Crises

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed these days. We seem to have run out of metaphors for extreme fear/upset/disorientation facing individuals, our society, and humanity. Breathless media coverage of the appalling political/legal action de jour contributes a lot to the sense that everything is spinning out of control. The water may, in fact, be swirling in the bowl, on its way down the drain. If so, there’s likely little to be done beyond gathering myself up, standing firmly, and connecting to those who mean the most to me.

If, however, there is another chapter to this story, thinking clearly about the challenges facing us and figuring out a plausible substantive response seems to me necessary. In this case, the advice noted above is equally applicable, at least as a start.

In order to actually do something useful, it’s important to figure out what challenges present the most significant threats to maintaining our individual and collective hopes. Unfortunately, given the inevitability of limited resources, this means triage. Working ferociously on the seventh biggest problem is not a recipe for our continuation and success. This means that some injustices need to be ignored, some stupidities should be left to molder on the sidelines, and some lives will be lost. For example, a recent piece in the NYT argued that litigators defending rights who lose in the lower courts should perhaps NOT appeal to the current Supreme Court, since they’re not likely to win there and a local loss is not as bad as a national loss and resources could be put to better use elsewhere.

Each person will have their own list of priorities, but not building such a list only ensures that effort will be wasted. Each list has to be based on hard thinking, a firm ethical outlook, and a set of parameters on which to build that list.

While I believe that the country and the world need radical change, I hope that this can be accomplished without wholesale calamity and that some mode of coherent human society can be maintained. The threshold threats to civilization thus seem to me to be 1) climate change, 2) AI, 3) nuclear/biological disasters through war or terrorism, and 4) the general collapse of national communities which are the foundation of democratic values (both across the list of countries and as a support for some kind of international system). 

My priorities are based on the likelihood of mass death and destruction and the amount of time it would take to recover from these particular crises. In other words, existential crises take priority over the merely godawful, horrible, appalling or self-inflicted.

With due regard for the interrelationship of these phenomena, and especially mindful that any of the first three could lead to the fourth, I am prepared to defer action on competing with China, defending Ukraine, any number of civil wars and famines in the world, the “war on drugs,” the disruptions of immigration, unfairness in the tax code, etc. etc. In other words, if we don’t “fix” the top items on my (your) list, it won’t matter much if HWSNBN lines his family’s pockets, or Israel gets over its current spasm of excessive violence.

Of course, I’m not in a position to do much about most of these to any significant degree; so, to some extent, my statements can be characterized as posturing or as an “academic” exercise. But since I can only be responsible for myself and my attitudes and actions, perhaps all that I (you) can do. 

Looking historically, it’s difficult to come up with any plausible precedents for our current global predicament. Prior to the modern era, the world was sufficiently disconnected so that a crisis in one country or region would have limited effects elsewhere. Similarly, the cumulation of  capabilities of our modern technologies is sufficiently recent that we can say that there was no means by which any threat could have such a wide and deep impact nor was there any means of doing something about it. We can look at the fall of the Roman Empire as having only a regional impact, even if it took a thousand years to reboot European civilization. The most likely candidate for the leading global human disaster is the Black Death of the 14C. Somewhere in the neighborhood of a quarter to a third of humanity died as a result, and that too took a couple of centuries to recover from. 

This gives us some perspective on the combination of WWI/Great Depression/WWII (probably the greatest disruption of the modern era). The prospect of nuclear war that has loomed over the world for the past 65 years is arguably greater, but we have dodged that bullet so far. The threats to global human society from my four horsemen are of a greater order of magnitude than those we faced a hundred years ago. All the rest of the crises in human society (insert your list of wars, revolutions, pandemics, etc. here) filled the news reports and fill the history books but are otherwise (relatively) small beer.

Franklin Roosevelt who, as much as anyone, helped turn the tide on the early 20C set of crises, famously said: “The only thing we have to fear—is fear itself.” It’s true at both a social level and at a personal level as well. Falling into the abyss of despair is a pretty sure route to the bottom. Roosevelt was endowed, in the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, with a “second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament.” We were fortunate that things turned out as well as they did. In our own time, we have chosen a political leadership with a second-class intellect and a third (fourth?)-class temperament. Globally, the alternatives are only relatively better. 

So it is to my own temperament that I must turn; and you to yours.