WJ's,1906 SF "earthquake essay continued: “Two things in retrospect strike me especially, and are the most emphatic of all my impressions. Both are reassuring as to human nature. The first was the rapidity of the improvisation of order out of chaos.” He described how people took initiative, without leadership or coordination, for much of what needed to be done, giving as an example the way two admirers of the painter William Keith went to the centrally located homes doomed to burn and saved his paintings from the flames. (They brought the salvaged roll of canvases to him in his studio, where he had given up his work for lost and was already painting more.) An echo of “The Moral Equivalent of War” is evident in his statement that this purposeful energy, “like soldiering . . . always lies latent in human nature.”
The second thing that struck him was “the universal equanimity. We soon got letters from the East, ringing with anxiety and pathos; but I now know fully what I have always believed, that the pathetic way of feeling great disasters belongs rather to the point of view of people at a distance than to the immediate victims. I heard not a single really pathetic or sentimental word in California expressed by anyone.
A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit...suffering and loss are transformed when they are shared experiences. In the earthquake he found what he had been looking for: a moral equivalent of war, a situation that would “inflame the civic temper as past history has inflamed the military temper.” The civic temper—the phrase suggests social engagement not just as a duty but also as an appetite and an orientation."
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