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<DIV style="MARGIN-LEFT: 1em; MARGIN-RIGHT: 1em"><A
href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-gartonash8sep08,0,68039.story?track=tothtml">http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-gartonash8sep08,0,68039.story?track=tothtml</A><BR>
<H1>The thin veneer of civilization</H1>By Timothy Garton Ash<BR>TIMOTHY GARTON
ASH is a professor of European studies at Oxford University and a Hoover
Institution senior fellow.<BR><BR>September 8, 2005<BR><BR>THE BIG LESSON of
Katrina is not about the incompetence of the Bush administration, the scandalous
neglect of poor black people in the United States or our unpreparedness for
major natural disasters, though all of those apply. Katrina's big lesson is that
the crust of civilization 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.
<BR><BR>You think the looting, rape and armed terror that emerged within hours
in New Orleans couldn't happen elsewhere? Think again. It happened here in
Europe only 60 years ago. Read the memoirs of Holocaust and Gulag survivors,
Norman Lewis' account of Naples in 1944 or the recently republished anonymous
diary of a German woman in Berlin in 1945. It happened in Bosnia just 10 years
ago. And that wasn't even the <I>force majeure</I> of a natural disaster. Those
were man-made hurricanes. <BR><BR>The basic point is the same: Remove the
elementary staples of organized, civilized 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. <BR><BR>The word "civilization," in one of its earliest
senses, referred to the process of human animals being civilized — 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. Reading Jack
London the other day, I came across an unusual word: decivilization. The
opposite process, that is — the one by which people cease to be civilized and
become barbaric. Katrina tells us about the ever-present possibility of
decivilization.<BR><BR>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 that is delayed or canceled. 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. (To find a common enemy is the only sure way
to human solidarity.) But then a rumor 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 advanced degrees and impeccable table manners,
elbow aside the competition, get their boarding passes and then retreat into a
corner, avoiding other people's gaze — the gorilla who got the banana. All this
just to avoid a night at the Holiday Inn in Des Moines.<BR><BR>Obviously, the
decivilization in New Orleans was 1,000 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 that could push humanity
back. The most obvious threat is more natural disasters as a result of climate
change. If this cataclysm is interpreted by politicians as — to use the
hackneyed phrase that they will themselves undoubtedly use — a "wake-up call" to
alert Americans to 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. We may be launched on
an unstoppable downward spiral. If 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.<BR><BR>In a sense, these
too would be man-made hurricanes. But there are also the more direct threats of
humans toward other humans. Thus far, terrorist attacks have provoked outrage,
fear, some restrictions of civil liberties and the abuses of Guantanamo Bay and
Abu Ghraib prisons, but they have not resulted in mass hysteria or scapegoating.
But suppose this is just a beginning. Suppose there's a dirty bomb or even a
small nuclear weapon exploded by a terrorist group in a major city. What then?
<BR><BR>Almost 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.
Even with current levels of immigration, the resulting encounters — especially
those between Muslim immigrants and European residents — are proving to be
explosive. How civilized will we remain? And then there is the challenge of
accommodating the emerging great powers, especially India and China, into the
international system. Especially in the case of China, where communist leaders
use diversionary nationalism to stay in power, there is a danger of war. Nothing
decivilizes more quickly and surely than war.<BR><BR>So never mind Samuel
Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations." That, as the old Russian saying goes, was
long ago and not true anyway. What's under threat here is simply civilization,
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. </DIV><BR clear=all></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>