Crisis and Revelation
“Things Aren’t Getting Worse. The Truth is Just Being Revealed.”
Welcome to Ever Not Quite—essays about technology and humanism.
This essay moves away from my last few posts about the history of photography and the rise of algorithmic images. Of course, there’s much more to say about that subject, and I’ve come to think of that essay as a prolegomenon of sorts to a more sustained treatment of technical images—of how they are employed and how they fuse with the minds and imaginations of those who see them. Perhaps I’ll continue in that vein another time.
This essay is about something which has been on my mind for a long time: the way that the goal of bringing the world under human control—one of the central tenets of the modern project—seems to result directly in so many contemporary crises which are out of our control. Here, I explore the idea that a crisis is usually not an accidental intrusion from outside, but a revelation of a truth which had been hidden by the logic of the very systems it places under threat. Before I proceed, I want to acknowledge that this essay is fairly audacious in the way it attempts to link together some of the major challenges of our time. I admit to feeling a little uneasy making such immodest statements about issues that are so large and complex, and I want to emphasize the provisional spirit with which I write—an attitude which I have already proclaimed in the very title of this publication. But, as you will see, I think it is necessary to begin to try to find ways to say these things, even when doing so courts the risk of sounding foolish.
I began writing this essay in order to explore an idea which I had long wanted to attempt to put into words. But I soon realized that what had helped my thoughts to coalesce was the influence of one particular book: At Work in the Ruins by
, which was recently released in paperback.1 This post is not exactly a review of that book, but it did become the singular lens through which I proceed with these reflections.One last thing. Since Ever Not Quite started over a year ago, I haven’t offered the option for readers to support it with a paid subscription. Beginning with the publication of the next essay (which I expect will come sometime later in November), I’ll open up the option to become a paid subscriber. Nothing else will change; I don’t plan to paywall anything, so if you’re a free subscriber, you will continue to have access to all the essays, past and future. But if you’d like to support me, and if you’re able to do so, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Short of that, you can still help out by sharing Ever Not Quite with others who might be interested in what I’m doing here.
Thank you for reading!
The aftermath of an apocalypse is a shivering expanse, where reality itself requires constant mending.
Federico Campagna, Prophetic Culture
Perhaps this is the place to start. I recently came across a meme—I can’t remember where exactly, but it was somewhere online—with text that read: “Things Aren’t Getting Worse; The Truth is Just Being Revealed”. Perhaps you’ve seen it too. In fact, I’ve come across similar messages in different places recently, which have, let’s just say, diverging political and cultural orientations. This seems to be a sentiment that many different people can agree on. As I understand it, the idea here can perhaps be stated even more succinctly: Every crisis is also a revelation. The many crises the world faces today, to which we attach various names and which daily make their way from headlines into our speech, together reveal something which is itself unseen about the true nature of the world as we have constructed it. They are manifestations of unacknowledged truths about ourselves, about what we are doing, and about the processes which we have set into motion.2
These challenges far exceed the labels which we usually apply to them, and which so often immediately precede the word “crisis”: climate-, Covid-, cost-of-living-, loneliness-, friendship-, subprime mortgage-; economic-, ecological-, constitutional-. This list could be extended, and new crises are coined all the time. My purpose here isn’t to disparage the profligate use of this word, although I do often feel that it is being overused. My point is that, when we use these terms, there is a sense that we aren’t really talking about the issue we are ostensibly naming—or, at least, we aren’t just talking about the issue at hand. Rather, we seem to be tapping into a more diffuse, ambient sense of a general unraveling. So often, what most threatens modern post-industrial societies are expressions of their own innermost pathologies, latent enough that they could metastasize, later to reveal themselves in the form of more acute symptoms. When a crisis finally reveals itself as such—sometimes with apocalyptic stakes—we are misled if we fail to understand it within this larger context. Or at least that is what I take the meme to be gesturing at, and it is this suggestion which I want to consider here.
It is well known that the word ‘apocalypse,’ which I’ve just invoked, comes from a Greek word meaning ‘uncovering,’ or ‘unveiling’ (apokálupsis, from apo- , ‘un-’ + kaptein, ‘to cover’). An ‘apocalypse’ was once a genre of literature, originating within Judaism in the centuries following the Babylonian exile, in which cosmic truths would be revealed to a specific person by a supernatural being. Although it has predominantly come in modern parlance to describe any account of the future catastrophic end of the world—a sense which it has acquired from the Book of Revelation, the apocalyptic final book of the New Testament which foretells the end of the world and the Second Coming of Jesus—the word ‘apocalypse’ still carries its original meaning, which suggests a curtain being pulled aside to reveal a truth which has until now remained hidden.
Consider the so-called ‘alignment problem’ within artificial intelligence research, which is not usually called a crisis, exactly, but which some warn could yield potentially apocalyptic outcomes—that is, apocalyptic in the cataclysmic sense. But as Shannon Vallor argues in her recent book, The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking, the alignment problem is also apocalyptic in the original sense. That is, it reveals the dark side of the choices that we ourselves—or at least those among us involved in the development of artificial intelligence—have already made in bringing AI into existence in the first place: Insofar as its ‘mis-alignment’ could place us at risk of rogue and potentially super-human systems, this will be possible only because we ourselves have already made countless choices which have facilitated such a destructive possibility. The call, we might say, is coming from inside the house. Here’s Vallor:
AI is no panacea or cheap technical fix for our social and environmental ills. AI won’t enable a sustainable future without reformed political institutions and economic incentives. What’s more, the kinds of AI technologies we’re developing today are undermining and delaying these reforms rather than supporting them, precisely because they mirror the misplaced patterns of judgment and value that led us into our current peril.
To change that will require something more radical than the solutions sought by a growing number of computer scientists interested in fields like “AI safety,” who are looking for ways to program AI to be more reliably beneficial and aligned with human values. The reason this kind of strategy won’t work, at least in our present environment, is because human values are at the very root of the problem. AI isn’t developing in harmful ways today because it’s misaligned with our current values. It’s already expressing those values all too well. AI tools reflect the values of the wealthy postindustrial societies that build them. These are the very values that brought us to our current heights of scientific ingenuity, but also to the sixth mass extinction and the brink of planetary devastation. AI is a mirror of ourselves, not as we ought to be or could be, but as we already are and have long been. This is why we can’t let today’s AI tools decide who we will become, why we can’t let them project our futures for us. Yet increasingly, that’s exactly what we are building them to do.3
According to the conventional account of the alignment problem, the danger is that artificially intelligent systems might seize control and begin to perform actions that run counter to our interests, and by the time we notice something has gone awry, it will already be too late to stop them. But to the extent that this only really takes into account the technical side of the problem—that we might prove to have insufficient mastery over the tools we have created—we open ourselves only to a superficial reading of the situation. On a deeper level, according to Vallor, the dangers presented by AI do not prove that it is misaligned with human values—quite the opposite: the ‘values’ (if we can call them that) which these systems embody are precisely the ones you get when you employ existing assumptions about judgment, thinking, creativity, and information to create algorithms fed by vast amounts of data. If we find objectionable what comes out the other end, it’s worth remembering that these results are little more than our own choices being reflected back to us. All this is a way of saying that the alignment problem is a ‘crisis’ which originates in the decisions which we ourselves have made and are making—and not, as has often been implied, in some failure to see our values realized.
Speaking of ‘planetary devastation’, consider another passage from an important book-length essay from 2016 by the novelist Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Ghosh has a similar outlook towards what many have taken to calling the ‘climate crisis,’ which he also situates within a much longer story of human choices and endeavors:
Although different groups of people have contributed to it in vastly different measure, global warming is ultimately the product of the totality of human actions over time. Every human being who has ever lived has played a part in making us the dominant species on this planet, and in this sense every human being, past and present, has contributed to the present cycle of climate change.
The events of today’s changing climate, in that they represent the totality of human actions over time, represent also the terminus of history. For, if the entirety of our past is contained within the present, then temporality itself is drained of significance. [...]
The climate events of this era, then, are distillations of all of human history: they express the entirety of our being over time.4
Temporality itself is drained of significance: Here, the crisis is understood not as a moment in time, but as the revelation of a truth about time—namely, that the whole history of human action has, in as many ways as there have been individual people, contributed to what some would call the defining crisis of our time. The message here is not that each and every human action has added directly to atmospheric carbon, but that all our actions have helped in some way to construct a human-centered world, which has in turn created the conditions in which climate change, or something like it, is the logical outcome. Again, this crisis may best be understood not so much as a failure to impose our designs upon the world, but as the consequence of our very success in doing so. To rework a phrase from recent popular culture: We’re the problem; It’s us.
I’ve been put into this frame of mind by a recent book by Dougald Hine, At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics, & All the Other Emergencies, which is an unhurried meditation on—well, many things, but chief among them is the underlying reality that is revealed when things go wrong. Hine is well known as the co-author, together with
, of “Uncivilization: The Dark Mountain Manifesto”, which, back in 2009, launched the Dark Mountain Project, a movement which explores how we might begin to inhabit the world once the narratives around which modern societies are organized—narratives about human centrality within nature, the unthinking pursuit of technological mastery, and the story of progress more generally—have begun to relinquish their hold on our collective imagination.5 At the time, “Uncivilization” might have looked like a natural reaction to the financial crisis and the various forms of institutional malfeasance that characterized its era, but in retrospect it looks prescient, seeming to anticipate the more comprehensive and all-pervading sense of foreboding which has become more familiar today.At Work in the Ruins is the effort of a more seasoned thinker and storyteller than the one who once co-authored “Uncivilization”, which inclines towards the self-assured tone that typifies the manifesto as a literary genre. The book is demonstrably the output of someone who has spent some real time at work, as its title has it, exploring and deepening the ideas and practices that first set Dark Mountain into motion fifteen years ago. It is written with an air of cautious humility, proportional to the high stakes and massive scale of the issues with which the book is concerned. “I did not expect to write this book”, Hine admits at one point in its early pages, “and there are things I’ve said already that don’t sit comfortably with me.”6 Narrating more than arguing, a surprising fraction of At Work in the Ruins tells of the path that led to it being written in the first place, and we sense that Hine isn’t always quite sure how to talk about issues at this scale, which so surpass the scope of our lived experience.
The “ruins” in the book’s title are open to some interpretation: we can of course speak of ruins in the literal sense; all the recent talk of apocalypse certainly brings to mind images of the sorts of material ruins that might be left behind in the wake of pandemics, civil strife, and infrastructure collapse. But we need not take it this way: These are the ruins of what we might call modern techno-rational optimism, of our once-secure confidence that we knew what we were doing, what the world is, what we are, and what is possible—or even desirable—to expect from the future. Hine has no interest in facile catastrophizing, of the sort which results in pronouncements that are both too large and too final, and which encourage us to abdicate any responsibility to think about what might come after. As “Uncivilization” had already concluded back in 2009, “[t]he end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop.” Hine now puts it this way, adapting a line made famous by the philosopher Mark Fisher:7
Even the bold talk about human extinction can be a way to defer acknowledgment: it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the world as we know it. The hard part is to imagine still being here, to imagine lives worth living among the ruins of what we thought we knew, who we thought we were and where we thought the world was headed.8
The first part of the challenge, then, is to imagine that, whatever shape the world comes to take, life will in fact go on—and that it will acquire forms that are perhaps presently unimaginable. Preparing the groundwork for future possibilities is part of our task in the present.
But the second part of the challenge is to take seriously the possibility that our present set of crises, which have arisen despite our most expert attempts to prevent them, are not merely accidental byproducts of simple bad luck, but that they represent something essential which resides unseen within the logic of our highest techno-rational aspirations. Early in the book, Hine lands on this framing:
Here’s the question I keep coming back to, the one that seems to bring it all into focus: are we in this trouble because of a piece of bad luck with atmospheric chemistry—that all the CO2 unleashed by burning fossil fuels turned out to have unhappy and unforeseeable side effects—or did we get here because of an approach to the world, a way of seeing and treating everything, that would always have brought us to such a pass, even if the climate system had been less sensitive to our industrial emissions?
One way or another, any response to climate change is going to reflect an answer to this question, and how we answer it will determine what kind of action seems worth pursuing. If we’re dealing with a piece of bad luck, then we’ll look for a mix of hacks and fixes to patch up the way we were already doing things and stay on our existing path; if the cause lies in that way of doing things, then while we may need some of the same tricks to handle the immediate mess, the path we are on now looks like a dead end and we are left to look for other paths worth taking.9
If the second of these possibilities is closer to the truth, then even the expertise which we have tended to marshal in order to solve the existing crises will come to appear oddly counterproductive.
Last year, the World Economic Forum received no small amount of press for its use of the term “polycrisis”—which it defined as “a cluster of related global risks with compounding effects, such that the overall impact exceeds the sum of each part”—in its Global Risks Report, an annual publication which analyzes the most significant risks facing the world and how they may shape the future. “As 2023 begins”, the report began, “the world is facing a set of risks that feel both wholly new and eerily familiar.” It continued:
We’ve seen a return of “older” risks—inflation, cost-of-living crises, trade wars, capital outflows from emerging markets, widespread social unrest, geopolitical confrontation, and the spectre of nuclear warfare—which few of this generation’s business leaders or public policymakers have experienced. [...] Together, these are converging to shape a unique, uncertain and turbulent decade to come.
But reading through the report—and despite this early admission that these risks exceed the experience of those tasked with managing them—one is struck by the implicit self-assurance to which it gives voice, by its confident tone which seems everywhere to insist “we’ve got this.”10 These are the words of the globe-trotting jet-setters who have made it their mission to wrangle and take charge of all the world’s biggest problems, and who cannot seriously doubt that they will somehow succeed. And this makes sense: As individuals, the very fact that they find themselves working within an organization like the World Economic Forum means that they have probably found success in just about every endeavor they have ever undertaken in life—multiple degrees, lengthy CVs, shining references, years of experience inside complex and influential institutions—and they see no reason that this success should not continue. According to the terms by which society measures such things, these are the winners, and they believe that the continued success not only of their own careers, but of global peace and prosperity has come to rest on their shoulders.
Now, I want to acknowledge that this ambition is easy enough to understand, and it usually grows out of laudable intentions. The staffers of these organizations are often more than simply academically-gifted, but humane and hardworking people who feel called to do what they consider to be important work. They are moved to do good in the world by devoting their careers to the project of “bring[ing] together government, business and civil society to improve the state of the world.” But if that sounds like the sort of self-congratulatory PR pablum which often emanates from elite institutions, that’s because it is: These are the words with which the WEC introduces itself on the front page of its website. The world, it seems to think, is fundamentally perfectible, on the condition that it is placed in trustworthy hands: its own.11 But above all, it seems to interpret the crises of the modern world—of which, it concedes, there are many—as intrusions from outside, and not as consequences internal to the logic of perfectibility itself. To it, the biggest problem of all is insufficient progress along a preordained path—and not the paradoxes and contradictions that come with progress itself.
These are the people—the business leaders, policy makers, and experts—who get to play the proverbial adults in the room, brimming with what contemporary slang has dubbed “main character energy” against the backdrop of the unfolding drama in which they have cast themselves and made it their mission to sort out; they understand it to be their role to bring expertise and order to the chaotic and misinformed squabbling that is being carried on by most everybody else. These are real challenges, to be sure, but nowhere among the publications that the World Economic Forum puts out do we find anything that could be interpreted as an admission that they might fail to mitigate all the risks, to vanquish the polycrisis, to resolve all the problems. Still less are we offered any sense that the challenges which the Global Risks Report has identified might even reveal something deeply amiss in this project to control the world of which the WEF itself is among the chief exemplars.
But until they are successful, we have reason to wonder what it might mean if, ultimately, they aren’t—that is, what kind of world we will have if the revelations don’t stop coming. Here’s how Hine voices this suspicion:
If the world is made of problems to be solved, then to admit you are out of solutions is to reach the end of the world. To those who get to play the grown-ups in our societies, anything is better than to make such an admission. So it falls to the rest of us, those who are willing to sound foolish, to say that the map is mistaken, the world is not a problem to be solved.
If there is hope today, I am convinced that it lies on the far side of such an admission, though the admission itself may feel a lot like despair. This is especially so for those who have spent their lives most deeply embedded in the large institutions, public or private, that structure the world as we have known it.12
And so, one kind of crisis leads to another—the tangible realities of political conflict, climate change, the feeling of out-of-control and directionless technological acceleration—can prefigure a crisis of a different sort, at least for many of us: a crisis of the very self-confidence that led us in the first place to build the institutions and structures that now appear to be cracking up.
It can feel like a trespass with its own kind of imperial ambition, one which aims to pronounce upon a situation that is fundamentally beyond my ken, even to write such things, to admonish the authorities and experts who are, after all, only trying to fix the problems, and it is to suggest a degree of self-certainty which I don’t actually possess. Perhaps it is asking too much for such institutions to recognize the futility of this project, let alone to say so publicly. But for those of us who do, who are less committed to controlling things and more willing to think our way into uneasy territory, seeking out alternative paths into futures that look radically different from the ones that once defined our collective cultural aspirations now feels like a worthy and urgent task. By and large, such voices have been marginal in the discourse of modernity during the time in which its most audacious promises were more persuasive than they have recently become. These big stories, the ones that have been running the world for some time now, do not seem equipped to come to our rescue, or even to persuade us any longer with their hopeful vision which once commanded our collective sense of the future.
Whenever I am asked to state briefly what it is I write about, I’ve found that one good answer to that question is that I am exploring my suspicion that the distinctly modern stories we like to tell—above all our stories about what technology is, what it’s for, and where it’s going—are badly mistaken. It’s easy to point to the ways technology has improved the world, especially when we allow ourselves to default to the data-driven language of quantification which is native to technical thinking. But it’s much harder to articulate—often because it involves disavowing, at least to some extent, the satisfying precision that it offers—the many tradeoffs and thoughtless choices that have contributed to a dysfunctional relationship with technology. Dougald Hine asks what if all the largest narratives that have founded and sustained modernity are mistaken—or at least so deeply flawed that it is time to begin the painful and confusing process of gradual relinquishment? What kinds of projects are worth taking up, and what sort of work would be worth pursuing if we discover that we have come to believe something so unsettling and disorienting?
Writing in an altogether different context, I concluded an essay late last year with words from Martin Buber, who wrote towards the end of I and Thou that “[t]he sickness of our age is unlike that of any other and yet belongs with the sicknesses of all.”13 Buber, of course, was the preeminent philosopher and theologian of dialogue and relationship in the twentieth century, and here again I find myself treading along a similar path, guided back here with the help of Dougald Hine and At Work in the Ruins: What if these many contemporary crises are consequences, each in its own way, of the modes of relationship we have taken up with the world? Perhaps these “sicknesses” reveal not that our progress along some imagined trajectory has been insufficient—and that therefore what we need is simply more of it—but that the way of relating to the world which sees everything as a problem, as an object to be mastered, is likely always to result not only in the paradoxical withdrawal of a deeply felt connection with the world, but ultimately to crises of a more tangible sort.14 There is, I think, something unique each of us can take from this insight. For Hine, the path forward begins with what is closest to the human being as such—in working to recover the exiled capacities of storytelling and of embodied practice. But I think he would agree that there are many ways to do good work in the ruins.
Here on Substack, Dougald Hine is the author of Writing Home, which I recommend readers check out. A great way into Dougald’s recent thinking can be found in this interview, just released a few weeks ago.
One piece of art from recent years which captures this feeling with an uncanny sensitivity is “That Funny Feeling”, from Bo Burnham’s 2021 film, Inside.
Shannon Vallor, The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking, pg. 9-10.
Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, pg. 115.
Here on Substack, Paul Kingsnorth writes
, which I would recommend to readers who haven’t come across it already.Dougald Hine, At Work in the Ruins, pg. 21.
Fisher writes in his 2009 book, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? that the line “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism” captures the essence of what he means by ‘capitalist realism’ (Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, pg. 2). The line is an adaptation of the late literary critic and political theorist Fredric Jameson, who wrote in the introduction to his 1996 book, Seeds of Time, that “[i]t seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism” (Fredric Jameson, Seeds of Time, pg. xii).
Dougald Hine, At Work in the Ruins, pg. 41.
Ibid., pg. 41-2.
And yet, by my count, some form of the word “crisis”—i.e. “crisis”, “polycrisis”, “crises”, etc.—appears no fewer than 437 times in the 98-page document.
I have written at greater length about the limitations and self-undermining quality of these kinds of perfectibility projects, the most audacious case of which is the effective altruism movement.
Dougald Hine, At Work in the Ruins, pg. 118.
Martin Buber, I and Thou, pt. II.
I borrow the language of “paradoxical withdrawal” from The Uncontrollability of the World by the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa, who writes at one point: “the processes of making the world controllable also has a serious, paradoxical flipside: in many respects, the late modern lifeworld is becoming increasingly uncontrollable, unpredictable, and uncertain. Uncontrollability has returned in many areas of everyday life, but in a new and frightening form, almost as a self-made monster.” (Hartmut Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World, pg. 110). I have made more extensive use of Rosa’s work in an essay earlier this spring.
Thank you for synthesising the important work of so many writers so lucidly and with your own voice and thoughts!
Interesting, but I think we need to be wary of the tendency to turn today’s crisis into a morality play, that’s a universal tendency throughout history and it is not always helpful.