One crisis too many, Or: the importance of accomplishment

I

The most telling feature of present-day crisis thinking is that it’s doubled. Not only are we said to be at the crossroads of so many dire consequences (think Woody Allen’s quip: “More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly”).

But it’s worse than that. We’re also temporizing while in the crossroads. We’re not making the choices and are deluding ourselves with getting by, coping, delaying and waiting. As if the longer we can suspend choice, the greater chance the crossroads will go away. As if these were only rumors to be waited out.

So whether we find ourselves at the last, but always increasing number of, crossroads or procrastinating with no real escape route, the polycrisis of interconnected crises–that singular noun for multiple phenomena–is fast becoming its own plural, polycrises.

In brief, our problem is not only crisis-thinking but also its hackneyed metaphors–all those crossroads, all that tarrying while Rome burns, really? To puncture this thinking requires you to ask: But what about the accomplishments of real people, in real time, with real problems? Do they–both the people and the accomplishments–count for little or zilch, even if terms like “progress” and “success” are no longer as useful? This question is more complicated than the usual human persistence versus human endurance comparison. What do we do with the development fact that accomplishing things means less about “keep on going” than it is does about “this is what we have nevertheless done, now when it matters most”?

When people improvise in order to accomplish, then reducing that to coping and sub-par performance seems to me one crisis too many. Boris Pasternak, the Russian poet and novelist, is reported to have said that life creates events to distract our current attention away from it, so that we can get on with work that cannot be accomplished any other way.

II

But, so what?

So: Pose questions that offer up new metaphors on the principle that to change reality is at least to change the metaphors that last. Roberto Schwartz, the great Brazilian literary critic, recently described a play of his that tried to interrogate the certainties and contradictions in popular culture:

The problems are numerous: are cultural niches and racial quotas tantamount to prisons? Does a samba school band deserve the Nobel Prize? Is poverty picturesque, shameful, a solvable problem, a crucial world issue? The favela: rather than backward, don’t we all know that it’s the future of humanity? What are its teachings? Is popular culture revolutionary? Is individual success a betrayal? Does the favelado artist compete with contemporary art on an equal footing? Does it compete with him? The proliferation of questions and the critical freedom to confront them don’t guarantee a solution, but they bring fresh air and enjoyment.

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii153/articles/roberto-schwarz-political-polyphonies

Now we wouldn’t typically notice the accomplishments of “fresh air” and “enjoyment” while in the multiple crossroads of planetary polycrises.

But–and this is the thought experiment–if Schwartz’s questions are the ones we could be asking not only in Brazil but also everywhere, then the analyses of everywhere else is, importantly, with respect to samba school bands, the favela, and individual success as betrayal of collective efforts to address poverty variously defined. My wager is that out of these comparisons and contrasts emerge not only new questions that defamiliarize the intractable–e.g., in 1920, the USSR was the first country to decriminalize abortion practice by doctors–but also new ways to recast the repetition compulsions of the current crisis narratives.