3+ major earthquakes and thousands of aftershocks in the last 3 years, schools being amalgamated due to reducing numbers, businesses folding, empty suburbs and a knowledge that mental health issues start surfacing after year 3 of an upheaval. Anecdotal evidence from Cantabrians shows that we are more socially aware, more giving and are more accepting of the ever changing environment.
Is there any research from overseas that shows this is the case amongst human beings after social upheavals?
I find your question very interesting in that I've done some review on the literature on resilience for the Southeastern Pennsylvania Chapter of the American National Red Cross(ARC). The goal of community resilience is to return the community back to normal after a disaster. In the few texts on Emergency Management that I've perused the authors say early in their work that resilience is a function of wealth, i.e., people with means before the storm return to normal first and poor people are not able to regain their meager pre-storm financial status. I'm currently working on a project to introduce micro-insurance into the ARC dialog. I have not thought about the relationship between disasters, social capital, and anomie. I'll do some reading and make another comment later. Great question.
Your linking of anomie and social capital seems to pose a mutually exclusive dichotomy, i.e., when anomie, the alienation of individuals from the social rules of relationship, is present there is a decrease social capital, after Bourdieu's notion of habitus. The individuals in a state of anomie don't share conscious or, more important, unconscious learned behavior and relationship rules or values. There is an incommensurable set of behavior guides or schemata in the completely alienated condition. Social capital presumes a valorized set of behaviors which promote the advancement of common interests. I think of social capital as analogous to the economic notion of wealth, i.e., assets gained in a prior period that are available for use in a latter period. When I think of the disasters in which I've been involved there hasn't been enough disruption, over a long enough time period, to destroy the social habits that underlie the social capital in the locale. In my mind I believe disaster doesn't convey the scale of disruption needed to destroy the habitus of a society. I imagine a total anomic state as one resembling the condition of feral human beings. However even feral humans run in packs, as do feral animals, and hence we describe another type or level of social relationship. In this light anomie describes a state of being that has scale or dimension. My thought is that very little we do in modern society can erase the tacit, shared, social facts of society. I can only imagine the severity of the disaster that could force civilization into a severe state of anomie such that, in the extreme, all social capital would disappear. At that point we would be back to the animal state and even then we would engage in animal sociability; our elementary habitus. In thinking about your question I concluded that behavior in a disaster is not outside of "normal" for the situation. As a matter of fact the Red Cross works hard to bring the reality of disasters into the consciousness of Americans and hence into their grasp of the situation as "normal" for a disaster. By engaging in this community education task the Red Cross is establishing the social discourse that is acceptable under disaster conditions and therefore acting to reduce the scale of any anomie that might occur during the disaster. The relevant social capital that would advance one's interests during a disaster changes for sure and people who don't have sufficient learned behavior to present as social capital in a disaster situation will find themselves alienated from those that have received prior year investments. So I'd conclude that there is no "new normal" but rather a reassertion of the pre disaster normal that begins reemerge from the disorder of the disaster. Whew, that's a long answer, or ramble. I hope I said something of interest.
Here's an article that might lend some insight on the question you raise:
http://cde.williams.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/AidAgencies_Lee.pdf
Thanks Emery and Jacek for your answers and apologies for not replying back to you. I have been away overseas.
Emery,
you didn't ramble, in fact as I was reading your answer I could relate to many of your comments in terms of how I (and many of my friends) were feeling after the earthquakes. One thing I have found though (and again anecdotal) is that even my more 'right wing' friends have a 'softer' side to them. Thank you again for the article.
Jacek,
I will need time to digest the readings that you have presented here however I find it very interesting the notion you have put forward of 'fatalism as opposed to anomie'.
Thank you both very much, I will be sharing these thoughts with my colleagues.
Regards
Luis
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