To say there are now a series of interlocking and difficult worldwide crises that we must somehow navigate our way out of is hardly news. To say that we might fail to navigate our way out of them and therefore face societal collapses of some kind is a little more unorthodox, but isn’t exactly a bombshell. Even the British Government has just launched its own prepping website.
In this and the next couple of posts, I’m going to draw on some interesting recent writings that try to discern the navigational direction, and test the waters for the price of failure, in the context of these various crises. So perhaps the ‘C-wrecked’ of my title could reference ‘crisis’ or ‘collapse’. Actually, that’s not what I have in mind, but I’ll get to that.
Navigating the Polycrisis
What better title to begin my journey than Michael Albert’s Navigating the Polycrisis (MIT Press, 2024)?
Sombre content aside, there’s an awful lot I like about Mike’s book (disclosure: I’ve met him a couple of times and chatted with him about the state of the world. He generously included me in his acknowledgments and references, but endorsements from this site aren’t earned that easily).
One thing I like is that Mike’s not afraid to talk about societal collapse. I’ve discovered to my cost that doing so can easily make you vulnerable to ridicule in public debate, but Mike brings well-informed scholarly rigour to the possibility.
He also touches on the point that while collapse scenarios may be no-go in everyday media chatter, this isn’t so in the semi-clandestine worlds of corporate, military and security service forecasting. People in those worlds probably know things the rest of us don’t, so it might be wise for us to catch the echoes. Toward the end of the book, Mike conjures up some nightmare scenarios involving an unholy mix of AI, robotics, biotech and state militarization/securitization, which few people including me have probably taken seriously enough in their futurology.
On this matter of futurology, Mike laments the fact that academic scholarship is too wary of it, and too siloed within its specialisms at this critical point in world history when we need multidisciplinary perspectives on how to navigate the world to come. I take comfort for my own writing in a couple of aspects of his thinking here.
First, it’s easy to blunder when you step into unfamiliar areas of knowledge, opening you up to essentially bad faith arguments that your mistakes or lack of expertise disqualifies your entire perspective. Not necessarily.
Second (memo to self), I think Mike’s analysis blows away an objection often levelled at my advocacy for a small farm future along the lines of “Okay, but how are you going to implement that? Nobody wants to farm any more. Really, how’s the transition to a small farm future faring?”
While it’s not true that people don’t want to farm any more, the honest answer to how the transition to a small farm future is faring is “Very badly so far, thanks”. What I took from Mike’s book is that the transition to sustainable neoliberalism or global eco-socialism or ecomodernist solutionism or pretty much every damn route that people have pointed to as a way out of the polycrisis is also faring pretty badly. Mike does a pretty good job of avoiding the conceit that there’s some golden path leading us to a bright future. Instead, he shows us a world of trade-offs, happenstance and uncertain political gambits. I’m not convinced that worlds of potentially +2.5 or even >+3oC global warming he mentions are likely to retain as much of their present structure as he sometimes apparently supposes, but I’ll leave that thought there.
Another strong feature of the book is Mike’s ability to think in terms of whole systems, and their often bafflingly complex feedback loops. So, to pick an example that’s recently been burning hot in the comments section of this site, a full transition of the global economy in its present form to renewable energy may not be possible, even if it’s technically feasible (which it may not be…) due to complexities like sunk investments and price volatilities in fossil fuels, the reliance of renewable energy on fossil-fuelled pump-priming at a time when the net energy returns and flows of fossil fuels are declining, and on political pushback as these chill winds blow across the wider economy. Mike covers a lot of such feedbacks with impressive clarity and detail – refreshingly, without claiming to know how they’ll play out.
One such uncertainty is that even if ‘the world’ weathers the polycrisis with some success, it may be that ‘the West’ or Global North doesn’t, ceding political and economic primacy to other power centres. I’ve just started reading Peter Heather and John Rapley’s book Why Empires Fail: Rome, America and the Future of the West that bears on this point, and I’m looking forward to seeing what they have to say. Bottom line I think is that a lot of people will effectively be facing collapse scenarios even if the world system as a whole doesn’t collapse.
Anyway, back to Mike’s book: another good feature is the way he takes culture, ideology or what he calls ‘the existential crisis’ seriously in their independent influence on biophysical issues.
I don’t think he develops quite such a nuanced analysis here as he does with the more biophysical issues, often invoking what I see as a slightly questionable duality between ‘progressive’ responses to the polycrisis and the pushback of ‘far right populism’.
For sure, that polarity is real in a lot of places, but I think it draws its force from a wider crisis which raises questions about the desirability of the eco-socialist ‘Marshall Plan for the Earth’ that Mike seems broadly to favour, involving strong state control of capitalist economic forces in concert with popular ‘red-green’ activism from below.
I hope to explore this further in future writings. In brief, I don’t think you can simply invoke governments or the state as an essentially autonomous force, capable of solving or compounding the problems of the polycrisis. Existing state structures (the ‘Westphalian’ model of an international system of sovereign nation-states, and indeed the whole underlying cultural conception of state sovereignty) are a fundamental part of the polycrisis, and this applies to states in both socialist and capitalist garb.
This objection may be unfair in that Mike’s focus is on near-term events over the next few decades, and the ‘Westphalian’ state system is unlikely to disappear over that timeframe. But it might have been good to go a bit more ‘meta’ than invoking a mere ‘poly’-crisis for which there may be solutions if decisionmakers can thread the needle deftly enough. To invoke another terminology, perhaps the polycrisis involves super wicked problems to which there are no solutions within present global political cultures.
Mike seems ultimately a bit more ‘optimistic’ than me that the present global order will somehow find a way to tiptoe around the cliff-edge of collapse, but he provides plenty of well-evidenced grounds for caution on that front, while considerably enriching the field of debate. At the end of the book, he usefully names seven ‘world system pathways’ which maybe I’ll discuss more fully at some point: breakdown, neofeudalism, volatile techno-leviathan, stable techno-leviathan, ecomodernist socialism, fortress degrowth and abolitionist ecosocialism.
I’m an advocate for another possibility, which requires yet more word soup to classify: a small farm future, or agrarian localism, or distributism, or maybe civic republican agrarian populist left libertarianism (CRAPLL for short). I think crap’ll probably happen eventually, but most likely as a kind of creeping, wild and weedy margin that slowly engulfs the other scenarios Mike mentions. It will have to bide its time before it takes centre stage. So not really a world system pathway, more a post-world system possibility.
Maybe the small role I can play is to articulate what this emerging agrarian localist world might look like as best I can, particularly in relation to eco-socialism. I’m somewhat sympathetic to eco-socialism, but I fear eco-socialists often don’t really understand farming and farm societies, or nature, or the production of local livelihoods, and are therefore at risk of repeating the mistakes made by their (non-eco) socialist forebears.
This underlines a point that Mike takes pains to emphasize, and I think he’s right: which of the world system pathways we or our descendants experience in the coming decades is going to be determined more by politics than by anything else. Some of them also depend a bit on the progress of new technologies – but still mostly on the politics.
An advantage of the transition to agrarian localism is that it depends very little on new technologies, and almost entirely on politics – hence my subtitle for this post. At the moment, as I said earlier, those politics aren’t looking great. But the political field is shifting as rapidly as the technological one. If Mike’s worst case pathway of breakdown comes to pass, I think a lot of people will be experiencing a small farm future, but not in a good way. The challenge is to build a politics that delivers a better one.
On that note, I put ‘optimistic’ in scare quotes above, because there’s an odd aspect to this kind of language in debates about the poly-crisis – namely that preserving the world system in something like its present form is a worthy goal.
I can get a little way behind the argument that, with the state of the world as it now is, an absence of high-tech patches to the existing world system would mean a lot of people are going to have either no future or a very miserable one, so let’s not knock techno-fixing too much. But it rarely seems to figure in such arguments that there’s a wide range of options between, for example, our ~600 exajoule energy present and a zero exajoule energy future. Mainstream futurology seems entirely geared to maintaining (indeed, growing) the ~600 exajoule present, rather than making do with less. That ~600 exajoule present isn’t an especially pleasant present for a lot of people (and other organisms), and I’m not convinced there’s any reason to suppose that an even higher-energy future will be better for them, even if the energy sources are cleaner. In fact, probably the opposite.
Against the Vortex
Here’s where I’ve found the next book on my list, Anthony Galluzzo’s Against the Vortex: Zardoz and Degrowth Utopias in the Seventies and Today (2023, Zer0 books) informative.
Anthony uses John Boorman’s perceptive-yet-preposterous 1974 sci-fi actioner Zardoz as a foil for a wide-ranging argument about the ideologies (and pathologies) of our present modernist culture. His book isn’t an especially easy read unless you’re well-grounded in social theory and philosophy, but he nails a lot of points exceptionally well, uncovering the hidden and surprising genealogies linking the older modernisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the supposedly new and ‘disruptive’ tech-bro space of present times (Douglas Rushkoff’s Survival of the Richest might work as a more accessible introduction to some similar ideas).
I can’t do justice to the richness of Anthony’s analysis, but here are a few points which overlap with issues I’ve raised in my own writing:
- Anthony diagnoses what I think he rightly calls a “nostalgic futurism” shared by mainstream elements of the political right and left, involving “an ironically backward-looking desire for those high-modernist “lost futures” of the twentieth century” (p.9). The tarnished dream of social progress through technological innovation has somehow survived its twentieth-century savaging to animate another round of millenarian projection in the 2020s via alt-meat, renewable energy and what have you.
- That nostalgic modernist dream is built in part on the notion that technologies are neutral, and what matters is only whether they’re used for good or ill. This misses the fact that technologies aren’t ‘just’ technical, but socio-technical. Technologies organise people in particular ways, foreclosing other possibilities – likewise with expert knowledges, ‘what the science says’ and indeed our very notions of ‘good’ and ‘ill’. There’s a “hippie modernist cult of technology” (p.14) personified in figures like Stewart Brand that directly links the libertarian 1960s counterculture to the ‘disruptive’ tech-bro present, involving a simplistic and essentially domineering view of ‘liberation’.
- This simplistic libertarianism neglects the extent to which its purported freedoms rest on the exploitation of other people and ecologies. Its utopia “is a false utopia animated by a false communion built on exclusion, extraction, and the fantasy of repurposing megatechnical systems against these systems’ designs and architectures” (p.20)
- Against this, Anthony counterposes a ‘critical Aquarianism’ emphasizing human mortality, natality, embodiment, animality, fragility and interdependence (p.41). This critical Aquarian way of thinking is basically at odds with modernist themes like accumulation, efficiency, modularity, populations, progress and so on. In a nutshell, there’s more to life than life, especially the accumulation of life. Without death, life becomes meaningless.
I learned a lot from Anthony’s discussion of this last point. It’s stronger than my exploration of similar themes in Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, which prompted the (hyperbolic) ridicule of one ecomodernist antagonist. But I think here we get close to the root of the antipathy between (eco)modernism and its others – critical Aquarianism, Romanticism, neo-Luddism, neo-agrarianism, call it what you will. Each of the two considers the other a kind of death logic, and itself as an engaging vision of human life, without comprehending the alternative view in the mirror of its other.
Are there bridges across this divide? People have asked me in discussions of my Saying NO… book if there’s room for middle ground between ecomodernism and agrarian localism. Maybe. I’m not sure what it would look like, but I don’t set myself implacably against every totem of modernist ‘progress’. I agree with Anthony when he says that human reason is defined by acts of judgment, by drawing lines and setting limits (p.61). My starting offer for a critical-Aquarian-ecomodernist blend might be to aim near-term for, say, a 300 exajoule solar-powered world, with that energy flow shared more or less equally across humanity. How about it?
For his part, Anthony wonders if we can “exit the dead end of industrial modernism and its legitimating fictions—utilitarianism, Prometheanism, productivism and its ecocidal dreams of endless growth, secular immortality, and total control—in the face of interrelated material, ecological, and spiritual crises without sliding into … reactionary antimodernism” (p.54). Echoing the title of Dougald Hine’s excellent book At Work in the Ruins, he thinks it’s “only after the “future” and among the ruins that we will build our necessarily imperfect utopias” (p.12) and argues that “as opposed to the monoculture of capitalist modernity, ancient human history is a polycultural quilt of traditions that we must reinvent … after modernity. Postmodernism in this sense is a radical traditionalism” (p.60).
Those statements work for me as foundations for my own project, and I’m interested to discuss their numerous implications – even with critics, though probably not with the kind of critics apt to dismiss them as examples of bucolic fantasy or death-cultism.
Another author to mention is Carwyn Graves, who’s recently published the superb Tir: The Story of the Welsh Landscape. On the face of it it’s a very different kind of book to Mike’s or Anthony’s, but complementary in numerous ways – not least in its implicit message that workable versions of Anthony’s “radical traditionalism” may be closer to hand than some of us might think, for example in what remains of historic Welsh landscape management, and what could be rebuilt out of it.
But I’ve written more than enough words already for one blog post, so I will come to Carwyn’s book – and the mysterious question of C-wrecking – in my next one.
