Between the terrorist attacks of 2001 and the near destruction of New Orleans four years later, the 21st century’s first decade has given Americans ample opportunity to reflect on disaster. But, argues Rebecca Solnit in 

, we have yet to learn the crucial lessons that such calamities ought to teach us.

Solnit—the author of an impressively eclectic series of books on subjects ranging from political activism to the English photographer Eadweard Muybridge—surveys several disasters over roughly the last century, including the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the Mexico City earthquake of 1985, and, of course, 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. She contends that “disaster throws us into the temporary utopia of a transformed human nature and society, one that is bolder, freer, less attached and divided than in ordinary times.”

The example that most clearly illustrates Solnit’s contention is the San Francisco earthquake, which transformed the cityscape into a patchwork quilt of “spontaneously launched community centers and relief projects.” People opened their homes to strangers or simply gathered in the streets to create improvised rooming houses and cafés. What many written reports emphasize is not the hardship but the almost party-like atmosphere that came with having survived and then rediscovered a place in the community. The joyful aftermath of a disaster, Solnit writes, “is by its very nature unsustainable and evanescent, but like a lightning flash it illuminates ordinary life, and like lightning it sometimes shatters the old forms.”

These ephemeral utopias raise radical possibilities for social rearrangement. But they go largely unappreciated, due in large part to the mainstream media’s adherence to preconceived narratives that have more to do with Hollywood disaster films, Solnit claims, than with actual events. At best, ordinary citizens are depicted as passive victims who linger in the disaster area until they are rescued by the authorities. At worst, they are seen as dangers to themselves and to each other, prone to panic, looting, and violence. Only one thing can head off chaos: swift and decisive action by the police, the military, and other authorities.

In fact, Solnit argues, the evidence does not support this anti-democratic paternalism. The public almost never panics en masse, let alone runs wild: People tend instead to be calm, clearheaded, competent, and surprisingly altruistic. Indeed, ordinary citizens are not only the first but quite frequently the best responders to disaster. Official efforts can go wrong precisely because they are excessively paternalistic, militaristic, and authoritarian.

What elites tend to fear more than the disaster—given their power and wealth, they are probably well prepared to ride out an earthquake, fire, or flood—is the social destabilization that they believe will follow. It is not the image of rising water, but of looters at the door, that haunts the nightmares of the bourgeoisie. After the San Francisco earthquake, Brigadier General Frederick Funston sanctioned his soldiers’ use of deadly force against looters—an action typical of the official response to disasters, and one that makes little sense, considering that most “looters” are not thieves, but victims scavenging for food, clothing, and other necessities.

Officials aren't the only ones who resort to violence in the defense of status quo property arrangements. By far, Solnit’s most depressing chapter describes the killing of black men by white vigilantes in New Orleans following Katrina. A virulent mixture of racism and fear—spurred by wildly exaggerated news reports suggesting that the entire area had been plunged into anarchy—led middle-aged white men to slaughter innocent people whom they saw as potential thieves and killers. The murders are an open secret in the communities in which they occurred: One of the vigilantes was filmed bragging, “It was like pheasant season in South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it.” But neither the police nor the media have shown much interest in the story. As Solnit writes, “If the facts don’t fit the beliefs, murders in plain view can go largely unnoticed.”

The Katrina murders are meant to reinforce Solnit’s claim that during disasters the underclass has reason to fear privileged elites, rather than the other way around. But the crimes also undermine her thesis that human nature, as revealed in moments of crisis, should lead us to prefer anarchic over authoritarian political structures. Despite its subtitle, Solnit’s book has less to say about post-disaster utopias than about the forces that prevent such communities from enduring, or even from arising at all. Readers of 

 may find themselves on the same page with many readers of Dante: It is hell, not paradise, that makes the more vivid and lasting impression.

 is an associate professor of philosophy at California State University, Chico. His book 

 won the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. 

"A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster" 

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The United States has failed to learn the crucial lessons that have come with environmental and political catastrophes across the 20th century. 

The Good and the Bad in the Ugly

By the time of his death in 1973, at age 66, the poet Wystan Hugh Auden had been an American citizen for almost three decades. Born in Britain in 1907, the onetime schoolteacher was already well on his way to establishing himself as one of the 20th century’s leading poets when in 1939 he emigrated to the United States. It is not surprising, then, that at his passing it was American poets who felt most keenly that they had lost a master craftsman and an elder statesman. He had adopted their country as his own, and it had adopted him.

Auden’s poems—including such famous lyrics as “September 1, 1939” and “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”—combined elements of the traditional with Modernist innovations; the result was a voice that could move rapidly between a public declamatory tone and one that was markedly personal and intimate. In 

, University of Georgia English professor Aidan Wasley explores the ways in which Auden’s work shaped that of young American writers who read and, in many cases, knew him. During his lifetime, Wasley writes, Auden influenced “a startlingly diverse range of poets whose work would go on to define what we talk about when we talk about contemporary American poetry.”

The American edition of a book Auden published in 1941, two years after his arrival in America, was titled The Double Man, and Wasley emphasizes the various senses in which the poet’s life, career, and even character were bifurcated as he reinvented himself after crossing the Atlantic. “Auden’s renunciation of his English poetic identity amounted to a wholesale redefinition of poetry’s power and place in the world,” Wasley writes. Interestingly, the American poets Auden inspired often identified more with the youthful radicalism of his earlier work than with the apolitical, conservative values he seemed to adopt later in life. Wasley is clearly aware of this fact, though he does not explore it in 

Wasley pays particular attention to Auden’s influence on James Merrill, John Ashbery, and Adrienne Rich. (Auden selected both Ashbery’s and Rich’s first major collections for the renowned Yale Series of Younger Poets.) For Merrill and Rich—who had complicated relationships with their own fathers—Auden functioned as a poetic father figure. Merrill’s most important work, 

(1982), begins “in the shadow of Auden’s death and ends with Auden’s shadow itself instructing Merrill in the relationship between his own living poetic voice and those of his dead precursors,” Wasley writes. Rich saw in Auden a powerful male authority whom she desired both to please and to resist. As her work matured, Wasley says, “Rich would achieve, on her own terms, the ‘radical change and significant novelty in artistic style’ that Auden had found lacking in her first book.” Wasley resists the dominant view that Ashbery’s main influence has been Wallace Stevens, arguing—as Ashbery himself has occasionally suggested—that Auden was at least as important, particularly early in Ashbery’s career.

“In Memory of W. B. Yeats”—the first poem Auden wrote after arriving in the United States—contains his famous statement that “poetry makes nothing happen.” Wasley returns repeatedly to that phrase, attempting to dispel the idea that Auden meant to express deep pessimism about poetry or skepticism about its power to influence politics and society. A few lines later, Auden wrote that poetry “survives, / A way of happening, a mouth,” and Wasley takes this as an indication that Auden hoped poetry might reflect “the world not by standing outside it and looking in, but by taking a fundamental, engaged place within it.”

I confess to finding such formulations a bit vague. Of Wasley’s main contention—that Auden, for all his Britishness, has exerted a powerful influence on American poetry—there can be no doubt, but it is not a new idea. The book is strongest when it focuses on particular poems, not only those by Ashbery, Merrill, and Rich, but also James Schuyler, Frank O’Hara, and William Meredith. There is an undeniable pleasure in seeing connections drawn between such disparate writers, especially when these lines converge in a figure as compelling and multifaceted as Auden, and when the delight Wasley himself takes in the poetry of Auden and those he inspired is evident on nearly every page.

, an associate professor of philosophy at California State University, Chico, is the author of 

, which won the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. His second book, 

 is forthcoming in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets later this year. 

"The Age of Auden: Postwar Poetry and the American Scene" 

by Aidan Wasley, Princeton University Press, 2010. 

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W. H. Auden adopted America as his own, and it adopted him. 

Transatlantic Poet

Carlin Romano begins his new book with a provocative thesis: The United States is the most philosophical nation on earth. Romano, a critic at large for 

and professor of philosophy and humanities at Ursinus College, declares his stance in the first few pages of 

: “The surprising little secret of our ardently capitalist, famously materialist, heavily iPodded, iPadded, and iPhoned society is that America in the early 21st century towers as the most philosophical culture in the history of the world, an unprecedented marketplace of truth and argument that far surpasses ancient Greece, Cartesian France, 19th-century Germany, or any other place one can name over the past three millennia.”

How could such a hotbed of philosophy have gained the reputation for being an un-philosophical, indeed downright anti-intellectual culture? Romano’s explanation is that the word “philosophy” has come to be identified, incorrectly, with the work of a small number of Ivy League philosophy professors in the analytic tradition whose research concerns technical matters related to epistemology (i.e., the theory of knowledge)—people such as Willard Van Orman Quine, Donald Davidson, and Wilfrid Sellars, who saw science as the model for good philosophy and regarded logic as their primary instrument.

Outside of this sphere stands another American philosophical tradition, which is less concerned with the fine points of logic than with rhetoric and imagination, would rather persuade than prove, and cares less about precision and accuracy than utility. This tradition, which Romano refers to with his label “America the Philosophical,” is largely derived from such founding pragmatist philosophers as Charles Sanders Peirce and William James. In Romano’s view, it also includes a wildly varied range of thinkers and figures, among them Richard Posner, Cornel West, Susan Sontag, Oliver Sacks, Robert Coles, Robert Fulghum, and even Hugh Hefner—as well as Richard Rorty, whom Romano credits as the man who revealed analytic epistemology to be a sham.

One could, of course, accept the existence of these two traditions without accusing either of being spurious. But Romano misses no opportunity to heap scorn on the practitioners of analytic epistemology. Unfortunately, the overheated rhetoric he habitually employs makes him seem at least as intolerant as the allegedly narrow-minded academics he is attacking. At one point, he charges that “post-Rortyan epistemologists” are “oblivious in their inbred conventions to time and intellectual culture passing them by, [and] continue to focus on narrow syllogistic arguments in the theory of knowledge.” The reasoning of mainstream analytic epistemologists takes a wide variety of forms, and categorizing them as makers of “narrow syllogistic arguments” is a caricature at best. After a while, it appears that “analytic epistemology” functions as a label for whatever Romano doesn’t like, philosophically speaking.

Other than the fact that he finds them interesting, the figures Romano discusses with approval seem to have little in common. He gives no sense of what particular issues or debates he takes to define or even matter to philosophy. Perhaps this makes a kind of sense, given Romano’s apparent understanding of pragmatism as holding that it’s the practical effects of an idea on society and history, rather than its content, that matter.

This understanding explains how Romano can assert that the United States today is “the most philosophical culture in the history of the world.” What is important to him is “the quantity of [America’s] arguments, the diversity of its viewpoints, [and] the cockiness with which its citizens express their opinions.” Skeptics will remind us that what matters, philosophically, is not just the quantity of debate but its quality, the degree of thoughtfulness it expresses.

Romano also tenders as evidence of America’s philosophical bent “the intensity of its hunt for evidence and information, the widespread rejection of truths imposed by authority or tradition alone, [and] the resistance to false claims or justification and legitimacy.” But are Americans really more committed than other people to evidence-based belief, or more rational in their skepticism? American attitudes toward evolution and global warming, not to mention the willingness of large numbers of Americans to accept the epistemic authority of their favored news outlet, casts doubt on Romano’s claim. And Romano has very little to say about the role of religious commitments in Americans’ thinking.

Is this to say that the United States is an entirely un-philosophical society? Not at all. But 

 violates the first rule of good philosophy: It insists on treating this complex question as if it were a simple one.

is a professor of philosophy at California State University, Chico. He is the author of Love’s Vision (2011) and the forthcoming book On Loyalty, as well as two volumes of poetry.

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America is "an unprecedented marketplace of truth and argument that far surpasses ancient Greece, Cartesian France, 19th-century Germany, or any other place one can name over the past three millennia."

Troy Jollimore