- It looks like Covid cases are exploding.
- Historic drought and wildfires in the West.
- Full-scale invasion.
- Six months for floodwaters to recede.
- These pipeline gas cuts have added unprecedented pressure
[Female Narrator] It’s no secret that the world is in crisis.
Faced with destabilization from many different directions, all at once,
what was previously coined a global crisis has escalated.
We are in a polycrisis.
[Adam Tooze] If you just read a newspaper or watch the news, in a sense,
you are presented with this collage
and the collage begins to just look incoherent and crazy
to the point where you begin to wonder whether you actually
sort of be able to any longer trust your own senses.
And what the polycrisis concept says is, you know, relax.
This is actually the condition of our current moment.
So what is a 'polycrisis' - and is it a useful term for understanding the world today?
Adam Tooze believes it is.
Tooze is a leading historian, economist and an author
of several books on global economic history.
It’s an idea that was launched by a French theorist of complexities called Edgar Morin.
And then it was picked up by Jean-Claude Juncker,
the president of the European Commission in 2015, 2016,
to describe the experience of trying to govern Europe
when you had to deal with the Greek debt crisis,
Putin’s first aggression against Ukraine
and the sort of rumblings of Brexit in the background
and the refugee crisis in Syria spilling over into Europe.
The unfolding of this current moment starts in 2008,
which is simultaneously not just the financial crisis, which we all remember,
but also Putin’s first aggression against Georgia.
It is also the breakdown of the WTO in the Doha Round,
it is setting the stage for the disappointment of the Copenhagen climate talks,
and then on top of everything else, there was a swine flu epidemic in 2008-9.
And so, in a sense, you already see there many of the elements
of the current moment coming together.
This experience of not a single crisis with a single clearly defined logic,
but this coming together at a single moment of things which
- on the face of it and really when you even dig into it -
don’t have anything to do with each other, but nevertheless seem to pile on to each other
to create a situation in the minds of policymakers, business people, families, individuals -
that is overwhelming and that leaves us unable to cope...
So what is our current global situation? Russia has invaded Ukraine,
the climate crisis has escalated and the world
- emerging from a global pandemic - is navigating supply chain crises,
runaway inflation and a threat of a looming recession.
In short, a polycrisis.
So economics, politics, geopolitics and then the natural environment blowing back at us
– and those four things, they don’t reduce to a single common denominator.
They don’t reduce to a single factor.
You could say that in a broad sense, modernisation and the great acceleration
of economic development from 1945 onwards gives us both climate change and
zoonotic mutation and therefore pandemics.
But it’s a roundabout chain of causation that we’re talking about there.
Capitalism may be one of the drivers here, but it doesn’t by itself
explain why we are seeing the pressures.
We need to talk about urbanisation.
We need to talk about particular models of forced industrialisation
to actually get us to the chain of causation we’re interested in.
Capitalism supercharges geopolitics in important ways,
but one does not reduce to the other.
Nor do I think the democratic dysfunction
and distemper in a simple way reduces to geopolitics.
There’s a wider array of cultural, political forces at work.
Although the polycrisis affects us all, each of us is vulnerable to it in different ways
- as a country, community or even as an individual.
I was in Manhattan throughout the COVID shock in 2020
and it was evident that our highly sheltered lifestyle,
you know, in a Columbia University apartment with all the Wi-Fi we could possibly need
and three bedrooms was very different from that of, say,
the woman who normally cleans our apartment who’s stuck at home with four kids and,
you know, no adequate Wi-Fi access.
And the kids are trying to get some kind of online schooling.
And it’s a mess, right. That’s within New York.
And of course, the super affluent just left the city.
But then you amplify that out across the entire world.
You view the world from a highly specific position within this structure of inequality.
And there are different versions of, I think this experience,
especially if you live in North America, if you live in the United States,
Americans have been experiencing a kind of sense of national crisis that’s quite comprehensive.
But they read it as the experience of the American dream coming apart.
So if you are in Pakistan, you know, the fifth most populous country on earth,
one-third inundated at the end of last summer as a result of this extraordinary monsoon
which followed weeks later on, you know, this incredible heat wave
that ripped through South Asia over the summer.
It’s important for folks to constantly question what we think of as mainstream,
what we think of as relevant, what we think of as the central narrative of the moment,
and to check that against, as it were, other realities,
also to try and compose the regional logics that make sense.
That for me is a way of counterbalancing the, not just the experiential drift and the power drift,
but also the way our minds in the West slide away from the,
you know, this global reality that we face.
So, on a societal level the polycrisis is very real,
but how does it actually feel, and what impact does it have on us on a personal level?
You cannot live through the experience of 2020 and not be quite profoundly shaken
in your assumptions about what you can take for granted, especially as a young person.
It’s all very well for somebody of my age to look at the world and say,
Well, you know, I can take a hiatus for 18 months.
But I know from watching my daughter’s experience of it
that it’s much more panic-inducing if you don’t actually know
what the rest of your life is going to be like.
If you’ve been feeling confused and you’ve been feeling as though
everything is impacting you at the same time,
this is not a personal, private experience.
This is actually a collective experience.
And if you’ve been having a hard time reducing all of this to a common denominator,
then you know, join the club.
In fact, it doesn’t seem to be reducible to a common denominator.
And if you have have been having odd thoughts about how, you know,
your ability to insulate your house because you want to pursue an agenda of climate neutrality,
is being foiled by the fact that all of the raw materials cost too much
because supply chains are screwed up, because Vladimir Putin has started a war,
and that strikes you as weird. Well, that is the reality that we currently face.
And so I think the purpose, the idea of the concept is presumably
simply to make that experience of confusion,
of the weird intersection of things which appear
to really not have anything to do with why is it, you know,
what is my problem with insulating my house got to do with the war in Ukraine?
Well, this sort of concept opens up the threads
through which you can begin to see the connections.