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AI Summary:
Source: “If we understand the polycrisis as a description of our specific era with its existential problems, we can agree and disagree about the details. We can debate about the possibility to ‘decouple’ economic growth from environmental impact, about the tension between ‘green growth’ and a transformative change of societies. We can argue about the potential to predict and to plan for future changes. Overall, the discussion is about this stage in history, about us and those coming after us, about the situation we have inherited.
It is a whole other game to see a polycrisis as a technical concept with which to analyse and understand more specific concatenations of events, some of them with significant environmental dimensions, others with none. This is what Ferguson was no doubt talking about in his ‘just history happening’ snub – whether we need a new concept to understand complex situations in history. Clearly, many parts of the world have seen simultaneous, intertwining and mutually reinforcing crises before – the First World War has been invoked in these debates. As Drezner notes in his Vox article, the current combination of war, pandemic and political upheaval is scarcely unique…
If one uses polycrisis as a generic research concept, applicable from national to regional and global scales and across wildly different timescales, it is indeed a valid question to ask whether it grasps anything new, or whether it adds anything substantial to the toolkit. This is a practical question, unanswerable without experience. But to claim that ‘the’ polycrisis, our current turning point in history (and one that will turn inevitably, some way or the other), is ‘just history happening’, would be missing the point. The CO2 levels in the atmosphere are higher than ever in human history, global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass, wild animals make up only around 4 per cent of mammals, and a new mass extinction is already in the works. We are in effect living on a different planet than all the previous human generations – and people around the world are increasingly inhabiting very different planets from each other. Some of them may become uninhabitable pretty soon. The definition in the Cascade Institute’s working paper puts it like this: ‘a cascading, runaway failure of Earth’s natural and social systems that irreversibly and catastrophically degrades humanity’s prospects.’ This, clearly, is a proper noun. There is nothing ‘just’ about it, in any sense of the word. [Likewise, critiques of polycrisis which posit that polycrisis has already been experienced by less privileged people who have or are currently experiencing ongoing disasters and collapses miss the uniqueness of this moment in history, and conflate a polycrisis with the polycrisis]
Any discussion that fails to take this divergence of meanings into account will be confused. We can debate fruitfully about conceptions only if we share the conceptual realm. Otherwise, we are blinded by the surface similarity of words. (Often this is intentional: jumping from one conceptual realm to the next is an old rhetoric trick – like making claims about human nature based on sweeping observations of the natural world at large.) As I stated, the viability of ‘a’ polycrisis as a research concept is an empirical question. But how about the value of ‘the’ polycrisis as the description of our historical situation?
What key features does the polycrisis, our specific historical situation, have? Some features are often noted, and they speak to the origins of the term in Morin and Kern, and in complexity studies: the increasing complexity, interrelatedness and the lack of ‘buffering’ between eco-social systems has resulted in increasing vulnerability to cascades of changes, domino effects across ecological, social, political and economic systems. Thus, several system-level crises (eg, food systems, energy systems, international politics, logistics) can meet and amplify each other. In essence, there is nothing absolutely novel here, as sudden regime shifts are part and parcel of how complex systems behave. However, the global context has altered, and ‘a global production ecosystem’ has emerged, linking the localities of the world much tighter than ever before. The results of this could be clearly seen with the COVID-19 pandemic…
More immediately, the polycrisis requires us to take seriously the coexistence of quick (pandemic, war) and slow (climate change, biodiversity decline) crises. We have to inhabit these temporalities at the same time. It is hard to exist and to act on multiple timescales at the same time, to truly recognise the multiplicity of our troubles, but this is the key challenge of the polycrisis… The ‘the’ in polycrisis is crucial, because our historical condition is truly unique. Our ability to learn from history is negligible, because such a concatenation of social, political, economic and ecological factors has never taken place. Extraction and consumption of natural resources is still on the rise, while the ecological systems that facilitate this are eroding. The old linear models of development are questioned on a deep material level. But changing the current trajectories of extraction and consumption risks degrading societal cohesion or creating new conflicts – as, for example, when old fossil-fuel powerhouses lose their dominant position or when cutting consumption exacerbates inequalities, both within and between nations.
The ‘poly’ in polycrisis is crucial, too. We are not facing merely a host of disparate problems but a radical challenge to the very network of systems that maintain the ‘metabolism’ of existing societies. Holding climate change away from the truly disastrous realm requires transformation of key systems: energy, traffic and transport, housing and heating, food, industry. This requires social coordination on an unprecedented scale – lest these changes obstruct each other by competing over the same limited resources. But these transformations must be made in a way that does not undermine other vital ecological functions. The ecological transition can succeed on the climate front and fail fatally on others. But this is not merely a technical issue: avoiding fatal conflicts and spiralling inequality requires new political coalitions. In the long run, navigating through the polycrisis benefits all, but in the short run the benefits and costs will spread unevenly. There is no avoiding politics. In the era of the polycrisis, environmental politics has to be deeply interwoven with the questions of justice, equality, security and power.”
Source: “The most prominent source of contention over polycrisis concerns the novelty, or historical uniqueness, of today’s global crises… The paper ‘Global Polycrisis: The Casual Mechanisms of Crisis Entanglement’ (pp. 9-11) argues that there are at least two unprecedented features of the present global polycrisis. First, debates about ‘peak globalization’ and ‘deglobalization’ notwithstanding, circum-global interconnectivity has reached a never-before-seen density that creates self-reinforcing feedback loops, sensitive interdependencies, and rapid contagions. Second, humanity has never before pushed the planet’s physical and ecological systems so far from equilibrium, constituting today the main driving force of change in the Earth system. Ferguson, in his book Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe, also recognizes that increasingly complex societies generate increasingly complex—and cascading—crises but he maintains nonetheless that the present situation represents nothing fundamentally new in human history.
The WEF’s 2023 Global Risk Report (p. 6) offers an apt middle-ground in the debate by proposing that: the world is facing a set of risks that feel both wholly new and eerily familiar. We have seen a return of ‘older’ risks – inflation, cost-of-living crises, trade wars, capital outflows from emerging markets, widespread social unrest, geopolitical confrontation and the spectre of nuclear warfare – which few of this generation’s business leaders and public policy-makers have experienced. These are being amplified by comparatively new developments in the global risks landscape, including unsustainable levels of debt, a new era of low growth, low global investment and de-globalization, a decline in human development after decades of progress, rapid and unconstrained development of dual-use (civilian and military) technologies, and the growing pressure of climate change impacts and ambitions in an ever shrinking window for transition to a 1.5°C world. Together, these are converging to shape a unique, uncertain and turbulent decade to come.
Even if contemporary crises are not new or unique, the term polycrisis may still have considerable value. In the post ‘The Good News Hidden Inside Today’s Polycrisis’, Zurich Insurance Group (a collaborator on the WEF’s Global Risk Reports) proposed that “the growing use of the term polycrisis is in itself encouraging. It demonstrates that, although the problems that form the current polycrisis are neither new nor surprising, our perception of them is changing. A need for a new word to label and articulate a problem implies that a new kind of solution will also be required… Polycrisis is nothing new for many countries and regions of the world. The increased concern about a global polycrisis, however, may reflect the growing inability of richer parts of the globe to insulate themselves from such disasters as extreme weather, pandemics, economic stagnation, and violent conflict—disasters that might earlier have been dismissed as problems of the ‘developing’ world rather than ‘developed’ countries… Richer segments of humanity can no longer ignore intersecting crises, nor shield themselves against the effects. In this sense polycrisis has become truly global (though persistently uneven).”
Source: “I find it profoundly useful to contemplate ‘the polycrisis’ in relation to process-relational ontology and epistemology—which is to say in terms of a singular event comprised of multiple simultaneous, interconnected and entwined events. The many events can be understood as a single event. This is roughly to say that the polycrisis is best understood as an historical event which, when seen holistically, is a singular event less than it is merely many discrete events. It is not a matter of chance or happenstance that the rather extreme and dangerous biodiversity crisis has reached an emergency level of unfolding catastrophe at the very same historical moment as the climate crisis. These two are best understood as facets of the very same historical event — an event often characterized as planetary ecological overshoot…
…the exponentially explosive expansion of AI capabilities and capacities stands as a potential disruption of human culture unlike any which the world has experienced before. Even many of the experts in AI who invented this new technology are warning us that the disruptive potential of AI is flatly dangerous, and puts us all into an entirely novel collective risk situation—, the likes of which the world has never before seen… worse still, the arrival of this AI challenge to our adaptive capacities is occurring precisely at the historical moment in which all of the other facets of the polycrisis are reaching a kind of historical crescendo or apogee. Ask any expert on psychological trauma to explain or define psychological trauma in a single word, and 94% (a guess and estimate) will ponder a moment and say… overwhelm. But what is overwhelm? Overwhelm is a condition — be it chronic or acute — in which one’s adaptive capacities are stretched to a breaking point (chronic or acute). Overwhelm — and trauma — are not merely an event occurring for individuals. Oftentimes overwhelm and trauma are collective on a vast scale of populations. World Wars one and two were in this collective sense traumatic. They overwhelmed our collective capacities to adjust and adapt. But we made our way through these collective traumas, and we all carry the weight—the burden—as survivors…
The opposite of centripetal power, of course, is centrifugal power. Centripetal power asks ‘How can I use this power to overpower, dominate, control, oppress … so that I (or ‘we’) can better exploit ‘the other’? (Others) The answer to this question in modern times has been reducible to a single word: ownership — a word synonymous with property (under the cover of ‘the private sphere’) This is the kind of power which the billionaires have. And who pays the bills for AI ‘development.’ Billionaires do—, and their corporations. Centripetal power dynamics is driven by the desire of extraction, accumulation, empire, domination, dominion, concentration, hoarding. Centrifugal power is driven by the desire to enter into relationship — which I sometimes call simply ‘community’. Centrifugal power seeks to empower others, not to exploit them, use them, treat them as an extractive resource. It treats the more-than-human (David Abram) world in much the same way. It seeks to empower life to be free, alive, flourishing, self-determining…
AI has landed in our world at the very least opportune time. Its arrival on our doorstep just now will make adapting and adjusting to the previous iterations of the polycrisis of dominion and empire all the more adaptively challenging. Odds are, it will break us, sadly. We’re not up to the task, because we’re operating within the wrong paradigm — a paradigm of politics which is centered on accumulating power, not distributing it. AI offers economic and political advantages to those who would use it to manipulate, control, exploit, dominate… and build the empire of hierarchical exploitation. It is gasoline on an already existing fire which has already overtaken our world.”