It's a metacrisis. Which is to say, it’s beyond complex.
Chapter 9 is a hectic explainer. But prepare for some cognitive relief.
This mad Book Serialisation project we’re doing together rolls on. You can catch up on the previous 8 chapters here. Today I try to explain the metacrisis (or polycrisis) school of thought, which in turn tries to explain what the hell is going on. This book will continue to pulse between dense theory (that can provide the clarity we seek) and spiritual, or philosophical, perspectives (that we require to sit in the truth of it all).
Because this chapter is quite hard-going, I’ve bolded some key lines and ideas that it would be a shame for you to miss.
You’re new here? You can start at the beginning and navigate around using this Table of Contents if you like. The audio version is at the bottom, available only to subscribers. Ditto the conversation in the comments section where we workshop things together in real time.
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METACRISIS
I did think, let’s go about this slowly.
This is important. This should take
some really deep thought. We should take
small thoughtful steps.
But, bless us, we didn’t.
- Mary Oliver
*
I watch my four-year-old niece make a mess. Four-year-olds are truly impressive at making a mess – of their bedroom, a bathroom, a plate of food.
She’s pulled apart her bed, she’s tipped every craft box and pencil case onto the floor. There’s the rejected outfits from this morning; over there her wet socks, several balls of wool, her childcare lunchbox and a crushed playdough craft project. Her brother’s Lego bag has been up-tipped. My niece hops and prances among it all. It’s a creative, intuitive implosion, unhindered by any awareness of repercussions.
But as with any four-year-old, when time is called on the fun, she is wholly incapable of tidying and ordering it back together again.
Her brain can’t begin to sort the dried macaroni that’s fallen off the craft project, the painted pine cones, the socks, all the disparate things. Her dad stares at her, she stares at the room. Now what?
Humanity is my four-year-old niece.
*
Our intuitive, visceral drive to create and to expand our understanding of existence (the truest proof of our belonging to this glorious, omnipotent universe) has seen our civilisation make more and more complex… messes. Complex systems invariably get messy, per the second law of thermodynamics. The complexity sees everything speed up and, as it does, it becomes harder to tidy up in time for the next messy onslaught. Which then feeds a further messing up of all the existing messes.
For hundreds of thousands of years we managed to keep our expansive, often life-bettering, mess-making within a realm that was tidy-up-able. We moved at a pace that worked with nature’s rhythms and that enabled corrections along the way. Leaders, experts and elders could chime in and warn that things were getting out of hand, that we shouldn’t push the powerful laws of physics or the wisdoms of the seasons too far, and we’d course-correct as required. Restrictions on TV licencing laws were called for; we had town square meetings to develop agreements on the use of the commons. This kind of dignified thing.
But over time things got (exponentially) faster, didn’t they. And we expanded beyond limits. And it suddenly became impossible to heed the wise, thoughtful warnings.
We waded too far into the shark’s mouth.
Bless us.
*
It’s like the time my Dad took my Rubix cube and twisted it up to a point where only removing all the stickers and starting afresh would fix things (which of course it didn’t; the stickers buckled and the cheating cringe never lifted.)
*
The Collins Dictionary’s word of the year for 2022 was “permacrisis”. It describes a simultaneous series of dramatic and “unprecedented” world events that leads to a permanent or “extended period of instability and insecurity”. A few months later The Financial Times declared “polycrisis” their word of the year just as The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report warned we were toppling into one. The WEF report defined polycrisis as:
"A cluster of related global risks with compounding [my itals] effects, such as the overall impact exceeds the sum of each part."
An example might be the melting permafrost in the Arctic…which releases greenhouse gases… which heats the atmosphere… which melts more of the Arctic…which ratchets up fires in the Amazon (such that it now emits more carbon dioxide than it absorbs)… which then heats the atmosphere even more. Along the way the AMOC (the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation) system is deranged, food and water systems get looped in, ditto insect colony systems, trade systems, human hormonal systems …and down, down, down it all goes at a speed, and with a complexity and impact, greater than everything that led to it.
*
Others are calling “all this” a metacrisis. You might have heard the term bandied about.
Metacrisis thinking acknowledges that in addition to there being a stack of crises all happening at once, feedbacking and intensifying everything into a polycrisis, there’s also the overlaying crisis of our inability to fathom said polycrisis. This in turn creates the crisis of our not being able to discuss it sanely. Nor to have a chance in hell of resolving them. Here I point your attention to the misinformation, fragmentation, polarisation, bifurcation that abounds.
Plus, (wait there’s more!) there’s also an underlying crisis, which is loosely the original, collective mindset that allowed the whole clusterfuck1 to come about. Here I steer you to the growth imperative, individualism, extractivism, materialist disconnect from nature and linear thinking that has defined our civilisation from the outset.
*
Meta? Yeah, cos the problem is so thoroughly self-referential. We’re in it. And our in-it-ness is adding to the problem.
OK, so there’s a hobbit-y little world out there, operating in the dark corners of the IDW2 and the nepotistic bro-caster sub-universe, where the metacrisis is dissected and analysed ad nauseum. It even has a name - metamodernism. This realm coughs up interesting theories from time to time that I have found super helpful for framing this clusterfuck further. I think many of the questions some of you asked throughout this Book Serialisation process are answered by some of these metamodernist thinkers. Indeed, I share an interview I did with metamodernist and chess Grandmaster Jonathan Rowson as part of the Collapse Series running on Wild that does this: