Polycrisis
Description
Via Adam Tooze [1]:
1.
"in April 2022 the Cascade Institute published an interesting report on the theme by Scott Janzwood and Thomas Homer-Dixon. They defined a polycrisis as follows:
We define a global polycrisis as any combination of three or more interacting systemic risks with the potential to cause a cascading, runaway failure of Earth’s natural and social systems that irreversibly and catastrophically degrades humanity’s prospects. A systemic risk is a threat emerging within one natural, technological, or social system with impacts extending beyond that system to endanger the functionality of one or more other systems. A global polycrisis, should it occur, will inherit the four core properties of systemic risks—extreme complexity, high nonlinearity, transboundary causality, and deep uncertainty—while also exhibiting causal synchronization among risks."
2.
"The rather wonderful Antereisis cultural blog articulated the radical psychological condition we find ourselves in.
Translation:
The confining world, the permanent state of alarm, the hysteria, panic and paranoia of those who are actually persecuted: what has been subsumed under polycrisis can only be partially and never fully compensated by linguistic articulation and rationalization. Seeing-past, hearing-past, living-past - the blindness to apocalypse - are not an expression of refusal or political passivity, but mechanical consequences of an asymmetry between universal challenges and individual coping capacities."
(https://antereisis.substack.com/p/all-the-angels-are-here)
3. Secondrenaissance.net:
"The "polycrisis" is defined by the Cascade Institute as "any combination of three or more interacting systemic risks with the potential to cause a cascading, runaway failure of Earth’s natural and social systems that irreversibly and catastrophically degrades humanity’s prospects." Essentially, a polycrisis arises when multiple systems across various domains are in crisis simultaneously, and interact with each other to create a "complex and intertwined web of challenges.”
The term was coined in the 1999 book Homeland Earth: A Manifesto for a New Millennium by Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern, and was recently popularised by historian Adam Tooze. "Polycrisis" has become a relatively mainstream term, particularly outside of the Second Renaissance ecosystem. For example, it has been used by the World Economic Forum, and it was chosen by the the Financial Times as the word to describe 2022.5 It is sometimes used interchangeably with the term 'metacrisis', although the two concepts are distinct."
(https://secondrenaissance.net/publications/overview-ecosystem-names)
Characteristics
Christopher Hobson and Matthew Davies:
"A polycrisis can be thought of as having the following properties:
(1) Multiple, separate crises happening simultaneously. This is the most immediate and comprehensible feature.
(2) Feedback loops, in which individual crises interact in both foreseeable and unexpected ways. This points to the ways that these separate crises relate to each other.
(3) Amplification, whereby these interactions cause crises to magnify or accelerate, generating a sense of lack of control. The way these separate problems relate and connect works to exacerbate and deepen the different crises.
(4) Unboundedness, in which each crisis ceases to be clearly demarcated, both in time and space, as different problems bleed over and merge. It becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish where one issue ends, and another commences.
(5) Layering, a dynamic Tooze attributes to Yixin’s analysis, whereby the concerns of interest groups related to each distinct crisis overlap ‘to create layered social problems: current problems with historical problems, tangible interest problems with ideological problems, political problems with non-political problems; all intersecting and interfering with one another’ (quoted in Tooze 2021, 18).
(6) The breakdown of shared meaning, stemming from crises being understood differently and from the complex ways in which they interact, and how these interactions are subsequently perceived differently. As each crisis blurs and connects to the other, it becomes more difficult to identify a clear scope and narrative for each distinct crisis, as well as coming to terms with all the interactions between different issues.
(7) Cross purposes, whereby each individual crisis might impede the resolution of another crisis, in terms of demanding attention and resources, and the extent to which they have become tangled together makes it difficult to distinguish and prioritise.
(8) Emergent properties, the collection of these dynamics, which all exhibit a high degree of reflexivity, exceeds the sum total of its parts. The polycrisis is ultimately much more than a collection of smaller, separate crises. Instead, it is something like a socio-political version of the ‘Fujiwhara effect,’ a term used to describe when two or more cyclones come together, morph and merge."
(https://imperfectnotes.substack.com/p/polycrisis)
Visualisation
(from https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-165-polycrisis-thinking )
| Type of risk | Number of “systems of origin” | Scale of outcomes | Magnitude and reversibility of outcomes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Systemic risk | One | Possibly regional, continental or global | Typically sub-catastrophic, probably reversible |
| Global catastrophic risk | One | Global | Irreversible and catastrophic degradation of humanity's prospects |
| Polycrisis | Three or more | Possibly regional, continental or global | Sub-catastrophic, possibly reversible |
| Global polycrisis | Three or more | Global | Irreversible and catastrophic degradation of humanity's prospects |
Discussion
Why not 'Meta' instead of 'Poly' ?
Jonathan Rowson"
"Polycrisis refers to the world system of systems beginning to malfunction, with escalating risks due to emerging properties in the whole being significantly more dangerous than the sum of its parts; polycrisis was chosen by The Financial Times as the word to describe 2022, it has become a buzzword in Davos circles, and is growing in popularity among academics, philanthropists and journalists. Polycrisis already has some theoretical sophistication (see below) that will no doubt grow but I believe the term is ultimately insidious because it fetishizes complexity, and amounts to a kind of performative lamentation about the world spinning out of control.
The unit of analysis in polycrisis is the world system as a whole, which is a system of systems, with ‘system’ usually meaning a group of interrelated elements that act according to a discernible set of rules within a unified whole that usually has some kind of goal. Polycrisis typically refers to a situation in which at least three such systems are in a state of crisis, unable to function properly, and affecting other systems to which they are inextricably linked. This kind of effect was palpable during the pandemic when financial, health, and educational systems were so clearly intertwined, but it applies more broadly.
The term polycrisis was recently popularised by historian Adam Tooze, but it has an intellectual pedigree in the thought of Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern from their book Homeland Earth in 1999. There have been rigorous attempts to clarify the concept for a policy context by The Cascade Institute and more recent excellent overviews by the Post Carbon Institute (relatively empirical) and an elegant reflection by Ville Lahde in Aeon magazine (relatively philosophical). There have also been some early academic considerations in International Relations and Anthropology. In essence, polycrisis says there is a worsening geopolitical predicament confounded by the loss of intelligibility, particularly our inability to understand causal mechanisms at scale, and there is no credible conventional response in sight that is commensurate with the emergence of escalating risks to geopolitical stability.
Poly gives us a lot, but it does not give us Meta’s interiority or relationality, which is where all hope engendered by meaningful action at the level of civil society lies (action gives rise to hope, not vice versa). Poly might help us to stand back and see what is ‘out there’ in perspective, but that is not enough. Just standing back to see the big picture risks delusion, because it is a partial view pretending to be whole. Meta highlights that we also need to look within ourselves to psyche and soul, and also beyond, for a renewal in our worldview or cosmovision which has a direct bearing on prevailing ideologies and social imaginaries. (Paul Marshall’s work on New Axial Vision details this idea well.)"
(https://perspecteeva.substack.com/p/prefixing-the-world)
Further Critiques of Polycrisis
Jonathan Rowson:
"In addition to polycrisis and metacrisis, one can speak of hypercrisis or macrocrisis but they are very similar to polycrisis in spirit. Permacrisis, however, is a useful conceptual mediator, because it helps to show the relationship between polycrisis and metacrisis more clearly. Permacrisis frames crisis as an indefinite feature of life, but it can also thereby be thought of as the structural absence of renewal, and therefore the slow death of this epoch. Metacrisis is therefore crucial because it is both the inside of the polycrisis and the implication of the permacrisis. Polycrisis is currently almost entirely descriptive and not in any sense prescriptive, and therefore lacks any sense of what my colleague Ivo Mensch calls ‘teleogenesis’ (the inception of purpose) or simply an escape pathway, and that means it is effectively a permacrisis. I suppose you could call it a ‘polypermacrisis’, if you want to, though it risks sounding like a particularly bad haircut.
Permacrisis was the Collins Dictionary word of the year for 2022 and its main contribution is to offer a new realism, a resolute rejection of the idea of progress that is fatal to the project of modernity. (In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1987) Habermas writes: ‘The concept of modernity expresses the conviction that the future has already begun: it is the epoch that lives for the future, that opens itself up to the novelty of the future’). Permacrisis therefore also amounts to a tacit historiographical claim that this may be the end of modernity and the setting for the birth of something qualitatively new. That idea of liminal time, an interregnum, or a time between worlds framing is an invitation to the idea of meta-crisis, because the sense of being stuck, of the story of progress having played itself out, means we need to look within, between, and beyond our current conception of the problem, perhaps through a new metaphysics, maybe a new social imaginary, and certainly through new forms of praxis that help us move from stuckness to collective unfolding (and let’s hope that means more than just rioting in the streets).
Further critiques of polycrisis include the claim that it stealthily protects incumbent power. At a recent seminar about Global Governance at UCL, I heard Vinay Gupta speak out strongly against the idea because “‘polycrisis buries the bodies of systemic failure under the mantle of complexity and pretends there is nothing we can do.” And Niall Ferguson critiques the term as being ‘just history’, though he comes from a triumphalist school of thought that tends not to entertain paradigmatic problems.
The critique of polycrisis that matters most to me and to Perspectiva however, is that it is epistemically, ontologically, and axiologically limited, by which I mean it is almost entirely exterior and actual, about the measurable world we know and value ‘out there’, with a human subject held as if a constant in an equation, looking at the increasingly variable object as if they were awaiting instructions. But what if human interiority, the nature and quality of our consciousness, are the active ingredients that matter most?
There may be other histories of metacrisis, including in the BBC television drama Dr.Who (!) but I first came across the term as a critique of the ideology of liberalism in the political theology of Milbank and Pabst in their book The Politics of Virtue (2016). This version of it is summarised elegantly in a review in The New Statesman by Rowan Williams called Liberalism and Capitalism have Hollowed Out Society: “There are crises and there are meta-crises: a system may stagger from one crisis to another but never recognise the underlying mechanisms that subvert its own logic...” (This line is consonant with the Pirsig quote above).
In a recent essay, Beyond Progressivism, John Milbank puts this version of metacrisis like this: “So we continue to live in the end of history, because the dominant mode of culture and technology remains Western, albeit in a terminally decadent mode of the latter. At the same time, this seeming finality is also not just a crisis but metacrisis. Today, we are not so much subject to passing tensions, potentially resolvable, as to the ultimate emergence of tensions latent in the very foundations of the modern.”
I think we can also feel those “tensions in the very foundations of the modern” in reality-avoidant cultures that are now politically and economically empowered, school and university education systems that are not fit for the purpose of navigating an increasingly unintelligible world, and the instrumental logic of markets and the optimising logic of unthinking machines risking a complete collapse of the perception and appreciation of intrinsic value. Zak Stein and Marc Gafni have developed ‘Cosmo-erotic humanism’ as a metatheoretical response to the metacrisis along these lines, starting with what they call first principles and first values. This builds on Zak Stein’s prior philosophical work, particularly with respect to fundamental questions that we need to learn how to ask and answer relating to intelligibility, capability, legitimacy, and meaning; indeed, Zak argues forthrightly, Education is the Metacrisis. Daniel Schmachtenberger uses the idea of metacrisis slightly differently, to encourage people to get problems in as full a perspective as possible to minimise externalities caused by naive problem-solving, and properly contend with catastrophic risk by understanding underlying ‘generator functions’ like rivalrous dynamics, exponential technology, and consuming our ecological substrate. What all these approaches have in common is that unlike ‘polycrisis’, theorists of metacrisis diagnose our predicament in a way that highlights things we can and must get to work on, even if they might feel slow, oblique, or speculative.
The implication is not that we set down our political, economic, and technological tools, but it does mean that ‘a new government’ is definitely not enough, and widely touted plans for ‘a new economy’ or ‘a new politics’ will not take root without arising alongside some kind of spiritual innovation to shift perception and understanding about the nature of the self and the meaning of life, often through art broadly conceived as work of a contemplative, creative, philosophical and aesthetic in nature. That’s partly what metamodernism is about, but it is also alive in Ben Okri’s call for existential creativity, which broadly says that if we want to save the world from itself, we need to make much better art, as if our lives depended on it (because they do)."
(https://perspecteeva.substack.com/p/prefixing-the-world)