Almost everywhere I look as I read the news it feels as if everybody everywhere is determined to just let events careen headlong into certain disaster because they’ve given up on the possibility of stopping short of those outcomes.
Anand Giridharadas’ call in his new book The Persuaders to “build better movements” where we welcome people “gently” into seeking transformational changes sounds so appealing, but it feels to me like the steering currents are flowing instead towards learning that lesson the hard way, through political failure, in part because of the structures and established cultures of liberal-left social media participation, in part because of the way that progressive politics enshrines a certain degree of internal antagonism, and in part because progressive politics rests on a social coalition that genuinely pulls in divergent directions. So some days, at least, the prospect of a gentle or optimistic approach seems dim, and that people will have to lose badly before they begin to embrace what it takes to win.
This isn’t particular to left politics. It feels as if more and more national governments are in the hands of people determined to make every avoidable mistake possible, to drive every car into every ditch, and that only after that happens will there be any chance to “build back better”, as it were. On the largest possible scale, that seems to be where we are at with climate change: only when it actually happens in a way that is undeniably and sustainably catastrophic will there be any consensus that we ought to do something about it.
The premise of a lot of efforts to prevent the worst from happening is that it is possible to avoid the worst if only sensible and plausible precautions are taken—and often that the worst, if it happens, will be impossible to repair or recover from.
The latter always ends up seeming to be false from the perspective of the present. We are here, after all, so past predictions of unrecoverable catastrophe must have been wrong. In the long run, it all turns out for the best, we the living invariably conclude. But in the long run, as John Maynard Keynes pointed out, we are all dead. More importantly, in the long past, many of us died and suffered needlessly in that endless series of presents where people assumed that the worst couldn’t be that bad. Perhaps the Black Death incidentally changed land tenure in a way that transformed agricultural productivity and ended serfdom. Perhaps the Great Depression forced liberal states to embrace (to varying degrees) the need for social democracy and the rights of labor to organize. But when we think in the present “perhaps we should avoid catastrophe if we can, but everything will come out ok eventually if we can’t” we are not thinking about us. Paradoxically, considering how much we resist doing so otherwise, we are thinking about people who will live long after us. Because if there is a catastrophe, we are not living in the long run any longer. We are the ones who will die, suffer or diminish. We aren’t the farmers of the “productivity revolution” working into new wealth and possibility at the edge of modernity. We’re the plague-dead piled high in the streets.
So the real question becomes, how often do we actually avoid catastrophe by taking good advice while we still can? I think it’s not that hard to convince people that it would be better for all concerned if South Florida did not sink under five feet of seawater, that it would be better if Russia’s disastrous war in Ukraine did not escalate to involve most of the world and include nuclear weapons, that it would be better if harsh call-outs and purification rituals did not drive people out of a progressive coalition in a time where electoral defeats mean the end of elections. What’s hard to convince people of is that we have frequently succeeded in avoiding the worst, because the things that were predicted never happened.
That’s hard not just because the events are non-existent, it’s also hard because at least some of those kinds of predictions were plainly just wrong in avoidable ways and in some cases their wrongness would have led to worse outcomes if people had listened more to them. If the strongest measures to enact mandatory population control advocated by many mainstream thinkers in the 1970s had been widely adopted, not only would that have created forms of repressive state power that would have been as potentially violating as what anti-abortion crusaders are now building across the United States, but likely the policy goals of such controls would have been less well-achieved than what happened in their absence. There have been so many interventions called for by well-meaning people making predictions that simply haven’t come true that it is hard for any fair-minded observer to easily trust that there are many times where we avoided disaster. Even the best-case scenarios, like the joint intervention of the Bush Administration and the Obama Administration in the 2007-08 fiscal crisis, seem easy to second-guess in hindsight, easy for us to wonder whether the intervention really prevented disaster or perhaps whether it simply deferred or delayed the inevitable.
I think the problem really is that it’s not correct prediction ———> prudential action to avoid that prediction that avoids catastrophe, for the most part. That’s the kind of single-variable thinking that makes for bad social science and bad policy-making, so no wonder it’s hard to demonstrate convincingly that we normally are very good at avoiding the worst outcomes if that’s where you go looking.
Where we really avoid the worst outcomes is not through highly intentional policy interventions but instead in the constraints, precautions and wisdoms that we bring to bear on established work, ongoing life, everyday practice—the stitch in time that saves nine. You get through a life of using power tools like table saws and routers without losing digits or crushing bones not via a dramatic change in the design of such tools (though now and again that helps, sure) but through making safety into an inflexible habit.
You build better movements by having the kind of everyday interpersonal decency, a grounded and lived ethic, that you can’t help but be compassionate and gentle towards everyone who wanders into the tent, and fierce only with those who violate that hospitality. You avoid driving every car into the ditch by steadfastly refusing to let people like Donald Trump get behind the wheel. Before it’s about ideology, it’s about reliability.
It’s not so much that you work incrementally towards change, because catastrophe comes on fast and takes fast responses. It’s that you recognize that the things that don’t happen are a result of careful and prudential attention that must be continuously embedded in everything we do—and that your first priority as a social and political actor has to be to call out all attempts to change what has worked to protect us from the unhappened catastrophes for no given reason. When leaders suddenly change procedures, rules, structures, missions without explanation—or at least without explaining why the existing habits are themselves a catastrophic prevention of hopeful possibility—that is the moment to fight hard.
You don’t let someone in your household take down the garlic from the window and throw away the crucifixes on the grounds that you’ve never seen a vampire around so why bother with all that. We are, or have been, protected everyday from disasters that could have happened by procedures, habits and customs that were adopted and routinized as responses to the possibility—or past occurrence—of the worst events. It is precisely when we forget that the only reason there are not vampires hereabouts is because we have garlic in the window that we’re most in danger of getting bitten.