Tapestries-52 | Lessons
Looking at a recent crisis to understand the questions to consider before the next one.
Hey fam, I’m on the way to Australia so I thought I’d get a piece out as I’ll be busy with family and friends over the next two weeks. See you on the other side.
1. What I’m thinking
I wrote a piece a month ago asking several questions. One of those questions was “how are we going to remember Covid-19, and what are some of the lessons we’ll take from the experience?” I’ve wanted to write about Covid for some time, but have hesitated. People have moved on, and as a result, they aren’t particularly interested in revisiting what was a painful episode. Part of this is understandable fatigue (physical, emotional, intellectual), and part is that the news cycle — which is designed to move through allegedly consequential stories at breathtaking speed (see chart below) — has crowded Covid out of any bandwidth.
But these are not good grounds for us to simply move on without reflecting on some of the important lessons of the pandemic. I expressed strong opinions (here and here) throughout the last two years on the issue, and I stand by most of my views. But here, rather than re-litigating the past, I want to pose some questions about the future, by asking how we may deal with similarly complex issues when they inevitably arise again. I don’t have the answers, but at this stage all we can work with are good questions. Let’s take a look.
a) What’s more important in a crisis: leading with certainty or acknowledging uncertainty? Public health officials and governments/leaders were tasked with an incredibly difficult job through the pandemic, dealing with a novel coronavirus in a time of great uncertainty and pre-existing polarization. In response, our leaders decided to project clarity and certainty, despite the highly uncertain and dynamic moment we were living through. My sense is that they should have acknowledged uncertainty, owned mistakes in real-time, and prioritized transparency and humility over the illusion of control. But if they took that approach, would we have given them credit for it? Would we have appreciated their honesty, or would opponents have swung the other way, criticizing them for being incompetent and bumbling instead of dishonest? An important question we need to ask ourselves is what do we actually want from our leaders in a time of crisis? Will we reward them for honesty and transparency, or do we actually prefer the comforting but illusory sense of certainty?
b) How will we treat dissenting views in the future? This follows on from the previous point. As the pandemic evolved, many dissents were censored. Countless people of good standing were either censored, removed or marginalized on the basis of views about a range of issues, including mask efficacy, vaccine efficacy and side-effects, and the impact of school restrictions on children’s development. With the passage of time, many of the positions that were previously censored and considered grounds for vilification, have turned out to be accurate and well-founded, and have been acknowledged by the institutions initially behind the push for censorship. These were positions expressed by thoughtful, highly qualified individuals. Alongside thoughtful and well-considered dissents, there was also an enormous amount of dangerous quackery. But putting quackery and the battle against “misinformation” (a battle I’m wary of) to the side, in the future, how will we and our social platforms deal with dissenting voices, in a dynamic environment, from well-qualified sources, especially when they challenge the prevailing view? How willing are we (as individuals) to consider alternate viewpoints when they clash with our strongly held beliefs?
c) Were we fair to parents, and what can we reasonably ask of each other in the future? I’m not a parent, and my understanding is that the experience of Covid was infinitely harder for parents of young children than many other cohorts. In addition to the practical nightmare of dealing with school closures, the pandemic dealt parents an endless series of tough choices. When it came to vaccines, they were told and expected to vaccinate their kids, for an illness that had an incredibly low incidence of serious disease among young children. They were effectively told to vaccinate their kids to help slow the spread of the disease amongst adults. Was that fair? Maybe it was. But it’s an important question to ask: what can we reasonably be expected to do as individuals, for the benefit of the collective? And what mechanisms should we use to compel compliance (if any at all)? It’s not a small question, and as we think about how this plays in the future, I’d consider it amongst the most important questions of all that came out of the pandemic.
I discussed the above with a friend this week, and our conversation was the prompt for writing this piece. When I asked him the first question (“how will we remember Covid”), his response was that he’ll remember it for the catastrophic loss of life that occurred. That struck me, because in all my intellectualizing, I’d brushed over that point. As we move on and obsess over the next calamity, we’d all do well to remember that most of all, Covid took the lives of far too many people, and that for many, the lasting impact of the pandemic will be the loss of a loved one.
2. What I’m consuming
a) The relentless 2021 news cycle in one chart, by Stef W. Kight in Axios
This is a chart from a piece I read last year, and I dug it up to share in the context of the sentiments above. It’s a breathtaking visualization of how quickly our news cycles move, and more than anything else, it’s a reminder that the only way to retain some sense of sanity and calm, is through resisting the urge to engage with every story and every calamity, all of the time.
b) What Many Progressives Misunderstand About Fighting Climate Change, by Alec Stapp in The Atlantic
I write semi-regularly here about my frustration with the impracticality that sits at the center of so many discussions about climate and energy. This piece is a good, thoughtful, sensible exploration about what we can do to push forward truly productive climate initiatives. One of my criticisms of the progressive approach to climate is that it’s couched in terms of social reorganization, which is a lofty goal but one entirely out-of-step with (a) the magnitude of the problem, (b) the way the world and large infrastructure, energy and innovation projects work, and (c) the importance of energy to our quality of life and evolving geopolitics. Key quote:
I believe we can make real progress on energy and climate, but it will rely on bringing together all the tools, innovation and risk-taking capacity of private enterprise, and by leading with practicality, not ideology. Progressives would do well to acknowledge this fact and consider a climate plan that might actually succeed in the real world, by helping remove the barriers standing in our way of solving the problems we all face.
c) Putin’s latest speech, translated by @KonstantinKisin
I don’t really know what to make of the seeming escalation of rhetoric and actions coming out of Russia. I do know that listening to what Putin is saying is a decent starting point. This thread is just that, with more resources at the end of the translation. It’s pretty venomous reading.
3. What I’m writing
I’ve been spending time revising the first chapter to more closely align with the updated emphasis on distance. The chapter talks about how our world has gotten smaller by bringing our objects of desire much more within our grasp. I figure a good way to bring you into the actual writing is just to share some of it, so here goes with a snippet of the first substantive chapter:
The first notion of distance I want to talk about relates to how we now interact with our objects of desire. My contention, as I hope to lay out in more detail in this chapter, is that technology has made our world feel much smaller in one important respect: the objects of our desire – whether physical or experiential – have never been more accessible, or easier to access.
This is not a problem in and of itself, but in a world where everything is within our grasp, we haven’t adequately considered how we now touch or interact with the people who exist between us and our objects and desires. We haven’t adequately considered how the wholesale redrawing of our boundaries, and resetting of our expectations, have changed the way we relate to those around us. In a world built for frictionless interactions with the goods and services we desire, what does it mean to live with dignity, to respect and acknowledge the human experience of those around us? These aren’t easy questions to answer, but to my mind, failing to consider them is not an option if one wants to live and operate as someone with a sense of alignment and equanimity.
Technology has changed the texture of our interaction with the world in many ways. In this chapter, I want to explore how we could or should conduct ourselves in a world that empowers us to sit at the absolute center of our own universes. Our responsibility as independent agents isn’t to change the world; that’s too big a task. Our responsibility is to constantly think about how we can change our worlds, and for me, that starts with the content of this chapter, namely how we treat the people and things around us in a world where distance has compressed. Let’s take a ride.
The name of the game for me now is getting the routine right. With the right rhythm and routine, I’m looking forward to getting the first draft done, and will keep sharing snippets in the meantime.
Wishing you all a wonderful weekend and a great start to the week.
When we consider leadership in a crisis, if we consider honesty and transparency to be the chosen path - how might we offer comfort to those who fear uncertainty when the answer is “I don’t know”?