by Noah Raford
It is crucially important that the new organizers and participants in these movements do not romanticize the spontaneously self-organizing potential of networks like Facebook or Twitter. These platforms are not yet naturally designed to support the resilient new forms of social capital and democratic organization that will be necessary for the full flourishing of white hat transformation. Avaaz itself is far from perfect in channeling the energies of its members, and, like other such movements, it is only a beginning. We need to broaden the base much further and to build better channels for white hats of all kinds to step up.
Some of the new frontiers in white hat organizing are in undergoverned spaces like Pakistan or Nigeria. Other frontiers involve working more closely with the warp and weave of the popular imagination, our media and our daily lives, to evolve positive frames and values. The work of analysts like George Lakoff and Drew Westen hold promise in this arena, not least because both promote an ethic of transparent reframing that, instead of manipulating the emotions, lays out its arguments on the table for all to see.15
The restless work of the white hats is crucial, because our existing paradigms of global governance, economic prosperity, and social order often seem to be failing. The market states, the Hobbesian attitude to the global commons, and the bent toward global counterinsurgency outlined in the work of Philip Bobbitt, Robert Kaplan, and other scribes of the establishment may still be dominant, but these paradigms are also, I believe, inadequate to delivering order or prosperity in a fractured, turbulent, and unequal world.
Global laws can and should be further solidified, contrary to Bobbitt’s dismissal of the dream of Edward Mandell House. Yet hopes of a better global society also rest fundamentally on networks of association and creativity, on the health and vibrancy of the global public sphere, and on the growing global conversation about norms and values.16
In Philip Dru: Administrator, in an argument with his prospective father-in-law, the hero states:
The moral tone and thought of the world is changing. You take it for granted that man must have in sight some material reward in order to achieve the best there is within him. I believe that mankind is awakening to the fact that material compensation is far less to be desired than spiritual compensation. This feeling will grow, and when it comes to full fruition, the world will find but little difficulty in attaining a certain measure of altruism. I agree with you that this much-to-be desired state of society cannot be altogether reached by laws, however drastic.
As the awakening process of global civil society converges with the mega-trends of economic transformation and disruption, we must keep clear in our minds the impossibility of achieving human flourishing solely through control, counterinsurgency, or the rule of law. We must develop and preserve systems of public authority that extend beyond the state, deep into society and the market. And we must construct new identities and designs for living, as well as new frameworks of social regulation and action.
Fortunately, the white hat ethos is one of mutual generosity, based on a logic of abundance rather than scarcity. Reality-based, but questioning and endlessly creative, it is the essence of the human spirit and the good society. This is something we can all share.
This article is dedicated to a young, unemployed Palestinian man whom I met in a Hamas minister’s office. His elder brother had been elected for Hamas to lead the Palestinian student unions but had been killed in office. The young man leaned in close to me as we took the elevator down to the ground floor. He had something very important to tell me. Was it a point of religious doctrine, a vow of martyrdom, or a claim to represent the Palestinian people?
The young man whispered passionately that he loved to dance the tango.
In hidden dancehalls all over the world, social power is brewing.
What will we change? The decision is ours.
13 Beyond Survival
Pioneering as a Response to Crisis
Graham Leicester
Hell is a most popular subject today because so many people are in it. Hell is very stimulating and easy to understand. Paradise is very difficult to understand, and also, there is in Paradise a rebuke. In that Paradise there is a purity which reveals one’s own sense of impurity.
—Cecil Collins, Theatre of the Soul
The Marvelous and the Murderous
The essays in this volume are compelling. They bring into the harsh light of rational examination and understanding some of the dark forces at work in the world. They lay bare the ways of power that inevitably find their opportunity when order collapses and scarcity reins. At such times, we might find it a struggle to articulate an alternative to “going down with the ship of high-modernist capitalism as it breaks up or taking to the lifeboats captained by warlord entrepreneurs” (as Barnes and Gilman put it).
Expressing a credible alternative is bound to be challenging. It is not just that “the devil always has the best tunes.” It is also that, by contrast, the music of the spheres is more demanding of the listener. It is easier to dismiss alternatives as unrealistic and utopian rather than accept, as Cecil Collins suggests in the epigram to this essay, that their very imagining represents a challenge to who we are, how we live, and what we are prepared to stand for today.
Yet lessons can be learned from the rich history of human action in periods of challenge and duress that offer us a sense of what’s possible. Those who emerge from crisis with both their aspirations and their humanity intact appear to follow a journey in four phases. The first step is survival, the sine qua non. But what should we do beyond that? The next step must be to generate fresh insight into our new situation. The third step involves maintaining the will to act and to persevere—survival now with a purpose. The final factor is hope, without which we cannot even start the journey.
These phases are described in more detail below. But these are not lessons only for those of us unfortunate enough to find ourselves in the badlands of globalization’s ungovernable spaces. We live in a world of such boundless complexity, radical interconnectedness, and rapid change that we are all already, as Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan pointed out back in the early 1990s, “in over our heads.”
The core challenge in these circumstances is to learn how to draw upon strengths and inner resources we may not think we have and that our typical defensive responses to crisis deny us. These strengths are not technical or structural or theoretical; they are existential. It is our artists, our poets, our mythmakers who have constantly brought them to mind for us for generations.
One touchstone for me is Seamus Heaney’s extraordinary acceptance speech for his 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature. In it he tells of his own experience of losing hope during the “harrowing of the heart” that he experienced during the years of conflict in his native Northern Ireland. He describes how, during those decades, he bent over his desk like a monk, going through the motions of writing, “blowing up sparks for meagre heat.”
But then, “finally and happily,” he “straightened up.” He found his inner strength again. As he puts it, “I began … to try to make space in my reckoning and imagining for the marvelous as well as for the murderous.”
Heaney illustrates the point with a story about a group of workmates ambushed by the roadside in those times. The armed gunmen line the men up against a wall and ask that any Catholics among them step forward. The assumption is that these are Protestant paramilitaries, and that the Catholics will be shot dead.
The one Catholic among them, “caught between dread and witness,” makes a motion to step forward. But at that moment, in the darkness, he feels the Protestant worker next to him take his hand and squeeze it, as if to say—don’t worry, we will not betray you, stay in line. But it is too late. He has already made a motion. He expects to be shot, but instead is thrown aside as the rest of the men are gunned down. The gunmen themselves are Catholic, presumably members of the Provisional IRA.
The image haunts Heaney—as it must anyone who reads his speech. It is a
reminder of the utter inseparability of the marvelous and the murderous, both ever present and always available in the same image. The squeeze of the hand is as real as the volley of gunfire, and as much a part of our human nature.
Yet, as Heaney puts it, “as writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.” It is the gift of poetry, in particular what he calls “the necessary poetry,” to lend power to the positive, to hold both the murderous and the marvelous “in a single thought.”
As we contemplate dark times ahead, we too must be open to the marvelous, ready to see and to respond to hope amid despair. Not false hope, not blithe optimism, not the fantasy of rescue, but the mature hope that brings with it its own burden, its own challenge. Heaney concludes his speech by pointing to the contradictory needs we experience at times of crisis: “the need on the one hand for a truth telling that will be hard and retributive, and on the other hand, the need not to harden the mind to a point where it denies its own yearnings for sweetness and trust.” In light of the dark imaginings of much of this collection, the few words of practical hope that follow are offered in this spirit.
Lesson 1: Survival
I spend my professional life encouraging people to think and to reflect. Yet I have lost count of the number of senior figures who, at times of crisis, have told me they are not interested in new thinking and ideas just at the moment, thank you. Their first priority is survival.
Fair enough. They need to batten down the hatches, concentrate on the short term, look after the staff, cut costs, lie low for a while—keep themselves and their organizations viable while waiting for recovery.
They evidently don’t know much about survivors. Studies of accidents, plane crashes, shipwrecks, and people who get lost in the wilderness show that those who decide to sit still and wait for things to get better are far more likely to perish. Rule one for survivors is “discard the hope of rescue.”
That is a challenging stance—which is why we don’t generally go there. But think about the costs of waiting for rescue. It leaves you as a victim in your own eyes. It relieves you of the need to make sense of the condition you find yourself in. It clothes you in false comfort. And ultimately, if things don’t improve, it leads to growing anxiety, panic, and finally resignation, as it becomes clear that the moment for effective action has long gone, and rescue is not on the way. All a bit gloomy, I’m afraid. So if you are committed to survival in difficult times, don’t go about it that way.
What’s the alternative? Many survival schools (which are enjoying boomtown business, incidentally, since the prophets of planetary doom found their voices) use the acronym STOP: stop, think, observe, plan … and then, crucially, act.
The first three are linked. They are about coming to terms with new circumstances. We automatically resist this. It has something to do with maintaining our emotional stability: we do not like to admit to being confused. People who wander off the trail and get lost almost never turn back. They press on, convincing themselves that they are still on track and that they will come across a landmark on the trail just around the next corner. This is called “bending the map.” Survivors don’t make the mistake of imposing old patterns on new information.
Maintaining that level of awareness, however, is tricky. It requires a recognition that our emotions condition our thinking. We are more likely to believe what we feel than what we know. And when we are in danger or under pressure or anxious, our emotions tend to crowd out rational thought. That’s why fighter pilots have such intensive training, so the right thing to do becomes instinctive when the body is suffused with fear. As one instructor says, “when you climb inside the cockpit, your IQ rolls back to that of an ape.”
That’s why it is important to slow down, to maintain the balance between emotions and reason. And observe. Really observe. Don’t just see what you expect to see, what you hope to see. Make sense of your situation anew—in all its fearful complexity.
This is where new thinking comes in. Malcolm Gladwell writes pithily about the ability to perform under pressure: “Choking [in a sport] is a result of thinking too much. Panic is a result of thinking too little.” So try to think just enough, and in a way that acknowledges the new landscape of the crisis and with an emotional quality that allows our understandable fear and anxiety to express itself in creative impulse rather than blinkered denial.
New thinking is a survival strategy. In fact, it is the survival strategy. Is anybody interested now?1
Lesson 2: Insight
I wrote in the previous lesson about the extensive research on the qualities of survivors—how they react to danger, how they think and respond in a crisis, what they do, and how they pull through. There are clues here for what constitutes intelligent behavior at a time of crisis.
The survival drama has three acts. Act 1 is the descent into chaos. Act 2 is confusion, commitment to survival, and the subsequent struggle. Act 3 brings us, at last, to reemergence into safety. The critical task at the entry to act 2 is to maintain the energy and adrenaline that fear generates, but not to descend into panic. Manage the anxiety; take a long, hard look at the situation; recognize that you are off the map; and generate the one thing that is going to help you survive: fresh insight.
Most of us are not in life and death situations today. But we are no strangers to feeling overwhelmed, anxious, or stressed—when things get out of hand at work, for example—and struggling, in those circumstances, to perform at our best, precisely when our best is most needed. On top of these normal pressures, today we are operating in a complex world running constantly in failure mode (as Charles Perrow puts it in his book Normal Accidents)—a world in which small errors in any part of the system can rapidly escalate, with critical and unforeseen consequences. The disruption of the financial system in 2007–2008 is just one example. We hope that small failures in systems of governance in the face of the growth of transnational crime described elsewhere in this volume do not escalate. But we cannot be sure. As pressures mount, the threat of at least a partial collapse of contemporary civilization is frighteningly plausible.
The important thing is how we respond. Most people go into denial: carry on, ignore inconvenient evidence, and hope for the best. Others commission extensive research to assess future risk: analyze trends and develop scenarios. But that too is of no value if it simply feeds complacency in the present: “It’s okay, we did the scenarios exercise, and we’re future-proofed.”
No, you’re not. Because what we need to be prepared for is unpredictable, disruptive change. That is what triggers a crisis. And at that point, it is your instincts that kick in—who you are, not what you know. If you have a habit of relying on plans and numbers you will cling on to them more tightly than ever. But if you are a survivor, you will adapt to the new circumstance. You will take careful stock of the new situation. What is this place? What opportunities does it offer? What sense can I make that will allow me to take the first step out of the crisis rather than just waiting for it to pass?
How can we do that? We can take a longer-term perspective—recognizing that our sense of the future inevitably colors our reading of the present. We can start to notice things we have previously missed through inattention, prejudice, or cultural habit. Psychiatrists notice subtleties of behavior that others miss. Naturalists notice entire ecologies on the underside of a leaf. Recognizing that we typically have a limited view and taking steps to identify our blind spots and to find alternative ways of perceiving expands the space in which fresh insight may emerge.
And insight is not inert. It is not ‘blue skies’ thinking. Insight demands action. And that in turn will bring something new into the world and provide the source for new scanning and fresh insight. Our first steps will kick start a learning cycle. We cannot plan but we will learn our way out of crisis.2
Lesson 3: Perseverance
Up to now I have treated “survival” broadly as a metaphor. But we al
so know that times of crisis are truly testing. We are stressed; some will become depressed; levels of suicide rise; violence increases. New thinking and fresh insight are crucial for future prosperity. But so too will be actions to look after ourselves, to maintain our energy to persevere, and to care for the wounded.
The warning signals have been mounting for decades. The World Health Organization suggests that by 2020 depression will be second only to heart disease as a source of illness and premature death in the world. Rising levels of divorce, family breakdown, burnout, stress, drinking and drug problems, domestic and other violence, accidents at work, absenteeism, diagnosed depression, mental illness, and suicide—all have been steadily rising to global epidemic proportions. We live in powerful times, and we are not coping well.
On top of this, some societies and nations are having to come to terms with the psychological impact of crushing natural disasters. The Philippines has been struck by a category 5 typhoon—killing over ten thousand. Cities from New York to Tokyo continue their cleanup from natural disasters that cost billions in damages years earlier. And the rise in more conventional violence shows no let up. At the time of writing, nearly eighty thousand people have been killed in violence among drug cartels in Mexico between 2006 and 2014. Syria has experienced over one hundred thousand casualties in less than three years of its civil war. Countries from Sudan to Egypt continue their descent into darkness. How can we maintain composure in this sea of troubles?
At a human level, we effectively face a choice between awareness and growth or denial and decline. Denial and decline occur when we stop learning—when we respond to new challenges with the same old routines. When our certainties are threatened, we have a natural tendency to invest in them even more heavily. In organizations, this shows up as micromanaging systems of accountability in order to regain control: stricter discipline and closer oversight, more metrics, harder work. But in example after example, we see the results of this turning of the screw simply leading to increased pressure on organizations and individuals.