In our current bleak days, it’s easy to forget that throughout history there’s always a crisis going on. Those in the middle of a specific crisis (that would be us!) often lose perspective amid the pressures and urgencies of the moment. Indeed, I might suggest that we can see that crises are often (usually?) the product of overfocusing on those urgencies and putting off dealing with the important underlying issues until the pressures build up and they crater into their own urgent crisis down the road.
Even if I am wrong in my causal analysis, it’s hard to argue against the notion that crises arise due to the accumulation of change, often sprinkled with some dramatic event which manifests those changes. Since History can be characterized as the study of change over time and since Historians are not above (over-)dramatizing their work, it’s no wonder that “crisis” appears frequently in History book titles.
There’s the “July Crisis” (summer of 1914 leading up to WWI), the “General Crisis of the 17th Century,” Marx’s ongoing “crisis of capitalism,” just to name a few and not to mention the innumerable localized or brief crises scattered about, usually of a geopolitical or economic nature. We have “constitutional crises” (Dred Scott, Nixon, Trump) and the Brits have “cabinet crises.” It’s hard to tell the difference between a “problem” and a “crisis;” so much so that I suspect using the term “crisis” is just a way to claim attention, either contemporaneously or historically.
Most History books that aren’t “crisis” centered focus rather on “transitions.” How many times have I read: “It was a time of transition from [A] to [B]”? As if. As if there’s not always some transition going on. The nature of history (small h) is that change is always happening: From the Mughals to the Raj, from sail to steam, from foragers to growers, from search engines to AI. As Johan Gouldsblom suggested, pretty much all of history can be summed up as: First, nobody has xx, then some folks have xx, then everybody has xx. Despite our idealization of the past captured in some historical ‘snapshot,” in fact (with the possible exception of “revolutions”) there is no stability from which any particular change is a remarkable difference. And, of course, few of these transitions have much in the way of a clearly demarcated starting point or ending.
Perhaps crises are merely the crux points of transitions.
It’s also worth noting that much of this crisis/transition sensibility comes from elites who have the ability to observe this level of change. There are many (most?) whose lives are precarious and in a constant state of crisis; but they don’t write books or blogs.
In any event, characterizing some change as either a crisis or a transition is, likely as not, merely a rhetorical device. Sometimes, these are useful as when a historian puts a new frame of interpretation on events, such as the shift from plain old cell phones to “smart” phones or the shift in political alignment among Southern whites from the Democrats to the GOP in the aftermath of the mid-20C Civil Rights movement. Sometimes, however, putting “crisis” in the title is just a way to sell books.
The insightful historian Adam Tooze (2022) characterizes our current era as being in a “polycrisis,” highlighting the multiple overlapping issues that seem to be coming to a head in the 2020s. It’s not a terrible word (and certainly preferable to the overused “perfect storm” metaphor), but as with the 17C or the 1930s (just to pick two examples), any good crisis worth its name always include multiple components and angles.
One important perspective that arises from looking at the history of crises is that whoever comes out the end figures out how to make do and eventually we get to us in the present day. In other words, however much contemporaries bewail their particular circumstances as the end of the world, it isn’t. And, as noted from the beginning of this blog series, there are few lessons to be taken from these events/developments and fewer occasions for judgmentalism. If the Russians had deployed a bit more sophisticated military planning in 1914, the “July Crisis” would likely have ended up as a relatively forgettable third Balkan War rather than a continental conflagration. While we know the damage that resulted in the event, we don’t know how the world would have been along the line of that alternate history; so we can’t say which was worse or start blaming anyone for what we ended up with. Crises that get resolved get forgotten and subsumed into the flow of history.
Perhaps it’s a fundamental human addiction to adrenalin that makes it so attractive/effective/ necessary to hype things up and overdramatize the mundane. Perhaps parts of us secretly want to (as the Chinese curse) “live in interesting times.” On the other hand, it’s hard to blame those (myself included on some scores) who try to bang the drum loudly when they see peril coming and unattended to. We revert to whatever devices lay at hand, including rhetoric, to rouse the sleeping populace even at the risk of overusing and devaluing the language to the point of moral exhaustion. On the other hand, Paul Revere would not likely have cried out to Lexington and Concord that “the British crisis is coming.”
The real test of a crisis is what we do with it. As Winston Churchill (perhaps apocryphally) and Rahm Emmanual (certainly) said: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Still, historically, most crises do; folks muddle through until a bunch more changes pile up, we go through a transition or two and then walk into the next crisis. Those that then try to seize the day are called “revolutionaries.” They, too almost always end up in a crisis of their own soon enough.
Even if I am wrong in my causal analysis, it’s hard to argue against the notion that crises arise due to the accumulation of change, often sprinkled with some dramatic event which manifests those changes. Since History can be characterized as the study of change over time and since Historians are not above (over-)dramatizing their work, it’s no wonder that “crisis” appears frequently in History book titles.
There’s the “July Crisis” (summer of 1914 leading up to WWI), the “General Crisis of the 17th Century,” Marx’s ongoing “crisis of capitalism,” just to name a few and not to mention the innumerable localized or brief crises scattered about, usually of a geopolitical or economic nature. We have “constitutional crises” (Dred Scott, Nixon, Trump) and the Brits have “cabinet crises.” It’s hard to tell the difference between a “problem” and a “crisis;” so much so that I suspect using the term “crisis” is just a way to claim attention, either contemporaneously or historically.
Most History books that aren’t “crisis” centered focus rather on “transitions.” How many times have I read: “It was a time of transition from [A] to [B]”? As if. As if there’s not always some transition going on. The nature of history (small h) is that change is always happening: From the Mughals to the Raj, from sail to steam, from foragers to growers, from search engines to AI. As Johan Gouldsblom suggested, pretty much all of history can be summed up as: First, nobody has xx, then some folks have xx, then everybody has xx. Despite our idealization of the past captured in some historical ‘snapshot,” in fact (with the possible exception of “revolutions”) there is no stability from which any particular change is a remarkable difference. And, of course, few of these transitions have much in the way of a clearly demarcated starting point or ending.
Perhaps crises are merely the crux points of transitions.
It’s also worth noting that much of this crisis/transition sensibility comes from elites who have the ability to observe this level of change. There are many (most?) whose lives are precarious and in a constant state of crisis; but they don’t write books or blogs.
In any event, characterizing some change as either a crisis or a transition is, likely as not, merely a rhetorical device. Sometimes, these are useful as when a historian puts a new frame of interpretation on events, such as the shift from plain old cell phones to “smart” phones or the shift in political alignment among Southern whites from the Democrats to the GOP in the aftermath of the mid-20C Civil Rights movement. Sometimes, however, putting “crisis” in the title is just a way to sell books.
The insightful historian Adam Tooze (2022) characterizes our current era as being in a “polycrisis,” highlighting the multiple overlapping issues that seem to be coming to a head in the 2020s. It’s not a terrible word (and certainly preferable to the overused “perfect storm” metaphor), but as with the 17C or the 1930s (just to pick two examples), any good crisis worth its name always include multiple components and angles.
One important perspective that arises from looking at the history of crises is that whoever comes out the end figures out how to make do and eventually we get to us in the present day. In other words, however much contemporaries bewail their particular circumstances as the end of the world, it isn’t. And, as noted from the beginning of this blog series, there are few lessons to be taken from these events/developments and fewer occasions for judgmentalism. If the Russians had deployed a bit more sophisticated military planning in 1914, the “July Crisis” would likely have ended up as a relatively forgettable third Balkan War rather than a continental conflagration. While we know the damage that resulted in the event, we don’t know how the world would have been along the line of that alternate history; so we can’t say which was worse or start blaming anyone for what we ended up with. Crises that get resolved get forgotten and subsumed into the flow of history.
Perhaps it’s a fundamental human addiction to adrenalin that makes it so attractive/effective/ necessary to hype things up and overdramatize the mundane. Perhaps parts of us secretly want to (as the Chinese curse) “live in interesting times.” On the other hand, it’s hard to blame those (myself included on some scores) who try to bang the drum loudly when they see peril coming and unattended to. We revert to whatever devices lay at hand, including rhetoric, to rouse the sleeping populace even at the risk of overusing and devaluing the language to the point of moral exhaustion. On the other hand, Paul Revere would not likely have cried out to Lexington and Concord that “the British crisis is coming.”
The real test of a crisis is what we do with it. As Winston Churchill (perhaps apocryphally) and Rahm Emmanual (certainly) said: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Still, historically, most crises do; folks muddle through until a bunch more changes pile up, we go through a transition or two and then walk into the next crisis. Those that then try to seize the day are called “revolutionaries.” They, too almost always end up in a crisis of their own soon enough.
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