Much water had flowed away, many people had died, many been born, many had grown up or grown old; still more ideas had been born and had died, much that was old and beautiful and much that was old and bad had perished; much that was beautiful and new had grown up and still more that was immature, monstrous, and new, had come into God’s world.
Leo Tolstoy, Two Hussars
Tolstoy’s depiction of the jumbled mix of good and bad, continuity and change, is one that still holds. Invariably, though, our attention is drawn to the specific ideas now appearing and perishing. With the new year, the content monster rolls on, with previews replacing reviews, all while the trendlines remain in place. At Davos, another World Economic Forum (WEF), and with it, another ‘Global Risks Report’. The authors of the 2023 edition, clearly readers of the FT, determined to follow Tooze in picking up polycrisis as a frame:
The cascading and connected crises we find ourselves in at the beginning of 2023 demand a new descriptor to define the scale of the problems the world is facing…
The collective vocabularies stored in the world’s great dictionaries didn’t appear to hold a single word to sum up all this strife. So here’s a new one: Polycrisis.
The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2023 uses the term, to explain how, “present and future risks can also interact with each other to form a ‘polycrisis’ – a cluster of related global risks with compounding effects, such that the overall impact exceeds the sum of each part”.
A year later, polycrisis has been notably exercised, the term completely absent from the new report. It appears Niall Ferguson’s intervention, deriding it as a useless concept, held sway. Regardless, the new edition is no less gloomy, presenting ‘a pessimistic global outlook’:
The cascading shocks that have beset the world in recent years are proving intractable. War and conflict, polarized politics, a continuing cost-of-living crisis and the ever-increasing impacts of a changing climate are destabilizing the global order.
Certainly true enough, as far as it goes. The report dutifully lays out in bland, passive language the various crises, risks and destabilisations, along with suitably empty platitudes: ‘The risks are growing — but so is our capacity to respond’. The issues pointed to in the report are valid enough, but such sanitised considerations - devoid of context and specificity - offer little help. Ultimately the system that Davos represents and reinforces is largely one of ‘risk for thee, but not for me’. This is perhaps indicative of another reason polycrisis has quickly exited from WEF’s language, as engaging with it encourages the kind of serious reckoning that it is precisely not what the Davos crowd are interested in. To do so, as Naomi Klein has highlighted, would require ‘changing everything’.
Continuing with the theme of Magritte, in 1942 he completed this painting while Belgium was under German occupation. It was titled ‘The Companions of Fear’ (‘Les compagnons de la peur’), which was the French title for the Rex Stout detective novel, The League of Frightened Men. Indeed, the original Stout title is a pretty good descriptor of the Davos set with their amorphous risks and equally amorphous cooperation.
All the while, the world burns.
Turning, returning to Tolstoy. This time his work, What Is to Be Done?. In it, he considered the misshapen world he found himself in:
But what is to be done, then? We did not do it, did we? And if not we, who did?
We say, “It is not we who have done all this; it has been done of itself”; as children say when they break anything, that “it broke itself.”
Tolstoy posed the question as one of agency, of choice, the part and the whole, the snake and the wheel. He emphasised precisely the need to reckon with the question, to try to find a way to a respond to it, while recognising any answers would be invariably insufficient. Tolstoy suggested:
Illumination, the roar of cannon, music, uniforms, cleanliness, brilliancy, which we usually connect with the idea of the importance of any act, are, on the contrary, tokens of the absence of importance in that act. Great, true deeds are always simple and modest. Such is also the greatest deed which is left to us to do,—the solution of those awful contradictions in which we are living. The acts which solve these contradictions are modest, imperceptible, seemingly ridiculous acts…
When considering the mounting systemic risks we are collectively facing, to speak of simple, modest acts might appear woefully insufficient. Yet what else is there? Honestly facing the awful contradictions, reckoning with them, acknowledging the costs and tradeoffs, recognising and reckoning with ‘the immature, monstrous, and new’, while holding onto beauty - old and new - that is our collective challenge.