A beggar is given two fifty-rupee notes—a relatively large sum in Nepal—and gives half to his companion in misfortune. A nurse exhausted after a difficult night watch still stays a few hours more to help a dying man who is alone. My sister, Ève, who all her life has taken care of children with behavioral problems, has never hesitated to get up in the middle of the night to welcome a child running away from home. At the end of a too-busy day, an engineer coming home from his office walks an extra quarter-mile to show a stranger lost in the capital the way back to his hotel.
There have been discussions about the banality of evil.1 But one could also talk of the “banality of good,” picturing the thousand and one expressions of solidarity, consideration, and involvement in favor of others’ good, which punctuate our daily lives and exercise a considerable influence on the quality of social life. And those who carry out these countless acts of mutual aid and solicitude generally say that it is quite “normal” to help one’s neighbor. If it is justifiable to evoke this notion of ordinariness, it is also because everyday good does not make much commotion and people rarely pay attention to it; it doesn’t make the headlines in the media like an arson, a horrible crime, or the sexual habits of a politician. If there is “banality of good,” it’s also a sign that we are all potentially capable of doing good around us.
“Assistance is a deed that is in accordance with nature. Never get tired of receiving it or giving it,”2 said Marcus Aurelius. Between a fifth and a third of Europeans, depending on the country, or over 100 million individuals, take part in volunteer activities.3 In the United States, this number is close to 50% of the population and includes a majority of women and retired people who, when they have free time, think it their duty to help other members of society.4 American volunteerism is particularly high in the realm of the arts, and contributes to the functioning of many cultural institutions. About 1,500 people, for instance, work without pay for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. What’s more, three-fourths of the inhabitants of the United States donate every year to charity organizations.
In France, the number of volunteers is about 12 million, or one Frenchman out of five (a third of them over sixty).5 Those who devote at least two hours a week to their volunteer activity number a little over 3 million.6 In 2004, the work accomplished by volunteers represented the equivalent of 820,000 full-time jobs.7
About 40,000 international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have been counted throughout the world, and an even larger number of national NGOs. Russia has almost 280,000 national NGOs; in 2009, India had over 3 million. The number of charity organizations has doubled in the United States since 2000 (numbering almost 1 million now). Certainly not all of them are effective, and the management of some of them has been criticized at times. Nevertheless, this movement, by its very amplitude, is one of the great innovations of the last fifty years, and represents a major factor in the transformation of society. Some NGOs have a political aim or are focused on sports or the arts. Most have a social calling: reduction of poverty, environmental cleanup, education, health, emergency aid during wars or natural catastrophes. Others work toward promoting peace or improving the condition of women or children.
BRAC (Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee), the largest NGO in the world, has helped over 70 million women in Bangladesh and in seven other countries to emerge from poverty. Other NGOs, both globally like Greenpeace and EIA (Environmental Investigation Agency) and locally like tens of thousands of smaller NGOs, devote themselves to the protection of the environment or of animals.
Some organizations like Kiva, GlobalGiving, and MicroWorld8 directly and effectively connect people in need to donors who want to improve others’ lives via the Internet. Founded in 2005, Kiva has facilitated over half a million donors to offer 300 million dollars in microcredit-type loans in sixty countries; 98% of these loans have been repaid. Similarly, since 2002, GlobalGiving has financed the completion of over 5,000 charity projects. MicroWorld connects potential lenders with people in need of financing to start up an activity that will help them get their families out of poverty. These are just a few examples among so many others.
In a chapter from his inspiring book La Bonté humaine (Human Kindness), the psychologist Jacques Lecomte has compiled a number of studies showing how during catastrophes solidarity wins out over selfishness, discipline over looting, and calm over panic.9 We are too often led to believe that it’s the opposite that occurs. Lecomte describes the emblematic case of Hurricane Katrina, which, in August 2005, ravaged New Orleans and the Louisiana coast, rupturing the Mississippi River dams. This was one of the most devastating natural catastrophes in the history of the United States:
To this tragedy another was quickly added. For, as soon as the media started covering the event, it reported frightening human behavior. On August 31, a CNN reporter declared there was gunfire and pillaging, and that “New Orleans looks more like a war zone than a modern American metropolis.”
The situation seemed so alarming that Ray Nagin, mayor of New Orleans, ordered 1,500 police officers to interrupt their rescue operation to devote their efforts to stopping the looting.10 The media reported rapes and murders, with the policemen themselves being the targets of the shooters. The governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Blanco, declared: “We will restore law and order. What angers me the most is that disasters like this often bring out the worst in people. I will not tolerate this kind of behavior.”11 She sent National Guard troops to New Orleans, with the authorization to shoot at looters, stating: “These troops are fresh back from Iraq, well-trained, experienced, battle-tested, and under my orders to restore order in the streets. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.”12 This apocalyptic vision of New Orleans was broadcast throughout the world. The military force deployed to reestablish order amounted to more than 72,000 men and women. All this seemed to confirm the belief that, as Lecomte says, “left without government control, humans would return to their vilest, most hurtful natural leanings, without any sensitivity to others’ suffering. Except for one thing: these frightening descriptions were totally false. The consequences of this falsification of facts were tragic.”13
In fact, this hysteria of alarmist news managed to persuade emergency services that they were facing a wild pack of criminals—which kept them from arriving in time and acting effectively. What actually happened? The journalists reported the situation based on second-hand rumors. Once the media frenzy was over, they critiqued their own work. A month after the hurricane, the Los Angeles Times acknowledged: “Rumors supplanted accurate information and the media magnified the problem. Rapes, violence, and estimates of the dead were wrong.”14 The New York Times quoted Edward Compass, the New Orleans chief of police, who had declared that vandals had taken over the city and that rapes (of children especially) and assaults had taken place. He admitted that his previous declarations were wrong: “We have no official reports to document any murder. Not one official report of rape or sexual assault. The most alarming stories that coursed through the city appear to be little more than figments of frightened imaginations.… It seems that the overall response of the inhabitants of New Orleans did not correspond in any way to the general image of chaos and violence described by the media.”15
In reality, hundreds of mutual aid groups were formed. One of them, which was nicknamed “Robin Hood Looters,” was made up of eleven friends, soon joined by the inhabitants of their working-class neighborhood. After leading their families to a safe place, they returned to the site despite the danger to help save the inhabitants.
For two weeks, they requisitioned boats and looked for food, water, and clothing in abandoned houses. They followed some self-imposed rules, such as not carrying any weapons. This group collaborated with the local police and the National Guard, which entrusted them with getting survivors out of the danger zone.16
Finally, “while some antisocial behavior did occur, the overwhelming majority of the emergent activity was prosocial in nature.”17 According to one New Orleans law enforcement officer: “Most people by and large really, really, really just helped one another and they didn’t ask for anything back.”18
According to the investigations of the Disaster Research Center, the decision to militarize the zone also had the consequence of increasing the number of victims. Some people refused to leave their houses because of information that the city was infested with looters, and emergency services were afraid of approaching the damaged zones.19 Thus, by focusing on the fight against imaginary violence, “the officials in charge failed to take full advantage of the goodwill and altruistic spirit of the inhabitants and resources of the community.… By transferring people from rescue operations to maintaining order, the authorities placed law and order above the lives of hurricane victims.”20
What happened in New Orleans is not an isolated case. A widespread myth claims that, during catastrophes, people react with panic and that an “everyone for himself” mentality prevails. The media and movies have acclimated us to scenes of panic, sequences of entire crowds fleeing and screaming with terror in complete disorder. This exposure can lead to reactions of fear, which are entirely legitimate, and which lead us to get away as quickly as possible from danger, to be confused with reactions of “panic” in the course of which people lose control of themselves and behave irrationally.21 According to sociologists, a person is overcome with panic when he feels cornered; when flight, which seems his sole chance for survival, seems impossible (as when trapped in a burning night-club with all emergency doors closed); and when he thinks no one can come to his aid.22 In such cases, fear becomes uncontrolled panic.
The Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware has developed the largest database in the world on human reactions to catastrophes. It emerges from analysis of all these data that three widespread beliefs are actually myths: general panic; a massive rise in selfish, even criminal, behavior; and the feeling of powerlessness while waiting for help.
The sociologist Lee Clarke wrote that during the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, witnesses all agreed that panic was almost absent, while cooperation and mutual aid were prevalent. Despite the high number of victims, almost everyone below the floors where the planes struck survived, essentially thanks to the absence of panic.23
The English sociologist John Drury and his collaborators support Clarke’s observation. During the London bombings in 2005 (three in the underground and one on a bus), which took the lives of 56 people and wounded 700, “Rather than personal selfishness and competition prevailing, mutual helping and concern were predominant amongst survivors, despite the fact that most people were amongst strangers rather than affiliates. There is also evidence that this helping behavior took place in spite of perceived danger rather than because people felt that they were now out of danger.”24 None of the people interviewed made any statements stemming from selfishness. On the contrary, they showed “at least as much concern for the strangers around them” as for their friends, and “they also used a variety of their own terms to describe the experience—‘unity,’ ‘together,’ ‘similarity,’ ‘affinity,’ ‘part of a group.’ ”
Enrico Quarantelli, co-founder of the Center for Disaster Research, concludes: “I no longer believe that the term ‘panic’ should be treated as a social science concept. It is a label taken from popular discourse… During the whole history of our research involving nearly 700 different field studies, I would be hard pressed to cite… but a few marginal instances of anything that could be called panic behavior.”25
During most catastrophes, acts defined as looting are quite rare. According to Enrico Quarantelli, one must in fact make a distinction between “looting” and “justified appropriation.” The latter consists of taking urgently needed available objects and commodities—unused or abandoned—with the intention of returning them if possible, except when products for immediate consumption (food, water, medicine) are considered indispensable for survival. Researchers also noted that, when there is looting, it is rarely done by organized groups, but by individuals who do so furtively, and whose behavior is condemned by the other survivors.26
In the case of the tsunami that devastated the Japanese coastline in 2011, the absence of the slightest instance of looting, theft, or undisciplined behavior was so marked that the media, which were present at the heart of the tragedy, could only wonder at the fact, faced with the admirable prosocial qualities of the Japanese people. No doubt such qualities are explained by the feeling of belonging to a community in which everyone feels close to and responsible for everyone else, and by the civility and sense of duty that, in Japanese culture, outweigh individualism.
Natural catastrophes, attacks, accidents… these are all, of course, exceptional circumstances that have nothing commonplace (banal) about them. But by mentioning them in this chapter on the “banality of good,” I intend to emphasize the fact that, even in such circumstances, the most common behavior is mutual aid, help, and solidarity, while indifference, selfishness, violence, and greed are rare.