A little less noise, there, a little less noise…
‘Incompetence’ has come up a great number of times in media discussions of the White House’s response to Katrina’s decimation of New Orleans, and it’s an apt word — one that’s been used many times before to describe this government. But there’s more than incompetence going on, here. I’ve been struggling to understand the federal and muncipal governments’s reasons behind some very bizarre acts: Why are resources that could be put toward saving lives instead being directed toward the protection of abandoned private property? Why do National Guardsmen have a mandate to shoot survivalist looters with the aim to kill? Why were 1,500 New Orleans police officers taken off of search-and-rescue duty to actively seek out looters?
The easy answer is that Bush, or politicians in general, work for the rich. That they don’t care about people, or about certain groups of people. I think the truth is a little more complicated than this.
In New Orleans, we saw, and there remains, the kind of anomie that erupts when social structures collapse suddenly. Politicians, as leaders of a hierarchical order, must, in such situations, attempt to restore order. Marcel Mauss writes of “primitive” and “antique” societies that ‘everything, food, women, children, goods, talismans, land, labour, services, priestly offices and ranks, is material for transmission and surrender. Everything goes and comes as if there were a constant exchange of a spiritual matter including things and men…’ From here, he passes smoothly into the role that gods and Nature play in this exchange. In Capitalism, there is a major difference — every object is some human being’s (or corporate person’s) property. Despite possible Weberian Protestant roots, the spiritual has been sucked out of the equation. In pre-Christian Asante and in animist Thailand, one made a request from a local spirit before cutting down a tree. Here, now, everything is owned by living people (again, biological or corporate). (There still exist government properties, in the United States; our Capitalism is not complete, and one shouldn’t overlook the long-standing trend toward privatisation.)
Mauss’ thesis in The Gift is that the exchange of material goods and services carries with it an intangible component that binds human beings and societies together. Violation of these unwritten contracts leads to social break-down: vengeance, feuds, war, collapse — anomie. As Mauss noticed, in some societies, these tendencies are more pronounced than in others. For an American Capitalist, material exchange is not just an essential part of those phenomena in which ‘are expressed at once all kinds of institutions’ which Mauss refers to as ‘total social phenomena’; rather, material exchange is the essential total social phenomenon which encompasses all other institutions.
For those of us who don’t buy into Capitalist ideology, or who can better empathise with those struggling to survive in New Orleans, the decisions made by the federal and municipal governments may seem heartless, or may seem to indicate a greater concern with things that with people. I may very well be wrong, but I think what’s really going on here is that these officials see the breakdown of the social order as the cause of the suffering in New Orleans, and for them, that social order is tied up in the exchange of material goods. Looters, who have given proprietary rules the finger, are seen as having broken the essential Capitalist social contract. Thus: war, violence, anomie. In attacking these people (who are trying to survive, who are by and large not posing a serious threat [this is not to discard the rapes, murders, and personal thefts that have taken place in New Orleans, but the thug with the gun is not the average bread- or medicine-thief]), the governments have, in their view, been getting at one of the roots of New Orleans’ suffering.
I don’t know whether that makes me hopeful or afraid.
UPDATE: The looters in New Orleans were referred to in the Army Times as ‘the insurgency’, five days ago. There is no indication from credible news sources that I have been able to find that armed looting is dominant. The best we have is hearsay, and the hearsay which appears, to me, more credible indicates that the majority of those in New Orleans were not brigands or attempted murderers. According to today’s New York Times, there are now something like 15,000 Army, Army National Guard, and police troops in place to forcibly evacuate 5-10,000 civilians.