OK, big conjecture time. Put pretentiously, this is my Grand Unified Theory of organic political response to crisis in North American and Western European societies: a generalized, free-floating sense of crisis tends to drive majority populations toward the nativist right, and the usual search for convenient scapegoats, but curiously, as a crisis intensifies locally, sentiment passes through some phase transition that activates, instead, instincts toward mutual aid and expressions of solidarity.
@adamgreenfield I have some heretical opinions on this. One is that, in the West, these bursts of solidarity and mutual aid tend to be post-traumatic, usually, as you say, in the aftermath of a natural or wartime disaster. This makes them rather fleeting.
The other heretical opinion is that Western cultures are still unable to formulate solidarity and mutual beyond Christian charity and "grace". This limits their effectiveness (and maybe also explains their fleeting nature.)
@acousticmirror Oh, I agree completely. What I’m writing is in large part an attempt to open up the space of that affect, to smear out that sense of urgency so that it can encompass the whole of life. This is difficult for many reasons, of course, but even on the neuroendocrine level we find that certain states of being (great joy, profound grief) simply cannot be sustained for particularly long before the neurotransmitters that mediate them need to be replenished.
@adamgreenfield Yes, this would be interesting. Especially since catastrophe and trauma can't be sustained for long (and, to be honest, probably shouldn't.)
@acousticmirror@adamgreenfield another complication is that white/western(and probably specifically USian) culture is chronically dysregulated, on a "cultural nervous system" level. without increased capacity/skill for modulation, "additional" (more like "ongoing") crises can't be met with any level of fluency. perhaps necessitating creation/amplification of gap-spaces where that work can be attended to.
My city had a pretty catastrophic flood 7 years ago and this was essentially what happened.
The other thing is that charity tended to align across class/social lines. So lots of people helped clean/clear out houses (often owned by very wealthy people) who were friends of friends, while poor people living in apartments got a lot less help (despite needing more).
I don’t mean for this to be taken entirely seriously, but neither do I think there’s nothing to it. There’s plenty of empirical evidence to suggest that while elite panic is real, and occasionally deadly, acute localized crisis (“natural disasters” and similar pulse events) do not seem to trigger pogroms of the type seen after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, when Japanese nationalists slaughtered several thousand ethnic Koreans, and instead do seem to inspire solidaristic recovery efforts.
The main American exception is, of course, the aftermath of Katrina in New Orleans, where (with the exception of the Common Ground mutual-aid effort) the posture of relief operations and eventual disposition of recovery resources are inseparable from white grievance. Anyway, this is what I’m thinking about just now.
And the hugely salient question that pops out of this is: will majority populations perceive the cascading, interlocking and intensifying set of disruptive climatic events I call “the Long Emergency” more as a chronic background condition, and (“therefore”) continue their steady drift rightward, or as something sharp and local enough to drive them through the phase transition toward expressions of real solidarity?
@adamgreenfield This is an important conjecture. I remember William Gibson mentioning something along the lines of there being no models for a long, prolonged decline like this one, in history or in fiction: all out collapse model narratives represent it as something delimited in a (sometimes, very) short time stretch. We don't even know how to tell the story of a century/century-and-a-half-long decline.
@acousticmirror@adamgreenfield I thought that 2016 was going to drive us toward mutual aid and the response I had (as a lot of us did) was to join a Unitarian Congregation, unfortunately, that turned to dust as for whatever reason (psyops? incompetence? puritanism), people turned more and more toward extreme leftism (the robin d'angelo anti-racist industry is one example, we've spoken about others in person, Adam...). now, not so sure.
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