My Brother’s Keeper
Note: The flooding caused by Hurricane Helene in the western part of North Carolina in late September, 2024 was the worst in that region’s history. The death and damage toll continues to rise. If you are interested in giving to help with the crisis or recovery, here is a link to some possible places you might contribute.
I got a note from a friend this week taking exception with my last post, “Radical Positivism,” arguing that maybe if we saw more people doing good, we would join them and do more good ourselves. “Too Pollyannish?” he asked. He quoted 16th century Christian theologian John Calvin, who wrote of the “total depravity of man” and 21st century physicist Stephen Hawking, who played out the consequences of our behavior and said, “it all ends in mushroom clouds… it’s inevitable.”
It’s a fundamental premise of Christianity (not in Judaism or Islam) that we are a “fallen” people, fundamentally depraved and, without heavenly intervention, destined for doom.
It started, my faith argues, with the sin that got Adam and Eve got kicked out of paradise. In no time, their son Cain had killed his brother Abel, and, when confronted by God, professed ignorance, asking, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that most of the time, given a choice, we will choose ourselves over our brothers.
But there’s at least one situation where more of us toggle our default from selfishness to selflessness. During disasters.
For a moment, in disaster, we become brothers and sisters again.
You’d think that it is when we are frightened, cold, thirsty or hungry is when we would be at our worst. Time and again, during disasters, we find the opposite.
It’s happening again this week in my home state of North Carolina, on the east coast of the United States, as the people of our mountain counties recover from the worst flood in recorded history.
A friend of mine, Steve Riley, wrote an essay for The Washington Post early this week about what is happening in his home of Black Mountain in the wake of the flood. Even as the news of the devastation continued to unfold, he described something else: a self-organized band of chain saw-wielding neighbors, who systematically worked together, days before emergency crews could arrive, to clear trees from their road and enable the neighborhood to escape. Two days after he wrote, white boards had sprung up along the main street of town communicating essential information (wi-fi and cell service were still out), and Black Mountain had self-organized daily old-school town meetings to get the word out.
Citizens gather for an old-school town meeting in Black Mountain, NC (photo New York Times).
A professor at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC, described how his street figured out its response: “As neighbors watched one another rebuild their roads and cut back debris,” wrote Chris Moody for The Atlantic,
“The urge to help became contagious. Void of cars, our road became a parade of people from the neighborhood carrying anything they could – chain saws, shovels, food, cases of beer and water – while looking for people in need.”
Many residents of Moody’s neighborhood couldn’t make their wells work without electricity. So a neighbor, who had managed to get his generator, filled up jugs of water from his bathtub.
Later, Moody and his wife packed up left-over chili and chocolate chip cookies and went door-to-door offering neighbors food. While they were gone, another neighbor with a backhoe repaired their driveway.
If you think those are just cherry-picked stories, you should take some time to read A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit. In it, she does an exhaustive review of all the evidence we have from five of the biggest disasters over a century, starting with the San Francisco earthquake and fires of 1906 and ending with Hurricane Katrina a century later. Her firm conclusion: in the worst of times, our better angels take over.
“When all ordinary divides and patterns are shattered,” she writes, “People step up – not all, but the great preponderance.”
Solnit is not naïve: she details some of the worst behavior that occurs during disasters. And it is easy to find the same sorts of behavior in the one that is unfolding right now in the wake of Hurricane Helene: real estate profiteers swooping in offering to buy people’s land for pennies; price-gouging check cashers charging exorbitant rates of interest for cash; fights at gas stations.
What Solnit painstakingly demonstrates is that there is much more good behavior than bad, and that gives her hope. “The study of disasters,” she writes, “Makes it clear that there are plural and contingent natures – but the prevalent human nature in disaster is resilient, generous, empathetic and brave.”
What if Calvin and Hawking missed something, and there really is a “plural and contingent” nature in all of us, the possibility that we could act selflessly, not just selfishly?
I’ve seen the selfless side of my “plural” nature emerge briefly during any number of cleanups I’ve done in past hurricanes.
I put aside past beefs with neighbors to drag limbs. I share food and water and stories and hugs with strangers.
I feel like a part of something bigger. I feel alive. And then a few days later, I retreat again to selfishness.
We are at our best during disasters. But how can we sustain that in everyday life? (Photo USA Today)
But those ephemeral moments of disaster, writes Solnit, “Demonstrate what is possible…or latent: the resiliency and generosity of those around us and how deeply most of us desire connection, participation, altruism and purposefulness.” The moments of unexpected happiness that we feel in the midst of disaster come from “that purposefulness, the immersion in service and survival, and from an affection that is not private and personal but civic: the love of strangers for each other, of a citizen for his or her city, of belonging to a greater whole, of doing the work that matters.”
What if we could find a way to sustain all that in the times after the disaster, to feel the responsibility and joy of “keeping” our brothers every day, and of teaching others to do the same?
If so, maybe we could, as Solnit suggests, “…find a back door back into paradise, the paradise at least in which we are who we hope to be, do the work we desire, and are each our sister’s and brother’s keeper.”
Paradise on earth? I’m skeptical. But I’ll take an earth where a few more of us exercise generosity and kindness a little more often.
Over in Red Hill, North Carolina late last week, farmer James Waters watched during Helene as his farmland literally washed away during the storm. Two days later, he told a reporter about taking his young son out for a mission in his neighborhood: “He’s like, ‘where are we going?’” Waters answered: “We’re going to check on the neighbors. That’s what we do. These are good lessons.”
-Leslie
Notes:
Black Mountain town meetings: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/02/us/hurricane-helene-north-carolina.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb
Atlantic article by Chris Moody on neighbors helping neighbors in Boone: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/10/hurricane-helene-rural-north-carolina/680090/
A Paradise Built in Hell: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/301070/a-paradise-built-in-hell-by-rebecca-solnit/
USA Today article by Chris Kenning about Red Hill efforts: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/09/30/helene-destruction-north-carolina-community/75447227007/