LOSING THE MANDATE OF HEAVEN
Contemplate This Ruin
More than three thousand years ago, the Chou dynasty defeated the Shang and became rulers of China for almost a thousand years. To justify their usurpation of power, they proposed that rulers rule by t’ien ming, the “mandate of heaven.” The principle suggested that earthly rulers are part of the cosmic order, endorsed by the harmony they presumably provide or protect. The word revolution in Chinese is ge ming; “ge”—to strip away—and “ming”—the mandate. A revolution not only removes a regime but also tears away its justification for governing. So does a disaster: since the Chou dynasty, earthquakes in China have often been seen as signs that the rulers had lost the mandate of heaven. Even in modern times, many interpreted in this light the death of Chairman Mao two months after the colossal 1976 Tang Shan earthquake killed hundreds of thousands. And the extreme care the Chinese government took after the big 2008 earthquake may have been out of fear of losing credibility and support at a volatile moment when the citizenry and the world were watching closely for callousness and corruption (which were amply present in the badly built schools that killed so many children).
Much about this Chinese worldview seems remote from ours—but disasters in the Western world and present time also threaten the powers that be and often generate change. This is how disaster and revolution come to resemble each other. In some ways a disaster merely brings the existing tensions, conflicts, and tendencies in a society and its government to light or to a crisis point. If the government fails to meet the urgent needs of its people, if it is seen to be self-interested, incompetent, or possessed of interests that serve an elite while sabotaging the well-being of the majority, the upheaval of disaster provides an opportunity to redress this failing that disaster has brought to light. Political scientists A. Cooper Drury and Richard Stuart Olson write, “Disasters overload political systems by multiplying societal demands and empowering new groups on one hand while disarticulating economies and disorganizing governments (as well as revealing their organizational, administrative, and moral deficiencies) on the other.” And as Quarantelli points out, bureaucracies aren’t good at the urgent needs of disaster because they don’t improvise rapidly or well—as do many citizens’ groups, including the emergent groups that arise to meet new needs—and because their priorities are sometimes at odds with those of the citizenry.
This suggests another explanation for why elites, in the term coined by Caron Chess and elaborated by Lee Clarke and Kathleen Tierney, panic. They are being tested most harshly at what they do least well, and suddenly their mandate of heaven, their own legitimacy and power, is in question. Earlier disaster scholars tended to imagine that in natural disaster, all parties share common interests and goals, but contemporary sociologists see disasters as moments when subterranean conflicts emerge into the open. Tierney said, “Elites fear disruption of the social order, challenges to their legitimacy.” Disasters provide both, lavishly.
Often in disaster, the government is at least inadequate to the crisis; not infrequently, it is so disarrayed as to be irrelevant or almost nonexis tent. Some of this is simply scale: a city may have civil servants adequate to respond to an ordinary day of fires, injuries, and accidents, but not when such daily crises are multiplied a thousandfold. Then the citizens are on their own, as they are when bureaucracy and red tape keep institutions from responding urgently enough. In the absence of government, people govern themselves. Everyone from Hobbes to Hollywood filmmakers has assumed this means “law of the jungle” chaos. What in fact takes place is another kind of anarchy, where the citizenry by and large organize and care for themselves. In the immediate aftermath of disaster, government fails as if it had been overthrown and civil society succeeds as though it has revolted: the task of government, usually described as “reestablishing order,” is to take back the city and the power to govern it, as well as to perform practical functions—restoring power, cleaning up rubble. So the more long-term aftermath of disaster is often in some sense a counterrevolution, with varying degrees of success. The possibility that they have been overthrown or, more accurately, rendered irrelevant is a very good reason for elite panic if not for the sometimes vicious acts that ensue.
Of course a government that is reasonably popular and responds reasonably well faces a very different situation. During the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the Bay Area suffered relatively little loss of life because decades of good building codes and enforcement resulted in few vulnerable structures. Where structures collapsed, local volunteers and officials worked well together. The major calamity was the Nimitz Freeway collapse—the elevated structure had been built on soft ground. The first responders, as usual, were the locals—including factory workers who brought heavy equipment and stayed for four days to try to rescue the living and retrieve the dead. The radical group Seeds of Peace set up a kitchen and essential services, and officials joined the effort. There was little to resent about the behavior of the government and virtually no social change as a result, though many hailed the removal of the much-hated Nimitz, which had chopped an inner-city neighborhood in half, and San Francisco’s damaged Embarcadero Freeway, an eyesore hiding the eastern waterfront. Less popular governments and more violent disasters are a volatile combination, however.
The first great modern disaster was the Lisbon earthquake of November 1, 1755, which destroyed much of that capital city of Portugal—and then did far more politically. It was modern, argues disaster sociologist Russell Dynes, because it was widely treated as a natural occurrence rather than a divine manifestation. Nevertheless it led to sweeping change both in Portugal and across Europe. It struck midmorning on a Sunday, when much of the population was at Mass. Stone churches collapsed onto their congregations. The royal palace and many stone mansions crumbled. The ocean pulled back to expose the rubble on the floor of the harbor, and then a tsunami scoured the waterfront portions of the city. Fires began that burned for several days. Tens of thousands died. It was a huge earthquake, centered on the Atlantic floor, estimated at nine on the Richter scale, devastating as far away as Morocco, felt as far away as northern Europe, with tsunami waves that reached Ireland and North Africa.
Pombal, one of the king’s chief ministers, seized more power as the detached King José I and his court moved to tents outside the city. He used that power to modernize Lisbon, update its building codes, and evict the Jesuits with whom he had been battling (in part over how the colonies and their indigenous populations in South America would be governed, in part over how much power the church would have in Portugal). While Pombal battled the Jesuits at home, European intellectuals fought over the meaning of the earthquake abroad. Many argued against the divine theory of disasters or an all-powerful Providence. One, the philosophical writer Voltaire, immediately used the earthquake as the prime evidence against an optimistic worldview in his “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster” and later in his comic novella Candide. In the former he began:Come, ye philosophers, who cry, “All’s well,”
And contemplate this ruin of a world.
Behold these shreds and cinders of your race,
This child and mother heaped in common wreck,
These scattered limbs beneath the marble shafts—
A hundred thousand whom the earth devours. . . .
The Lisbon earthquake is usually considered to be one of the starting points of the European Enlightenment, a movement away from authority and religiosity toward individual reason—and doubt. Upheaval in disaster can be as immediate as political change, as intangible as ideological shift. A disaster like the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City produced both.
A Shock to the System
That disasters open the way for change is nowhere more evident than in the earthquake that, thirteen years before the Mexico City quake, devastated Nicaragua’s capital and helped bring on a revolution. Not a large quake in objective terms, it was a shallow one directly beneath the city. It reduced to rubble much of the central c
ity and killed several thousand. A large portion of the population lost homes and jobs. For decades afterward the heart of the city was a vast ruin populated by squatters, a negative monument to loss and politics. Dictator Anastasio Somoza could profit more from developing the urban edge than rebuilding the city center, so he attempted to remake the city for his own purposes. To facilitate doing so, he declared martial law and gripped anew the power he had been on the brink of reluctantly relinquishing after many decades of dictatorial rule—the Somoza dynasty had been in power since 1930.
Gioconda Belli, a daughter of Nicaragua’s elite, a poet, and an early member of the Sandinistas, the group that would overthrow the government after the earthquake, remembers it vividly. “As the earth shakes so does the sense of security,” she recalled thirty-five years later in Los Angeles, where she now lives. “It is such a shock to the system, to the body, and to the sense of place, to the sense of security. All of a sudden a lot of things that you took for granted cease to be for granted and you also realize what is important for you. What fascinated me about the earthquake was how the collective began to function as a whole. Usually it’s very dispersed. And all of the sudden the grief and the pain and the fear and all of that, it kicks in. But what I found fascinating was how people networked and there was no higher authority. We were left to our own devices. And so we all knew we were dependent on each other and everybody helped each other.”
Lavish from her mane of curly hair and rich voice to her many romantic and political involvements, Belli lights up describing what those days were like, still enthused about that social moment, still outraged about Somoza’s actions: “All of a sudden you went from being in your house the night before, going to bed alone in your own little world to being thrown out on the street and mingling with neighbors you might not have said hello to very much or whatever and getting attached to those people, minding them, helping, trying to see what you could do for one another, talking about how you felt. There’s no authority, you kind of stop believing in God for that moment. It’s hard to process that there is a God when you’re living through such horrors: seeing your city go up in flames and all the destruction. So that’s what I remember, that kind of solidarity, and of course what happened was that we began to get—you know, it was December twenty-third at midnight, and we usually celebrate Christmas on the twenty-fourth, so the date was also very emotional. It was a family day. It’s a very Catholic country. Aid began pouring in pretty quickly, but we began to see that the aid was not being channeled appropriately. It was being given to the military and the military families. You could drive on the highway and see outside their houses they had put up tents for their families because everybody was afraid to go indoors, because the aftershocks were quite intense. And also Somoza took over again, he named himself president of the emergency committee. The next day he was in command. You know this greed that decided to show itself, plus the military measures that were taken, the state of siege and curfew and censorship of the press, all of that happened. People basically felt that this government had forsaken them, and that’s when things began to turn.”
Somoza seized control of assets and industries with such rapacity that even the affluent and powerful who had previously tolerated him turned on him, and he alienated the Catholic Church as well. These wealthy Nicaraguans—Belli aside—were not the ones who made the revolution, but their disaffection with Somoza and what was called his “kleptocracy” helped open the way for it. Nor did the disaster inevitably result in a revolution; the revolutionaries themselves did the hard work of bringing it about, but the earthquake was a shift that helped. Other, later, events mattered: the 1978 assassination of the moderate but independent newspaper (La Prensa) editor Pedro Chamorro was a final outrage. But the shift in atmosphere came with the disaster on the night before Christmas Eve of 1972, and it lasted. Belli recalls, “June or July, I went back to Managua and there was still that sense, it was like—how could I explain it—like we were going back to the city, like we weren’t going to give the city up. There was a lot of talk of moving the city somewhere else, people that swore they would never go back. So there was a sense of community in the neighborhoods. There was so much of a sense of having survived a catastrophe that really does bond people together. You never look at your neighbor the same way because after you go through something like that, you really land in reality in a different way.
“Life now is changed back, but I think that’s also what [then] allowed revolution to become stronger, because, really, you had a sense of what was important. And people realized that what was important was freedom and being able to decide your life and agency. We had a sense of agency in those days that we were able to decide and to do. Two days later you had this tyrant imposing a curfew, imposing martial law, all those kinds of things. The sense of oppression on top of the catastrophe was really unbearable. And once you had realized that your life can be decided by one night of the earth deciding to shake: ‘So what? I want to live a good life and I want to risk my life because I can also lose my life in one night.’ You realize that life has to be lived well or is not worth living. It’s a very profound transformation that takes place during catastrophes. It’s like a near-death experience but lived collectively. It makes such a big difference. I think that’s what brings out the best in people. I’ve seen it over and over, when you cease to think about yourself only. Something kicks in and you start worrying about the tribe, the collective. That kind of makes life meaningful.” What’s clear from Belli’s and other accounts is that the experience is profoundly subjective: it cannot be measured by seismometers, casualty counts, fallen buildings, or anything so quantifi able. The disaster as we usually understand it is tangible, but its psychic consequences are both intangible and often its most important effect.
Scholars agree about the profundity of the rupture. Richard Stuart Olson writes, “Legacies of the Managua 1972 disaster and its aftermath persist to this day, including the emigration of thousands of Nicaraguans of all classes to the United States. Increased pluralism, social mobility, political opportunity, and, in the end, democracy are the most important and enduring. In fact, the 1972 disaster still abruptly divides Nicaraguan history and collective memory.” The revolution did not come right away, but the insurgency grew, as did popular support for it. The Sandinista Revolution that took over Nicaragua in June of 1979 was the last of the old-style leftist revolutions, the last socialist revolution but also one of the last in which a small armed group overthrew a government in the name of justice and the people. And it was perhaps the last revolution in which the old idea of state socialism triumphed; a decade later the Berlin Wall would fall and a revolution in the nature of revolution would follow—but that is another story. Belli devoted much of the 1970s to working toward the revolution. Seven years after the earthquake, the revolution swept the country and the Sandinistas approached Managua in triumph.
Belli remembers, “Those first few days were like a dream because—just that feeling I remember of driving down the road toward Managua and people coming out to get the paper: their faces and the happiness. Yes, everyone was exultant and organizing. . . . This whole system of government disappears from one day to the next and you are left with this country, and you get to do it from the bottom up. It’s quite an amazing energy. Everybody came to volunteer and bring things. The peasants would come with corn and whatever they could find. People would give you things and do this and that and would contribute things. It was this outpouring of love and goodwill, and wherever we went were these crowds that would come and they would kill a pig and have a big feast for us.” Where disaster brought fear and grief, the revolution brought triumph—and bloodshed, but also a sense of radical uncertainty, shared fate, and urgency that brought on generosity and an atmosphere of mutual aid.
The Sandinistas in power did many splendid things—there were literacy campaigns and measures to bring economic justice and alleviate poverty—and some things that were less than splendid. Th
ey never resolved, for example, their relationship with the Miskito Indians who lived on the Honduran border, and the ways they confiscated the property of the rich was often vindictive or self-serving. But what the Sandinistas might have done is impossible to know, because “the Reagan Revolution” overtook the United States in 1980, and the Reagan administration, in those late years of the cold war, sought to extirpate all signs of socialism in Central America. The administration surreptitiously funded the Contras, the anti-Sandinista guerrillas who made sallies from the Honduran border to attack small rural communities struggling to raise food and realize the reforms. The Contras stiffened the Sandinistas’ positions and sapped the economic vitality of the country, and it was in part to put an end to this hemorrhage that the people elected a non-Sandinista government in 1990.
Since then, much of the Sandinista achievement has trickled away, and the widespread poverty has become more dire—though some achievements of the 1970s still matter. Nicaragua is not a dictatorship anymore. Belli went back to her country after Hurricane Mitch in 1998 and says of those who had been hit hard, “They were amazing. I was so happy to see it. It was a product of the revolution. These people had organized themselves into this group, this community had organized themselves so they had their demands and what they needed, but not just asking; they had their own plan. The way they talk, they are so articulate and amazing, it’s great to watch. They had that sense of purpose, of strength, and of dignity, which was not there before.”
A Paradise Built in Hell Page 19
