A Paradise Built in Hell (11 page)

I don’t have a television. For many years the devices seemed like forbidden fruit when I encountered them in hotels and motels, and I would eagerly turn on the TV and look for something to watch. Situation comedies would catch my attention, for several always seemed to be in rerun on the cable channels. In them, the world often seemed reduced to a realm almost without the serious suffering of poverty, illness, and death that puts minor emotional trials in perspective, but without ideals, without larger possibilities beyond pursuing almost always deeply selfish needs (the characters were constantly pitted against each other, and the laugh tracks chimed in most reliably at these moments). If someone aspired to something more, their folly was shown up immediately; even romantic love was always risibly self-serving, delusional, or lecherous. Along with therapy culture, the sitcoms seemed to define down what it means to be human. It wasn’t that I condemned them morally; it’s just that they made me feel lousy. (Fortunately, in those hotels I could usually find an old movie, or the Weather Channel, with its inexhaustible supply of spectacular disasters, or
The Simpsons.
) Even best-selling semiliterary novels I picked up seemed to shrink away from the full scope of being human. It was as though the rooms in which the characters lived had no windows, or more terrifyingly yet, there was nothing outside those windows. We were consigned to the purely personal—it was not the warm home to which we might return from the politics of Day or the seascapes of Lopez. It was not the shelter at the center of the world, but all that was left: a prison.

The world is much larger, and these other loves lead you to its vastness. We are often told of public and political life merely as a force, a duty, and occasionally a terror. But it is sometimes also a joy. The human being you recognize in reading, for example, Tom Paine’s
Rights of Man
or Nelson Mandela’s autobiography is far larger than this creature of family and erotic life. That being has a soul, ethics, ideals, a chance at heroism, at shaping history, a set of motivations based on principles. Paine writes that nature “has not only forced man into society by a diversity of wants that the reciprocal aid of each other can supply, but she has implanted in him a system of social affections, which, though not necessary to his existence, are essential to his happiness. There is no period in life when this love for society ceases to act. It begins and ends with our being.” But that love and that happiness have no place in the conventional configuration of who we are and what we should want. We lack the language for that aspect of our existence, the language we need to describe what happens during disaster.

And yet the experience happens anyway. Again and again I have seen people slip into this realm and light up with joy. The lack of a language doesn’t prevent them from experiencing it, only from grasping and making something of it. During the buildup to the beginning of the war on Iraq in 2003, huge crowds assembled to march in opposition to it. I joined—and though this was about a particular political stance, the expression on people’s faces wasn’t partisan. The crowd—one march I joined had two hundred thousand participants, on a weekend when people marched and demonstrated on all seven continents of the earth (if you counted the protesting scientists in Antarctica)—radiated ebullience and exhilaration. They seemed to have found something they had long craved, a chance to speak out, to participate, to have voices and feel in their numbers a sense of power, to feel that they mattered, that they could step into history rather than merely watch it.

It was moving to see this idealistic joy on so many thousands of faces, disconcerting to realize how uncommon the experience seemed to be—this experience, which was essentially that of citizenship itself, of playing a role in public life, of being connected to strangers around you and thereby to that abstraction we call society. An even more powerful and pervasive form of it came during the election of Barack Obama, when people around the nation and the world wept, suddenly able to feel the pain of centuries as it was in some way lifted and a hope that seemed out of reach before. The global wave of emotion was about a deep and too often dormant passion for justice, for meaning, for the well-being of others, and the fate of nations. We should feel like that regularly, routinely, in a democracy, but the experience is rare in too many societies and nations. Some part of this joy is sometimes found in disaster, and its effect is so profound that some people remember disasters, from the London Blitz to the collapse of the World Trade Center towers, with strange ardor.

We have, most of us, a deep desire for this democratic public life, for a voice, for membership, for purpose and meaning that cannot be only personal. We want larger selves and a larger world. It is part of the seduction of war William James warned against—for life during wartime often serves to bring people into this sense of common cause, sacrifice, absorption in something larger. Chris Hedges inveighed against it too, in his book
War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
: “The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidity of our lives become apparent. Trivia dominates our conversations and increasingly our airwaves. And war is an enticing elixir. It gives us resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble.” Which only brings us back to James’s question: What is the moral equivalent of war—not the equivalent of its carnage, its xenophobias, its savagery—but its urgency, its meaning, its solidarity? What else generates what he called the “civic temperament”? Many aspects of public life open up room for such emotion, some quietly, as anyone long devoted to a cause or a community understands, some dramatically, as those who have lived through the warlike suspension of everyday life and solidarity of a major disaster or upheaval know. The extremes of joy are limited to extreme situations—to great public events and historic moments. Yet something of their satisfaction tides over into everyday life, when that life is deep and broad.

There are many other loves than the personal. The largeness of the world is one of the balms to personal woe, and each of us enlarges the world by idealistic passion and engagement. Meaning must be sought out; it is not built into most people’s lives. The tasks that arise in disaster often restore this meaning. The writer Stephen Doheny-Farina says of the great ice storm that paralyzed and rendered powerless much of the northeastern United States and Canada in 1998: “Although all disasters have their unique dangers, in many ways the impact of the ice storm was less a sudden catastrophe than an unforeseen change in the way we had to live. . . . And during that process a fascinating phenomenon evolved: as the power grid failed, in its place arose a vibrant grid of social ties—formal and informal, organized and serendipitous, public and private, official and ad hoc.” He loved it so much that when the power went on and he returned to preparing his college classes, he found, “The job seemed so distant to me. It was almost as if I had changed careers over the course of two weeks from teacher to home handyman—klutzy, semi-clueless, but coachable, very willing to learn new skills like how to run and maintain a two-cycle generator engine. Suddenly the power went out again. I got up quickly and looked out the window to see if there was evidence of power anywhere in sight. I got on the phone and started calling people. Power seemed to be out across the village. I was alive—it was as if the power left the grid and poured into me.”

Principles and ideas are among the other loves, and Dorothy Day describes even her feeling for the books of Dostoyevsky, DeQuincy, and Dickens as a great passion and an important part of her life. Day believed that “people have so great a need to reverence, to worship, to adore; it is a psychological necessity of human nature that must be taken into account. We do not like to admit how people fail us.” And thus we need something more. In her view, this includes love of God and religious practice. And so, after long anguish and indecision, she left her lover and partner so that she could baptize her daughter and become a member of the Catholic Church. Afterward, her long loneliness left her, but another dilemma arose, since she had left her life among radicals behind as well. “How little, how puny my work had been since becoming a Catholic, I thought. How self-centered, how ingrown, how lacking in sense of community!” She moved back to New York City and worked again as a journalist, covering a march of the poor on Washington—the Great Depression had spread desperation over the land a year after her conversion—but she felt isolated and disengaged, until 1932, when she met Peter Maurin, the French peasant who was as radical as he was devout. He changed her life.

He was waiting for her in her own apartment, and the two of them together founded a mission neither of them could have carried out independently. Day called him a “genius, a saint, an agitator, a writer, a lecturer, a poor man, and a shabby tramp, all in one.” Not everyone was so enthused about Maurin, an autodidact who happily lectured anyone under any circumstances, but his unshakable self-confidence in their vision made it possible for her to throw her considerable energies into realizing it. On May Day, 1933, they began. They had launched a penny newspaper—twenty-five hundred copies of the first issue were already printed—that would preach their mix of pacifism, solidarity with the poor, social reform, and works of kindness as acts of faith. It was called the
Catholic Worker,
a name that was a riposte to the popular Communist
Daily Worker
but also an insistence on work and workers as central to its vision. Day and Maurin were regular contributors, and a motley crew of writers, illustrators, and newspaper sellers began to gather round. Some of them were homeless, many of them were otherwise unemployed, and it was a logical next step to turn the
Catholic Worker
from a newspaper into a movement by opening “houses of hospitality” to lodge these and other destitute and displaced people. After attempting to locate in several parts of New York City, they settled in the Bowery, famed for its skid-row atmosphere and tough citizens.

By 1939, the
Catholic Worker
was no longer entirely under their direction; they had formed a template that begat twenty-three sister Houses of Hospitality, two farms, and study groups around the country. The newspaper’s circulation exploded; two years after its founding it had reached 110,000; by 1939 it would reach nearly 200,000. Day and Maurin were not enthusiasts for the New Deal that arose from the radical politics and radical needs of Depression America; they believed that “the works of mercy could be practiced to combat the taking over by the state of all those services which could be built up by mutual aid.” They wanted the needs of the poor to be met personally and the poor to become participants in their own care and thereby members of the community. The state removed that obligation—Day never really ceased to be an anarchist, a person who believed in as much autonomy for the individual and as little role for the state as possible. She and Maurin were much influenced by the French philosopher Emmanuel Mounier’s idea of “personalism”—of addressing people as individuals rather than members of a class and of taking personal responsibility for social problems. She was also a pacifist who saw the grand gestures of war as only myriad unjustifiable acts of killing individuals. During the Second World War, this led to a decline in support for the movement, but the same position led to a resurgence of support and interest during the Vietnam War.

Day deplored Catholics who claimed to love God but did not love him in the form of the poor and the needy, and she saw her two loves as one. She spoke of the “sense of solidarity which made me gradually understand the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ, whereby we are the members one of another.” The Catholic Church preaches the “Corporal Works of Mercy” that include feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, harboring the homeless, visiting the sick, and burying the dead, and the Catholic Worker, both radical and devout, attempted to practice all these, along with the Spiritual Works of Mercy, which include instructing the ignorant, counseling the doubtful, admonishing sinners, comforting the afflicted, and praying for all. These works of mercy had been much more integral parts of medieval society, when huge religious orders ran hospitals and charity was considered a part of everyone’s religious duty. There is something medieval about Day, with her stark face, fierce will, and simplifying approach to complex problems. Her devoutness often appeased the church officials who looked askance at the radical rhetoric and practice of the Catholic Worker.

The idea of community was central to Day’s work. And the houses of hospitality were communes of a sort, in which the poor were taken in and the core workers ministered to the residents and others in need. The phrase
the poor
sounds far more pleasant than the actuality of people in crisis, alcoholics, drug addicts, and the mentally ill, then and now—though one Catholic Worker house near San Francisco now ministers largely to immigrant farmworkers. Maurin had been raised on a farm and dreamed that the poor could be returned to the countryside, where they could produce their food communally, outside the cash economy. Though the Catholic Worker maintained two farms, the farming activities were often comic—the characters they sent out to the farms were not always enthused about the simple diet or motivated to undertake hard work without bosses. Day and Maurin were trying to avoid what had happened to the food relief in the 1906 earthquake—the institutionaliza tion that reduced the hungry to passive consumers rather than participants in their own survival. With this empowerment, of course, came a degree of chaos and uncertainty—but they were always clear that what the poor needed was much more than food, and power and possibility were also shared.

Even disasters that don’t beget broad social change often beget transformed individuals who impact their society. The Great Depression triggered vast economic and social reforms, from changes in the banking system and the economy to the social services of the New Deal. It also served as the long disaster to which Dorothy Day was able to work out a lasting equivalent to the brief moment of disaster solidarity and generosity she had experienced at age eight. The Catholic Worker was her answer to how to extend that engagement, a wedding of her radical commitments and her spiritual desires. More than a century after the earthquake moved a little girl in Oakland, it is still going, still benefiting the bereft, the marginal, the incapacitated. Few would choose a life lived so exclusively and intensively for the other loves. And yet, Dorothy Day’s life is only an extreme and enduring version of the altruism that arises in disasters.