I’ve mentioned “Whig history” here before. A little bit ago it occurred to me that there are any number of drastically different ways of looking at the ways in which events unfold. One of the ways is historical inevitability. There are all sorts of phrases that people use to describe that (besides “Whig history” and “historic inevitability”) like “the wrong side of history”, “the tide of history”, or “the arc of the moral universe”. It leads you to believe that because things happened in a certain way it is the only way they could have happened and thinking anything else is either stupid or self-serving.
Another way is to think that people do things for reasons. They may understand the reasons or they may not. They may be right or they may be mistaken. But they do what they do for reasons. There’s nothing inevitable about what they do because a tiny change in how they felt that morning or arriving at their destinations that evening five minutes earlier or later and the reasons might have changed.
Most “change” that you allude to is birthed from some extreme event. Because of such horrendous circumstances petty ideological differences are overwhelmed by people coalescing around a survival mode bandwidth, focused on dealing with a third party jointly-felt problem. You see this melting pot of efforts in natural disasters as well as man-made ones.