It Always Lies Below
By Timothy Garton Ash
08 September , 2005
The GuardianBefore our attention wanders on to the next headline story, let's learn Katrina's big lesson. This is not about the incompetence of the Bush administration, the scandalous neglect of poor black people in America, or our unpreparedness for major natural disasters - though all of those apply. Katrina's big lesson is that the crust of civilisation on which we tread is always wafer thin. One tremor, and you've fallen through, scratching and gouging for your life like a wild dog.
You think the looting, rape and armed terror that emerged within hours in New Orleans would never happen in nice, civilised Europe? Think again. It happened here, all over our continent only 60 years ago. Read the memoirs of Holocaust and gulag survivors, Norman Lewis's account of Naples in 1944, or the recently republished anonymous diary of a German woman in Berlin in 1945. It happened again in Bosnia just 10 years ago. And that wasn't even the force majeure of a natural disaster. Europe's were man-made hurricanes.
The basic point is the same: remove the elementary staples of organised, civilised life - food, shelter, drinkable water, minimal personal security - and we go back within hours to a Hobbesian state of nature, a war of all against all. Some people, some of the time, behave with heroic solidarity; most people, most of the time, engage in a ruthless fight for individual and genetic survival. A few become temporary angels, most revert to being apes.The word civilisation, in one of its earliest senses, referred to the process of human animals being civilised - by which we mean, I suppose, achieving a mutual recognition of human dignity, or at least accepting in principle the desirability of such a recognition. (As the slave-owning Thomas Jefferson did, even if he failed to practise what he preached.) Reading Jack London the other day, I came across an unusual word: decivilisation. The opposite process, that is, the one by which people cease to be civilised and become barbaric. Katrina tells us about the ever-present possibility of decivilisation.
There are intimations of this even in normal, everyday life. Road rage is a good example. Or think what it's like waiting for a late-night flight which is delayed or cancelled. At first, those carefully guarded cocoons of personal space we carry around with us in airport waiting-areas break down into flickerings of solidarity. The glance of mutual sympathy over the newspaper or laptop screen. A few words of shared frustration or irony. Often this grows into a stronger manifestation of group solidarity, perhaps directed against the hapless check-in staff of BA, Air France or American Airlines. (To find a common enemy is the only sure way to human solidarity.)
But then a rumour creeps out that there are a few seats left on another flight at Gate 37. Instant collapse of solidarity. Angels become apes. The sick, infirm, elderly, women and children are left behind in the stampede. Dark-suited men, with degrees from Harvard or Oxford and impeccable table-manners, turn into gorillas charging through the jungle. When, having elbowed aside the competition, they get their boarding-card, they retreat into a corner, avoiding other people's gaze. The gorilla who got the banana. (Believe me, I know whereof I speak; I have been that ape.) All this just to avoid a night at the Holiday Inn in Des Moines.
Obviously the decivilisation in New Orleans was a thousand times worse. I can't avoid the feeling that there will be more of this, much more of it, as we go deeper into the 21st century. There are just too many big problems looming which could push humanity back. The most obvious threat is more natural disasters as a result of climate change. If this cataclysm is interpreted by American politicians such as John McCain as - to use the hackneyed phrase that they will themselves undoubtedly use - a "wake-up call" to alert Americans to the the consequences of the United States continuing to pump out carbon dioxide as if there were no tomorrow, then the Katrina hurricane cloud will have a silver lining. But it may already be too late. If recent indications are correct that not just the icecaps but the permafrost in Siberia is thawing, which thawing would itself then generate further emissions of natural greenhouse gases, then we may be launched on an unstoppable downward spiral. If that were so, if large parts of the world were tormented by unpredictable storms, flooding and temperature changes, then what happened in New Orleans would seem like a tea party.
In a sense, these too would be man-made hurricanes. But there are also the more direct threats of humans towards other humans. Thus far, terrorist attacks have provoked outrage, fear, some restrictions of civil liberties, and the abuses of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, but they have not resulted in mass hysteria or scapegoating. Least of all in London, the world capital of phlegmatism. But suppose we ain't seen nothing yet. Suppose there's a dirty bomb or even a small nuclear weapon exploded by a terrorist group in a major city. What then?
A lmost having the force of a flood is the pressure of mass migration from the poor and overpopulated south of the planet to the rich north. (Not accidentally, anti-immigration populists routinely use the flood metaphor.) If natural or political disaster were to put still more millions on the move, our immigration controls might one day prove to be like the levees of New Orleans. But even with current levels of immigration, the resulting encounters - especially those between Muslims and indigenous Europeans - are proving to be explosive. How civilised will we remain? In the way some Europeans and some Muslim migrants are talking about each other, I see the advancing shadow of a new European barbarism.
And then there is the challenge I mentioned in this column two weeks ago, of accommodating the emerging great powers, particularly India and China, into the international system. Especially in the case of China, where late-communist leaders use diversionary nationalism to stay in power, there is a danger of war. Nothing decivilises more quickly and surely than war.
So never mind Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilisations". That, as the old Russian saying goes, was long ago and not true anyway. What's under threat here is simply civilisation, the thin crust we lay across the seething magma of nature, including human nature. New Orleans opened a small hole through which we glimpsed what always lies below. The Big Easy shows us the Big Difficult, which is to preserve that crust.
In political preaching mode, we may take Katrina as an appeal to get serious about addressing these challenges, which means the great blocs and the great powers of the world - Europe, America, China, India, Russia, Japan, Latin America, the UN - reaching for a new level of international cooperation. But on a sober analysis, we may venture a more pessimistic conclusion: that somewhere around the year 2000 the world reached a high point in the diffusion of civilisation, to which future generations may look back with nostalgia and envy.
As so often, I hope I'm wrong. Read your new-look, user-friendly Guardian in 2020, and you'll know.
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