I’ve been meaning for a while to discuss Jonathan Rowson’s article on whether the ‘polycrisis’ is better understood as a ‘metacrisis’, but it’s very long and also a little technical in parts, so I’ve had to think about the best way to summarise it.
Polycrisis vs metacrisis may seem like a distinction without a difference, but Rowson persuaded me that the different words have a different impact on our sense of agency in the face of crisis. ‘Metacrisis’, he argues, is more likely to give us the scope to act.
Since I had pretty much exactly that discussion in a podcast recording I made last November, about how we found the space to continue to act in the face of worsening drivers of change all around us, it seems a good moment to review it.
So first, Rowson recognises early on that everyone might not be convinced that there is a difference here:
These prefixes that seek to qualify what kind of crisis we are in are not inert, they are psychoactive and influence our sense of possibility. It matters that we get it right.
Really?
Does it really matter?
Yes, I really think so.
But he starts with the notion of ‘crisis’. He quotes the German historian Reinhard Kosselleck (new to me) who argued that ‘crisis’ and its relationship to the idea of ‘critique’ was central to the notion of modernity.1 Building on this, Rowson says:
Our world has been created through perpetual crisis construction and crisis management, and the over-use of crisis by the powerful has been critiqued as a method of control for precisely that reason. The term applies at all scales, however, and still feels indispensable.
That link in the passage above goes to a review of a book by Janet Roitman called Anti-crisis which spells out this point about crisis as control, and is worth expanding on a bit:
In particular, she notes that when politicians, academics and scientists frame a certain situation in crisis terminology, the political debate immediately becomes more charged; indeed, simply invoking the term crisis enables some political and intellectual possibilities, while foreclosing others.
But back to Rowson again. In a long and slightly breathless sentence, which I’m quoting in full because it is impossible to break it up, he characterises some of the features of the current world and suggests that it is not surprising that talk of ‘crisis’ abounds:
We are living in a phase of an apparent shift in geological time ( Holocene to Anthropocene, Capitalocene, or Novocene ), a transformed information system that fosters addiction and division by design (the internet-enabled and algorithmically-driven smartphone especially), literally life-changing (or denaturing) technologies like gene editing and synthetic biology, and lifeworld-changing technologies like deep fakes and virtual reality, AI as a kind of enigmatic and accelerating threat multiplier, climate collapse as the nexus of systemic risk to food and water supply, and the resulting fallout in terms of bio-precarity and security risks, as well as socially corrosive levels of inequality, the palpable fragility of national economies and the absence of a competent political class. (Emphasis in original)
All of this creates a sense of of stuckness (I’m simplifying quite a complex part of the argument here, for reasons of space):
The essence of our predicament is that this relationship is now dysfunctional because we don’t quite know what crisis is asking of us, and because the world is not now changing as it needs to – mind and society are not moving with the spirit of the times.
This is why the prefix matters. In Rowson’s mind, one helps us start to get unstuck, and one doesn’t. ‘Meta’ is the helpful label here:
(I)t draws attention to interiority (meta as within) and relationality (meta as between) as spiritual features of what is typically assumed to be a political challenge, while also highlighting that a fixation with crisis may preclude other and better ways of being in the world (meta as beyond).
I’ll come back to this in a moment, and there’s a longer and more formal definition in the piece, but it’s worth pausing to spell out how Rowson charaterises the polycrisis in contrast to the metacrisis:
Polycrisis refers to the world system of systems beginning to malfunction, with escalating risks due to emerging properties in the whole being significantly more dangerous than the sum of its parts;… I believe the term is ultimately insidious because it fetishizes complexity, and amounts to a kind of performative lamentation about the world spinning out of control.
Although polycrisis was chosen by the Financial Times as the word to describe 2022, it does have some intellectual history, going back to the book Homeland Earth in 1999. Since then The Cascade Institute and the Post Carbon Institute have both tried to develop it in different ways.
But, to underline the point, it remains, essentially, a disabling idea:
In essence, polycrisis says there is a worsening geopolitical predicament confounded by the loss of intelligibility, particularly our inability to understand causal mechanisms at scale, and there is no credible conventional response in sight that is commensurate with the emergence of escalating risks to geopolitical stability.
I was struck by this distinction between the nature of ‘polycrisis’ and ‘metacrisis’ because it seemed to reflect a division that is also present in futures. Much of the business futures of the 70s, 80s and 90s was essentially ‘out there’, with a positivist view of the world that didn’t engage with values, power, or ethics.
The recent wave of futures thinking, perhaps going back to Richard Slaughter’s integral futures in the late ‘90s, instead puts the participant into the work. Values matter, ethics matter, agency matters. It is, to pick out a couple of words from Rowson’s description of ‘metacrisis’ above, about interiority and relationality.
(‘Crisis.. what else’, via pxHere. CC0 public domain.)
This piece is already long, but Rowson has a short, if slightly loaded, quiz to help tease out the difference between polycrisis and metacrisis which is worth sharing here. Yes or no answers only:
- Do the world’s problems have an underlying/overarching/inherent cause that we might do something about?
- Do the main ways that those with political and economic power currently try to solve problems (policy, regulation, trade, technology, economic growth) tend to make those problems worse?
- Is there reason to think our historical moment is qualitatively distinct from other historical moments in a way that calls for a fundamental shift in our relationship to reality?
- Should we take care to ensure that the terminology we choose to distil the essence of our global situation is as accurate and edifying as it possibly can be?
- Is there something about the very idea of crisis that militates against the kinds of transformation we now need?
I’ll leave you work out which one is which.2
1 Bo Isenberg writes: “Critique expresses the possibility that everything could have been different. By doing so, critique puts things and the order of things in a state of crisis – institutions, meanings, relationships, mental and cultural dispositions. … It has been said that critique is a genuinely modern disposition, just as crisis is a genuinely modern societal and mental state.”
2 But if you’re stuck: if you mostly answered ‘Yes’, you’re at the metacrisis end of the spectrum. Mostly ‘no’, and you’re more polycrisis.
