Episode 67: John Protevi discusses Darwin, disaster, and prosociality
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Hey, Matt Techman here from Elucidations. Before we get going today, I just thought I'd ask, if you're a fan of the show, to maybe go to our iTunes page and leave a rating and a review, and that way more people can discover it. Alright, thanks.
Hello and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast recorded at the University of Chicago. I'm Matt Tykeman, and with me is John Protevi, Phyllis M. Taylor Professor of French Studies and Professor of Philosophy at Louisiana State University. And he is here to talk with us about Darwin, disaster and pro sociality. John Protevi, welcome.
Thanks Matt. I'm very glad to be here.
So disaster is kind of an interesting topic that you don't see a lot in the philosophy journals. Uh what's philosophically interesting about disasters?
Well, I think it shows a number of things about uh both the human nature presuppositions uh and politics. What we can see in when we actually look at what the social scientists say about disasters, especially people at the University of Delaware Disaster Research Center. They find very little individualistic, every man for himself, panic behavior. Which you might expect if human beings really were. rational egoists, that is, people who calculate what the cost-benefit analysis of any uh action would be relative to uh what's in it for them or their close relatives, let's say. And if you take that view of human nature, then you would think that the state is needed in order to shift the balance of the cost benefits such that people will not prey upon their fellow humans, will not steal, will not do this or that because
the chance of getting caught and punished more severely than the benefits of the uh act would be will impress upon their decisions such that they'll refrain from these. So we can set up a cost benefits uh system within society via the state power. So in a disaster then you would see the breakdown of the state power that is going to shape the cost benefit structures impinging on individual rational decision making. And uh hence you would see an uptick in predations, theft, stealing, etcetera, etcetera. But what the social sciences have found, these uh sociologists basically, surveying lots of disasters, have found in fact Lots of cooperation, very little panic. And in fact, if anything, what you need to do is shock people out of a sort of lethargy.
that they get into and of vast conformancy. that they'll stick together and you know, kind of herd behavior. So the an old anarchist point here is that well what the state is really doing is imposing individuality and competition on people. such that the breakdown of the state reveals the cooperation that lies beneath. Now these are very broad brush descriptions. Obviously there is some panic sometimes in disaster situations. fire in a crowded space is not really conducive to cooperation. But we do by and large find lots and lots of examples of uh situation in which there's no state power presence that you find lots of uh pro social behavior. So for instance in the nine eleven towers. It wasn't every man for himself scrambling uh down the towers, I'm gonna get out and you you stand in my way, I'm gonna get over the top of you.
No apparently all the Testimony from the people in the towers testified to a vast cooperative collaborative effort to get everybody down. In fact what you needed to do mostly is to get people up and out away from their desks from in s for state of shock where they needed to gets uh get moving. So disasters can be interesting that way, I think, in revealing what you would expect to find, and what you actually do find, as revealing certain sets of presuppositions about human nature, and on the basis of that what politics is for. I've done some work on uh media reports on the uh Haitian earthquake. There's also reports you can do a lot quite a bit about Hurricane Katrina. But in Haiti there's a f uh couple of nice clips, so Fox News hysterical meaning in the
non sexist sense of the word. Reporting about Haiti on the brink of anarchy, four thousand escaped inmates roaming the streets, reports of bodies stacked up as roadblocks.
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