How to bear the unraveling
Apocalypse reflections, book updates, and recent reading.
You’ve probably heard: The ceasefire in Israel/Palestine is now broken, fighting’s resumed, and hundreds more people have died in the last few days. Some of them had sought refuge in designated “safe zones” and returned home when fighting paused in January. But home is, again, no refuge.
Earlier this week, The Economist’s editorial team discussed the future of Israel and Gaza now that Israeli and US strikes in the region have resumed.1 I learned that Gaza’s residents have lost access to fresh food and only a few bakeries are still operating. I heard that US leaders are “bored” of this conflict while the US diplomatic corps is “understaffed” because of recent workforce cuts and voluntary resignations. Other regional influences—the Palestinian Authority, the EU, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt—have all weakened in the last 17 months, but Israel’s prime minister is riding high having received funding, weapons, logistics, and moral cover from the US to stay king of the hill.
Anshel Pfeffer summed it up: “There’s no majority consensus about two nations in one land… No one’s looking for a solution right now.”
The abyss is lovely, dark, and deep. I only resisted screaming into it by walking away from the computer.
It’s been five years now since the onset of COVID-19 in the US: five years that feel like just-yesterday and forever-ago at the same time. I listened to Alexis Madrigal and science writer Ed Yong on Northern California’s public radio station KQED to mark that anniversary.
While he was at The Atlantic, Ed was someone I came to trust to interpret public health developments: first with general COVID news and then with stories and experiences from people living with long Covid:
[In March 2020], people with similar illnesses like myalgic encephalomyelitis (also known as chronic fatigue syndrome or M.E./C.F.S.) had warned that the new pathogen would trigger a wave of disability. They knew then what is clear now: People infected by Covid can be pummeled by months or years of debilitating symptoms, including extreme fatigue, cognitive impairment, chest pain, shortness of breath and postexertional malaise — a state in which existing symptoms worsen after even minor physical or mental exertion.
Ed and Alexis remember how infectious disease, public health, and public policy experts navigated the “stumbling, erratic, meandering march toward slightly reduced uncertainty” of science and communicating about it. It’s hard to walk laypeople through several rounds of tentative study findings while still encouraging them to do specific things based on those findings, like mask, test regularly, or stay home when sick.
I worked with communicators and administrators during those years. We tried to put scientific and public health advice to work in our own environment, where there was very little appetite for “Not sure.” We looked for the simplest ways our groups could reduce viral spread and avert COVID’s severest impacts, but we weren’t scientists. We were just trying to live.
The virus evolved. The rules kept changing. Health can be so personal, so connected to conscience, and there were landmines everywhere.
Every public conversation risks two issues that Alexis and Ed raise too: denial and paternalism. You can pretend problems aren’t problems or are easily resolved, and you can impose solutions dogmatically and without respecting people’s autonomy or rights.
“The choice,” Ed says, “is not ignore uncertainty falsely or just say ‘We don’t know,’ full stop, neither of which is very satisfying. I think you can show people why we are uncertain, why it is hard to get answers to any of these big questions, what things people might to do get answers and how long that might take.”
Tech and science communicators describe observable reality as best as they and we can know it. They translate the latest in expert knowledge into plain language, from studies and surveys to theories of why so-and-so is so. By tracking cases and sharing stories, they help us unpack what’s happening around us and how we can respond.
That’s why what Ed says next sticks with me:
When you have something that’s going to last for years, it’s so much more important not to give people messaging, but to show them how to think about it.
Focusing on how to think in the face of COVID was one of the things my team did, mostly because we had some good advisors. We set a policy for our space and gatherings that we updated over time. We also talked through the criteria and information we were using to think about the issues, shape the policy, and change things up when we needed to. I made as much of that available to the full team as I could. When things are uncertain, as they are right now, shifting from outcomes to process and leaning into more transparency than a command-and-control culture prefers can give everyone more room to breathe.
Political campaigners and commercial advertisers don’t do that. They test language for how well it connects with audiences and persuades them. Last election, for instance, the Harris-Walz campaign bet everything on a mix of joy and militarism. Long-time communicator Frank Luntz tested messages for Republicans over three decades (Luntz is how we got “climate change” and “energy exploration” where “global warming” and “oil drilling” used to be). The 47th President doesn’t give a damn about Luntz-tested language but he mainlines messages from the media networks and platforms he thinks let him hear from real people, and he adapts to them.
What Ed Yong and Alexis are talking about in their conversation isn’t merely getting the right messengers the right media or scripts. Teaching people how to think about something is less like matching their words to yours and more like building a map of what’s going on that aligns with reality and so makes it easier, not harder, to discern with others what it all means and where to go.
In systems sciences, we map out inputs, processes, outputs, risk factors, benefits, contingencies, all that. We also look at the context around those things, note connections among them, view them from more perspectives than the ones that come naturally to us, trace patterns and differences between similar cases, uncover values and biases of interpretation or understanding, and more.
Some of those moves can feel like overkill in simple times; some of them are Sisyphean mid-crisis. But a wider, deeper, denser, textured multidimensional view is exactly what we need in the throes of apocalypse. Whether we’re talking about street kidnappings, Signal scandals, or the Smithsonian, we have to see the topics-of-the-day beyond disconnected headlines.
Targeting non-citizens makes citizens vulnerable too. Government officials destroying records about killing people in another country isn’t just a group chat oopsie; it undermines civilian oversight of the military and democratic transparency. Hounding universities and cultural institutions weakens our memory-keepers and meaning-makers, demoralizing scholars and narrowing the spaces that connect us.
There are so many pieces to connect, yes. Good news? This kind of perspective isn’t an individual enterprise. I don’t have to know all the things from all the angles all by myself. It’s impossible to do! I’m part of an ecosystem, as are you. We only have to bring our best sense, efforts, understanding, and energy into our relationships with others so we can learn, grow, and adapt together, even, as now, when it’s hard.
Together we can be wise. Wisdom is collective.
Take what comfort you can in that.
“When you have something that’s going to last for years, it’s so much more important not to give people messaging, but to show them how to think about it.” —Ed Yong
Forty-three Februarys ago, Audre Lorde stood at a podium at Harvard University to share what she’d learned from the uprisings of the 1960s and the work of Malcolm X.
“I’d been guilty,” she said then, “of what many of us are still guilty of: letting the media (and I don’t mean only the white media) define the bearers of those messages most important to our lives.”
But as she looked closer at Malcolm X’s life, words, and work, she saw a model for reflection and creative survival worth studying and emulating.
“There are no new ideas. Just new ways of giving those ideas we cherish breath and power in our own living…
One of the most basic Black survival skills is the ability to change, to metabolize experience, good or ill, into something that is useful, lasting, effective. Four hundred years of survival as an endangered species has taught most of us that if we intend to live, we had better become fast learners. Malcolm knew this. We do not have to live the same mistakes over again if we can look at them, learn from them, and build upon them.”
The whole address is worth your time; read it at Black Past.
How the book’s going
As I shared a few notes ago, I’m working on Building a Moral Economy: Religious Roots full-time.
I’ve had some glorious conversations over the last four months with housing justice organizers, seminarians, current and former clergy members, a climate activist, a farmer, financial planners, responsible investing lobbyists, artists, and local democracy advocates, and I’ve now got hours and hours of audio to review. It’s writing season: me, my transcripts, the keyboard, and the pen. I’ll take all the encouragement you can send!
In early April, some Building a Moral Economy team members will be at a live-and-digital event in California. As soon as we have details on that program, I’ll share with you. I’ll join virtually.
Sign up for email updates from the editor while you wait.
Springtime sniffles = meds + books + couch time
Since pollinating plants and an ecosystem virus chose to co-evolve with me recently, I’ve had some unexpected downtime to drink tea and read.2
I blasted through Sarah Wynn-Williams’ tech-politics memoir Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism. It’s full of anecdotes about Facebook/Meta’s early years in global diplomacy, and could easily inspire a sequel to the 2010 film The Social Network. It also shot to bestseller status this month for the most social-media-network reason possible: Meta demanded the author stop promoting it so comment sections everywhere took over. The hardcover version is on backorder at Bookshop.org but the e-version’s available. If you read it, let’s chat.
I also finished Americanah, Chimamanda Adichie’s 2013 novel on the Nigerian diaspora. I started it maybe four years ago, lost track of it, and started over. There are so many themes in Americanah: immigration, media, academia, sexuality, race, and class. Mostly it reminded me of relationships from my own long-ago, especially the ones that can pick up wherever they left off as if uninterrupted by intervals of years. Grateful for those.
This morning I started Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Patsy (2019), which takes on a similar story of migration, family, and sexuality in the late 20th Century through the eyes of Jamaicans. Good so far.
What are you reading this spring?
Three things
Robert Reich names the courage and collection action this moment requires: “Every institution, group, firm, or individual that surrenders to Trump’s wanton tyranny invites more of it.”
Oxford’s Dr. Joshua Adam Bull—“mathematical agony uncle”—explains why a little chaos makes for tastier tea: “A steady flow doesn’t mix.”
At Tech Policy, Eryk Salvaggio counters artificial intelligence/machine learning hype: we need visions of the future that include and require human participation and shared decision-making. “Functional democracy has never existed. It is a flawed, dysfunctional system that must constantly be steered. But we have to keep human hands on the wheel.”
That’s the call now. Rest when you need to. Read as much as you can. Lean into the textured wisdom we can weave together.
And keep your hands on the wheel.
Til next time,
Keisha
I resent the military term “strike” as much as “collateral damage” stinks in my nose. They’re both dissociative ways to talk about destroying people, places, and things, usually by bombing them to shreds.
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