welcome to polycrisis
04
Apr
This is the part of title of the article by Adam Tooze, professor of history at Yale
University (USA) written in the Financial Times in 2022 that drew a lot of attention: pandemics, droughts, floods, mega storms, forest fires, war in Ukraine and high prices of fuel and food, as is typical of the magazine and of today’s world, the economic aspect stands out.
But Edgar Morin’s polycrisis went deeper, the author recognizes the origin of the term, but is unaware of what Edgar Morin and many other philosophers actually think, who point to the most fundamental root of these evils: our way of thinking. thinking and the vision of the world that we create from it and implant in our societies.
The term cited by Morin was said for the first time in 1990, but in an interview with Le Monde on April 20, 2020, the French educator updated the word: “The health crisis triggered a chain of crises that were linked together. This polycrisis or megacrisis extends from the existential to the political, passing through the economy, from the individual to the planetary, passing through families, regions, states. In short, a tiny virus in an overlooked village in China has unleashed a world of disruption.”
In his view, the polycrisis crossed our ways of being, living together, producing, consuming and being in the world, challenging us to think about all our paradigms, much of what he wrote talks about new methods such as hologramatic and the danger of hyperspecialization of science that leads “to a new obscurantism” that is our inability to see the whole in modernity.
It is true that we are going through other crises, but Tooze’s article shows the implications of the war in Ukraine and the pandemic in accelerating these crises (see the Map), in the pragmatic aspect of the economic it is clear, in the spiritual and ontological aspect it is still not so clear , but it may be clearer soon.
