How to make sense of a world crisis
Everything seems to be going wrong in the world all at once. It is not just a crisis. It is a polycrisis. So said Adam Tooze a couple of years ago. For a long time, I would introduce my podcast show by repeating Xi Jinping’s remark:
“The world is in a crisis it has not seen for 100 years.”
—Xi Jinping 2023
There is a widespread feeling of crisis in the world right now: wars, pandemic after-effects, economic shocks, rise and fall of great powers, political disorder, and upheavals in ideas. But what does world crisis really mean? What are the elements of this crisis?
And how has my thinking on this world crisis changed? It certainly has since I began The Burning Archive in 2015? Amid this polycrisis, how do we—largely powerless writers and readers—act virtuously, within our circles of control, informed by the wisdom of literature and history?
In this post I share with you an edited and updated version of my paid-subscriber only post on the world crisis. Many of you have joined me since I wrote this article. While I am on a short holiday, this post can help you live in tune with the mode of a changing world. I have edited the article into three shorter articles and added voiceover.
I begin by asking what we mean by this term, ‘crisis’. I will share some fragments from my writings over the last dozen years that have explored the idea of world crisis. They offer some starting points for thinking through, and ordering this overwhelming problem of the world crisis.
Notes Toward a Definition of Crisis
I have not undertaken exhaustive research on how this term may be defined. I know enough of the warp and weave of its rich history. It has strands of theological concepts of the Last Judgement imported into secular, political history. Utopian thinkers conceived the unrealistic on the threshold of politics and governing with their use of the term. It has commonly been a weapon to subvert institutions which authors felt disconnected from.
Within Marxist, radical and progressive viewpoints, crisis represents the parting of the waves of history, and the opportunity for revolution. This kind of thinking can take hold of our minds. Crisis makes us think that the second coming is at hand. That apocalypse, meaning revelation, is now. But comically, less intensely, history keeps going on, calling that event going, and that mishap on.
My working definition, from several years ago, of crisis is the situation of a complex system that is functioning poorly. The reasons for dysfunction may not be known by the agents within the system. But the poor functioning creates high levels of uncertainty among those agents, and threatens their accomplishment of high priority goals. In reaction, the agents press the system for immediate decisions to prevent further disintegration or downfall. Crises are often total, involving all social systems.
This definition was used in writing on a crisis of the political party system in Australia between 2010 and 2020. This crisis infected, but did not subvert, the whole political system. At the time, I thought one of the major political parties in Australia would collapse, as major parties had done in France, Italy, and other countries. But the institutions kept going on. It was a lesson in the fallacy of crisis thinking. Our minds seek a pattern, a release of the tension of social conflicts, and a narrative form. But real history does not follow a story arc. Its chaotic course does not bend to our historical narrative minds.
Crisis, however, remains a useful term to designate events, processes or changes that seem out of the ordinary. In the world crisis we sense around us today, there is a common intuition that big changes are taking place or at least major decisions could be made that affect the identity of institutions, nations, civilizations, the whole world, or even the planet. I may have been right that there was a crisis of the political party system in Australia, in the sense that agents were confronted with decisions that were make or break about their goals, purpose and identity. But I was wrong about the outcomes of the crisis. They muddled through, and, in the end, no major changes, no revelation occurred. This crisis, this world polycrisis, however, seems different.
Perhaps that difference is essential to defining a crisis. Events have escaped the control of decision-makers. The falcon cannot hear the falconer, as Yeats wrote in The Second Coming.’ A crisis is a period when the ‘system’ does not function as planned or as intended by the agents of the system. America no longer sets the goals of the international rules based order. The economy is in tatters. The citizens do not heed their masters. The students denounce their teachers. Events, dear boy, events.
Moreover, this crisis seems a world crisis because those changes or decisions or loss of control are occurring in multiple fields, systems and regions. The term used widely over the last year to describe this aspect of the world crisis is “polycrisis.”
Adam Tooze and Polycrisis
“If you've been feeling confused and as though everything is impacting on you all at the same time, this is not a personal, private experience. This is actually a collective experience.”
—Adam Tooze, historian
Adam Tooze is one of the most interesting historians today. He is deeply engaged with the real world problems of economics, finance and environment. He is an influential commentator, including in Germany where he grew up. He has popularised the term “polycrisis” as a way to make sense of this world. He has even spoken to the World Economic Forum, that club of wannabe system controllers, about the topic. That is where the above quotation comes from.
I am no fan of the annual Davos club, but I do not begrudge or denigrate Adam Tooze for speaking there. His histories of the financial crises of the world since 1914 are the best there are. His commentary on events is always interesting, and sometimes unpredictable. He is genuinely reflective on the limits and mistakes of his past thinking. He also views ‘polycrisis’ as a way of coming to terms with mindful history, with the personal psychological challenges of all these wild changes. Some of his writing on polycrisis is behind paywalls at the Financial Times so I will need to find my way through them. But the key elements can be drawn from his open writing.
Tooze traces the idea of polycrisis to the French thinker, Edgar Morin, who articulated the concept against a background of systems theory in the 1970s. The 1970s is also important to Tooze since he sees this period as essentially the era in which the current configuration of major world systems was established, including the abandonment of the gold standard by the USA in 1971, the spread of globalization, the undermining of the communist world, and awareness of the blowback of modernity on the environment.
So the essential feature of a polycrisis is that there are distinct changes in multiple systems that challenge decision-makers and the understanding by experts of how the world works. He commented at the World Economic Forum,
The key things for me are economics, politics, geopolitics, and then the natural environment blowing back at us. And those four things, they don't reduce to a single common denominator. They don't reduce to a single factor. The polycrisis term has a real utility descriptively, because it's arm-waving. It's going, ‘Look, there's a lot of stuff happening here all at once’. And that precisely is what we're trying to wrap our minds around.
Interestingly, Tooze also defines a feature of polycrisis as the breakdown of expert consensus about social reality, so that decision-makers no longer have a functional concept with which to control the events of the world. In one of his substack pieces, Thinking on a Tightrope, he wrote,
There are two aspects to the novelty that I stress in the FT piece, one is our inability to understand our current situation as the result of a single, specific causal factor and secondly the extraordinary scale and breadth of global development, especially in the last 50 years, that makes it seem probable, according to the cognitive schemata and models that we do have at our disposal, that we are about to crash through critical tipping points.
So I might summarise, or adapt, Tooze’s idea of the polycrisis as a situation where:
in multiple fields of ‘systems’ there are big changes
these changes provoke big ‘systemic’ or even catastrophic risks
the changed systems interact with each other in unpredicted ways
the decision-makers in the systems and in governments, which are responsible for coordinating responses to social conflict, have lost control of these systems
there is a dysfunctional mismatch between the mental models of these decision-makers and social reality
the responses to the crisis have grave consequences for the identity or future of the society, and
the decision-makers need to adapt their mental models quickly or under extreme stress.
I think there are some useful dimensions to Tooze’s thinking about the polycrisis. It has limitations too. After all, things change in multiple systems all the time, and decision-makers deceive themselves with their mental models all the time. What is different about a crisis? I find his thinking skewed towards the investor and major government decision-maker, but that is the world in which he moves largely.
But he also does relate the idea of polycrisis to how we all should live mindfully through these troubled times. In March 2023, he said the concept can help us all because it offers,
basically a kind of message of relief in a sense. If you've been having a hard time reducing all of this to a common denominator, then join the club. If your ability to insulate your house, because you want to pursue an agenda of climate neutrality, is being foiled by the fact that all of the raw materials cost too much because supply chains are screwed up, that is the reality that we currently face.
The purpose, the idea of the concept is simply to open up the threads through which you can begin to see the connections. If you just read a newspaper or watch the news, you are presented with this collage that begins to just look incoherent and crazy to the point where you begin to wonder whether you will actually be able to trust your own senses.
What the polycrisis concept says is, ‘Relax, this is actually the condition of our current moment’. I think that's useful, giving the sense a name. It's therapeutic. ‘Here is your fear, here is something that fundamentally distresses you. This is what it might be called’.
I will take the term, ‘polycrisis’, in that generous sense in my articles on the world crisis, but also extend it from Tooze’s focus on geopolitics and economics to include the social and cultural crises that also affect our sense of this particular world crisis.
Next time we will look at my theses on the current polycrisis of the world.