Navigating the Polycrisis–Life in Turbulent Times

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Dear Friends:

How can we explain the explosive emergence of global awareness of the polycrisis over the past year, 2022-2023? Three years ago, almost no one had heard of the polycrisis.

What happened? 

What Is the Polycrisis?

First, let’s roughly define the polycrisis. Some claim it is nothing new. We believe the polycrisis is new. We believe a confluence of environmental, social, technological, financial-economic, natural and other forces are interacting with ever increasing unpredictability, rapidity and power. We believe these unpredictable interactions are causing future shocks of ever greater frequency and amplitude.

Because the polycrisis looks different, feels different, and is explained differently everywhere, there won’t be any single understanding of it. Think of the polycrisis as a global weather system. Weather everywhere is deeply interrelated, but local weather looks different in each place. Continue reading →

The Long View: the Launch of Our Omega Website

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Dear TNS Friends,

What a strange time.

Awareness of the global polycrisis—whatever we choose to call it—is deepening across the country and around the world.

We’ve formally launched our new website, omega.ngo. You can sign up to get Stanley Wu’s highly regarded The Long View, a free monthly summary of the best coverage of polycrisis news and views, right here. It will take you to our online magazine, our bookshelf, our videos and podcasts.

The polycrisis consists of the sum total of all the environmental, social, technological, financial/economic stressors and other stressors (earthquakes and more). They are all interacting unpredictably and with increasing speed and force. We are experiencing future shocks of ever greater size and frequency.

The polycrisis has many names, many narratives, many appearances. It doesn’t matter much what we call it. We just need to know it’s real.

We can’t escape the polycrisis. We must perforce navigate it. Navigating it wisely may be a life and death matter. We can seek to bend the arc of the polycrisis toward better outcomes. We can consciously learn to live and love and flourish in the polycrisis as best we can.

We don’t offer a single point of view. We know the polycrisis looks different everywhere. We know you experience depends on who you are, where you are, what conditions you live under, and indeed what your life orientation and story about yourself and the world is.

So we’re curating those stories, those narratives, from around the world.

Our deepest hope is humanity will survive this bottleneck in human evolution and grow into a mature and compassionate global civilization that fulfills our true human destiny.

We also deeply believe that we can’t navigate well without good maps of what i actually happening. That requires looking very directly at some grievous truths about where we are and what we face. But it also requires looking at hopeful prospects we may ignore in the face of all the negative trends.

We hope you’ll join us for this journey—this adventure, really—into the heart of the global polycrisis. Together, we give each other the courage, hope and  strength to work for a better world. No matter what we face, we’ll do far better if we walk together.

Join us at omega.ngo.

With gratitude,
Michael

The Year of the Polycrisis

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Dear New School Friends:

I want to thank each of you who contributed, or continued to contribute, to The New School in 2022. You’ve made a critical contribution to our work. It’s never too late to add your support. So if you intended to contribute, or are moved to now, we welcome support at any level you can afford. You can do so right here.

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This past year was the year that the polycrisis exploded as a global meme. “Polycrisis” was the word of the year 2022 in the Collins Dictionary. The World Economic Forum in Davos where the ultra-wealthy and their acolytes gather to pontificate declared 2023 “the year of the polycrisis.”

“The theme of our meeting in Davos is cooperation in a fragmented world,” [WEF Chair Klaus] Klaus stated. In what the WEF calls the “Year of the Polycrisis,” Klaus declared that “economic, environmental, social, and geopolitical crises are converging and conflating, creating an extremely versatile and uncertain future.” Continue reading →

Fall Letter from Commonweal

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Commonweal Labyrinth in Fog. Photo: Peter Cunningham.

Dear Commonweal Friends,

I hope this letter finds each of you as well as you can be in these tumultuous times.

Oren Slozberg: A Leader for Commonweal

In September, I turned over the helm at Commonweal to my beloved friend and partner Oren Slozberg. Oren has worked with us at Commonweal for nine years. He has led Commonweal as executive director for five years. His extraordinary wisdom, kindness, and commitment to Commonweal are known to all. We could not ask for a more inspired leader for Commonweal’s future.

The time was right. This is a long-planned and carefully executed next step in what Oren rightly calls “intergenerational leadership” at Commonweal. As far as our community is concerned, little has changed. I am able to focus far more intensively on the work I was put here to do. Continue reading →

Call the World “the Vale of Soul Making”

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The Commonweal bluff at night. Photo: Power of Hope 2022

Dear New School Friends,

Call the world, if you please, “the Vale of Soul Making,” [wrote the poet John Keats to a friend.] Then you will understand the use of the world.

I hope this finds you as well as you can be in troubled times. Truth is, times have been troubled for many people around the world for centuries, even millennia. So troubled times are not new. What hasn’t happened before any time recently is that the troubles are landing on the doorsteps of people who have enjoyed some measure of peace and security—however tenuous that peace and security may have been.

A great sadness is settling on the world. New York Times columnist David Brooks, a centrist Republican who writes thoughtful essays, put it this way:

The negativity in the culture reflects the negativity in real life. The General Social Survey asks people to rate their happiness levels. Between 1990 and 2018 the share of Americans who put themselves in the lowest happiness category increased by more than 50 percent. And that was before the pandemic. Continue reading →

And If Not Now, When?

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Photo: Stanley Wu

Dear TNS Friends:

These are the days of harvest blessings in many traditions. A good harvest was often a matter of life or death—of starvation or of plenty for the days and nights of dark and cold in the Northern Hemisphere.

It is also a good time to turn inward ourselves, to harvest what we have garnered since the last harvest, to ask what we have learned that may help us on our path.

As I enter my eightieth year this October, it is also a time of deeper reflection for me—and for many among us who are in or approaching our later years. The great Jewish mystic Rabbi Hillel asked us this same question 2,000 years ago:

If I am not for myself, who will be?
If I am not for others, what am I?
And if not now, when? Continue reading →

Shed a Little Light

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Dear New School Friends:

Awareness of the global polycrisis is spreading everywhere now. Most often people tie the polycrisis to climate change. Fewer realize that the real challenge is the unpredictable interaction of all the global stressors—environmental, social, technological, and financial/economic.

Climate, COVID, and conflicts without end are the three emblematic issues for the polycrisis. But the emblematic issues keep morphing. The Ukraine war was for months in the headlines—now it has faded in the news (though it continues in reality). COVID, once a constant headline, has now moved into the background and monkeypox takes its star turn, though COVID remains a far greater danger. Continue reading →

Embrace Fearlessly this Burning World

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Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Dear New School Friends:

The great writer and naturalist Barry Lopez participated in a Commonweal retreat a few years before he died. That is where I came to know him. On May 31, Ben Ehrenreich, himself a great writer and naturalist, published this New York Times review of the last book Barry Lopez left us—a book of essays with this unforgettable title: Embrace Fearlessly This Burning World. Rebecca Solnit, another great writer, wrote a beautiful introduction.

I dedicate this post to Barry Lopez.  Here are some quotes from Ehrenreich’s review that touch me most deeply:

“The central project of my adult life as a writer,” [Lopez] says, “is to know and love what we have been given, and to urge others to do the same.”

“Throughout this book, Lopez considers his calling in terms that are unabashedly spiritual. Raised a Catholic, he was “fixated” in high school, he wrote, on emulating the life of the Jesuit paleontologist and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Even after drifting away from Catholicism, he took time off from a New York publishing job for a retreat at the Kentucky abbey where the mystic and writer Thomas Merton lived. Fortunately for us, he didn’t stay. But years later, Lopez still relied “on the centrality of a life of prayer, which I broadly took to be a continuous, respectful attendance to the presence of the Divine. Prayer was one’s daily effort to be incorporated within that essence.”

“We must invent overnight,” Lopez concludes, “another kind of civilization.” He offers no details, only fundamentals: “It is a good idea to love each other, and to love the Earth.” Continue reading →

Troubles and Transformation in Turbulent Times

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Dear Friends:

We live in an intensely dangerous period of time–for ourselves and for the world.

The turbulence continues to accelerate. This is the polycrisis–the quickening interaction of environmental, social, technological and economic stressors–leading to unpredictable future shocks of increasing frequency and intensity.

In the perception of many in the West, the first poster child for the polycrisis was the climate emergency. Then came COVID. Then the Ukraine War. And now dangerous levels of inflation, supply chain breakdown, and both political and financial instability.

In other parts of the world, the perception is different. Many have lived for decades and beyond under polycrisis conditions. “The future is already here,” the sci-fi great William Gibson observes–“it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

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In the United States, we are acutely aware of the transformation of the Supreme Court. The Court ruled on three emblematic conservative causes–bibles, bullets and babies. They promised to rule on whether states can set their own rules for elections without review by state superior courts.  

Republicans have locked in control of 70% of state legislative districts for the coming decade.  The mid-terms look promising for them. They also look well positioned for the 2024 presidential contest. Continue reading →

Would Knowing Make A Difference?

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Dear Friends:

This morning at 8 a.m., four of us from Commonweal went down to Agate Beach in Bolinas. We went to visit an extraordinary whale rib that had washed up with the tide. I estimate the rib is about twelve feet long and as thick as my thigh. Since it is only one side of the whale’s rib cage, the rib cage must have been over twenty-four feet wide.

Whole whales have washed ashore in Bolinas before during my 50 years here. Somehow this whale bone, picked clean by the elements, struck me with a special power.

I don’t know what happened to the whale. Did it die of old age? Was it chemical contaminants that weakened it? Or was it one of the growing number of casualties hit by the immense cargo ships that we see moving in and out of San Francisco Bay every day? Continue reading →