Messes are made by people who want but don’t know what they want, let alone how to get it. Joyce Carol Oates
There are more dishes to come, more flavors to try, and this time I will not spill or spit or drop or splash. Jay Rayner
We don’t have to wait for someone to make messes of our lives. We do a good enough job, ourselves. Jodi Picoult
I’m shaken and I’m stirred. Anthony Hamilton
You don’t know how much it is tiring to stay here, since Chaos is all I know. Mess is all I see; And noise is all I hear. Samiha Totanji
Like a button on a shirt buttoned wrong, every attempt to correct things led to yet another fine –not to say elegant– mess. Haruki Murakami
Clean up your room! Many Mothers
I spent some of my childhood sharing a bedroom with three younger brothers, a situation that was challenging both in terms of privacy and especially in terms of maintaining some semblance of fairness and order.
My mother, who had more children to care for than she needed and likely wanted, was constantly demanding that those of us responsible for turning that small room into a preview of Armageddon (mostly me) invested some of our life force in cleaning up the mess that was, as are so many messes in this world, so much easier to make than to repair.
The only blessing in this scenario was that there was a door to close, a way to keep the chaos of that room from spreading like a virus into unsuspecting corners of that small house. But even inside the room itself, there were good reasons to restore some baseline of order, a baseline more likely to foster respect for the rights and feelings of other inhabitants, a baseline that allowed us to keep our toys and other belongings as “shared property” only when we chose to share them; not giving in to the chaos which enabled bullies like me to grab whatever they wanted over the squeals of disapproval from the other children.
Needless to say, my mother had a different standard of cleanliness and “order” than her children did, and she struggled to get us to buy in to her standard without having to impose it through her own labor. And people do, indeed, have sometimes wildly divergent levels of comfort around issues of order and cleanliness, as many in long-term relationships discover. That said, there are lessons around “mess” that we would do well to consider, specifically the lesson that messes are more easily made than undone, and that the easiest way to clean up after ourselves is to resist the temptation to make a mess in the first instance.
I know that it is frustrating for some readers to endure these weekly attempts to analogize lessons from family life to civic life, from modest bedrooms to large conference rooms filled with important people ostensibly doing important things. But let’s go there anyway. For the world we now inhabit is surely characterized by one “mess” after another, many of which we could have seen coming if we were not so intent on averting our gaze; many of which have also given those of us in places of privilege an excuse to disregard the rights and needs of others, to grab more than our share of the metaphorical toys and stuffed animals, to get around to cleaning up after ourselves when it is convenient for us to do so and not when it is most urgent.
Unlike the chaos of my childhood resting space, for us in this larger world there is no door to close, no way to confine the consequences of the mess to the authors of the mess. The chaos that we willingly tolerate for ourselves is also most often chaos exported, becoming yet another imposition on people who, in some instances at least, have their own issues with disorder and turmoil to resolve; people and communities whose messes are already challenging enough without additional external consequences from the discord which they neither caused nor can reasonably assimilate.
Those of you who read this weekly post and/or other (likely better) alternatives don’t need me to remind you about our currently over-heated mess threshold. From a hyperactive pandemic to a conflict in Yemen that promises environmental ruin in the long term and starving children in the short term; from climate risks that have likely passed their tipping point to the growing numbers of displaced persons exchanging hopelessness at home for road-weary misery; from ocean creatures ingesting more plastic than prey to landscapes more prone to wildfires than wild flowers; the chaos that we have sown has deep roots and broad consequences, most of which inspire responses that are not as carefully crafted and boldly implemented as they should be, responses that seem to enable messes of longer-duration as often as they offer tangible improvement.
Even our democracies now seem in peril as more and more people worldwide seem to have abandoned the responsibility to push through the “messiness” of democratic consultation and consensus-building in favor of iron-like authoritarian voices telling them what they should want, what they should value and how they should go about getting what they have convinced themselves they are entitled to have. Sadly, these are often the voices that justify their own mess-making at the expense of others, an entitlement to sow substantial short-term chaos secure in the belief that its consequences can be successfully exported as needed — that we can keep our own rooms reasonably in order in part by shipping messes off to the dwellings and communities of of others, largely against their will.
The UN which we engage relentlessly is a place at its best where nations and peoples can come together to assess and resolve common threats, to own the messes we have made and reverse the consequences we have largely ignored; and then together authorize and enact multilateral strategies to better ensure that there is less clutter and chaos on our planet, dampening down verbal excuses and political impediments preventing us from doing more to resolve the messes that perpetually beckon.
But at its worst, the UN is a place of inertia and obstruction, halls of policy where mostly privileged national lenses fuss over resolution and/or treaty language that guarantees (at best) tepid responses to our major messes, responses that are often not nearly as timely and robust as they need to be from an institution and its Assembly that are not yet as prescient, reliable and determined as we need them to be.
I am not naïve regarding the considerable value of a UN institution in which I (and my colleagues) have spent many long years. But the lessons that seemed clear to me when I first entered still apply. The longer we fail to acknowledge and respond to the messes that impact so much of our planet, the harder they are to resolve. And the less we are willing to control the consequential spread of our own chaos and disorder, the more mistrust and enmity we are likely to provoke in others.
My sense is that no amount of institutional self-referencing, no amount of speeches lofty or obstructionist in the General Assembly Hall or other multilateral settings should ever blind us to the degree to which the chaos, the mess, the “noise” of our world (including the cries of those whose lives are characterized by flying bombs, grave food insecurity and polluted waterways) have raised expectations for our policy. The world is crying out for new “dishes and flavors” to try, innovative solutions to threats and messes that have festered for much too long, fresh commitments from the most privileged that they will clean up their own spaces without off-loading the worst of their clutter on to spaces where it simply doesn’t belong.
Do we as a policy community have what it takes to make such a commitment? Are we willing to swallow some of the mistrust and downright orneriness that lead to sometimes bitter deliberations, such as was the case this week regarding a proposed e-voting procedure to allow the core work of the General Assembly to continue during a pandemic or other crisis? Are we willing to follow the trail of our own messes to ensure that our “solutions” don’t inadvertently create more discord, thereby impeding even more than is already the case the rights, development and stability of those we purport to help?
In my view (and hardly mine alone) a fair bit of what we in places of privilege and influence have wrought upon the world should shake us to our very core. But it should also stir a fresh passion in us, a passion to reverse our messy trajectories while we still can, to create more fairness and accountability within our institutional halls, to shut the door on the spread of our chaos of excess and indifference better than we are doing so far, chaos now firmly embedded in pandemics and armed conflicts, in climate shocks and social inequalities.
My mother knew little of such things. But she recognized a mess when she saw one, and she would likely recognize that we, too, have many messes still to acknowledge and confine within the spaces where we work and live.
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