Why We Love Disaster Stories

There comes a point in every tale of disaster—from Jon Krakauer’s 1997 Everest chronicle, Into Thin Air, to last year’s blockbuster space movie, Gravity —when you think, Could it get any worse? Of course, it always does. And as readers or viewers, we can’t get enough. Why are these books and movies so compelling? Are we simply fascinated by others’ misfortune? The worse their luck, the greater our thrill? Or is it a need for catharsis—for acknowledgment of, and release from, all our repressed anxieties about the things that could harm us? Perhaps both, to some degree. But I think another reason we love these tales is the deep examination of moral choices they often offer. What decisions did the climbers or astronauts or sailors or hikers or airplane passengers make in the most dire of circumstances? And how would we behave in similar emergencies? As Pulitzer Prize winner Sheri Fink writes in Five Days at Memorial, her eloquent book about a hospital’s response to Hurricane Katrina, “It is hard for any of us to know how we would act under such terrible pressure.” When you read her story and others in this genre, you can’t help wondering how your own carefully constructed but mostly untested moral reasoning would hold up in a catastrophic situation. Would your behavior be guided by selflessness, self-interest, or something else? Five Days at Memorial is a fascinating story on several levels, but the issue of moral choice comes to dominate the tale. At one point Fink draws a comparison between what went on at Memorial Medical Center and events at nearby Charity Hospital in the desperate days after the hurricane hit New Orleans. Memorial flooded and lost power. With supplies running low and rescue uncertain, the medical staff gave several patients morphine injections that allegedly caused their deaths. Some of those patients had been designated do-not-resuscitate; one was considered too obese for airlifting; they were suffering. Compassion, not just expediency, appeared to motivate the health care workers. Indeed, after an attending physician, Anna Pou, was arrested on second-degree murder charges, there was a groundswell of support for her, and in the end, a grand jury declined to indict her. Over at Charity Hospital, things were very different. The staff continued to provide care to patients, despite conditions that were possibly even worse than those at Memorial. Leaders never categorized patients as too ill to rescue. In that light, the decisions made by Pou and her colleagues seem less defensible. Since the storm, [doctors and nurses] had barely slept….Languishing patients were receiving little medical care. Crisis settings by definition present extraordinary challenges. Yet as Harvard’s Lachlan Forrow, an expert in medical ethics and palliative care, wrote in response to the euthanasia charges leveled at Memorial staffers: “We should almost always see exceptional moral situations as opportunities for us to show exceptionally deep commitment to our deepest moral values.” The best disaster narratives offer up those types of character tests—none black-and-white, all colored in shades of gray. If you had been responsible for patients in a hospital with no power and little food, what would you have done? If you had been a guide on Mount Everest in blizzard conditions, would you have left climbers behind while you descended from the summit? If you had been on United Airlines Flight 93 on 9/11, would you have risked your life by storming the terrorists? Sometimes the absence of moral choices can make a disaster story seem strangely empty. For all its thrills and breathtaking 3-D effects, Gravity was mostly devoid of character decisions, except whether Sandra Bullock’s astronaut should give up or go on. Trapped Under the Sea, a new book from journalist Neil Swidey about a disaster that left a group of workers stranded in a 10-mile-long tunnel beneath Boston Harbor in 1999, has a similar problem. It’s a vivid story, well told, but once calamity strikes, the only dilemma facing the trapped men is whether to try to recover colleagues’ bodies. The moral choices that truly mattered get scant probing; they were made earlier by the supervising engineer who implemented the workers’ faulty breathing system and pushed ahead despite warning signs. Harvard Business School’s Amy Edmondson, in numerous case studies and articles, has analyzed both the flawed decision making that leads to disasters and the tough choices people must make as a consequence. Her work has showcased leadership failures (at NASA, for example, in the run-up to the Challenger explosion) as well as triumphs, such as the willingness of the head of the 2010 Chilean mine rescue operation to try an innovative drilling idea suggested by a 24-year-old engineer. That open-mindedness took some moral courage—a leader more concerned about protecting entrenched hierarchies might have ignored advice from someone so young and inexperienced. In good times and bad, before crises and after, leadership quality often rests on the strength of leaders’ intuitive moral sense. If that sense is powerful, the leaders will probably do the right thing when disaster strikes (or prevent trouble from happening at all). If their commitment to ethics isn’t “exceptionally deep,” to borrow Lachlan Forrow’s words, they might find themselves cutting corners and thus courting catastrophe, or, in the midst of a crisis, pushing people aside to save themselves. We look at the central figures in disaster scenarios and ask, “Is that a portrait of me? However unselfish I may be, would my moral compass go haywire under pressure?” Most of us probably imagine ourselves putting aside fear and personal needs to lead others through a crisis. But would we be that heroic? Could we be?

Why We Love Disaster Stories

Partner Center