Contents

Chapter 1: Crisis

Welcome to the age of the polycrisis. (World Economic Forum, 2023)

It’s not unusual to feel that we are living through a crisis, a time of intense difficulty or great danger. But this sentiment is a luxury. Only those of us who do not live by navigating a seemingly perpetual stream of daily adversities have the luxury of entertaining the idea of the wider crisis. To be able to afford the time to worry about what the next crisis might be is almost entirely an indulgence of those who, most of the time, are free from both great danger and substantial difficulty.

Consider how often the word crisis now appears in Englishlanguage publications. It was uncommon throughout the nineteenth century and up to the early 1930s, but in the mid-1930s its use began to surge. That surge appeared to abate in the late 1940s, but this lull was short-lived. Use of the term accelerated throughout the 1960s, and the word has become more and more common ever since. People may shout ‘fire’ more often, but it does not necessarily mean there are more fires than before. In the case of crisis, it might mean that a great number of us have more time to worry.

While we clearly have mentioned crisis more often in recent times, this is not an indication that we have entered an age of cascading crises. Perhaps, counter-intuitively, we spoke of crisis, and often by implication the next crisis, precisely because we were experiencing an increased capacity to sit back and think about the future. The period before the 1960s was one of almost constant wars, epidemics and pandemics occurring worldwide. Before the 1960s, there was so much infectious disease, so many famines and such frequent bad harvests, that we could have been forgiven for continually crying out, ‘Crisis!’ Yet we were restrained in our language.

The second fact worth noting is that since the late 1960s there has been no let-up in our collective sense of crisis, at least not based on the frequency of use of that word in all the printed media surveyed. The word crisis was used twice as often in 1960, and four times as often since 1980, as it was in 1900.

So, was the rising frequency of the appearance of the word crisis just an increase in hyperbole, a tendency towards exaggeration? Did a new trend begin, led by some writers of the 1960s trying to gain readers’ attention? Were more books being written by people who had the luxury to speculate on wider issues? There were more writers by then, and more people were able to read and to buy books than ever before. Perhaps it was just this social trend which stoked up the rhetoric? My point here is that, imagined or real, we have been living in an age of crisis for some time.2

Returning to the present, what are the major crises of our time and what do people, worldwide, concern their thoughts with? One way to try to answer this question is not to concentrate on what is written – since what writers are always at least partly motivated by is gaining attention. Instead, we can concentrate on what people themselves say most concerns them, and then look into each of those issues. You may be wondering why this matters, however. Why are other people’s opinions of interest?

Why should anyone care what the rest of the world’s population thinks, especially when they don’t think the same way we do? I don’t underestimate how difficult it is going to be to look at things this way – to try to take seriously distant others’ collective worries. It is easier to dismiss the rest of the world than to admit that you might have a privileged view. You might question the surveys I draw on in this book. You might think that the masses are being led astray by pollsters and their weasel words. But before you decide that others’ views on what matters most are less valid than your own, are you not curious to know more about them?

This is a modified excerpt from Chapter 1, click here to download a reading sample (PDF document).