too. Blissful sigh.
She was so very good.
Thanks for letting me know something I really thought interesting was so useless to you and that I shouldn't have bothered!
You have a great day, too!
To address the good doctor's questions --
1) What surprised you in the interview? What's going to stick with you?
One surprise was Solnit's point "that everyday life is a kind of disaster of alienation and meaninglessness for so many people, and actual disasters, this sudden transformation and upending of everyday relations and systems, often liberates people from that. They suddenly have everything in common with the neighbors who are experiencing the same things." It's not like I didn't already intuit this in some fashion, but I had not previously seen it so well put. It's one of those points in a piece when you see it and think, "Yes, of course, that's exactly right, I never thought of it that way before."
Another surprise was the account of a half-million people being extemporaneously evacuated by boat out of lower Manhattan on 9/11. I did not know that had happened.
What I hope will stick with me is the reminder that people are often decent and will do the right thing because that is the thing they want to do.
2) What do you think of Solnit's suggestion that people in a disaster tend to be more cooperative than competitive?
I think she's right, and she presents the evidence.
3) What about her point about authorities' tendency to make things worse by trying to reimpose "order"? What warnings does that suggest for liberal lovers of Big Gummint?
"Order" and "Assistance" are two different things. They can overlap, to a broader mutual good, or they can generate an interference pattern that cancels out both order and assistance. They are manifestations of technology, in the broad sense of technology as the structured application of techniques, and as technology, they are independently intrinsically neither good nor bad, but depend upon how they are employed by people to determine if their effect is going to be for the good or bad.
4) How do you see Solnit's ideas playing out in the current pandemic?
Spot on. One point she makes, though not as explicitly as I'm about to, is how the great majority of us are wage-slaves, and this pandemic is forcing us to think about how those shackles are to be broken and cast aside.
5) What other stuff have you read/watched that looks at similar themes? Particularly, can you think of any post-apocalyptic fictions where instead of a Walking Dead hellscape where fellow survivors are as deadly as the zombies, people do the mutual aid thing?
I got nothing, but I got this: I think there's hope for us, and I insist on it.
Among the many things from the interview that I will remember is:
And people often think of my book as being entirely about these really socially positive things, but it's about the successes of civil society, with notable exceptions, including the racists in Hurricane Katrina, but also about the many kinds of failure of institutional authority and elites in moments like this.(emphasis added)
Which seems self-evident but like many issues still needs to be emphasized occasionally.
"Hobbes in Hollywood"
Bet THAT went to his furry tiger head!
But seriously, why is any of this remotely as revelation? Cooperation is, after all, how humans pretty much conquered the planet...
If by Libya you are referring to 2011, then you are implicitly setting up Qadhafi's dictatorship as "orderly", which is the kind of move that usually the State Department makes for pro-US dictatorships.
And people didn't run around shooting each other in Moldova, unless you're referring to Transnistria?
What, so we can all feel like killing ourselves?
Seriously, I read the two "Parable" books at the beginning of the pandemic and I couldn't sleep for fear of imaginary rape/arson gangs and my child being stolen by fascist mobs for a week.
I'd have paid to see that. Once, IRL, I happened across 50+ ducks feasting on a scattering of birdseed or whatever about 6 feet across. I rounded the corner only to see a similarly sized mass of ducks on the run to do battle with them. A car pulled in and scattered them all before battle could commence, dammit. It would have been glorious.
Curiosity: I'm sure your training deals with how to identify and work with local leaders. Care to share some of that with us? Darker times may be coming.