Tag Archives: panic

Priority Mail: Delivering on Multiple Global Threats, Dr. Robert Zuber

15 Mar

Priority

A crisis is the sum of intuition and blind spots, a blend of facts noted and facts ignored. Michael Crichton 

Truth is always a turning point. Sheila Walsh

Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

If we want to embrace life, we also have to embrace chaos. Susan Elizabeth Phillips

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. Antonio Gramsci

The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. Edward O. Wilson

The virus teaches us that security in the end is human security. Jan Eliasson

This is a week when the “embrace of chaos” took many forms, from people on the hunt for disinfectants and toilet paper to government officials ducking allegations of incompetence and reluctantly turning over control of COVID-19 response to medical professionals who actually know what they’re doing – even if much of the medical infrastructure needed to predict and prevent outbreaks has long been eviscerated.

Indeed, we are in a period where broad public confidence in our often–medieval institutions has taken a hit, as rumors are more readily available than truth, families struggle to reassure children whose lives have been upended through school closures and social distancing, and many millions who live paycheck to paycheck, if indeed they are fortunate enough to receive a paycheck, make gut-wrenching choices between attending to the threat of virus and providing a minimal sustenance for their families.

And as we now seek to “flatten the curve” on outbreaks, we know at some level that that there is more to come, more from this particular virus but also more from other viral threats lurking in our cities, in our melting ice, in our equatorial forests. At least in the US, we have yet to face the full force of social isolation, the degree to which “touching” has become both a social violation and a medical emergency, the distancing brought on by this virus that merely compounds that already solidified through our previous economic and political choices. And all of this is being reinforced by institutions that at times seem hell-bent on suppressing the expression of our better selves, institutions which act as though they have our confidence when they actually have little more than the wary resignation we now liberally bestow on all who are not in our own “tribe.”

There is something genuinely unsettling about the sight of people standing on two-hour lines just to get into supermarkets and then yanking virtually any cleaning agents or non-perishable foodstuffs off the shelves in a particularly frantic search for wipes and masks we collectively should have known we would need and which are now needed most by the various “first responders” who have to try to referee our newly-minted panic based on (in)decisions they had no hand in making. At the same time, a  Palestinian writer recently reminded western colleagues this week that the sight of empty shelves is a common one, not only in Gaza, but in many parts of the world where violence and displacement affect wider swaths of the population than this virus is likely to do, a reminder that this deprivation that rightly unsettles many in so-called developed countries is merely a taste of what many millions of families experience on a daily basis.

Indeed, one of the potential (if preventable) casualties of this current virus is a massive breakdown of what remains of our solidarity with the parts of the world (including in our own countries) where shelves are often bare, where health care and housing are always elusive, where children are perpetually in danger of a stolen childhood.

Like many institutions at present, the UN is flying at half-mast, trying to both protect staff from infection and find a way to keep our collective eye on issues that the virus might have made worse, but certainly didn’t make disappear. Families are still fleeing violence in Idlib and northern Yemen. Ice caps continue to melt into increasingly warming oceans. Migrants continue to face intimidation in multiple forms rather than welcome mats. Children are still being deprived of liberty or recruited into armed groups. So-called peace agreements continue to fail basic tenets of inclusiveness and transparency. Biodiversity remains under threat across the life spectrum. Governments and others continue to misuse resources, including their intentional mis-allocation, in ways that bolster some interests and devastate others.

But this virus is our preoccupation now, and not without reason. Indeed, it is almost shocking to hear conversations and broadcasts, about toilet paper to be sure but also about social policy, that do not in some fashion or other reference COVID-19.  And while we hold our collective breath in the US and await a peak in infections that is almost sure to come and which will likely be confirmed by even our barely-adequate testing regimes, there is plenty of incentive – driven in part by our stubbornly “paleolithic emotions” – to block out all but what we consider to be the most urgent of matters, allowing this virus to take up too much of our collective bandwidth, providing cover for our grabbing and hoarding, our suspicions and conspiracies, our distrust and indifference.

In this context, it was a bit comforting this week to see the UN take a longer if no less urgent view, one that focuses on remaking the institutions we need and don’t yet have, institutions that are able to both respond to crisis and, perhaps more importantly, anticipate crises yet to materialize.

During a debate on Wednesday on the “role and authority of the General Assembly” chaired by Ghana and Slovakia –this at a time when expectations of UN shutdown were rampant — delegates discussed ways to make the Assembly (the most representative of UN bodies) fit to address current and future threats in a manner that better integrates and energizes the priorities, energies, skills and initiatives of global constituents. A theme that resonated throughout the conference room was the importance of (as the European Union noted) setting sharper priorities for our work, eliminating the “noise” and “clutter” of the GA agenda such that it can become more than a “catch basin” of issues, more than a producer of resolutions that (as Costa Rica maintained) are often without clear implications for constituents.

At a moment in time consumed by a strange and unpredictable virus, it was refreshing to hear the UN vet its own limitations and “blind spots” in a manner that promised better communication, clearer priorities, greater policy effectiveness and (as the UK suggested) a firmer focus on “what is most relevant to others.” Mexico noted that “we know what we mean” in this chamber, but few beyond the chamber can decipher our methods and strategies aside perhaps from concluding that such methods are not yet up to the challenges and expectations that have long been mandated for this policy space.

In a moment when people are too often avoiding each other, strategizing around each other, grabbing from each other, it felt right to hear Malaysia challenge the Assembly to “get closer to the people.” The question now is how to get closer, how to engage people without “infecting” them, how to offer reassurance without subsequently engendering cynicism? Perhaps there is some policy version of the elbow greeting now used to maintain connection without handshakes! In any event, this is not the last of the health or other crises knocking at the door. We need institutions that can warn of what seem to be an ever-present laundry list of (mostly self-inflicted) dangers, but that can also demonstrate the will (with sufficient resources) to address threats (both on and off our collective radar) at their earliest possible stages, and that can facilitate the birth of structures and their policy prescriptions that we badly need but don’t yet  have.

We also need institutions that can encourage our better selves, the “selves” that enable community sing-alongs from otherwise isolated Italian balconies, or the sharing of health supplies with perfect strangers, or enduring the current “nightmare” of food shopping to make sure that the elderly and other vulnerable persons have what they need to survive the current threat, or advocating for prisoners and the homeless whose options for fending off sickness are limited at best.

If Wednesday’s discussion was any indication, the General Assembly seems determined to be one of those institutions, one of those that can predict more effectively, inspire attentive responses, set clearer priorities, and act with greater resolve alongside a wider range of skills and voices. We will help that process along in any way we can.

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Cool Spa:  Endorsing Emotions Appropriate for Urgent Times, Dr. Robert Zuber

27 Jan

panic

It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you’ve made, and there’s this panic because you don’t know yet the scale of disaster you’ve left yourself open to.  Kazuo Ishiguro

But there’s another sort of terror: the terror of failure, of being blamed for some disaster, or of assuming responsibility.  David Weber

The two of them, the smart ones, the clever ones, the great defenders of truth and fairness and justice, had done nothing while others had worked themselves to exhaustion.  Michael Grant

It’s a cruel fact of war that it takes little more than applying pressure to one finger to end another person’s life. More than that, it’s a cruel fact of life that we are hardwired to follow the crowd in a moment of panic.  Trevor Richardson

This was potentially a tide-turning week for the world and the UN found itself at the epicenter of much of it.

Yesterday the Security Council held a rare Saturday session to focus on the situation in Venezuela.  The conversation attracted numerous ministers and other senior diplomats, both Council members and many interested regional states, and featured the presence of US Secretary of State Pompeo who stuck around long enough to bash Cuba and issue a warning to countries still on the fence regarding the legitimacy of the Maduro presidency that it is “time to choose.”  He was replaced around the oval by Elliot Abrams of Iran-Contra infamy who was making his debut as chief adviser on Venezuela to the current US president.

The optics of this were not ideal for the US, for whom the presence of Abrams and the bullying tactics of Pompeo underscored fears of some states that the US is now resurrecting a modernist version of the Monroe Doctrine and its “backyard” justifications for aggressive intervention.   There is still vast, lingering pain throughout the region regarding prior “arrangements” between the US and its client states, governments at times willing to throw their own people under the bus to enable the policy objectives of its larger neighbor over which they essentially have no say.

And yet, many states were clear that the current situation in Venezuela, one which has resulted in mass displacement, rights violations and widespread economic ruin, has conspired to delegitimize the Maduro government.  European states at this meeting went so far as to propose an “eight day” window within which Maduro must arrange for new elections, a proposal subsequently mocked by the Russians.  Others preferred the “path of negotiations” approach with facilitation offered by Mexico and Uruguay.  Regardless, emotions were raw during much of this five hour session. Tensions among states seeking to transition the situation in Caracas and do justice to the many thousands of currently displaced (and the neighboring countries hosting them) as well as among states fearing the return of a more hostile US “backyard” remained consistently high.

Surprisingly a bit less “raw” was Friday’s Council debate on the climate-conflict nexus organized by January’s Council president the Dominican Republic.  In a discussion that spanned eight uninterrupted hours and involved 82 state speakers, both the urgency and the politics of climate response were on display. While there were no “climate denying” statements made (the US spoke effectively on disaster response but failed to utter the “C” word), many states (including Germany and some Council colleagues) noted that while climate change might not be the cause of conflict, its impacts have a “multiplier” effect on political and security tensions, adding flooding, drought, storms and other “disasters” to a worrisome global mix characterized by still-too-high levels of poverty and mass displacement, too much plastic in our oceans, and too many hands grabbing at the “cookie jar” of dwindling natural resources.  While some states shared concern about Council energy being “diluted” by excess attention to this particular “thematic obligation,” the Fiji representative rightly noted that we have reached the “tipping point” on climate, echoing Japan’s call for climate considerations integrated “throughout the conflict cycle” and Ireland’s call to explore the climate-conflict nexus across the spectrum of UN policymaking.

Beyond the UN this week was the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, bringing together the elites of the planet –complete with their copious entourages and private jets — to deliberate on the fate of a world they (in the aggregate) have done much to destroy on behalf of global citizens about whom too many of these “leaders” seem to actually care little.  This toxic (in my view) event which draws media attention as though this were the policy equivalent of a Super Bowl or Academy Awards, provides yet another reminder of the residual “vertical” dimensions of global governance, placing on display guardians of the planet who, so far as we can tell, are principally skilled at guarding their own privilege.  Media coverage this year focused on the “gloom” of Davos as elites contemplated the uncertainty of these times – as though much of the rest of this largely “exhausted” planet doesn’t cope with higher levels of uncertainty all the time!

But something did come out of Davos this year that grabbed considerable media interest and not without reason.  Perhaps my favorite quotation of the entire week came from a Swedish teenager, Greta Thunberg, whose warning to the Davos elites seemed to prompt at least a bit of soul-searching:

Adults keep saying: “We owe it to the young people to give them hope.” But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.

Preaching panic and culpability to generations (including diplomats and elites) that so often go out of their way to “keep cool,” that too-often misconstrue the difference between “keeping your head” and willful indifference to anything that might cause someone to actually and practically care, surely seems like risky business.  But in these times it is also essential business.

Let’s put this “panic” in some perspective.  The “playing it cool” game, like most other games we now indulge, has positive and negative repercussions.  To the extent that it implies keeping your head while others around you are losing theirs, this is surely a skill worth cultivating.  But the degree to which “cool” and its attendant platitudes become the mask behind which we hide from seeing, from feeling, from responding, then such “cool” becomes merely the latest iteration of a narcissistic pattern that too-easily hardens into inattention and dismissiveness; indeed into a potential “disorder” in its own right.

A similar distinction can be attributed to “panic.”  If panic is, as it so often is these days, a sub-set of our now-chronic anxiety, then it is related primarily to our perceived incapacity to control outcomes and/or to recover our brand from ill- advised movements “on the chess board.”  Panic in this sense is more likely to drive an irrational herd than to drive productive outcomes, concerned more with finding “spas” and other niches of personal relief and escape than urgently using those skills and capacities available to help resolve whatever crises make their appearance before us.

As much as we might like to think otherwise within our bastions of “cool,” there are many times when “panic” represents the more accurate reading of circumstance: the parent hovering over a desperately sick child; the homeless person on the cusp of a deadly hypothermia; a family evading traffickers as they seek fresh water and arable farmland, or escape from political instability; an entire nation watching helplessly as melting ice caps raise ocean levels, breeching fresh water supplies with salt and shifting fish stocks away from the access on which local populations depend.  These circumstances are not diminishing in frequency; indeed they threaten to carry us to our collective demise unless we grasp both the urgency they represent and our still-potent (for now) capacity for contructive response.

If some of the “small island” and other states who participated in Friday’s Council debate on climate change and conflict are correct; if their growing and still-unheeded concerns are indeed justified by circumstance; if the warnings uttered in Davos by Greta Thunberg have the merit that many seem to think they do; then “panic” in its most urgent and productive sense is fully warranted.  Not the panic of the herd, but neither the “cool” detachment of persons who don’t (or refuse to) understand that the metaphorical house fire whose potential and implications they fear has long been burning.

 

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