Polycrisis

Polycrisis is one of many names for our current condition, recently popularized foremost by Adam Tooze. A short history of the concept would start with french complexity theorist Edgar Morin (Homeland Earth):

one is at a loss to single out a number one problem to which all others would be subordinated. There is no single vital problem, but many vital problems, and it is this complex intersolidarity of problems, antagonisms, crises, uncontrolled processes, and the general crisis of the planet that constitutes the number one vital problem (Morin & Kern 1999)

So, we have a) a multiplicity of crises and b) they interact, c) thus forming one big general crisis: the polycrisis that is irreducible to just one crisis. The interaction between these crises is the important factor, not just their pure number. [[ Emergence ]] is a keyword.

A new age of Polycrisis

A first critical reflex leads us to ask how unprecedented this situation of Polycrisis really is. What value is there in declaring our age as the age of polycrisis?

Think back to 2008-2009. Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia. John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate. The banks were toppling. The Doha World Trade Organization round came to grief, as did the climate talks in Copenhagen the following year. And, to top it all, swine flu was on the loose. (Tooze 2022)

So, is all this talk about a new age of polycrisis just symptomatic for our lack of a robust collective memory? Tooze warns of complacency and highlights a central novelty of our situation:

In the 1970s, whether you were a Eurocommunist, an ecologist or an angst-ridden conservative, you could still attribute your worries to a single cause — late capitalism, too much or too little economic growth, or an excess of entitlement. A single cause also meant that one could imagine a sweeping solution, be it social revolution or neoliberalism. What makes the crises of the past 15 years so disorientating is that it no longer seems plausible to point to a single cause and, by implication, a single fix. Whereas in the 1980s you might still have believed that “the market” would efficiently steer the economy, deliver growth, defuse contentious political issues and win the cold war, who would make the same claim today? It turns out that democracy is fragile. Sustainable development will require contentious industrial policy. And the new cold war between Beijing and Washington is only just getting going. (Tooze 2022)

So what Tooze is arguing here, is that in the past we didn’t really have any real polycrises so to speak, just some form of multicrisis, a multiplicity of crises that could still be attributed to a singular cause. The second critical reflex here would be to ask if this actually the case. Is it really the case that all these crises can’t be attributed to one single source, e.g. capitalism, or is it simply the case that such a grand narrative would no longer be believable? In other words, has there really been some kind of “ontological” change, which legitimizes talk of an age of polycrisis, or is this simply a question of (postmodern) culture? Unfortunately at least this article of his doesn’t really address this question.

Sources

  • Morin, E. & Kern, A. B. (1999). Homeland Earth
  • Tooze, A. (2022). Welcome to the World of the Polycrisis

Backlinks