Shifting Paradigms

Duly, but, happily, not dully, completed reading last year's November 5 issue of The New York Review of Books with Bill McKibben's In the Face of Catastrophe: A Surprise, a review of a book by Rebecca Solnit about communities that arise in times of disaster, generally, though not exclusively, the natural sort. I've yet to find anything quite as gripping in the other two mags I'm now embarked on, the December 3 edition of TNYRB being an especial let-down after the giddy heights of November. In fact, it was my third reading of the McKibben piece which seems to me extraordinarily thought-provoking - though perhaps it's slightly more accurate to say that it's Solnit's book that's doing the real provocation.

McKibben says of her work: A Paradise Built in Hell is an 8.5 on the intellectual Richter scale. It opens a breach in the walls of received wisdom that one hopes many other thinkers will rush through. I'm not sure I'd be classified as a thinker in McKibben's sense - I think he's referring to those movers and shakers at the cutting edge of thought, as it were - but I must say, what I read of Solnit's ideas certainly made me question some of my deepest assumptions about human nature. Essentially she questions the whole Hobbesian package regarding the law of the jungle governing the deepest roots of our behaviour. It seems that in instances like the Hurricane Katrina saga people's essential instincts were to help each other - despite the story the mainstream media felt necessary to spin, possibly because it was felt to be what should have happened according to our models of human behaviour. The lawlessness set in when the authorities decided some law was necessary.

Now all this sounds suspiciously utopian in its drift. But it chimes with a few things I've learned and noticed over the years. At the very least, it's a reminder that the world and those on it are often a lot more complicated than our mental models of them can allow for.