There are people organizing in most communities across the country and doing other forms of it and other countries to figure out how do we take care of each other in the context of not being able to physically be with each other in ordinary ways.

And it's just extraordinary seeing both the intensity of this desire to help people you may never meet and the creativity in figuring out how to do it.

Hello and welcome to Wise is happening with me your host Chris Hayes.

One of the things that's been strange about this moment we live in there's a lot of things are strange is there's a lot of graphs that look insane.

And the reason there are a lot of graphs of that looking saying is because most of normal life Wednesday looks like Tuesday and Thursday looks like Wednesday.

But that's not in the case now for you know the last four or five weeks in American life so you can choose a graph it's like air travel or TSA throughput or toilet paper purchases or you know flower purchases for for making bread.

There's a million different graphs that just like go along and then they shoot up and do something wild and one of the graphs that does that is gun purchases.

So you've seen right when lockdown started enormous enormous spike in firearms purchases and there was you know there were a bunch of news stories and photos of people lining up for those guns as we entered lockdown.

And I think there's a well sort of long complicated reason why Americans would do that but I think the animating idea behind it is a pretty familiar one which is basically when you move towards emergency catastrophe or disaster.

The civilizing influences of the social order fall away and when the civilizing influences of the social order fall away we are all thrown into a kind of Hobbesian Ma in which it is every man against every man and you have to protect your property from marauders and looters and when the resources get scarce who knows who will be showing up to try to take what's yours and so you have to arm yourself.

And that's a really powerful idea that I think is often associated particularly in I think you know filmic representations of chaos of catastrophe of disaster is the idea of like the mob run a mock and the looting hordes and order falling away and violent spiking and you know everyone sort of out for themselves.

But it's not clear that's a realistic portrayal of what happens in the midst of disaster, catastrophe and crisis.

In fact there's a whole lot of evidence that the main reaction of human beings in those situations is kind of the opposite.

It's not violent marauding it's not taking up arms to horde what's theirs but it's solidarity it's community it's sharing it's generosity it's grace and we've seen a bunch of examples of that and we're going to talk about this in this hour in the midst of the COVID pandemic.

But as I've been wrestling with all this I was thinking a lot about an author who I love and a book that I had read when it first came out years ago by Rebecca Solman the book is called a paradise built in hell and it was published after Katrina and remember reading it and had a very profound effect on me because the thesis of the book is precisely this it's a study of the aftermath of a variety of disasters including the San Francisco earthquake and Katrina and 9-11 in New York.

And what she argues in that book what she shows really is how often it's the case that people the better angels of ourselves are called forth in these moments that there's a kind of amidst the trauma and tragedy and danger and awful grief and wounds of these moments there is combined with that.

A kind of joy or a kind of ecstasis or a kind of courage or a kind of community that's instantiated that's really beautiful and points towards how the world could be in good ways.

And so I've been thinking about that book a lot I reacquired it and have been rereading it and the author of that book Rebecca Solman is one of my favorite nonfiction writers in the English language she's just a masterful pro stylist and thinker.

And I thought I would really love to have a conversation with her about the themes in that book which she's been kind of writing about a bit more amidst all this so without further ado Rebecca Solman.

It's great to have you you know this that book made a really profound impact on me and I thought maybe we can start out with you talking about how you found your way to the topic.

I didn't there was a series of things that happened the major one is because the hundredth anniversary of the San Francisco earthquake and fire was coming up in 2006 around 2004 I got involved in a few projects to think about what had happened started looking really closely at what happened and realized that the earthquake didn't do that much damage institutional authorities treating the public as an enemy to be controlled and making bad decisions was actually the most important thing to do.

It was actually the most destructive force and in the meantime ordinary people were as you note remarkable altruistic creative innovative generous putting the conditions of survival in a ruined city together and so I had all that information and hand and just written in a say about disaster for harpers that actually went to press the day that hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast.

...