Ethics Newsline®

Katrina and the Big Easy: Is a New Moral Order Emerging?

Apr 7th, 2008 • Posted in: Commentary

by Rushworth M. Kidder

Last week I spent four days in New Orleans, a city in comeback mode two-and-a-half years after the ravages of hurricane Katrina. Traveling as trustees of a charitable foundation, our group met dozens of community leaders, government appointees, business executives, bankers, demographers, environmentalists, and local residents. We saw the gray-brown watermark on the sides of buildings several yards above ground level — evidence of a flood that immersed an area seven times the size of Manhattan, in some places for as long as 56 days. We heard chilling stories of personal loss and social disorganization. Yet we also found evidence that in small but significant ways, a new political and moral order is struggling to be born — one that could shape not only New Orleans but the nation.

If that sounds overblown, consider that New Orleans is the site of one of the two great American stories of this still-young century. If 9/11 represented a major test of the nation’s ability to respond to international attacks, Katrina tested our ability to respond to domestic crises. Both are ongoing stories. Both leave us wondering whether we’re passing or failing. Both mark points of definitive, irreversible change.

You can’t hang around New Orleans for very long without hearing people talk about change — and about the “silver lining” arising from the calamity. Environmentalists see a silver lining in the new concern for the nearby wetlands, which could have significantly reduced the storm surge if they hadn’t already been degraded by decades of commercial development. Community organizers see the silver lining in the sound of once-silent citizens speaking up to save neighborhoods devastated by the floods. Economists see it in the resilience of local entrepreneurs who, working with nonprofit microcredit banks, are reopening day-care centers, driving schools, debris-removal companies, and hosts of other mom-and-pop businesses. Churches see it in once-separate black and white congregations coming together in new forms of collective action.

That doesn’t mean the challenges aren’t severe. New Orleans may never again reach its pre-Katrina population. Nearly 40 percent of the population, according to figures from the Brookings Institution, live below the poverty level. The destruction of 100,000 homes from wind and flood damage has wiped out family investments and pushed rents up by nearly 50 percent. The final bill for repairing present damage and investing in a new future will exceed $100 billion.

Still, the optimism is palpable. Why? Because what’s also being destroyed are some old ways of thinking. The city’s entrenched and infamous public corruption is at last being resolutely challenged. So is the idea that you can build houses safely without stilts — slab on grade, as they say here — on dangerously low land behind a flawed levee system. So is the idea that you can simply reconstruct school buildings in an education system ranked among the nation’s worst before Katrina hit.

But there’s deeper change afoot. To understand it, imagine a horizontal scale with two end points labeled, respectively, Big government will save us and Big government will destroy us. Conventional wisdom puts each of us somewhere along that scale, roughly related to our location along the conservative-liberal spectrum. So you might predict that impoverished, jobless, welfare-dependent communities in New Orleans would cluster toward the liberal end of the scale, while the city’s oil-rich, high-living, internationally sophisticated communities would have little use for government.

Instead, voice after voice last week echoed that of Marylee Orr, executive director of the Louisiana Environmental Action Network. In the weeks and months following the storm, she told us, “I thought that government agencies would come forth and help us. It didn’t happen.” Yet there is equal skepticism, even from business leaders, about New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin’s declaration that “market forces” should be allowed to determine the city’s redevelopment.

In an odd way, it’s as though New Orleans finds itself at right angles to that whole scale, its residents distrusting both ends points and shifting instead to live along a different, perpendicular axis. They’re rolling up their sleeves and getting things done themselves, depending less on governments or markets and more on their own self-reliance. Of course they need money and regulations — two things that governments provide. And of course they need financial incentives and economic opportunities, which markets create. But in the new realism of survival, the old horizontal idolatries of either one are collapsing like shotgun houses in a storm surge.

In an election year, that collapse has ramifications for politics just as, in a period of economic uncertainty, it has financial implications. But primarily, in an age groping to understand 9/11 and Katrina, that shift has ethical consequences. In a city called the Big Easy, the easy language of bigness — in praise of big government or in adulation of vast market forces — is losing sway. Instead, in conversation after conversation, you hear the language of individual values. People here talk about responsibility for self and others. They talk about a race-blind respect for everyone’s dignity. They’re demanding public truth telling, a compassion for all who suffer when disaster strikes, and a justice that is incorruptible, swift, and fair.

Will that shift from horizontal to perpendicular thinking reach beyond New Orleans? Will it create a fledgling social order at right angles to the past, equally wary of governments and markets? That may depend on the nation’s youngest voters — the newly energized activists who continue to pour into New Orleans, gravitate toward presidential campaigns, and distrust the politics of polarity. But that’s a subject for another column.