When History Overflows, Build a Lifeboat

Some thoughts on how to deal with the chaos of current events.

According to the fact-checking site Snopes.com, the Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin never actually said, “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.” Still, the sentiment rings true. And while we aren’t (as Lenin was) living through the overthrow of a brutal monarchy and the establishment of a revolutionary new regime, the last few days, weeks and months have been filled with radically destabilizing developments.

It's a challenge to me as a writer on a self-imposed weekly schedule to engage with the news of the moment when so much is in flux. The purpose of The Connector as I see it is to help my readers make sense of the world and to help us find some stable ground to stand on and strategies to operate from, where our shared goal is to bolster efforts to build a better democracy and a more inclusive and just society.

How exactly to do that when events in the Middle East are escalating toward a full-scale regional war? And when an openly fascist and racist authoritarian movement has been normalized in America and stands on the brink of even greater power? And when a big chunk of the American Southeast experiences its version of 2012’s Superstorm Sandy? (Not to mention, when a megalomaniacal billionaire has turned one of the world’s premiere social media companies into a full-blown platform for misinformation and hate?)

Four-and-a-half years ago, as the COVID epidemic hit its first, horrible spike, Jamais Cascio, a professional futurist, wrote a prescient and helpful post titled, “Facing the Age of Chaos.” He began with this simple insight: “This current moment of political mayhem, climate disasters, and global pandemic — and so much more — vividly demonstrates the need for a way of making sense of the world, the need for a new method or tool to see the shapes this age of chaos takes. The methods we have developed over the years to recognize and respond to commonplace disruptions seem increasingly, painfully inadequate when the world appears to be falling apart. It’s hard to see the big picture when everything insists on coloring outside the lines.”

Cascio went on to argue that it was time for a new framework that might help us make disruptive chance more understandable and therefore more manageable. Instead of thinking of our times as Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (ie., VUCA, an older framework that arose in the late 1980s), he argued that we need to see ourselves as having entered a phase change where things aren’t just bubbling along, but now they are boiling. He offered four words to describe our current mess: Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear and Incomprehensible (BANI).

Brittle things, he wrote, look strong but actually are dangerously vulnerable to catastrophic failure. (Like, say, the global supply chain, or our Electoral College system for picking a new president.) Anxious, he suggested, was the spirit of our age and its rise was driving many toward coping by embracing charismatic figures or conspiracies or becoming obsessed with fighting them. Nonlinear describes the sense that cause and effect no longer hold, or that events occur that are disproportionate to what we might argue are their causes. (Our badly designed electoral system, where a few late deciding voters may tilt the electoral college towards an outrageous outcome, is just one more example of a nonlinear situation.) And finally, when the reasons behind an event seem illogical or senseless or just based in origins so old or unspeakable that we have forgotten or don’t have words to adequately describe them—that makes everything incomprehensible. “Incomprehensibility is,” he wrote, “in effect, the end state of ‘information overload.’”

I’m not going to recapitulate his whole essay here (it’s not that long and it is quite readable), but rather want to jump to Cascio’s conclusion. As the world becomes more brittle, anxious, nonlinear and incomprehensible, it gets very tempting to adopt an apocalyptic frame. He wrote, “The danger of this urge is that it can easily become a trigger for surrender, a slipstream into despair. Such a danger isn’t limited to futurists; for so many around the world, things are too strange, too out of control, too immense, and too fragile to even begin to imagine appropriate responses.”

But here’s the key point:

It doesn’t have to be that way. The BANI framework offers a lens through which to see and structure what’s happening in the world. At least at a surface level, the components of the acronym might even hint at opportunities for response: brittleness could be met by resilience and slack; anxiety can be eased by empathy and mindfulness; nonlinearity would need context and flexibility; incomprehensibility asks for transparency and intuition. These may well be more reactions than solutions, but they suggest the possibility that responses can be found.

Cascio has since added to his thinking about how one responds to a BANI world, suggesting that “Brittle gets countered by Bendable, as in flexibility and resilience, such as alternative sourcing and disaster plans. Anxiety can be met by Acceptance, empathy for what others experience, and an attempt not to use anger and fear to respond to anger and fear. Nonlinearity needs Neuroflexibility, the capacity to improvise, think critically, and reject scripted responses. And we can push back against Incomprehensibility with Inclusion of multiple, diverse perspectives and ideas. At the heart of the Positive BANI concept is that we must re-examine our assumptions, push past embedded or habitual behaviors and ideas, be aware of our environments, and nimble in our strategies. Ultimately, a chaotic world means that we must seek clarity rather than certainty.”

So, then what?

What that means in the face of the current maelstrom, I think, is first try not to be too distracted by the spectacles on offer. My main coping mechanism is to avoid cable news. Video of missiles and interceptors over the skies of Tel Aviv or explosions in Beirut or flooded-out Asheville, North Carolina is hard to resist: our brains are wired to focus on threats, and our secondary nervous systems—like the global Internet and the stock market—reproduce and amplify those effects even more. (Hence I’ve chosen to illustrate this post with a somewhat calming image rather than a collage of disastrous ones.)

Made with Dall-E. Ok, maybe not that calming!

Second, if you’ve got a strategy for how you’re prioritizing your time as a politically engaged person, keep your head down and stick to it. Unless you are already professionally working on the problem of Middle East peace, there’s nothing you can do at this moment to change the trajectory of events there. Sure, it would nice if we had a big antiwar movement in America that could intervene along with partners across the world to try to head off a full-scale regional war, but the last time we had such a thing, in the build-up to President George W. Bush’s ill-fated attack on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003, even the presence of something like 15 million people marching worldwide on the same day couldn’t deter him. Hopefully, the logic of mutually assured destruction will keep the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Iran from doing things like blowing up each other’s oil fields or going nuclear. (And as I’ve written here multiple times, choices made by key progressive actors here in the immediate aftermath of last year’s October 7 attack led to the formation of two polarized camps, each defending just one side of the Israel-Palestine conflict, rather than a unified peace movement in a position to tip American policy into a more balanced approach than the one now on display.)

Third and most metaphorically: We are in the middle of tectonic shifts. The plates are grinding beneath us—and if you’re standing in a fault zone where they bang hard against each other (such as the Israel-Palestine conflict) it hurts to be engaged! Disaster can strike anywhere, as people far inland from hurricane-prone Florida just learned. The waves of change that are coming are too big for any of us to stop. So build lifeboats: build community, strengthen friendships, and look for ways to involve people different than just your own tribe in shared activity.

Yes, my anxious brain wants to have a party, and I bet yours is running on a higher pace as well. We’re in a storm of raging history, but the only option is to keep building lifeboats, keep inviting people on board, and keep rowing.

Speaking of those two polarized camps…

The war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza seems intractable. Both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar apparently believe that they can win by sticking to the path of violent confrontation—Israel by crushing Hamas, and Hamas by expanding the conflict to the West Bank, Lebanon and ultimately the entire region. Both men also fear for their own futures in the event of an end to the hostilities, though not for exactly parallel reasons. More crucially and related to this stalemate, as a recent and little-noted poll of both sides found, among the Israeli and Palestinian polities in the land between the river and the sea, each side believes the other is committed to their annihilation. It is a fight to the death.

And yet, an alternative path beckons. It is not just the one being offered by President Joe Biden, who has devoted much time to cobbling together a potential alliance of moderate Sunni nations willing to normalize relations with Israel if it exits Gaza and commits to a future Palestinian state. It is the potential of mutual coexistence. A new joint poll conducted over the summer of 2024 by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) in Ramallah and the International Program in Conflict Resolution and Mediation at Tel Aviv University found plenty of evidence that Israelis and Palestinians believe the worst of the other side. The topline findings are terrible:

--An overwhelming majority of the Palestinians (81%) think the Palestinian suffering under the siege and blockade of the Gaza Strip justifies what Hamas did on October 7; only 28% of Israeli Arabs take this view.

--Among Israeli Jews, 84% believe Hamas’ attack on October 7 justifies current Israeli actions in the Gaza Strip.

--The vast majority of Israeli Jews (93%) attribute maximalist and genocidal aspirations to Hamas’s attack and the ensuing war: 66% believe they want to “to commit genocide against us,” and 27% believe the aim is to conquer land and expel the Jews.

--When Palestinians were asked how they interpret Israel’s aim in the current war, again, a vast majority of Palestinians (88%) attribute maximalist and genocidal aspirations to Israel: 61% select “commit genocide against us,” and 27% select “to conquer our land and expel the people.”

--Large majorities on both sides, 72% among Israeli Jews, 68% among Palestinians, and 60% among Israeli Arabs expect escalation in the West Bank. Similarly, 58% of the Israelis (62% of Israeli Jews and 41% of Israeli Arabs) and 53% of the Palestinians believe the Gaza war will expand into a regional war.

--A slim majority of 51% of the Palestinians, 54% of Israeli Jews, and 17% of Israeli Arabs are opposed to the vision presented by the US for the future after the end of the war in Gaza. The vision was described as having four components: a ceasefire/exchange of hostages/prisoners, a revitalized Palestinian Authority in control of the Gaza Strip, a two-state solution, and regional peace and Saudi-Israeli normalization. Support for the vision stands at 83% among Israeli Arabs, 46% among Israeli Jews, and 45% among the Palestinians.

But the study also found a silver lining: that if each side took brave steps meant to break the cycle of violence and oppression, popular opinion would shift and a majority would support a comprehensive peace deal.

Those brave steps would not be easy—they include Israel acknowledging Palestinians’ historic link to the land, offering to pay compensation to Palestinian refugees for the loss of their homes and land, and a commitment to eventually release all the Palestinian prisoners it holds. On the other side, they foresee the Palestinian government offering to combat incitement against Israel and changing its school textbooks to show that, allowing Israeli factories to keep operating in its territory, paying compensation to Jews who had to leave Arab countries after 1948, and committing to consolidate all armed factions into a single security force while disarming any others.

According to the poll, the prospect of those kinds of confidence-building moves shifted how both Israelis and Palestinians thought about compromise, and when paired together as joint moves that would be taken in concert by both sides, the effect was even stronger. It produced majority support among both communities for the following package: “a de-militarized Palestinian state, an Israeli withdrawal to the Green Line with equal territorial exchange, family unification in Israel of 100,000 Palestinian refugees, West Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine, the Jewish Quarter and the Western Wall under Israeli sovereignty and the Muslim and Christian quarters and the al Haram al Sharif/Temple Mount under Palestinian sovereignty, Israeli and the future state of Palestine will be democratic, the bilateral agreement will be part of a larger peace agreement with all Arab states, the US and major Arab countries will ensure full implementation of the agreement by both sides, and the end of the conflict and claims.”

This suggests that the future is still fluid. Brave leaders and new political movements could shift the direction of the conflict from mutual annihilation to mutual coexistence. Intriguingly, it is the Israeli Palestinian Arab community, which lives in both camps, that shows the most interest in changing the course of events. Unfortunately, that is not the track we are on now.

If you want to read just one thing about…

--Hurricane Helene? Make it this post by Susan Crawford, titled, “’This is Our Sandy.’”

--The value of talking to potential voters in swing states? Make it this post by Dean Briggs in The Grassroots Connector titled, “Canvasser’s Notebook.”

--Why you should pay much less attention to polling? Make it this essay by Rick Perlstein in The American Prospect titled “The Polling Imperilment.”

--How to protect democracy over the next 100 days? Make it this post from Protect Democracy co-founders Ian Bassin and Justin Florence.

--How Americans can come together across the political divide that is the gun issue? Make it this post by Gideon Lichfield (whose Substack Futurepolis is a new fave for me).

And if you want to get a daily list of just three or four pointers to the best reporting and commentary on the 2024 election, make it Dan Gillmor’s The Cornerstone of Democracy newsletter. Here’s a great recent example.

End Times

Your moment of zen, courtesy of two geniuses of comedy.