Glimpses of the Multipolar World, 3 June 2023
Erdogan. Polycrisis. Reinhart Koselleck. Virginia Woolf. How to look at a bureaucrat. Ferenc Hörcher. Hrvoje Morić, Indo-Pacific, St. Petersburg.
Each week in my newsletter, I offer seven glimpses for seven days of the multipolar world. This week, I share glimpses of:
The Big Story. Erdogan will pivot Türkiye to Eurasia.
Governing the Multipolar World. Polycrisis or World Crisis?
Using History Mindfully. Reinhart Koselleck and Crisis
Fragments of the Burning Archive. Virginia Woolf and Human Character, 1910.
What surprised me most. Koselleck’s Way of Looking at a Bureaucrat
Reading and Listening. Ferenc Hörcher. Cultural Debris. Roger Scruton.
Gratitudes and Works-in-Progress. Hrvoje Morić, Indo-Pacific, St. Petersburg.
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Don’t forget my 100th podcast reader/listener “competition” or participation exercise. Just a reminder I am inviting you until 30 June 2023 to share with me your responses to two optional questions:
What is your favourite episode on the Burning Archive podcast backlist, and why?
What is a ‘fragment of the Burning Archive’ (a cultural or historical artefact meaningful to you and the times) that you would like featured on the podcast?
You can submit your ideas in response to the Substack chat thread or can leave a comment right here
1. The Big Story
The big story was the victory of Erdogan in the Presidential election in Türkiye. Western powers went full tilt to remove Erdogan, and install a regime at the entrance to the Black Sea that is more hostile to Russia. The Economist, now worthless rag except as an indicator of the new ‘Washington Consensus’, even published a demonising cover story, ‘Erdogan Must Go’, and engaged in much wishful thinking of all the benefits for the Anglo-American world if its wish came true.
But Erdogan won. His party is more entrenched. An alternative leader has emerged, trained and expert in Russia, and his Foreign Minister has already signalled Türkiye has had enough of American meddling in its affairs. The Euro-Atlanticists have overplayed their expensive, but weak hand, again. Türkiye will pivot to Eurasia, although with some subtlety in the deals.
Josep Borrell, the European Union’s Foreign Minister, notoriously declared that Europe is a garden, and the rest of the world is a jungle. Westworld is about to discover that the Ottoman world taught Europe much about gardening, culture and diplomacy. Westworld will be forced to recognise, again, that the domains of the Eastern Roman Empire spawned many civilizations as fertile as Carolingian Europe.
2. Governing the unruly multipolar world
In the podcast this week I focus on the concepts of crisis and polycrisis. I have said that the world is in a crisis it has not seen for 100 years. This claim is dramatic, but can be questioned. It is grounded in the remarks that Xi Jinping made to Vladimir Putin in Moscow this year. But is it true?
On the podcast, I question what is true about the claim, what is false, and how the current world crisis compares to World War One. Some comparisons to World War One emerged when I read key books on World War One, including Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers, Dominic Lieven, Towards the Flame, Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished, and Adam Tooze, The Deluge. I have reported snippets of this reading on the substack and on a livestream and two edited videos (overview and Clark) on my YouTube channel. The comparison does bring out aspects of our current situation, but also highlights the unique contemporary path.
In preparing the podcast, I explored this currently fashionable idea of polycrisis. In brief, it means big changes in many systems, all disturbing and interacting with each other. In a way, the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once is the emblematic artwork of the polycrisis. The concept has been promoted by the economic historian, Adam Tooze, including at the World Economic Forum and in a series of articles on his blog, substack and podcast - a thinker after my own heart, in more ways than one.
The most interesting aspect of Tooze’s use of the idea of polycrisis is not that many big things are happening all together. That is pretty standard, messy human history, really. The more interesting part is how he identifies a mismatch between decision-makers’ (and we all make decisions, don’t we?) mental model of social reality, and the facts of social reality, as revealed by the events of the polycrisis.
For example, we want our modern industrial economy to chug along, but the environmental crisis reveals we cannot do so without risking catastrophe. But there are no easy solutions without changing our ways of life, our mental models. Or, governments want to come to the rescue of their populations during a pandemic, if for no other reason than it will gain them votes. But when political leaders ask their public health officials, ‘what do we do to rescue the voters?’, those officials are caught in a mental model, the discipline of public health, that prefers universal, controlling solutions, and is ill-fitted to the new circumstances of this new virus and this new globally networked world. So the political leaders act boldly to save the voters, but in the process deprive those voters of basic human rights. Either way, the virus wins, and the mental models break.
In Adam Tooze’s more fertile thinking on polycrisis, it is therefore not only the number and magnitude of the crises that matters. It is the impact of the crisis on social learning and social coordination through systems of politics. You cannot manage the polycrisis if your mental model of events does not match reality. To survive the polycrisis we must shed our grand illusions. But enduring this shock exacts a toll. You discover that you are wrong about how you have understood the world for years or even decades. But facing facts is hard. It brings pain and suffering. Many people cannot do it. Many ordinary people make flights of fancy. Many elites escape into delusions of control. But a few people from both camps recognise the eternal dilemma. “Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind/ cannot bear very much reality.” (T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, Burnt Norton)
In this way, Tooze’s idea of the polycrisis takes us away from fashionable managerial gibberish towards a difficult truth about our real ability to control events, to shape society, and to force reality into the phantasms of our minds. As he wrote in “Polycrisis, Thinking on the Tightrope”,
As Bruno Latour forced us to recognize, it is not at all obvious that we do understand our own situation. In fact, as he convincingly argued in We Have Never Been Modern, modernity’s account of itself is built around blindspots specifically with regard to the hybrid mobilization of material resources and actors and the working of science itself, which define the grand developmental narrative.
It is for this reason that Tooze says it can be therapeutic to recognise the polycrisis, and the mismatch between reality and idea, between history and the stories we tell about the past. Tooze is one of the most interesting commentators on governing the unruly multipolar world today.
I have begun a series of articles on the polycrisis or world crisis. If all goes well, they will be a book in the making. These fortnightly articles are for paid subscribers only. You can join my private history seminar! All you need to do is upgrade your subscription.
3. Using history to live mindfully in the present.
Tooze also says that the polycrisis besieges our mental health. So many changes, so many terrible things. The polycrisis can easily drive any of us mad. How can we cope?
Well, nothing is but thinking makes it so. So we can use history to live mindfully in our present polycrisis.
In his substack piece, Tooze gracefully recognises one distinguished historian of ideas, Reinhart Koselleck, who can help us do that.
polycrisis indicates our flailing inability to grasp our situation with the confidence and conceptual clarity that we might once have hoped for. Implicitly, I am referencing a short-hand history of social philosophy and social theory that goes back to what Reinhart Koselleck called the “Sattelzeit” of the turn of the 18th to the 19th centuries, which saw the emergence of modern historical consciousness in the West. The arc of that intellectual history defined political, historical, economic and social thinking at least down to the mid 20th century.
Koselleck (1923-2006) is an intellectual historian’s historian. He stood outside schools, and spanned fields. He was an original and profound thinker who wrote a book, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society that reflected profoundly on the meaning of ‘crisis’ and the capacity of people with different types of social experience to conduct politics, or, I would say, governing. Although I have only skimmed the book so far, there is one particular argument he made that resonates with my own reflections on governing in my forthcoming 13 Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat. Koselleck argued that politics is better understood from the point of view of public servants and political leaders who actually work inside governing institutions. Their social experience forces them, everyday, to do the dance with strangers, in which mental models entwine and adapt to social reality, that is required to coordinate and respond to real, dynamic social problems. It is an experience that academics, journalists, outsider social critics often do not have. It gives at best practical wisdom. Yet bureaucrats do not write essays that give an account of this experience, and share this wisdom… or, at least, not till now.
You may need to go to a good research library to read Koselleck. But you can also read at JSTOR (free if you register and read online) his essay, “Crisis”. This essay masterfully presents the intellectual history of the idea of crisis in the European tradition. If you read it, you will never use the word ‘crisis’ unmindfully again. There he wrote,
“The concept of crisis, which once had the power to pose unavoidable, harsh and non-negotiable alternatives, has been transformed to fit the uncertainties of whatever might be favoured at a given moment? Such a tendency towards imprecision and vagueness, however, may itself be viewed as the symptom of a historical crisis that cannot as yet be fully guaged."
4. Fragments from the Burning Archive
The fragment from the Burning Archive I shared on the podcast this week was Virginia Woolf’s essay, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”. This essay was originally published as 'Character in Fiction' in the July 1924 issue of The Criterion, a journal edited by T S Eliot. It was later published as a series of the first Hogarth Essays series, which ran from 1924 to 1926. A kind of early substack!
Towards the start of the essay, Woolf wrote about the arrival of modernism, and made the famous observation:
‘On or about December 1910 human character changed’.
She referred to an influential exhibition of Manet and the Post-Impressionists, organised by Roger Fry, a critic and impresario who was part of Woolf’s Bloomsbury Group. And she almost prefigured Adam Tooze, noting how changes in the domain of art and human relations affect other fields. This is what she meant by the change in human character. She explained
'All human relations have shifted – those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature'.
For Woolf modernism in culture heralded modernity in society. Do listen to my reflections on this fragement and its connection to today’s World Crisis on this week’s podcast. You can see the first imprint publication of Woolf’s essay at the British Library here or read a pdf version here.
5. What surprised me most this week.
What surprised me most this week was that little discovery in Reinhart Kosseleck, Critique and Crisis about how real experience in governing can offer greater insight into social or political problems, than a thousand think tank seminars. This surprise revealed the joy of curiosity and discovery in the infinite conversation. Kosseleck’s books are going on my reading list!
6. What I am reading or listening to
I listened to a terrific podcast featuring the Hungarian political/cultural philosopher, Ferenc Hörcher on the Cultural Debris. He discussed the work of Roger Scruton that I have learned from for years. Ferenc Hörcher is a professor of political science and philosophy at the University of Public Service in Budapest. He wrote Art and Politics in Roger Scruton’s Conservative Philosophy. He also reflected in the podcast on how ideas emerge from, are bounded by, and freed by social experience. It is well worth listening to, and also reading Ferenc’s books and tweets. They convey a love of learning, practical wisdom and of life. Ferenc was good enough to follow me on Twitter recently. You should follow him, and even me too.
7. Works-in-progress and gratitudes
This week my works-in-progress and published content were:
on the podcast I published Episode 103 Crisis, Polycrisis or Just Another Day in the Office?
On the YouTube Channel I did my Livestream on India, and produced a 25 minte video from that livestream in which I presented my 10 point plan for Australia to pivot its foreign policy to Delhi.
I wrote a short opinion piece on the Indo-Pacific, which I see as a misleading concept for foreign policy. I will let you know if and when it gets published.
I wrote a short a opinion piece on the decision by the local council of Melbourne to sever its ‘sister relationship’ with St. Petersburg. I sent this piece in speculatively to The Age, but they have not published it. So I posted it to theburningarchive.com on 2 June evening. Please enjoy and share.
I finished the proof of 13 Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat. Over next month I will add a few small sections, do the final interior and external design, and hopefully have the book for sale in July.
On Twitter, I posted on Kosseleck and the concept of polycrisis, the current debate in Australia on the misuse of consultants, some Pushkin banter with the RWA team, and how Stephen Walt could improve his understanding of the history of empires with After Tamerlane
And of course I did my first ever live radio interview with Hrvoje Morić. You can listen here. I appear from about the 20 minute mark.
In all of this, I am especially grateful to Hrvoje Morić for inviting me on the show and sharing my work with a wider audience.
Next week…
I am drafting my next paid-subscriber-only post on Theses on the Crisis of the World.
On Tuesday on Youtube, I will do my next Livestream (6 June 9.30 pm AEST) on the World Crisis, Polycrisis or Just Another Day at the Office, building on my latest podcast. I will share what I am reading and writing on this topic, and will respond to viewer questions, comments, and responses to this week’s podcast. I am experimenting with times on this livestream for now.
On Friday on the podcast, I will talk about the Indo-Pacific.
I will be getting my online course on mindful history ready for launch, and my book 13 Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat ready for publication.
And of course I will respond to any comments and questions you may have.
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my book of essays From the Burning Archive: Essays and Fragments 2015-2021.
my collected poems, Gathering Flowers of the Mind.
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