Crossing Together: A Common Sense for a World Without Bearings

This year’s Rencontres Économiques d’Aix-en-Provence has a theme that doesn’t pretend things are simpler than they are: navigating a world without bearings. Not a world in crisis, which would at least imply a known shape to the crisis, but one that has lost the instruments by which it used to know where things stand. The organisers are explicit that no answer to this gets built by anyone working alone. The question this year is how a society finds new compasses once the old ones stop pointing anywhere reliable, and finds them together.

Article from The Institute of Policy Studies

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Navigating without a map

There is an old formula for moving without a map. China’s reform era called it crossing the river by feeling the stones, a phrase older than the politicians later credited with it, used by people with no blueprint and no choice but to test the ground underfoot, one uncertain step at a time. It pictures a single river-crosser. It assumes that the problem of not knowing is something you solve alone, carefully, slowly, against a current that doesn’t care how careful you are.

Crossing arms-linked: the cost and the trust it creates

I want to offer an addition to it, and to be specific about what work the addition actually does. Cross arms-linked. Not as a gesture of warmth but because the river feels different when more than one body enters it together. On 29 July 2017 a flash flood hit the Narrows at Zion National Park in Utah, USA while a family group was a couple of miles into the hike, the water rising from ankle-deep to waist-deep within minutes. They linked arms on instinct: the strongest took the upstream position and broke the current, the youngest, some as young as one, were kept in the most sheltered place in the line, and strangers nearby joined the chain unasked. Everyone made it out. That instinct matches what every swiftwater safety guide actually teaches: the person breaking the current goes first, the most vulnerable gets the most protected position, one person calls each move, and more feet testing the riverbed at once find the unstable ground faster than any single explorer could. A stumble that would drop someone crossing alone gets caught instead. That is the entire practical case, and it holds only if there is alignment in the group about how to cross rather than hoping the current will be kind.

It comes at a cost however. The same arm that catches a stumble can transmit one. Link enough people and you trade many small, separate risks for one larger, shared risk: the chain holds together or it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t, it rarely fails alone. NATO’s founding treaty makes the same trade in different language, an attack on one member treated as an attack on all, the alliance bound together in what the treaty itself calls a spirit of solidarity. It has been invoked exactly once, after September 11, 2001, and even then several member states hesitated before the alliance acted. It has also never been extended to non-members facing comparable danger on NATO’s own border, because the commitment only covers those who joined the chain in advance, not whoever happens to be standing nearby once the water starts rising. Every durable version of this arrangement that history has actually produced, in pooled lending and in shared sovereign debt just as much as in collective defence, handles the risk the same way: not by denying it’s shared, but by being exact about how much of it is, and by drawing that boundary in advance rather than after the fact. A call to link arms that skips this part isn’t asking for solidarity. It is asking for a blank cheque, and people can tell the difference.

And here is something else worth pondering, because it runs against the order most people assume. The instinct is that a group needs to already trust each other, already feel like a “we,” before anyone will risk a crossing like this. What actually happens runs the other way, especially if there are few pre-existing bonds, or they have frayed. The trust, the shared instinct, the willingness to vouch for someone you barely know, tends to arrive after the crossing rather than before it, built out of having already done the hard thing together rather than waiting until it felt safe to try. Strangers on a flooded riverbank linking arms with people they had never met an hour earlier, and the chain held, and something was different between them afterward that hadn’t been there when they arrived. The common sense this conference is asking us to recover collectively isn’t a precondition for acting together under uncertainty. It’s what acting together under uncertainty produces, if it produces anything at all.

What the conference itself is testing

What survives the crossing matters independently of whether the crossing succeeds outright. Even an effort that falls short, hands pulled apart by a current stronger than anyone judged, the far bank not reached this time, leaves something behind that the failure doesn’t erase: a precedent for having tried it together, a working vocabulary for the next attempt, a “we” that didn’t exist among the people standing at the water’s edge that morning. That’s the only reliable promise available to anyone trying to navigate a world that has genuinely lost its bearings. Not that the crossing will succeed. Only that doing it arms-linked, feeling for the next stone as a group rather than as scattered individuals, is how the common compass actually gets made.

Which is the whole case for a gathering like this one, said plainly. Three days, one park, several hundred people who may disagree, arriving anyway and giving each other the time, the room, and the floor: ideas put forward, argued against, defended badly and then better, controversy that nobody in the room fully controls once it starts moving. The river here was never literal. The current that actually matters is the debate itself, risked out loud, in public, where it can go wrong in front of everyone watching. Link arms with the people you came to argue with, not only the people you already agree with. That was always the better test of it. So bring your disagreement. Bring your argument. Let us navigate a world without bearings by crossing the river by feeling the stones, arms joined together.