Economists have recently started using the term “polycrisis” to describe the multiple meltdowns of our globalized world, a concept the political scientist Daniel Drezner has defined as “the concatenation of shocks that generate crises that trigger crises in other systems that, in turn, worsen the initial crises, making the combined effect far, far worse than the sum of its parts.” And while some historians have challenged the notion that our age is in any worse shape than previous eras, it seems fair to say that the consciousness of the modern media-literate American is verily drenched in the perception of crisis. We live in an age, if not of crisis, at least of crisis-thought.
With Donald Trump’s reckless and vengeful second term fully underway, polycrisis is, for many, more of a felt reality than ever. As basic goods and services become more difficult to access, political dissent is silenced, and climate and medical research and regulations are eviscerated, crisis seems to be a core feature of Americans’ daily lives. Crisis-thought runs even more rampant in such a context, our urge to tune out and stop following the barrage of insanities and inanities held in check by a gnawing sense of irresponsibility, a nebulous feeling that any relaxation of vigilance is a form of complicity.
What is noteworthy about the tenor of our moment is not that we perceive our society to be under threat; almost every period of American history has been characterized by danger and disaster. Rather, what is more significant is the pervasive sense that such crises must dwell at the front and center of our mental lives. To live with a constant awareness of the ways in which darkness, evil, and societal collapse threaten our daily existences is in many quarters deemed to be a sign of intellectual profundity and moral maturity. To live otherwise is typically considered to be a particularly egregious form of escapism. As the philosopher Jonathan Lear has written regarding the climate crisis, “If we read newspapers or participate in social media, read blogs, or watch television, it would be surprising if the end of the world were not somehow on our minds. Indeed, there is cultural pressure to feel anxious about the future.” The spiritual motto of the age might best be summed up in the words of Theodor Adorno, who wrote in 1944, “There is nothing innocuous left. The little pleasures, expressions of life that seemed exempt from the responsibility of thought, not only have an element of defiant silliness, of callous refusal to see, but directly serve their diametrical opposite. Even the blossoming tree lies the moment its bloom is seen without the shadow of terror.”
It was not always this way. The reigning ideology of America in the Victorian Age, for example, has been described by the historian Jackson Lears as one of “evasive banality.” Many of our late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century forebears were enchanted by visions of scientific and moral progress stretching endlessly into the roseate future, which were combined with ideals of strict social and ethical propriety in the present. These Americans were not unacquainted with the night, having lived through the gruesome bloodbath that was the Civil War. But their sights were set on building a happier future rather than lingering over the torn limbs and shattered spirits that still hobbled among them.
Yet as Lears and others have shown, the generation of intellectuals coming of age in the 1890s–1910s rebelled against the blithe optimism of their parents’ generation, which they perceived to be both hypocritical and repressive. By the time of the twentieth century, with its panoply of catastrophes, was fully underway, cosmic affirmation was out and tragedy was in. As Mark Greif has succinctly summed up, “In the middle decades of the twentieth century, American intellectuals of manifold types, from disparate and even hostile groups, converged on a perception of danger.” The word of the day was crisis. The theologians spoke of a new “crisis theology,” pioneered by Karl Barth and Emil Brunner and Americanized by Reinhold Niebuhr in the magazine Christianity and Crisis; W.E.B. Du Bois named his influential magazine The Crisis; pragmatists such as John Dewey and Sidney Hook could speak of a “crisis of liberalism”; reactionary political theorist Carl Schmitt would describe a Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy; and, to this day, books about twentieth-century intellectual life bear names like The Age of the Crisis of Man and The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis. The near-obsessive incantation of the word crisis bespoke (and bespeaks) a feeling that twentieth-century Americans (and Europeans) were living through an age of unique tribulation. The forces of evil—whether religiously or secularly conceived—were on the rise, and a renewed attention to the roots and fruits of the resurgent darkness was now required.
The Dragon and the Dragon-Slayer
But if many of us take for granted that we live in an age of crisis and that any slackening of our attention to danger is simply a reactionary kind of escapism, we should, perhaps, think again. For even in the recent past, it was not so obvious that the contemplation of evil was an unambiguous moral good. We might consider the case of one mid-twentieth-century intellectual who dissented from this prevailing view: the literary and cultural critic Lionel Trilling (1905–1975). Trilling, whose life coincided with all the major upheavals of the twentieth century, explored the moral implications of what he perceived to be the era’s obsession with the extremes of human experience—especially extreme evil. In brief, Trilling remains one of our finest critics of the limits of crisis-thought.