Watching Lawrence of Arabia and Voting on Tuesday

In the sweeping classical drama, Lawrence of Arabia, the young British diplomat T.E. Lawrence - played by Peter O'Toole - has convinced a group of Arab tribes to mount a surprise attack on the Ottoman Army whom they seek independence.     Lawrence leads a band of these Bedouin warriors across the desert, approaching Aqaba’s Ottoman port from the rear.  They cross the desert in blistering heat, braving swirling sandstorms.  At one point, they discover that one of the Arab soldiers, named Gasim, has fallen off his camel.  Lawrence instantly decides that he must turn around and get the lost man.  Sherif Ali, the chief Arab leader, played in the movie by Omar Sharif, objects.  One of his aides tells Lawrence,  "Gasim's time has come.   It is written."  Lawrence snaps back,  "Nothing is written!"  Then he turns around, ventures back, searches amid the sands and storms, and finds Gasim staggering about, half-dead.  Lawrence brings him back to the camp to a hero's welcome.  When Sherif Ali offers water, Lawerence looks at him and, before quenching his thirst, calmly repeats, "Nothing is written."  

I often think about the world that is being ushered in as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic.  However, I have been neglecting one crucial element - human power.  People can choose which direction they want to push themselves, their societies, and their world.  We have more leeway now.  In most eras, history proceeds along a set path, and change is hard.  But the novel coronavirus has upended society.  People are disoriented.  Things are already changing, and in that atmosphere, further change becomes easier than ever. 

Let's think about the changes we have accepted in our own lives in response to the pandemic.  We have agreed to isolate ourselves for long stretches.    We have worked, attended meetings, and had deeply personal conversations by talking to our laptops.  We have taken online courses and seen doctors and therapists using telemedicine.  In just weeks, companies changed policies that would usually have taken them years to revise.  Overnight, cities turned avenues into pedestrian walkways and sidewalks into cafes.  Attitudes towards people previously ignored or overlooked are shifting, as seen in the newly adopted phrase "essential workers."  And governments have opened up their coffers in ways that were once unimaginable and could lead to much greater willingness to invest in the future.   

I believe these changes could be the start of something new or momentary blips.  We have many futures in front of us.  We could turn inward and embrace nationalism and self-interest or view this global pandemic to spur worldwide cooperation and action.   We have confronted just such a crossroads before.  During the 1920s, after a world war and a great epidemic, the world could have come in either of two different directions.  Some of the leaders who came out of the conflict wanted to create peace structures that might prevent another.  But Congress rejected Woodrow Wilson's plans, and the US turned its back on the League of Nations and efforts to create a system of collective security in Europe.  European leaders imposed harshly disciplinary terms on Germany, pushing the country towards collapse.  These decisions led to a very dark world in the 1930s - hyperinflation, mass unemployment, fascism, and another world war.  A different set of choices could have led the world down an entirely different path.  

Similarly, in the 1940s, Stalin's Soviet Union chose a challenge and confrontation strategy, refusing the US’s offer for Marshall Plan assistance, and rejecting any negotiation to place nuclear energy under international authority for peaceful use.  Had a different Soviet leader been in power at that time, say, Khrushchev, the Cold War might have been a much less tense and hair-raising period in history.  It might even never have happened.  

When we look at the world today, it is clear that trends are pushing forward - and fast.  Economic development is creating ever-greater climate risks.  For demographic and other reasons, countries are growing more slowly.  The rich are getting richer; the big are getting bigger.  Technology is moving so fast that human beings might lose control over their creations for the first time in history.  Globalization will continue, but the opposition to it is growing louder and louder.  Nations are becoming more conservative.  The US and China are headed toward a bitter and prolonged confrontation, but we can make choices that shape and alter these trends.   

We could settle into a world of slow growth, increasing natural threats, and rising inequality and continue with business as usual.  Or we could choose to act forcefully, using the vast capacity of governments to make a massive new investment to equip people with the skills and security they need in an age of bewildering transformation. We could build a twenty-first-century infrastructure putting to work many of those most threatened by new technologies.  We could control carbon emission by merely placing a price on them that reflects their real cost.  And we could recognize that along with dynamism and growth, we need resilience and security - or else then the next crisis could be the last.  We need a plan of reform, not revolution.  I don't think we have to overthrow the existing order hoping that something better would take its place.  We have made real gains economically and politically.  The world is a better place than it was fifty years ago by almost any measure.  We understand the deficiencies and the ways to address them.  The problem has not been to arrive at solutions - it has been to find the political will to implement them.  We needed reforms in many areas and were enacted; these reforms would add up to a revolution of sorts.  With even some of these ideas implemented, the world could look very different twenty years from now.
 
Countries can change.  In 1930, most nations in the world had a small government and did not consider it their job to promote their people's general well-being. By 1950, every one of the world's major nations had embraced that mandate—it is not easy.  On October 20, 1935, Gallup published its first official public opinion poll.  It revealed that - amid the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl - 60% of Americans believed "expenditures by the Government for relief and recovery" were too significant.  Only 9% said they were too little, while 31%  said they were about right.  That did not deter Franklin Roosevelt from steaming ahead with the New Deal - and continuing his efforts to educate the American public about the need for government as a stabilizing force in the economy and society.  Great leaders like FDR read polls to understand their challenge's nature, not as an excuse for inaction.  

Consider the European Union.  At first, the pandemic made its members close up. They shut down borders, competed for medical supplies, and accused one another of malice and venality.  Public sentiment was running strongly against the EU in hard-hit countries like Italy.  But after the initial shock, Europeans began to consider how to handle the fallout from COVID-19.  They recognized that it placed unprecedented stress on the continent., particularly on its weakest members.  Thanks to wise leadership from the most significant powers, Germany and France, and the EU's top officials, an accord was struck in July 2020 to issue European bonds that will allow the poorer countries to access funds that are, in effect, guaranteed by the richest.  This might sound like a technical matter, but it represents a dramatic step forward in a more deeply interconnected Europe.   European leaders saw the direction in which Covid-19 was pushing them and pushed back.  A pandemic that initially drove countries apart could prove to be the catalyst for a long-sought closer union.  

The same tension between integration and isolation can be seen across the world.  The pandemic is leading countries to look inward.  But enlightened leaders will recognize that the only real solution to problems like pandemics - and climate change and cyberwar - is to look outward, toward more and better cooperation.  The answer to a badly funded, weak World Health Organization is not to withdraw from it in the hope that it withers away, but rather to support it better and give it more autonomy so that it could stand up to China - or the US - if a health emergency required it.  No single country can organize the entire world anymore.  None want to.  That leaves only the possibilities of chaos, cold war, or cooperation.  

Trends matter.  Technological forces, economic realities, and biological imperatives all determine the parameters of what one can do.  "men make their own history,"  Karl Marx wrote,  "but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances,  but under the circumstances, existing already, given, and transmitted from the past."  That is why the wisest leaders try to understand history, evaluate the larger forces at work, and determine how much room there is for human action.  The man who almost single-handedly unified Germany, Otto von Bismarck, described his role in these terms:  "the statesman's task is to hear God's footsteps marching through history, and to try and catch on to His coattails as He marches past."

Let me go back to my favorite classic movie.  In the Lawrence of Arabia, the lesson about fate versus human power gets more complicated.  The night before the attack on Aqaba, the Arab tribes start quarreling bitterly over a murder committed by one tribesman against another tribe member.  As an outsider, Lawrence offers to execute the murderer so that justice could be done by an impartial hand - only to realize that the murderer is Gasim,  that man whose life he had saved in the desert.  And yet he walks up and calmly shoots six bullets into his chest.  The lesson perhaps is that Gasim was destined to die.  Lawrence had been able to save him in the desert, and in doing so, gave him a reprieve.  But, his actions, Gasim threw away that chance for a different future.  
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In his own way, Dwight Eisenhower was making a similar point to Walter Cronkite as they sat overlooking the rows of graves in Normandy.  The soldiers who died during World War II gave us all a chance to build a better and more peaceful world.  So, too, this ugly pandemic has created the possibility for change and reform in our times.  It has opened up a path to a new world.  It's ours to take that opportunity or waste it.  Lawrence is right.  "Nothing is written."

*This piece has been written based on the lessons and the conclusion of “Ten Lessons For a Post-Pandemic World” By Fareed Zakaria