Americans have always been proud of their government’s fully developed apparatuses for public security. Their 911 emergency crews are the envy of everyone else. Their fire and police forces are abundant and well-equipped. The National Guard is a battle-ready force maintained in large domestic military bases.
The capacity to provide public security is a key pillar of legitimacy for the American government.
When the terrorist attacks happened in 2001, the disaster personnel of New York rose to the challenge heroically. Their courage and professionalism was duly celebrated.
When a Department for Homeland Security was created in the aftermath of that attack, Americans hardly objected. That new agency had vast powers to conduct surveillance and collect information on American citizens. Instead of being perceived a threat to freedom, this was accepted as a source of assurance.
The capacity of the US government to care for its citizens was seriously shaken over the past week, however.
Nearly a week after Hurricane Katrina struck Mississippi and Louisiana, there is no clear estimate of the casualty toll. Tens of thousands of hungry and angry people are huddled in evacuation centers.
In the first two days after the calamity, government response was chaotic and insufficient.
Although public security authorities had developed contingency plans for precisely such a calamity, and dry runs were done only recently, things did not snap into place when the real thing happened. The local governments were simply overwhelmed. The federal authorities, it seemed to the most directly affected, had gone fishing.
Power was down and the whole cities were flooded. Food, clean water and gasoline supplies disappeared. It was only on the third and fourth days after the storm struck that the National Guard began trickling into the zone of devastation with critical supplies.
Meanwhile, the police disappeared from the streets. The mayor of New Orleans reports that a third of the city’s police force simply did not report for work after policemen were fired upon by gunmen in dark streets. The same mayor later reported a rising incidence of suicide among the city’s fire and police personnel under the extreme stress of managing a disaster.
For over two days, New Orleans was a scene straight out of any of those dark, pessimistic movies Hollywood dished out the past few years.
The shops were flagrantly looted. Roving armed bands fired at security forces. There was a widespread epidemic of rape. Government was simply nonexistent – and the worst, not the best, of human character ruled the day.
There were, to be sure, many stories of heroism and many instances where the redeeming instincts of humanity managed to shine through. But these stories were overwhelmed by the bad news: the looting, the rapes, the suicides and the appalling appetite for inflicting violence during a moment of great collective despair.
Order has eventually been restored in the calamity-stricken areas, particularly in the cities of New Orleans and Biloxi, through the barrel of a gun.
Food convoys drove into the flooded communities with National Guardsmen riding shotgun atop the precious cargo. Nearly ten thousand military personnel were deployed to the affected communities, supported by fire and rescue units from all over the United States.
Still, we were all treated to a nightmarish glimpse of what happens when government disappears.
What we saw is that public order is such a fragile thing, particularly in communities under great stress. When the capacity of the state to impose order is momentarily interrupted, chaos quickly reigns.
What we saw does not give us reassurance about the capacity of communities to spontaneously create order when the state momentarily disappears. This is particularly true of highly urbanized communities characterized by anonymity and impersonal structures.
Impersonal communities put under great stress seem prone to chaos once the levers of social control are momentarily incapacitated. If that could happen in a highly developed civic culture as that present in the United States, the likelihood seems greater in societies where the civic culture is less developed and the capacities of the state to quickly restore order is seriously constrained.
What might we learn from this horrifying glimpse of man-made disasters layered upon a natural calamity?
Ours is a society with a less developed civic culture. Ours is a society whose state capacities are seriously limited by chronic fiscal difficulties. And, as we know only too well, ours is a national community significantly more prone to natural calamities.
I shudder at the thought of a calamity in the same proportion as Hurricane Katrina hitting us. Our physical infrastructure is immensely more vulnerable. Our institutional infrastructure is even more so.
Over the longer term, we are of course aspiring to build up our institutional capacity so that we can respond more coherently to the grinding challenge of relieving poverty, strengthening our communities and strengthening our ability to respond to calamities. Given the familiar fiscal limitations and the notoriously low appreciation for the necessity to support the state with more revenues, that aspiration will not be realized soon.
In the meantime, we ought to avoid toying with the public order, teasing chaos by our incredible propensity for politicking, by our susceptibility to senseless grandstanding and endless agitation on the barest of excuses.