Chartbook #165: Polycrisis - thinking on the tightrope. - 0 views
shared by Javier E on 30 Oct 22
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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
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“Polycrisis is a way of capturing the tangled mix of challenges and changes closely interact with one another, bending, blurring and amplifying each other.”
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The FT essay was a short piece - originally drafted to run to only 750 words. In that short compass I focused on three aspects
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(1) Defining the concept of polycrisis in simple and intuitive terms;
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(2) Stressing the diversity of causal factors implied by the term “poly”;
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(3) and emphasizing the novelty of our current situation.
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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.
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Do we actually know what development or growth are?
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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.
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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.
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What Beck taught us was that risk is no longer in any simple sense “natural” but a phenomenon of second nature.
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A Beckian reading of polycrisis might look a bit like the version produced by Christopher Hobson and Matthew Davies summarized
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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.
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(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.
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(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.
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(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.
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(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).
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(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.
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(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.
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(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.
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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
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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.
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The issue of politics must however be flagged.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Can one really say that the Biden administration, the Chinese, Putin’s regime are crisis-fighting? Are they not escalating?
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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.
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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.
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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.
