Crisis Management

What do we need to get through a crisis? Prof. Elaine Scarry tells us that it is: “good habits.” Link here.

Looking at the response to the current earthquake in Japan through the lens of the Kobe earthquake, Scarry suggests that Japan has dealt with these events effectively because it does not rely on emergency government powers, but instead on the good habits that good people have cultivated in their social interactions with their friends and neighbors.

In her words: “Of course when things are done voluntarily often there is no visible sign of it for a while. It’s not self-announcing in the way that government efforts are....The remarkable participation of the population in helping after the Kobe earthquake was a habit. They hadn’t been practicing how to clear rubble from earthquakes. I don’t even know if they explicitly practiced first aid. But they did have habits of feeling it was their responsibility and their ability to keep the streets clean, to help take care of the elderly in their block and their town, and that translated during the emergency. I quote de Tocqueville saying that voluntary associations establish ‘habits of the heart.’”

This almost sounds Scarry is comparing a command economy with a free a market economy. She seems to be suggesting that a command economy places so much control in the hands of a centralized authority that they become morally lax and lazy. If the government is going to do it for you, why bother to do it yourself? And if the government is going to punish people who do bad things, why bother to try to good things?

When people do not depend on government to step in when something goes wrong, they are more likely to take initiatives and to treat each other with respect.

This tells us that weak government does not lead to the law of the jungle, to a dog-eat-dog world… it leads to community cooperation and an orderly marketplace. Who knew?

The notion that good habits will get us through a crisis is perhaps more radical than it appears at first glance.

Surely, this principle guides training exercises. The more you train for an event, the more you practice, the better you will function when the s#@% hits the fan.

Most people will agree to this principle, in the abstract. But what does therapy, for example, offer as crisis preparation?

Doesn’t therapy promote the notion that if we understand the past, integrate and process our traumas, we will be so filled with insight that we will be better able to handle future traumas?

And hasn’t therapy pretended that you can best process a trauma when you learn to express all of your feelings about it.

This is not at all the same thing as developing good habits.

If our good habits will help us to function optimally when we are going through an emergency, we getting in touch with our feelings about our past traumas is probably not going to be of much help.

Bad habits produce bad behavior and bad behavior will become the rationale for increased government interference.