Polycrisis

Open Source with Christopher Lydon

Christopher Lydon

Arts

4.7 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 4 November 2022

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Finally, there’s a word for it: the polycrisis, to describe the multiple messes we’re in. Our guest the historian Adam Tooze says it’s a polycrisis when old crises like war, weather, and disease are breeding ...

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	I'm Christopher Lighten. This is Open Sores.
0:03.5	Adam Tewes is our Raditat Talker on the tightrope.
0:07.5	Our English-American historian of this age of waking nightmares,
0:13.3	pandemic, megastorms, migration, inflation,
0:17.1	grain war, energy war, war war in Ukraine.
0:21.6	Adam Tewes is our polymath in what he has just decided to call
0:26.2	the polycrisis. The polypart refers not just to many crises,
0:31.2	but to the variety of shapes and sizes and origin stories that come with the disruption.
0:37.2	Together, they are transforming the world faster now than ever in history,
0:42.2	he says, but they are not together, meaning that no common remedy will treat them.
0:48.2	One more key thing about the polycrisis, Adam Tewes will tell you
0:52.2	is that nobody really has a handle on this monster.
0:55.7	Not the bankers, or the military men, or the experts, not even Adam Tewes.
1:00.7	It's overwhelming for sure. It's not something I made up.
1:03.7	It was out there. It's a found concept.
1:05.7	I think it's got messy in Europe around 2014, 2015, 2016,
1:08.7	where you had the first iteration of the Ukraine crisis,
1:11.7	you had the Syrian refugee crisis, you had the Greek debt crisis,
1:14.7	oil boiling up at the same time, populism, ultimately Brexit, Trump,
1:18.7	the whole works, and I thought, wow, that's really interesting,
1:21.7	that people should be using this capacious idea,
1:24.7	that characterizes the present precisely in terms of the variety
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Christopher Lydon, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Christopher Lydon and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.