January 7, 2023
“Permacrisis” is the Collins Dictionary’s choice as word of the year for 2022. The Economist magazine affirms that permacrisis captures the significant and lasting changes we are experiencing. Our geopolitics (especially resulting from the relationship of western countries with China and Russia); energy (commodity shocks resulting from supply chain issues and particularly Russia’s provision of energy to the west); and cost-of-living challenges (flowing from both inflation and the adjustments of western governments to post-COVID realities) are troubling problems that accompany the calendar turn. The Economist predicts these will combine to make a global recession inevitable for 2023, which will be unlike previous recessions.
More local to Canada, Susan Delacourt, writing in the Toronto Star, wonders whether the term permacrisis “perfectly captures the state of politics in Canada—not just these past 12 months, but over almost the entire tenure of Justin Trudeau’s government as it blows past seven years in power.” She suggests that permacrisis will result in much more short-term political thinking. Crises are now managed and not resolved. She concedes that there is some inherent contradiction in this framing. If a crisis represents some aberration from what is usually considered normal, and we are in perpetual crisis, is it really a crisis or rather simply a new normal to which we are slow to adapt? Still, it’s the word of the year so we might as well go with it.
Reading these (and several other variations on the theme of permacrisis) leaves me skeptical. Embedded within this analysis is a nostalgic yearning for a pre-pandemic world, a sort of normal that the magnitude of recent experience almost guarantees will not return. Individuals and societies are shaped by recent experiences and longer-term trends. While much of the “permacrisis" analysis amounts to an “aw, shucks, these present problems seem bigger and longer-lasting than our old problems,” it also betrays a lack of historical perspective.
A longer-term frame might be more helpful. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the world started to adjust to the end of the Cold War and a world without the ever-present risk of mutual nuclear annihilation. In response, management guru Peter Drucker published a book in 1993 entitled Post-Capitalist Society. He noted that while history was by definition the accounting of change over time, there were certain epochs of history in which the change was more defining than others. He referenced the Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution as periods of history in which the pace of change was so rapid it was nearly impossible for children to understand the world into which their parents had been born. The monolithic religious culture present to someone growing up in the 1490s was entirely foreign to their children born in the 1520s. Not just religiously, but politically, socially and culturally, the Protestant Reformation brought with it an entire reframe of basic assumptions and lived realities.
For any of us born before 1975 or so, the Cold War and its inherent assumptions about liberal democracy, totalitarianism, and freedom, not to mention peace and stability, shaped our lives. I doubt I was the only kid to worry while laying in bed whether the Soviet Union might really drop a nuclear bomb, and if so, what that would mean.
This was not the everyday experience of someone growing up in the 90s, but if that translated into optimism regarding the future, a whole pile of different assumptions was smashed on September 11, 2001. The enemies now were not just pledging allegiance to a flag on the other side of the world expressing an ideology we really didn’t understand, but they were now among us, boarding planes with us, creating a terrorist threat to our neighbourhoods. It took time for governments and individuals to process and understand that.
Drucker points out that it isn’t just signature historical events that determine epoch-shaping times, but also what accompanies them. Would the Reformation have happened without concurrent invention by Gutenberg of the printing press? Would the identification of global terrorist movements that threaten our security, alongside the economic benefits of a globalized economy, have happened without the digital revolution of the past few decades? Those of us of a certain vintage, even if we’ve made the conscious effort to learn how to use our electronic gadgets, marvel at how naturally today’s children, and even toddlers, figure out the basics of their electronics.
Of course, what prompts Collins to name 2022 as permacrisis are none of what I just mentioned, but rather the events of 2020-2021 and the whole-of-life implications that come with living through a global pandemic. There have been pandemics before, although none in any of our lifetimes, with the 1918-1919 global influenza epidemic being the most comparable to COVID.
Historical perspective matters when forecasting the future. Has another generation experienced such a succession of epoch-shaping changes, each with profound historical significance? Depending on which decade you were born in, you have lived through one, two, three, or all four of the events I’ve mentioned. These aren’t just events to read about in the newspaper. They’re framework-altering events with far-reaching implications for how we view ourselves, our neighbours, and our obligations. I don’t have the expertise to map how these interact, or the extent to which experiencing the Cold War might influence how I view 9/11, compared to the person who came of age during 9/11 and had no meaningful memory of the Cold War. But not being able to name it, doesn’t mean it isn’t real. Are the generational divides that affect today’s population greater because of these subsequent events, separated as they are by approximately a decade or two each?
If I proposed a word of the year, I would go with “tipping point” rather than permacrisis. We have seen most of the present crises before. I wonder whether it is not any one thing itself, but the cascading challenges coming in short succession which results in a cultural angst that feels different. Sorting through it is messy, and partially dependent on our own age and history, which further complicates finding a common narrative to explain our times.
Predictions are relatively pointless in that none of us can know the future with certainty. The exercise can be helpful in trying to understand and name the present. Effective leadership includes defining reality and being able to accurately understand what is happening. But the point is neither prediction, nor optimism, nor pessimism. It is comprehension that can inform our behaviour.
I’ll avoid pronouncing on whether we live in good times or bad times, content in the knowledge we live in God’s time. The only faithfulness we can provide is that which is suitable to our own times and generation. My guess is that a century or two from now, future generations will look back at ours as an epoch-changing time, one of those moments of history that gets its own chapter (maybe even two) in the history books. But that doesn’t give us any extra tools to deal with our present challenges. It is obedience and trust in the God of history who has promised to provide for us, whatever our circumstances—permacrisis or tipping point—that will carry us through 2023.
Happy New Year.
