Group items tagged

It feels like being shown around a fascinating exhibit by an enthusiastic curator. Yet The Reality Bubble is essentially a warning: our blind spots, Tong contends, are responsible for the destruction of our habitat

showing why there is a balance to nature, while making clear that there is so much about other creatures we are blind to.

humans have subordinated the elements and the animal kingdom to our will and our desire for consumption, and in doing so have sown the seeds of our own demise.

the folly of the idea of human exceptionalism and how, if we are to survive as a species, we need to get very good at scale, and fast. But she doesn’t preach

From a chimpanzee with a photographic memory to beetles that navigate by means of the Milky Way, Tong’s revelatory examples inspire a sense of wonder

Tong also discusses time, space and ownership as initially useful concepts that became co-opted in the march towards efficiency and more profit. In a striking passage she writes that “the illusion of free time is the ouroboros of capitalism. Leisure has entered the marketplace so that it feeds back into the economy”.

The Reality Bubble is no knock-off but a new addition to the “human journey” genre. It is not just a book that tells a story of humanity; it is a gentle but highly effective wake-up call.

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

“Polycrisis is a way of capturing the tangled mix of challenges and changes closely interact with one another, bending, blurring and amplifying each other.”

The FT essay was a short piece - originally drafted to run to only 750 words. In that short compass I focused on three aspects

(1) Defining the concept of polycrisis in simple and intuitive terms;

(2) Stressing the diversity of causal factors implied by the term “poly”;

(3) and emphasizing the novelty of our current situation.

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.

Do we actually know what development or growth are?

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.

t we have every reason to think that we are at a dramatic threshold point, but also that our need to reach for a term as unspecific as polycrisis indicates our flailing inability to grasp our situation with the confidence and conceptual clarity that we might once have hoped for.

What Beck taught us was that risk is no longer in any simple sense “natural” but a phenomenon of second nature.

A Beckian reading of polycrisis might look a bit like the version produced by Christopher Hobson and Matthew Davies summarized

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.

(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.

(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.

We need to think “big”. Or rather we need to learn how to span the void between the very big and the very particular, the micro and the macro

What all this talk of grand social processes and movements of the mind should not obscure is the extent to which the current crisis is also a matter of identity, choice and action. As much as it is a matter of sociology, social theory and grand historical sweep, it is also a matter of psychology, both at the group and very intimate level, and of politics.

The issue of politics must however be flagged.

The polycrisis affects us at every level. And if you want to take seriously the problem of thinking in medias res you cannot bracket the matter of psychology.

The tension of the current moment is not, after all, simply the result of long-term processes of development, or environmental change. It is massively exacerbated by geopolitical tension resulting from strategic decisions taken by state elites. Some of those are elected. Some not.

What is characteristic of the current moment, and symptomatic of the polycrisis, is that the decisive actors in Russia, China and the United States, the three greatest military powers, are all defining their positions as though their very identities were on the line.

Can one really say that the Biden administration, the Chinese, Putin’s regime are crisis-fighting? Are they not escalating?

It is surely a matter of both, and in interdependence. Each of the major powers will insist that they are acting defensively (crisis-fighting in the extended sense). But what this entails, if you feel fundamental interests are at stake, is escalation, even to the point of engaging in open warfare or risking atomic confrontation.

It is like the classic Cold War but only worse, because everyone feels under truly existential pressure and has a sense of the clock ticking. If no one confidently believes that they have time on their side - and who has that luxury in the age of polycrisis? - it makes for a very dangerous situation indeed.

I found the idea of polycrisis interesting and timely because the prefix “poly” directed attention to the diversity of challenges without specifying a single dominant contradiction or source of tension or dysfunction.

In this spirit, in my FT column I’ve repeatedly harped on questions of global development as particularly glaring examples of the way in which Western governments and their publics fail to rise to the scale of contemporary global challenges.

Conversely, flights from reality, blindspots and structural hypocrisies are profoundly telling as to our actual interests and willingness to summon the will, the power and the resources to act effectively in the world we are actually in.

These questions are not contemplative. They are not posed out of idle curiosity. They are urgent and practical. They are the first step, if we want to claim to be realistically engaged with the world as it is and thus to have any hope of informed and purposive agency.

In previous one column I addressed the failure of rich countries to seize the huge opportunity of investing at scale in global public health

In a world of polycrisis, in which intersecting problems compound each other and there are few easy wins, it is all the more important to recognise those policy choices that are truly obvious. Vaccines are one such investment. Since the 1960s, global vaccination campaigns have eradicated smallpox, suppressed polio and contained measles

. Modest expenditures on public health have saved tens of millions of lives, reduced morbidity and allowed children around the world to develop into adults capable of living healthy and productive lives.  … Unfortunately, in public policy, pandemic preparedness is all too often relegated to the cash-starved budgets of development agencies or squeezed into strained health budgets.

Where such spending properly belongs is under the flag of industrial policy and national security. 

As the IMF declared: “vaccine policy is economic policy.” And pandemic preparedness belongs under national security because there is no more serious threat to a population. A far larger percentage of the UK died of Covid between 2020 and 2023 (225,000 out of 67mn) than were killed by German bombs in the second world war (70,000 out of 50mn)

The annual defence budget of just one of the larger European countries would suffice to pay for a comprehensive global pandemic preparedness programme

The money lavished on just one of the UK’s vainglorious aircraft carriers was enough to have made the world safe against both the ghastly Ebola and Marburg viruses. 

After last week’s Brics meeting in South Africa, the question hangs in the air: what does the west have to offer a new, multipolar world? Nowhere is that question more urgent than in Africa. The Niger coup extends the comprehensive rout of western strategy across the Sahel. The debacle of western military intervention, notably on the part of the French, is embarrassing. But the wave of coups also represents a failure of Europe’s effort to link economic development and security in the programme known as the Sahel Alliance

This multinational group jointly promoted by France and Germany co-ordinated aid and development projects across the region. Launched in July 2017, as of 2023 it counts more than 1,100 projects with a cumulative funding commitment of €22.97bn. For Niger, project commitments under the Sahel Alliance come to over €5.8bn. And this is only a part of the financial assistance that Niger was receiving in the years prior to the coup.

According to OECD data, the combined total of official development assistance for Niger in 2021 came to $1.78bn. These numbers sound impressive until you place them in relation to the scale of the Sahel’s development needs. The western Sahel is home to 100mn of some of the poorest people on Earth. Niger’s population of 25mn has the third-lowest human development index in the world and the highest birth rate. Long hailed as the western bastion in the region, almost two-thirds of the population cannot read. Niger desperately needs investment in education, irrigation and basic health services. To meet these priorities, on a per capita basis foreign aid in 2021 came to just $71 for every inhabitant of Niger, or $1.37 per week. Of this miserly total, roughly 7 cents were spent on education, 15 cents on health, and 30 cents on production and infrastructure. Twenty-six cents were devoted to the basics of keeping alive.

Last month I took up the issue of the prevailing fatalism in the USA when it comes to the question of development in Central America

The attack line from the Republicans is predictable: Kamala Harris was Biden’s border tsar. The crisis on the border with Mexico shows that she failed. So too is the response from the Democrats: No, the vice-president never was in charge of the border. Her role was to address the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. No one can blame her for failing. It was mission impossible

The striking thing about this retort is not that it is unreasonable, but that it sets such a low bar. Whereas for the Republicans the desperation in Central America is reason to seal the border even more firmly, for the Democrats the deep-seated nature of those problems is an excuse. Apparently, no one expects Harris or anyone else to succeed in addressing the poverty and insecurity in the region. Shrugging its shoulders, the US settles down to live with polycrisis on its doorstep.

I returned to the question of the scale of global aid and European aid in particular for the African continent.

Uncontentious estimates of global development need put the sum of investment required to achieve comprehensive sustainable develoment at between $ 3 and 4 trillion per annum. That is an immense amount, but given the rewards on offer and the fact that global GDP stands at $105 trillion it cannot be dismissed out of hand as “utopian”.

FDI and private lending will do some of the work. But it is highly volatile and not willing to take the risks necessary for comprehensive development. So support and derisking, on carefully managed terms, must come from public balance sheets. Some will come from multilateral development banks like the World Bank. But a substantial amount will depend on concessional loans and aid in the form of grants. The crucial question is, how much is being made available? How far does it reflect the needs of the moment?

According to the OECD, the volume of official development assistance (ODA) in 2023 was 224 billion, a new high. Of that amount only $36 billion went to Africa, the continent with the most dramatic development needs.

So, what might these figures look like, if the West was actually invested in changing the trajectory of Africa’s development through material assistance? To this question, too the OECD data provide an answer.

The upshot is startling: In 2023 money flows to Ukraine classified by the OECD as official development assistance (ODA) exceeded the equivalent flows to the entire African continent.

At this moment, millions in Sudan are at risk of outright famine. The UN’s funding appeal for Sudan famine relief is for $2.6 billion, less than the monthly rate of support for Ukraine in 2023. So far it has raised $1 billion.

This is a stark measure of the difference between a crisis in which the Western donors see their interests directly and urgently engaged and one to which they are relatively indifferent.

It is the difference between a crisis happening to “people just like us”, people who have been welcomed in their millions into their neighboring European countries, and a crisis happening in Africa to black people with whom the donor populations feel on the whole only an abstract form of sympathy and identification.

It is the difference between crises happening on either side of the global colour line.

These discrepancies reveal the extraordinary extent to which, for all the common place talk of globalization, racial hierarchies and geographical division continue to undergird our political discourse and policy.

They are a sad commentary on where we are at and what time we are in. They also force the question of whether and by what means this line will be maintained and at what cost.