The Alchemy of Crisis
On falling out of a love with an indispensable word.
*I’ll be writing a reflection on my time at FORGE in New York shortly (it was wonderful, not least the guava empanadas at a nearby Cuban restaurant). But first, I have been remiss in giving notice of activity at Perspectiva this month, and want to set the scene.
In November, I’ll be leading a Perspectiva community offering which grew out of my impression that the polycrisis is a permacrisis which is actually a metacrisis which is not really a crisis at all, and after that, I intend to speak of crisis only when strictly necessary, when asked very nicely, or in return for single malts.
Our new community offering is coming into view, including an online version of the antidebate tonight(!), a new culture club (yesterday! Sorry…) a conversation with Dougald Hine (November 20th) all of which is detailed in our recent post on the theme for the month which is: The Alchemy of Crisis. There is a presentation by me on November 13th about what that means, and I’m also giving a related talk in real life at The Kairos Club on November 14th.*
So what’s it all about?
*
The alchemy of crisis is about looking into the idea of crisis with sufficient discernment that you begin to see the power it has over you, and start to free yourself from its clutches. There is a place for the idea of crisis, and the word is full of crises of various kinds, but crisis-thinking should be a mindset we can choose to select and learn how to set aside, rather than our default mode of being and primary modus operandi. As always, the great Ursula le Guin has the words we need:
“We're in the world, not against it. It doesn't work to try to stand
outside things and run them, that way. It just doesn't work, it goes against life. There is a way but you have to follow it. The world is, no matter how we think it ought to be. You have to be with it. You have to let it be.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
We have to let the world be, which is not at all to say that we leave it alone, but that we stop denaturing and depotentiating it by imposing our concepts on it, which is what crisis thinking tends to do.
Alchemy is often thought of the mysterious process through which base metals are turned into gold, and the idea and practice has a richer esoteric history that is beyond our scope here. For now, without shame I quote from Wikipedia where the etymology of alchemy is presented in aggregate as 'the process of transmutation by which to fuse or reunite with the divine or original form'.
The alchemy of crisis therefore means working with the idea of crisis, not as a problem to be solved but as a mindset to be transcended to get to the distilled and concealed form lying inside crisis-thinking which might be thought of as follows: Look! Something is happening! Attend to the world! Who are you in this context?
There’s a longer description of this process of transcending and including crisis thinking in my essay, Prefixing the World, and there’s a medium length answer in this half-hour mini-documentary video by Katie Teague, which I would encourage you to watch if you haven’t already.
For now, here’s a new another way of putting the struggle with the idea of crisis.
There’s an Annie Lennox song, originally written by David Freeman and Joseph Hughes, called The Lover Speaks, and it includes a memorable lyric:
“No more I love you’s. The language is leaving me.”
That apostrophe blows my mind, but apparently it belongs there. The idea that a certain kind of language can leave you feels pertinent.
So that’s how I feel: No more ‘this is a crisis’, the language is leaving me.
Crisis language has not quite left me yet, however. In general, the idea of crisis is legitimate and important and has its place. It’s just that I don’t love it anymore, and I can feel like my work expounding on it is nearing its end. I can feel that the will to speak of crisis is dying inside of me. I am not in denial about the challenges facing the world, nor the tragedies and disasters and scandals that are part of our daily experience. It’s just that I am now more interested in what is prefigurative of a better world, where the potential lies, what building a parallel polis might involve and so on.
While I’m still on crisis duty, I can share that it seems to me we can chart an evolving relationship to crisis that is reflected in the terms we reach for. It's almost like a crisis menu, or buffet, or conceptual landscape that we need to traverse:
Crisis: a fork in the road calling for discernment and judgment.
Polycrisis: a fearful relationship to ambient crisis.
Permacrisis: a resolute relationship to indefinite crisis.
Metacrisis: a reflexive relationship to multi-faceted crisis.
(Postcrisis): a mature appreciation for the idea of crisis, freely relating to it as one disposition among many.
There are other terms like omnicrisis and macrocrisis which remain generic and unspecified and I don’t think they are particularly important. As indicated in the essay and video linked to above, metacrisis in particular is the place both where our predicament is seen as fully as possible, and where the idea of crisis reaches its apotheosis and therefore the beginning of its end, its decomposition, and transformation.
Here’s a more philosophical way to put it:
I don’t use meta simply in a superordinate way, as the big umbrella term or the deep code term, though that can be done. The primary value of meta, I believe, lies in its self-reference, its reflexivity.
‘Meta’ is there to show that our intellectual and spiritual challenge is to understand three kinds of relationships that are alive.
(1) the mind-to-world relationship
(2) the world-to-mind relationship
(3) Society’s capacity to perceive, understand & renew relationship b'wn 1 and 2.
I first encoutered this way of thinking in George Soros’s Lectures to the Central European University in 2009 where he defines ‘reflexivity’ - his key idea, as the defining feature of how he made his money and how he chooses to spend it.
Going beyond Soros, those *three* epistemic relationships (mind-to-world, world-to-mind *and* between mind-to-world and world-to-mind) characterise the dynamics of a distilled ontological relationship underlying reality, which is the relationship between three different kinds of phenomena that goes by many names: structure, culture and agency-Archer; Infrastructure, Social structure and Superstructure - Harris; World 1, World 2, World 3- Popper; Mind, Society, Environment-Guattari, I, We, World- Adnan, Emancipatory, Hermeneutic, Technical- Habermas.
Perspectiva refers to these three worlds as systems, souls and society, and that is important enough to us that it’s in our charitable objects and in the URL for our main website.
Remember that all threes are ultimately one, though the one is also many.
It's a lot, I know, but whoever said life was meant to be easy?
*
The point in relation to the alchemy of crisis is that ‘crisis’ operates at the first mind-to-world turn (as a concept) and at the second world-to-mind turn (as an assessment or disagnosis based on what’s happening), but everything that is of potential benefit to society happens on the third turn where these two perspectives start to see each other more clearly.
“Hello Mind-to-World. I see you”, says World-to-Mind.
“Hello World-to-Mind. I see you too”, says Mind-to-World.
When that conversation begins we notice that the idea or assessment of crisis is much less important than the lived appreciation for the fact that world and mind are playing with each other all the time, in the social sphere where we are all actors.
And then what? Well it looks like we have to keep playing, and learn to play better.
The aim is to get back to living meaningfully and purposively with reality as we find it. But first, we have to find it, which is not easy because we all look in different ways.
Yes I know it’s confusing, but I believe it’s no less true for that.
If you’re keen to deepen your confusion I’ll see you on the 13th!