Kieran Healy

Go read “this L.A. Times report”:http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-children5sep05,0,113027.story?coll=la-home-headlines about seven children — mostly toddlers, the eldest, six years old — who were lost and found in New Orleans these last few days.

In the chaos that was Causeway Boulevard, this group of refugees stood out: a 6-year-old boy walking down the road, holding a 5-month-old, surrounded by five toddlers who followed him around as if he were their leader.

They were holding hands. Three of the children were about 2 years old, and one was wearing only diapers. A 3-year-old girl, who wore colorful barrettes on the ends of her braids, had her 14-month-old brother in tow. The 6-year-old spoke for all of them, and he told rescuers his name was Deamonte Love.

The story of how they got there, and what happened next, is just remarkable. There are a lot of lessons you might draw from it — organizational failures and successes, the appalling choices that people sometimes have to make, courage in unexpected places, and how important it can be be for people to pay attention and make an effort. It’s also a reminder of something else, something I can’t quite articulate properly. Events like Katrina breed chaos, and that leads to long chains of contingencies, to accidents piled upon accidents, sometimes lucky sometimes not. We come across people in the middle of such chains of events. In most cases, their situation will not conform to some tidy morality tale. It might _look_ like it does, but that’s because we like to tell stories about how people got what they deserved. What you are really seeing — as in the case of these seven children — may turn out to be another thing altogether, or the accidental byproduct of many things.

I imagine that Joel (the thorough and keen-eyed guy who is copyediting my book manuscript) probably considered throwing in a few of these “lesser-known copyediting and proofreading symbols”:http://www.geist.com/comix/comix.php?id=18 as he dealt with my alleged prose last month. (Via “Making Light”:http://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/.)

CNN reports, in “uncharacteristically blunt terms”:http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/03/katrina.chertoff/index.html on Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff’s efforts to exonerate his agency.

Defending the U.S. government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff argued Saturday that government planners did not predict such a disaster ever could occur.

But in fact, government officials, scientists and journalists have warned of such a scenario for years. … He called the disaster “breathtaking in its surprise.” But engineers say the levees preventing this below-sea-level city from being turned into a swamp were built to withstand only Category 3 hurricanes. And officials have warned for years that a Category 4 could cause the levees to fail.

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Shepard Smith and Geraldo Rivera “resist Sean Hannity’s efforts”:http://www.crooksandliars.com/2005/09/02.html#a4763 to spin the scale of the disaster and, in particular, the suffering caused by clear, continuing failures of organization. Smith, especially, was working hard to stay calm and focused on relaying the conditions in front of him — he seemed like he wanted to reach through his camera, throttle Hannity and shout “Can’t you see what’s happening here?”

Here’s a thought-provoking piece sent to me by Tim McGovern. Centralized assistance (properly organized) has its advantages, decentralized assistance has at least as much potential. I wonder whether this or some similar idea would be workable.

*The Catastrophe the Suburbs Were Invented For*
Timothy McGovern

More than half the US population lives in the suburbs, and I’d be willing to bet (though I don’t have the numbers to back it up) that more than half the US population lives within a day and half drive of New Orleans or Houston (New York City is 1300 miles from New Orleans, Chicago 925 miles, Denver 1200 from Houston)

There’s a long weekend coming up. You’ve got a day and a half to drive to a refugee shelter, pick up a family and bring them home to be your guest for a few weeks or a month.

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Alan Schussman takes a first look at the social ecology of the flooded areas of New Orleans:

The flood area has a population of about 380,000. Here’s how it compares to national numbers [from the 2000 census]:

	median HH income	% black	% poverty	% owns home	% private trans.	% public trans.
US	$ 41,994	12.1	12.3	66.2	87.9	4.7
Flood area	$ 29,854	66.8	26.9	50.6	79.0	13.0

These real numbers should be part of the discussion of why so many people didn’t get out of town. Jack Shafer gives it some thought, but it’s also informative to compare these numbers with national rates: In the flooded area of the city, poverty is more than twice as high as the national rate; median income is twelve thousand dollars lower; reliance on public transportation is nearly three times as high. Lower rates of owner-occupation mean a greater lack of insurance coverage …

According to AP, this photo shows a man covering the body of a man who died — apparently in a chair — on Thursday outside the convention center in New Orleans. The baby in his arms looks to be about three or four months old. I wonder whether she has any milk to drink.

Plenty of people are “saying”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2005_08_28_atrios_archive.html#112559511188392756 “this”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2005/09/this_is_not_goo.html “already”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_09/007022.php, but the situation in New Orleans and the surrounding areas is just unbelievable, and the official response thus far is pretty appalling. The United States is the most powerful country on the face of the earth. Over the past few years in particular, a lot of money and thought was supposed to have been devoted to planning for rapid response to large-scale urban disasters in the wake of 9/11. While authorities in Louisiana and New Orleans are not as powerful as the Feds, they have known for years that a disaster of this kind was likely and were told in detail what it would do to their city. And yet. The “reports of what’s happening”:http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WEATHER/09/01/katrina.impact/index.html convey little except how “poorly-prepared”:http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/12528233.htm, “ill-coordinated”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-5248531,00.html and “slow-moving”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/09/impeach_george_.html the disaster response is. As “Mark Kleiman”:http://WWW.markarkleiman.com/archives/microeconomics_and_policy_analysis_/2005/08/failing_to_plan_is_planning_to_fail.php comments, failing to plan is planning to fail. Kevin Drum provides “a demoralizing chronology”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_09/007023.php explaining why FEMA is being run by people with “no experience”:http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/002458.html in disaster management.

Meanwhile, apparently the secretary of state has been “shoe-shopping on 5th avenue”:http://www.gawker.com/news/condoleezza-rice/index.php#breaking-condi-rice-spends-salary-on-shoes-123467.

I’ve written before about the sociological dimension of disasters — the fact that natural disasters are never wholly natural, because some kinds of people will be more likely to suffer and die than others, depending on how life is organized when the disaster hits. As everyone knows, social order is under severe pressure in New Orleans at the moment, and the media coverage is slowly coming around to analyzing the differential impact of the disaster. The fact that those who have been left behind, or turned into refugees, are disproportionately Africian-American, poor, or elderly is simply impossible to ignore from the media coverage. Seeing pundits and commentators react to these facts is, in a way, a barometer of their sociological imagination — their ability to see the systematic relationship between social structure and individual experience. For example, on the conservative side of the fence, the contrast between “David Brooks”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/01/opinion/01brooks.html and “Jonah Goldberg”:http://corner.nationalreview.com/05_08_28_corner-archive.asp#074746 (also “here”:http://corner.nationalreview.com/05_08_28_corner-archive.asp#074466) is striking. Brooks is one of nature’s optimists, and his vice is a tendency towards complaceny. But he has a sociological eye, and immediately grasps the social dimensions of the disaster:

Floods wash away the surface of society, the settled way things have been done. They expose the underlying power structures, the injustices, the patterns of corruption and the unacknowledged inequalities. … We’d like to think that the stories of hurricanes and floods are always stories of people rallying together to give aid and comfort. … Amid all the stories that recur with every disaster – tales of sudden death and miraculous survival, the displacement and the disease – there is also the testing. … Civic arrangements work or they fail. Leaders are found worthy or wanting. What’s happening in New Orleans and Mississippi today is a human tragedy. But take a close look at the people you see wandering, devastated, around New Orleans: they are predominantly black and poor. The political disturbances are still to come.

Brooks’ instinct to look at how the disaster exposes power relations and tests the social order is right on target. Contrast this with Goldberg. All _his_ instincts are that talk of class and poverty and refugees are merely rhetorical cards in a never-ending political slanging match, and his goal is to make sure they don’t get played. His immediate concern is to deny that there are any systematic differences in the experience of disaster, and to pretend it’s all just a question of partisan labeling:

bq. Whatever happened to the idea that unity in the face of a calamity is an important value? We’re all in it together, I guess, except for the poor who are extra-special.

And again:

bq. My guess is that it will simply be a really unpleasent time for [Superdome refugees for] the remainder of the day, but hardly so unpleasent as to sanctify them with refugee or some other victim status.

Burkean conservatives may be too sanguine about the virtues of inherited ways of doing things, but, if they have Brooks’ cast of mind they at least understand that there _is_ a social order, and that disasters like Katrina expose its structure and weaknesses. Meanwhile Goldberg — whom I’m sure has never gone a day without a hot meal in his life — is merely vicious.

No doubt you know this already from many sources, but it is easy to donate money to assist victims of Hurricane Katrina. To donate online to the Red Cross, click here or call 1-800-HELP-NOW. Right now the situation down there continues to deteriorate. I hope “this sort of thing”:http://www.cnn.com/2005/WEATHER/08/30/katrina.neworleans/index.html doesn’t become widespread:

bq. The city had no power, no drinking water, dwindling food supplies, widespread looting, smoke rising on the horizon and the sounds of gunfire. At least one large building was ablaze Tuesday.

My (limited) understanding of the logistics of this thing is that, the Iraq war notwithstanding, the National Guard of Louisiana and Mississippi should in principle still have about 50-60 percent of its manpower available for call-up. It looks like a good chunk of them may well be needed. The more residents they evacuate the better, too. It’s not so much the dead bodies that pose a threat of disease, it’s the waste produced by survivors (and debris) when there’s no clean water to be had.

This semester I’m teaching _Sources of Sociological Theory_ to undergraduate majors, a course I’ve taught several times before. After a crash course on the state of Europe and America prior to 1780 or so (100% guaranteed to make historians come out in at least hives, and possibly trigger fits), we’ve started reading Adam Smith. It’s always a pleasure to teach Smith as a social theorist. For one thing, he’s a clear enough writer (certainly compared to, e.g., Weber) and more importantly his central insight about the possibility of decentralized co-ordination always catches students by surprise. Even though students are all exposed one way or another to the rhetoric of free enterprise, free trade, market capitalism and what have you, in my experience even talented undergraduates have to work a bit to really see the power and elegance of Smith’s vision of a complex, co-ordinated division of labor. I do a few classroom exercises (based on ideas from Mitch Resnick and Tom Schelling, amongst others) to bring out the problem of co-ordination, the many ways it can fail, and the distinctive qualities of markets as a solution. (Though, as Schelling notes, not all cases of distributed co-ordination are markets, just as not all ellipses are circles.)

Although Smith is often presented as the champion of the individual, and opposed to thinkers who emphasize social structure or the state, it’s immediately clear when you read him that Smith was as much a “discoverer of society” — that is, of the idea that the social world is a human product consisting of myriad interlocking relationships dependent on specific institutions and human capacities — as any of the other theorists typically recognized as founders of modern sociology. His treatment of the problem of the division of labor also provides a platform to understand the others. Marx is much easier to understand once you know a bit about Smith, of course, but so are Durkheim’s ideas about social solidarity and the nonrational foundations of contractual exchange. And much of Weber’s work on the origins of capitalism was conceived explicitly with Smith in mind.

My friend Karen Bennett blurbs Jaegwon Kim’s new book, Physicalism, or something near enough. The back cover, though, is careful to introduce Karen’s endorsement by saying only, “Advance praise for _Physicalism_.” Presumably some sharp-eyed editor realised it wouldn’t do for people to read “Advance praise for Physicalism, or something near enough.” Round our way, the title is proving to have all kinds of useful applications: “I was on time, or something near enough”, “Childcare, or something near enough”, “A viable constitution for Iraq, or something near enough.” I think it should catch on.

“The whole of New Orleans is being evacuated”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/national/29katrinacnd.html as “Hurricane Katrina”:http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/text/index_hls2.shtml moves toward the coast. It’s been known for a long time that New Orleans could be devastated by a hurricane under just the right (meaning, very, very wrong) circumstances. The city is located in a bowl-shaped depression with water on three sides, and under the “worst-case”:http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0BJK/is_15_11/ai_68642805 “outcome”:http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/wetlands/hurricane1.html, if it flooded severely it would be tremendously difficult to get rid of the water. There’s a scholarly literature on the danger. “One government report says”:http://water.usgs.gov/wrri/02grants/prog-compl-reports/2002LA4B.pdf:

bq. New Orleans is the most vulnerable major city on the Gulf Coast and perhaps in the entire United States. Had Hurricane Georges not taken a last minute turn to the east in 1998, major portions of New Orleans would have flooded. It would likely have been one of the worst disasters of the century in terms of loss of life and damage. Additionally, Louisiana has extensive infrastructure of oil and gas facilities, chemical plants, and hazardous, industrial and residential landfills. Most of these facilities are in flood prone areas and within the confines of levee systems protecting housing and other structures from flooding. Even in areas where mitigation strategies have been engineered (i.e., levee, drainage, and pumping systems), such designs are unable to capture and control all storm water runoff from occasional extreme rain events.

“Another, from LSU,”:http://www.publichealth.hurricane.lsu.edu/Adobe%20files%20for%20webpage/LevitanHurrVulnBR&NO.pdf, tries to map the likely range of flooding from a category 2 or 3 storm. It’s not pretty. Hopefully things won’t go so badly, of course. But then again it might be the biggest thing to hit the region since the “Great Mississippi Flood”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684840022/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/ of 1927.

_Light Relief Update_: In the “CNN story on this event”:http://www.cnn.com/2005/WEATHER/08/28/hurricane.katrina/index.html, the mayor of New Orleans is quoted as saying “About 70 percent of New Orleans is below sea level, and is protected by a series of levies.” I’m sure our “libertarian friends”:http://www.highclearing.com/ would heartily endorse this statement, but I don’t think the transcript quite conveys the mayor’s meaning.

Eugene Volokh has been “arguing”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_08_21-2005_08_27.shtml#1124731507 that by pushing for a society where homosexuality isn’t illegal, repressed or stigmatized, gay people are out to convert those who might not have otherwise engaged in homosexual activity. In much the same way, I suppose, many 16 to 18 year olds are out to convert one another to various forms of heterosexual activity. The post is a good example of Volokh’s approach to the social scientific end of legal thinking: a bit of initial data followed by some big hypotheticals followed by a lot of speculation about the motives of some person or persons unknown. The end result is a very narrow argument (on one reading he’s just arguing that bisexuals are more likely to engage in homosexual sex if homosexual activity isn’t illegal or stigmatized), but one that’s nevertheless shot through with unpleasant undertones about the gay rights movement and its supposed efforts to “convert” ordinary decent people. The whole thing depends on equivocating between the narrow denotation of the word “convert” and its broad connotations.

Meanwhile, the NYT presents some doctor arguing that observing childbirth is “such a horrible experience”:http://nytimes.com/2005/08/23/health/23case.html that many men never recover from the trauma and lose their “romantic view of their wives.” Naturally this disgust and revulsion is the woman’s problem: “Women may want to consider the risks as they invite their partners to watch them…” Belle has already given this the “response it deserves”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2005/08/would_it_hurt_i.html (my advice: bring a bag of boiled sweets, lads, and you’ll be fine). But based on the reactions of “some people”:http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2005_08_21.html#003934, the link to Volokh’s post becomes obvious. It’s not just gay people who are trying to recruit straight men to homosexuality, it’s also women, who entrap men in delivery rooms. By having sex with them 40 weeks or so earlier, and then putting them through this awful experience, they surely drive men away from a healthy heterosexuality. These heartless women may also be part-timing it as agents for secular Darwinism, as they show God-fearing men that while the Intelligent Designer might have done a nice job with the fine detail of mitochondria, He really was not paying attention in other departments.

Chuck Hagel, the Republican U.S. Senator from Nebraska, “this morning”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-5224310,00.html:

Hagel scoffed at the idea that U.S. troops could be in Iraq four years from now at levels above 100,000, a contingency for which the Pentagon is preparing.
“We should start figuring out how we get out of there,” Hagel said on “This Week” on ABC. “But with this understanding, we cannot leave a vacuum that further destabilizes the Middle East. I think our involvement there has destabilized the Middle East. And the longer we stay there, I think the further destabilization will occur.”
Hagel said “stay the course” is not a policy. “By any standard, when you analyze 2 1/2 years in Iraq … we’re not winning,” he said. … “we are locked into a bogged-down problem not unsimilar, dissimilar to where we were in Vietnam,” Hagel said. “The longer we stay, the more problems we’re going to have. … What I think the White House does not yet understand – and some of my colleagues – the dam has broke on this policy,” Hagel said. “The longer we stay there, the more similarities [to Vietnam] are going to come together.” … Hagel described the Army contingency plan as “complete folly.” “I don’t know where he’s going to get these troops,” Hagel said. “There won’t be any National Guard left … no Army Reserve left … there is no way America is going to have 100,000 troops in Iraq, nor should it, in four years.” Hagel added: “It would bog us down, it would further destabilize the Middle East, it would give Iran more influence, it would hurt Israel, it would put our allies over there in Saudi Arabia and Jordan in a terrible position. It won’t be four years. We need to be out.”

Hagel was awarded two Purple Hearts for his service in Vietnam, so I’m sure that by Wednesday we’ll be hearing from Michelle Malkin that he might have shot himself in the leg a couple of times to get them. In the meantime, here’s a proleptic taster of what might be in store, courtesy of the National Review’s Rich Lowry. Way back in August 2002, Hagel was talking about the risks of invading Iraq. The Corner “spoke out in response”:http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/2002_08_11_corner-archive.asp#85351896:

Chuck Hagel is now deemed a foreign-policy sophisticate for mindlessly repeating over and over that there are “risks” to invading Iraq. Golly, Chuck, really? Hagel MUST have a Ph.D. in international relations or something to have developed such a nuanced view of American foreign policy. Who knows how many thousands of hours of study and thought it took Hagel to come to the conclusion that invading Iraq is “complicated” and “risky”? I bet Nebraska has never been blessed with such Metternich-ian savvy, possibly ever. So, it’s really too bad that Hagel debased his foreign-policy genius in the New York Times today by resorting to the most shamelessly stupid of peacenik arguments: “Maybe Mr. Perle would like to be in the first wave of those who go into Baghdad.” Ohhh, Chuck—your rhetorical powers are over-awing us here in The Corner. How long did it take you to think that one up?

It goes on a bit longer in this vein. You get the idea.