Disaster utopianism: looking for paradise in catastrophic places.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: Culture and Reviews - A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster - Book review

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A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, by Rebecca Solnit, Viking, 353 pages, $17.95

IT ISN'T UNUSUAL for a TV reporter to get his facts wrong. It's rarer for the images that accompany his dispatch to flagrantly contradict what he says. But on January 21, broadcasting in the aftermath of the earthquake that devastated Haiti, CNN correspondent Ivan Watson fretted about "chaotic crowds" as the camera showed people who were calm and patient. When Watson announced that we were watching a "chaotic scramble" onto a rescue ship, this was illustrated by a group of refugees carefully, methodically passing a baby onto the boat. Then, while more men and women peacefully loaded their luggage in the background, the reporter asked the ship's owner his burning question: "Has anybody offered you any help with crowd control of these thousands of desperate people?"

Bizarre as the report was, it was only an especially egregious expression of beliefs that have taken hold in far more places than just CNN. The ideas are cultural truisms: that crowds are unruly and irrational, that people usually panic in an emergency, that disaster conditions are often marked by violence, theft, and other aggressive behavior. The assumptions are so ingrained that a Western reporter in Haiti can still see what he expects to see even as a different story unfolds right under his nose. (The fact that the crowd in question was poor and black may have influenced his assessment as well.)

Yet decades of empirical research have shown that the conduct captured by CNN's cameras is much more common than the conduct described by CNN's correspondent. The madness of crowds is an extraordinarily popular delusion: As New Scientist noted in a review of the literature last year, sociologists have found that mass gatherings "nearly always act in a highly rational way," so much so that often "the best thing authorities can do is leave a crowd to its own devices" Meanwhile, despite Hollywood's cliches to the contrary, it is very rare for people to panic during an emergency. And the typical natural or technological disaster is followed not by a Mad Max war of all against all but by mutual aid in the rubble. Crime declines. Bottom-up cooperation flowers. Looting is rare, and when it does occur it usually amounts to scavenging, not theft. (If a store is half collapsed, the staff is nowhere to be found, and the food inside is going to spoil soon, is it really robbery to take some?)

After the quake, Haiti did see its share of murders, muggings, and rapes. It's a high-crime country, and an earthquake isn't enough to eradicate every gangster's and-social instincts. But the rumor mill magnified those incidents into something much more monstrous, as though it were impossible to walk outside after dark without being attacked by machete-wielding land pirates.

With time, as more people sent word from within the country, a much more positive picture emerged. "We wound our way through the camp asking for injured people who needed to get to the hospital," the aid worker Sasha Kramer wrote in a dispatch for New American Media. "Despite everyone telling us that as soon as we did this we would be mobbed by people, I was amazed: As we approached each tent, people gently pointed us towards their neighbors, guiding us to those who were suffering the most." At the hospital, a truck dropped off some food. "We braced ourselves for the fighting that we had heard would come," Kramer recounted, "but in a miraculous display of restraint and compassion people lined up to get the food and one by one the bags were handed out without a single serious incident."

Inigo Gilmore of The Guardian painted a similar portrait, concluding that "any...