Will Katrina burst the class and racial levees?

Hurricane Katrina has exposed long-standing racial and class divisions. President Bush felt compelled to acknowledge the role a history of racism played in the tragedy. As a nation we would be wise to accept this tragedy as an opportunity to challenge the deeply entrenched mindsets that sustain racial and class hatred

All natural disasters lead many to wonder why some die and others are spared, a question Job raised. In the wake of 9-11, some Christian conservatives were faulted for bringing religion into the discussion. The criticism was unfair. Such events inevitably evoke moral and religious responses. Nonetheless, a religious perspective more attuned to the wonder and unpredictable might of nature and cognizant of the limits of human knowledge – including its own worldview – might provide a more effective and humane intervention in current debate.

Natural disasters bring hard- to- comprehend deaths. This storm also exposed another evil, inequity that leaves the poor especially vulnerable. These are distinct forms of evil, but they interact. Unexplained death and extreme disorder can intensify anxiety about human finitude (our mortality and our limited knowledge). This anxiety takes us beyond legitimate questions about how best to prepare for catastrophe.

Debates become quests for revenge against the human condition. To compensate for finitude we claim permanent moral truths. Our way of life and our truths are not merely ours, they are final and all-embracing truths. Problems experienced within the body politic must therefore have an origin in other races, ethnicities, and/or lifestyles.

Extreme claims are made about the destructive impact of minorities on the public good. Removing or disciplining these groups is seen as the only route to safety. Claims about outgroups fall below the evidentiary standard we routinely demand of our courts, schools, and physicians. Those who demand more evidence for a harsh agenda are treated as not merely wrong but as dangerous enemies. Such anxieties and the exclusionary tendencies they engender cross usual political boundaries. They underlay the Crusades, slavery, the Holocaust, Stalinism, and McCarthyism. They are a temptation to all of us at least some of the time.

Initial reports from New Orleans followed this pattern. With scant attempts at verification, major media reported widespread violence in the Superdome and Convention Center. They described African Americans “looters” while the few whites pictured in similar situations were viewed as desperate foragers aiding their families. The Bush administration initially reinforced these stories by suggesting that violence by New Orleans residents was a key factor impeding aid.

The visible plight of the hapless victims eventually caused some rethinking. Some media, including the Los Angeles Times, attempted to scrutinize their own hurricane coverage.

They have acknowledged coroner’s reports as to the tiny number of deaths attributable to violence.

They have questioned their own sensationalist stories. Ideally, this self-scrutiny should lead to more careful reporting and some examination of the widespread social anxieties that evoked the reports.

Many Americans regard poverty as a reflection of moral character. Yet most of the poor in New Orleans work hard. In the city’s growing service sector – where most residents had worked – wages have been stagnant or declining even as worker productivity has increased.

President Clinton, who won praise from liberals for initiating a dialogue on race, was more muted on class. His welfare reform program emphasized the moral deficiencies of the poor. Trade programs like NAFTA substantially reduced the number of unionized, well paying manufacturing jobs that had eased earlier minorities out of poverty

Democrats have also faulted Bush for de-emphasizing natural disaster prevention. But after 9-11, Democrats joined Republicans in automatically assuming “terrorists” are the most serious threat to our safety. This stance may have been good politics and may have blunted doubts about risks implicit in our technologies and way of life.

It also, however, prevents a sober assessment of other compelling threats to life. Sen. Collins’ upcoming hearings should weigh the impact that both parties’ obsession with terrorism has on our preparations for other disasters.

Some environmentalists have their own contestable certitudes. Correlations between growing ocean warmth and storm intensity are increasingly accepted. Nonetheless, environmentalists who hinted that if President Bush had been a hawk on global warming, this hurricane might have been avoided overreached even the most confident theories. And determining the exact course of storms or the timing of earthquakes may always be beyond natural science.

More fundamentally, a growing minority within the scientific community doubts that science can ever yield fully predictive models of the natural world. Like other grand scientific theories, their work contains speculative aspects but also generates testable hypotheses. These scientists focus on a range of chemical reactions at far from equilibrium conditions. When these reactions are subject to changes in such parameters as temperature or pressure they can yield several distinctive outcomes.

This science does not speak of literal chaos. Probabilities can be established. At equilibrium conditions predictable order is maintained. Nonetheless, even in principle it is impossible to establish certainties when systems diverge far from equilibrium. Indeterminacy for these scientists is not just a matter of the complexity of systems or scientists’ inability to establish precisely all initial conditions.

Some element of chance is basic to all matter. Life and the emergence of human creativity are then understood as grandly fortuitous events. They are one among many possible outcomes and amplifications of the indeterminacy built into fundamental chemical and physical processes.

Opening our eyes to a bounteous nature that has created the possibility of life in its wondrous diversity may allow us to accept the inevitability of some unexplained deaths. It might also encourage us to build as much redundancy as possible into life sustaining resources even as we acknowledge that none of our plans and technologies is likely to be finally adequate in the face of continually evolving problems.

Nor need acceptance of human finitude still efforts to alleviate as much suffering as possible. It might even give a new poignancy to those endeavors. The New Orleans I admire is one where the grand public funerals for its most revered artists were occasions not to lament death but to celebrate the miracle of life and its creative moments.

Freed of the oppressive psychic need to bind others to our own eternal moral truths, our lives could be enriched by more dialogue with those whose greatest challenge to us lies simply in their different life styles. Charles Pierce, a staff writer for the Boston Globe, has reminded us that: “New Orleans was about free people expressing themselves freely. It was the place where the American idea fashioned most of the best parts of its soul, and the place from which it sent that soul out into the world, despite the fact that the soul itself was forged in those places where the promise of America was so clearly the biggest, emptiest bluff of all.”

History may never follow the iron logic of right or left. Still, the tragedy of Katrina may encourage us to make good on the promise of American life. We might commit ourselves to the endless task of assuring that as many different kinds and stripes as possible emerge and thrive together. My own-albeit contestable-faith, gleaned from the great Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, revels in the acceptance of a God who does not will all but rather wills that we make the best of all.

John Buell’s most recent book, co-authored with Tom DeLuca, is “Liars, Cheaters, Evil Doers: Demonization and the End of Civil Debate in American Politics” (New York University Press).