An infinite regress is not an explanation
Stop fossil fuels; stop cutting down trees; stop using plastics; stop this defense spending; stop being imperialist; stop techno-solutionism; be small-d democratic and small-p participatory; dismantle capitalism, racism and the rest; transform cities; save biodiversity; never forget class, gender, race, inequality, religion, bad faith, identity. . .and. . .and.
“We are living our whole lives in a state of emergency” (Denise Levertov, poet, 1967)
Which #1 global crisis? I could pick recent articles from any well-known media outlet. That I choose the online Guardian is not intended to single it out as worse. It’s just that these four competing examples came at around the same time there:
- Here is Francine Prose, former president of PEN, saying that the Trump authoritarian turn is the our number 1 gravest threat today– https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/25/america-feels-like-a-country-on-the-brink-of-an-authoritarian-takeover.
- Here is George Monbiot, Guardian columnist, saying it’s not Trump, but global biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse that deserve the global attention–https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/27/uk-government-report-ecosystem-collapse-foi-national-security.
- But no, someone else says it’s actually overshooting the 1.5C of warming that is the global unprecedented crisis– https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/26/number-of-people-living-in-extreme-heat-to-double-by-2050-if-2c-rise-occurs-study-finds
- And there is the polycrisis crowd that insists all of this and more are interactively interconnected into one mega, numero uno constellation of sub-crises–https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2026/jan/14/new-year-polycrisis-psychology-feeling-trapped
With so many #1 crises competing for our attention, which to choose? The fact of the matter is that there is no choice to be made.
Not one of the four is at a level of granularity with which to assess whether this #1 is more hazardous than the other #1’s and under what conditions. This is particularly true as the hazards are in terms of uncertainties (i.e., their respective unknown knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns.)
Crises of course can be reported in short- or long-form media articles. But in the same way that no decisionmaker should want to take a policy decision on the basis of one piece of information only, so too should decisionmakers treat “this is our number 1 crisis” as one piece of the needed information. Real-time action is taken for more granular, context-based reasons.
For example, the creators of AI may have a variety of crisis scenarios about the downside of AI. But when they say that the AI scenarios pose threat-equivalent to nuclear war or worse, you need to remind yourself that they have no equivalent level of detail for the latter as they do the former. In fact, they might be the last people on Earth you’d ask for nuclear war.
The doctrine of catastrophe-unless, then and now
Keynesianism, then, was a doctrine of catastrophe-unless: the worst can still be avoided through swift and decisive political action… George Watson (1977). “The Myth of Catastrophe.” In his Politics and Literature in Modern Britain, Rowman and Littlefield, Totowa, NJ.
Unlike half a century ago, the doctrine of catastrophe-unless now holds far wider. Inequality, the climate emergency, biodiversity loss, racism, militarism and so much more can only get worse, unless swift and decisive political actions are taken.
Watson was interested in understanding the fatalism of British literary intellectuals over capitalism in the Thirties. By extension, it would now seem we’re all intellectuals in our negativity, artificial or organic. “There is the sheer intellectual prestige of pessimism,” writes Watson. Ditto: “Many men, and especially intellectuals, would rather be thought alarmist than complacent.”
So what? “What is more, it is supremely satisfying to the aesthetic sense to watch a drama in which all the virtue is on one side.” In this view, “Life just cannot meander on. Intellectual nature abhors a vacuum; and if one apocalyptic vision is taken from mankind, like the Christian [one], then the same instinct will take itself to another.” Watson seems to believe the latter, however, is not also part of the meandering.
Stop imagining
Imagine that you’re in a room with four very tall walls, and they’re totally smooth. There are no footholds, and there’s no way out, and you’re in there with nothing, and there’s water pouring in from the top in all directions. What do you do? We were stumped, proposing one solution after another, and none of them worked. And then, the answer to his riddle was: Stop imagining.
https://urbanomnibus.net/2025/01/perhaps-a-lot-of-our-future-is-behind-us/
Not, “stop imagining” because what’s imagined is already here. But rather, “stop imagining because it’s getting us nowhere.” As in: “Imagination: Always ‘lively.’ Be on guard against it. When lacking in oneself, attack it in others. To write a novel, all you need is imagination” (Gustave Flaubert, novelist).
And yet: “What we have here is a failure of imagination,” intone the critics of this or that policy failure or crisis. But they are just as likely to demand we take seriously any of their crisis scenarios, even when they are unable to specify what it takes to disprove the scenarios or prevent their recurrence or come up with details about the response structure to be in place after the losses incurred by said crises.
To do the latter requires deep knowledge and realism—that is, far far far far more than the touted imagination. Having the former may even cure us of some crises.
And anyway, how do you know Next-Is-Worse?
Many ecologists and environmentalists I’ve read or with whom I’ve worked insist that, when it comes to ecosystems and the environment, more things can go straight-out, hair-raisingly wrong than right.
It is easier to mismanage an ecosystem than it is to manage it. Ecosystem collapse is more certain than ecosystem sustainability. Negative externalities in the environment are to be expected, positive ones not. Probabilities of large system failure and cascades are primed to flip to 1.0 in no time flat.
We must manage the planet’s resources better, but no one should expect technology to help. Economic growth is never a sufficient condition for improving the environment, and economic growth’s impacts on the environment are always sufficient for precaution. So much is uncertain that anything is possible, which means everything must be at risk.
Let’s call this, next-is-worse-ism. What, though, are its limits?
Let’s agree today’s rotten core is modernity—international capital, fossil fuel, global urbanization, the Enlightenment project—while in the same breadth insist all this is best understood in the very terms of that modernity: Anything and everything is at risk; all thinkable risks are warnings; any could be catastrophic.
In putting the paradox this way, we are like those trying to predict a poet’s next poem from their current body of work. A more productive approach, I suggest, is to ask: What are we getting from this habituation to next-is-worse-ism? One answer: Doing so saves us all the trouble and worry of having to figure out details.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 