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 my substack, jeffrich.substack.com 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. I’d love to share these insights with you.
Thanks for reading
Image: Adam Tooze, contemplating the polycrisis