Harvard social theorist Elaine Scarry was recently interviewed by the Boston Review on her new book, which probes in concrete detail the many ways citizens and communities can prepare for emergency situations in order to preserve themselves and their autonomy.
The interviewer begins by asking Professor Scarry about her interest in the suject, to which she responds,
I have been working for many years on the problems that arise from the population being willing to suspend its own responsibility for self-governing actions. One of the things that has seduced people into giving up on their own actions is the claim of emergency—the government will often make the spurious claim that because certain things require very fast action, there is no time for ordinary processes of deliberation and thinking, and therefore we have to abridge our normal protocols.
I find exactly the opposite to be the case. Thinking and emergency action are deeply compatible. Sometimes that thinking takes the form of very recognizable deliberative processes, and many other times that thinking takes a form that may be less easy to recognize—protocols, procedures, laws that we deliberate about in advance, and we build all the deliberation into the protocols, and then that allows us to act very quickly.
Later he follows up by asking
One thing I noticed in the coverage of the Japanese disaster was commentators saying how stoic and calm the Japanese were. I wouldn’t want to deny that there are cultural differences between peoples and nations, but if you have the right procedures and institutions in place for a disaster, then people will tend to be calm, because they’re calm when they know what to do.
Professor Scarry then builds on this idea further,
That’s exactly right. When we look at our own emergency surgeons, they also would look very calm even during a hair-raising procedure to try to save someone’s life, because exactly the result of prior preparation for emergency is that it allows some space in your mind for thinking. You’re not trying to invent everything on the spot; you may have to invent one thing on the spot, but nine of the ten things you have to do you’ve already rehearsed mentally. And so yes, I think you’re exactly right, that calmness is something that would accompany a society that has practiced. You know, in some spheres of emergency action people have described how time seems to slow down. Even though only minutes are involved, it can seem as though the whole event is taking place in slow motion. Surgeons have sometimes said that.
