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."

(https://cascadeinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/What-is-a-global-polycrisis-version-1.1-27April2022.pdf)

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)

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 )

Distinctions between systemic risk, global catastrophic risk, polycrisis, and global polycrisis

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)

More Information

• Adam Tooze
• Crisis