New Orleans is sinking.

Moments before Katrina roared ashore, New Orleans was a thriving port city of half a million people. 24 hours later, eighty percent of the city was under water. 48 hours later, unclaimed corpses floated by; funeral homes no longer had room for the dead; people frantically clambered onto rooftops and waved makeshift flags to attract aerial rescue; looting was rampant; police (where they could be found) were fired on by snipers; and a hospital was attacked by those seeking drugs. As the world watched, New Orleans became a microcosm of what Thomas Hobbes described three centuries ago as "the state of nature", namely a place where life is "nasty, poor, brutish and short."

After the tragedy came the accusations: pro forma, of course, President George Bush was a racist; the federal government (which did appear slow and clumsy off the mark) was insensitive. Peaceniks claimed that there were too few troops to pitch in because American soldiers are bogged down in the Iraqi quagmire. And the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the pop-up cleric on the scene wherever television cameras run, seemed to blame anyone who is now, or ever has been, associated with the Republican Party.

Meanwhile, the black poor--homeless, separated from loved ones, dispossessed, it seemed, from the face of the earth--shuffled from one ludicrous and inadequate sports stadium to another, or they took up living like carrion under bridges on interstate highways. Yet when one low level politician made the eminently sensible suggestion that a coastal city which lies beneath sea level and which steadily sinks lower not be rebuilt but abandoned, he was howled down and forced into a quick retraction.

Canadians sat by and watched, embarrassed yet again by a Liberal Government so in thrall to its innate, visceral anti-Americanism that its response--when finally it came--seemed tepid by comparison to Prime Minister Martin's bluster after the recent Asian tsunami disaster. Of course, whether Paul Martin's tsunami response was anything more than rhetorical bluster is the kind of question to which it is impossible to get any convincing answer.

Then again the countries affected by the Asian tsunami were Muslim; in Liberal Canada it is acceptable to be solicitous of the Muslim world, just not of our ostensibly Christian neighbours.

When Alexis de Tocqueville came to America in the early years of the nineteenth century he was impressed above all by American democracy and religious faith. Actually, the two go hand in hand; American democracy is primarily a product of the Christian faith of the founding fathers. Yet if one judges only by the scenes in New Orleans immediately after Hurricane Katrina, one could be forgiven for wondering if Christianity in America had run its course.

And why should that be any surprise? For half a century the media have mocked Christian virtues. For half a century the education system has taught that Christianity is backward and intolerant. For half a century the Courts have barred Christians from the public square.

Previous American generations were taught--in the home, in the school, in the church--that "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." And what is the "fear of the Lord?" Well, it is many things, not least those commandments set in stone tablets by the finger of God upon Mount Sinai: "Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's property ..." etc. In the aftermath of Katrina, we saw life without the fear of the Lord.

By recent judicial decree the Ten Commandments are banished from the public square; the effect--not so much of the ban but of the mindset behind the ban --was on display in the streets of New Orleans in the days after Katrina. That Hobbesian state of nature that the poor and black were forced to endure, and that the rest of us watched via television, was the end product of how we think today; it was also an indictment of the current education, welfare, and judicial systems.

New Orleans, post-Katrina, offered a glimpse of the face of evil. Whether good can yet be brought out of this particular evil, it is too early to say.

Ian Hunter is Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Law at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario.