Part of what I have been suggesting about polycrisis is the difficulty in making sense of it. Given this, I am trying a slightly different format for this note, it is consciously fragmentary, presented as a series of somewhat connected thoughts, observations and provocations about the current moment.
Defending worlds: at the end of his life Tony Judt’s reflected,
we are likely to find ourselves as intellectuals or political philosophers facing a situation in which our chief task not to imagine better worlds but rather to think how to prevent worse ones.
A decade after being published, his observation only feels more acute. Yet one of the great challenges of polycrisis can be disentangling those better and worse worlds.
The universal currency: one of my strongest memories in the days after the Fukushima nuclear accident was - for the first time - seriously considering where the electricity that I use actually comes from. It is one of those many basic and fundamental realities on which we base our lives, but largely take for granted. Until we can’t, that is. ‘Simply put, energy is the only truly universal currency’, is Vaclav Smil’s judgement in How the World Really Works, which is excellent in hammering home the need for greater awareness of the material realities our lives are based on.
Layering: This aspect of polycrisis is where the concerns of specific interest groups related to separate crises overlap to create layered social problems. A powerful example of this dynamic is present in the Ukraine war, insofar as it has been difficult to distinguish the respective interests of various actors. Understandably, the Ukrainians are doing as much as they can to defend their country and are actively trying to mobilise support for their cause. They have been remarkably effective at this, especially in the online space, further aided by the brutality of the Russians. In a provocative essay by Shi Zhan, ‘The First Metaverse War’, he observes how successful President Zelenskyy has been in mobilising social media to the cause of the Ukraine:
Politics requires telling a good story, as well as the performance of that story, and in social media terms, Zelenskyy’s two-way interactive performance in a small theater was better than Putin’s unilateral, centralized performance on the big screen, because when Zelenskyy staged his play for the world, he made war into a process his fans could follow, which seems to be a metaphor for the metaverse.
What Zhan highlights is the powerful dynamic between the underlying physical conflict and its manifestation online. In the process, however, what has become blurred is what is in the best interests of the Ukraine might not align with that of other actors. As the reverberations of the conflict become even more keenly felt across the rest of the world in the coming months, and the immediacy of the conflict fades from collective view, it remains to be seen to what extent the digital can shape the real.
Zooming in: what to make of Russia’s apparently cavalier attitude towards the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant? Is it more of the brute stupidity that appeared to be on display in the way they occupied the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone? An attempt to intimidate Ukraine and other opponents with the possibility a new kind of terror on the battlefield, a deliberate nuclear accident? Turning up the pressure on the Ukrainians by removing an important source of energy? Alternatively, disaster scenarios at Zaporizhzhia might work to stoke long-standing dread of nuclear power, potentially impeding the reconsideration of this energy source at a time when options are limited, sharpening the commodity crunch. In trying to disentangle these different rationales, it is worth keeping in mind John Gray’s suggestion that, ‘Putin is the face of a world the contemporary Western mind does not comprehend.’
Worse worlds and energy prices: a grimly appropriate way to end might be with this fragment from a letter written by Walter Benjamin in 1939:
Listen to this: the Vienna gas board has stopped supplying gas to the Jews. The gas consumption resulted in losses for the gas company, since it was precisely the biggest users who did not pay their bills. The Jews used the gas mainly for the purpose of committing suicide.
I finish with this to return to a theme of a previous note, reason only works in a reasonable world. It strikes me that attending to the task laid out by Judt entails reckoning with those times when reality outstrips imagination. Whether we are morally and spiritually equipped for where we might be heading remains to be seen.