There is an
idea that floats around the boundaries of discourse about civilization, wherein
a sudden lack of civilization instantly causes people to turn upon each other,
because humans are inherently selfish, greedy and impulsive, held in check by
Society and always waiting for the chance to grab everything they can, unable
to trust each other and coordinate any kind of collective survival when
everything falls apart. Lord of the Flies, and all that. Every Man for Himself.
One wonders
what it would take for this scenario to actually happen, because the immediate
aftermath of every natural disaster has the affected people trying to do
whatever they can for each other. The situation within the New Orleans Superdome
during Hurricane Katrina might serve as a counterexample, considering the
reports of chaos, sexual assault and death; as it happens there were only four actual
deaths inside, three of elders with medical conditions and one of a man who
jumped from the bleachers. As for the rest, such reports have never been
substantiated, nor supported by witness testimony. Thus the Superdome's
infamous reputation stands as an example to what people think happens in a
crisis, versus what actually happens.
I imagine
that things play out this way because everyone understands the situation to be
temporary and locally limited, with aid flowing in from outside as swiftly as
possible. A complete and sudden collapse of civilization might show different
effects as everyone decides their personal survival now depends entirely on
the immediate acquisition and hoarding of resources.
For the
most part humanity has not suffered a sudden worldwide systems collapse since
whatever caused the genetic bottleneck seventy thousand years ago. However, the
effects of the Black Plague in Europe got about as close as anything ever did
to an Apocalypse, so the behavior of the population in those four years could
be instructive. What DID they do?
Effects
varied depending on location, with some cities quarantining whole families
together, some places having family members abandon each other in fear, some
places having people try to tend to the sick and thereby dying themselves. A
mixed bag on the whole.
What about
today's plague, then?
Mostly a
matter of people trying to stay away from each other physically but keep in
touch over the wires, and do whatever they can for each other without exposing
each other to danger.
What about
today's riots?
Mostly a
matter of protestors providing First Aid to each other, sending each other
messages about how to survive a riot, and sending money to bail-relief
organizations, as the police seem to be inciting most of the violence in any
given area. If people within the mess are running away from each other it is
because the tear gas forces them to disperse. They run back as soon as they have a chance to wash out the eyes of the victims.
What about
actual shipwreck-stranding scenarios?
in 1965 six
schoolboys wrecked their ship on a small island south of Tonga and had the
perfect opportunity to re-create the Lord of the Flies scenario. Far from
collapsing into chaos the children worked with each other to survive on an
island everyone thought was uninhabitable. Apparently they did their work well
enough that they had time to set up a rudimentary badminton court.
We hear so
much of evil deeds that it is easy to believe evil lies at the heart of
humanity, and that this basic instinct would be the death of any efforts for
immediate survival, as every person turned upon each other, as if they had been
waiting for that chance all along. I think it is more accurate to say that
humans treat each other poorly when their societies are solid enough that
selfishness and rough treatment do not pose immediate risks to survival. As
soon as such actions pose clear risks the game changes, unless one is a suicidal fool.
And yet --
in the moment of someone's peril their rescuers rarely wait to make this
calculation. Perhaps the desire to rescue someone is more of an instinct than a
rational response. It doesn't always happen, of course, but usually it takes a
great deal of enmity to ignore that desire, and if such enmity is less than
personal, it is built out of a great deal of politics, ethnic chauvinism and
propaganda. Those tend to blow away when the hurricane winds approach.
I imagine
we wouldn't have survived the last seventy thousand years without that
instinct. Most of those millennia were well before anyone had the chance to
build any surplus food stores from agriculture. Those were ages of hunger,
lives spent from one end to the other in wandering, facing blizzards here and
forest fires there, snake bites and broken bones, terrible wounds and blinding
disease -- and yet, those who suffered survived, and we're here to remember them.
In The Mist a few of the the characters assert that humanity is
unstable, insane, monstrous, kept from killing each other just by the thin veil
of normalcy, at each other's throats the moment order breaks down -- "you
put two people in a room together and they'll start picking sides and dreaming
up reasons to kill each other," as Ollie says.
In my
experience putting two strangers in a room will result in either tense silence
or pleasant small talk. Maybe that's just how the culture of my valley works,
and elsewhere people are more prone to picking sides?
But you
have to have sides external to both parties for that to happen and sudden
disasters tend to obscure those externalities, leaving only...someone else, someone to talk to, someone to hold onto, maybe no more than a buoy in a storm but better than nothing when all else is water and wind.
When you were a young one, what did you run to after any trouble? Arms to hold you and a voice that soothed your fears. You lost this habit as the years went by, but it is not all gone away. We still try to hold each other when there is nothing else to hold.
You would think that in
The Mist the affected people would thus huddle together in their fear
rather than tear each other apart, if the situation is actually a matter of
survival. It is not
as though these people are suffering the paranoia that arises from creeping
disease. Their basic survival instincts are not driving individuals apart as
they would in a plague scenario. At least not until Mrs. Carmody blames the
Mist on a couple of the kids and orders them to be sacrificed. Before that
point everyone is just being stupid and selfish in their panic, as if none of
them actually cared about each other's survival, as if their instinct in the
face of danger was to scatter instead of run to each other --
I can
hardly call that realistic. If the movie shows such panic causing one death
after another then it appears to argue that such actions do not help groups of
people survive, and to say thereafter that humans are inherently selfish in
survival situations is to run right into the solid fact that we're still alive in a
cold and dangerous world.
In The Dark Knight the Joker says that civilized people will devour
each other as soon as the chips are down. If he's right it's only in terms of a
well-built civilization. Without that solid foundation the only solid
foundation we have is each other. We are not savage as a primal instinct, but
as an option enabled by living settled and easy.
As soon as
that civilization is shaken to pieces, we see the primal instinct of human
beings clearly -- it is the sight of one hand reaching out to another.