When Everything Is a Crisis, Nothing Is

[Nevilledog]

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/01/when-everything-is-a-crisis-nothing-is/

No word is invoked more to characterize the current era than “crisis.” The term has been wielded incessantly in 2020—already the most tumultuous year since 1968 and still only half over—to designate a series of new and ongoing plights. It has named the “impeachment crisis” and the “constitutional crisis” many thought it revealed, themselves signs of the “crisis of polarization” in U.S. politics. Crisis nearly always describes the coronavirus pandemic and the economic turmoil it has unleashed. Journalists speak of a “crisis of police violence” against Black people in the United States, a slow-burn tragedy that sparked a “crisis of civil unrest” after the killing of George Floyd. And Americans move nervously toward a presidential election whose results, regardless of the outcome, will be thrown into doubt by accusations of foreign meddling or partisan hijacking. A “crisis of legitimacy,” perhaps even a “crisis of emergency powers,” looms on the horizon.

Yet these problems, as awful and intractable as they are, add layers to an already familiar crisis atmosphere: There is also the environmental crisis, the health care crisis, the energy crisis, the housing crisis, the drug crisis, the debt crisis, the migrant crisis, the education crisis, and the marriage crisis. There is even a loneliness crisis.

None of these problems can be isolated; each extends into other domains embroiled in their own dysfunction, with the result that the world feels entangled in overlapping and intersecting crises.

How is it, then, that the term “crisis” should apply across so many fields—foreign affairs, domestic politics, climate, culture, economics, to name only a few? Does “crisis” have any meaning, beyond just a catch-all term for “trouble”? Is there any logic, or novelty, to the constant proclamations of crisis?

*snip*