I wrote the other day about the debunking of the Kitty Genovese story. For far too long, the image of three dozen people actively preferring the death of a young woman pleading for help rather than involve themselves and risk all sorts of things from minor inconveniences up to and including death has ruled much of our collective thoughts on what our collective life - the German social thinker Max Weber called it anomie - has done to us. I would be the last person to say that the debunking of the story proves the opposite of the story; rather, while there seems to be specific, credible evidence of one person who heard/saw something there is also evidence this person refused to act because of a certain mitigating circumstance. Being drunk, while hardly a morally exculpatory excuse, at least presents an understandable explanation.
On the larger point, much of our popular culture is flooded with images of large numbers of Americans acting, in the words of various characters from popular fiction and television and movies, "easily frightened, easily led, panicky, even dangerous". One that comes to my mind (because my wife has watched it recently) is an older episode of the TV series ER when a possible smallpox outbreak leads to a lockdown, which, in turn, leads to a riot, including violent attacks on the staff. The riot only stops when those trapped inside realize that the police will fire on them if they attempt to break out.
Lockdowns happen in all sorts of places all the time, sometimes for an hour or two, sometimes longer. I have yet to read of a riot (outside a prison lockdown, of course) in a lockdown situation. Considering that our recent history includes such things as powdered anthrax attacks, this should surprise many.
The other side of the coin - the anti-Genovese point of view, if you wish - is offered in the television series Lost. Considering what the characters go through - I'm still in season one, but that really big thing that shakes the trees and snatches the pilot out of the cockpit . . . I mean, these people set up a golf course for pete's sake. And it's entirely believable!
Why? Precisely because Hurley's reason for doing so - they need to be about more than mere survival, coasting from crisis to crisis, they need the distraction of something mindless in order to feel alive, not just like survivors - make so much sense (Hurley is the combination Greek chorus/moral check of the show, and I really love the fact he's worth close to $200 million back in the real world). Lost provides an alternative to the "Genovese syndrome" view that prevails on that episode of ER, and for that very reason, I think it is far more accurate.
Think back for just a moment or two to the image we saw on television on September 11, 2001. We saw people running through the streets, some toward, far more away from, the danger. We saw people - many, many people, not just the official "heroes" such as the firefighters and EMTs and police officers, but ordinary citizens - helping one another. There were no riots in the streets, there or in any other city that day. There were no angry mobs descending on Islamic centers of worship. There was no "mob" at all.
Or perhaps, to make sure my point isn't too parochial, consider the images from the South Asian tsunami a few years back. For all the devastation, and for all the reports of looting and economic exploitation, there were also images of people going about the understandable routine of trying to get their lives started again. They went back to the ruined villages and picked through the rubble for evidence of their personal effects; they hugged one another both in sorrow over loss and in relief at having made it through.
Remember the stories of Katrina survivors shooting at the helicopters trying to save people? Remember the white suburbanites who armed themselves at stories and rumors of gangs of African-Americans looting in the suburbs? Of course, none of these stories were true (well, the armed white folk was true); they were believed not because they were credible in a factual sense, but because, despite all evidence to the contrary, for the most part, we human beings are far less panicky, far less prone to go off on wild screaming-meemie fits, far less likely to pose a danger to others and ourselves in times of crisis, and far less likely to ignore the cries of those in need than we give ourselves credit for.
That there are counter-examples is no doubt true. That hardly disproves my thesis that we are better than believe of ourselves. I never said we were perfect, and there are plenty of examples of groups of human beings doing truly horrible things - lynchings, you know, were a community activity - to make that point, too. I only said that we need to cut ourselves some slack.
Virtual Tin Cup
