There’s a storm coming, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches, because when it hits, you’re all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.
This is a line from The Dark Knight, in which Selina Kyle (Catwoman) offers a stark warning to her dancing partner Bruce Wayne (Batman). Around 2016, I started incorporating it into a course I was teaching on the post-Cold War liberal international order. In pointing to some of the underlying tensions and imbalances in the structure of our world, I was trying to encourage my students to think about what a breaking point might look like. In retrospect, I was perhaps asking too much of them, especially given I was profoundly underestimating what it might suggest. While there were a growing array of indicators suggesting serious pressures and cracks were building, it is remarkably hard to move from intellectual recognition to practical acknowledgement of what appears to be unfolding.
In the intervening years - and especially following the onset of the pandemic - these stresses and fractures have become only more apparent. And yet still, it has been difficult to fully accept that things are changing. It is not simply that we are experiencing history in realtime, it is that the polycrisis we are faced with is remarkably complicated and complex. The last note started to try to sketch out some of the dynamics it entails, this is meant to continue that process of trying to make sense of what might be unfolding. To this intellectual challenge must be added the emotional one of acknowledging and accepting that things are changing, and potentially in ways that are not for the best.
Both with the onset of the pandemic in the first months of 2020, and then Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, much of the world - from the top leadership down to the general public - were remarkably blasé and disinterested to growing signs that something consequential was about to unfold. While it is tempting to blame hubris, it is doubtful it even reached a sufficient stage of active consideration. It feels more a case of lazy dismissal: ‘bad things don’t happen here’. For all the talk about having reached ‘the end of the end of history’, arguably the underlying sentiment powerfully remains: not only is progress linear, but the gains we have made are secure. Life gets easier, things get cheaper, goods become more available, borders only open, more options appear, and what we can afford we can have if we want. In this vision, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were effectively put out of business by modern society, those problems had been solved, at least in the industrialised West. They were perhaps something other people in other places had to worry about, but not us. Not us, right?
The vision of the Four Horsemen is perhaps overly comforting in a strange way, as it suggests a degree of clarity we presently lack. Certainly we are dealing with plague and war, with hunger fast approaching. Yet these problems are tightly coupled, along with issues related to energy, economy, climate and more, all amplifying and altering each other. Moreover, there is a certain inconclusiveness to these concerns - it is hard to judge the full nature and scope of the problems we are facing.
Some of these dynamics are captured in Jeremy Cliffe’s reflections on the first six months of the Ukraine war:
If the war had gone as Putin had hoped, that work of analysis would have been rather straightforward. A Ukraine successfully subjugated and sundered as punishment for its alignment with the West would have made a potent symbol of a new post-Western era, the collapse of the old order and the rise of a new, authoritarian-friendly multipolarity. Instead the events of the past six months tell a sufficiently complex story – of democratic resilience, of shifting power balances, of both authoritarian revisionism and weakness, of global systems both brittle and adaptable – to spark a genuine debate about what they mean.
This ambiguity and inconclusiveness is also present if one zooms in on Russia and its execution of the war. Attempts to paint Putin as a master strategist crash up against the remarkably poor fashion in which the invasion was commenced; yet those who wish to deride the Russian leader as deluded and detached from reality must account for the astute manner in which the country has sought to maximise its leverage through its commodities. What we are left with is a messier, more complex picture: Russia’s actions have been both calculated and stupid, its policies both shrewd and mistaken.
Shifting scales and views, one can start to make out the fractal patterns of these confusing crises. Cliffe continues:
Observant readers will notice just how many of these points also apply to the pandemic. Covid-19 also showed us many of the contours of a Westish world: the centrality of technology; the awkward middle-zone of an interdependent order without the structures to manage its own interdependence; an adaptive but political globalisation; a geopolitical edge to an Anthropocene crisis; authoritarian states at once too strong to be boxed in entirely by Western power but too weak to provide real stability; and a West whose fortunes depend most on its own internal cohesion.
Cliffe pairs the crises together, but the framing of polycrisis instead suggests that both the war and pandemic are part of a larger set of changes underway, greater in scale and consequence.
To provide some symmetry, this note can conclude with a quote from another Hollywood franchise. In Spectre, James Bond is trying to understand what he is caught up in, to which Mr White mocks his limited comprehension of the situation:
You’re a kite dancing in a hurricane
This feels like an apt description for where we find ourselves, individually and collectively. One of my major concerns is that we are radically underestimating what might be unfolding. While waiting for the clarity that history provides, we miss that we are experiencing a process: of dissolution and entropy, of change and transformation. Trying to comprehend these dynamics, intellectually and practically, increasingly feels like one of the great challenges of the present moment.