If we’ve had an in-person conversation in the past two years, there is a non-zero chance that I’ve subjected you to my opinions on the popularity of the word “unprecedented.” I have the impression that my irritation is widely shared. At any rate, a lot of people discovered the word all at once and embraced it:
Unprecedented’s ubiquity has reached a point where I can’t let myself get annoyed by it anymore, unless I’m willing to be riled up by almost every podcast I listen to and news outlet I read. Instead, I take a deep breath and remind myself that people are understandably pleased to flex their new vocabulary — even if it’s inaccurately used as a synonym for “shocking” or “different.”1 Now that we know this word (another 2020 leftover, along with the home-sewn masks and industrial quantities of hand sanitizer), we seem to favour it over more colloquial phrases, like “never-before-seen” or “worst/best in years.”
A lack of precedence incites a sense of crisis, although it’s a shortcut rather than a prerequisite. The unknown can be uncomfortable precisely because it’s unclear whether or not we’re supposed to do anything. It’s not a given that an event that stretches the limits of our collective memory is adverse, but if our intervention seems to be needed to avoid disaster — especially if we don’t know how or when to intervene — crisis comes on quickly.
I haven’t seen crisis’ frequency of use plotted on a graph. But even as these words collude with each other to direct our concept of the social, local, and global challenges that we face, they also reveal something about how we are managing our communal nervous system.
First, a disclaimer: The faddishness of word etymology in cultural thinkpieces is a(nother) pet peeve of mine; I see it as a cop-out to let a dictionary definition do the heavy lifting of meaning-making. However, I think it’s useful here to look at where crisis comes from and how its significance has changed.
The English word “crisis” comes from the Greek noun krisis, meaning decision or a decisive point.2 Until the 17th century, it was mainly used in medical contexts to describe the critical moment in an illness or disease. After the crisis, the patient would either recover or die. This suggestion of existential stakes soon made “crisis” a useful word in other contexts, like politics and religion, whose leaders could imbue their actions (or calls to action) with life- and soul-saving heroism.
Many more situations qualify for crisis status.
Crisis, therefore, was existentially threatening, more often externally indicated than internally perceived — and temporary. It could be identified as it was happening or defined as such after the fact. That describes some of the crises we know today, but our expansive contemporary circumstances mean that many more situations qualify for crisis status. Indeed, we’re so quick to apply the label that some modern-day historians have retroactively branded the whole of the 17th century as the “General Crisis.”
President Jimmy Carter’s 1979 address to the United States could be torn from the pages of 2022, pointing as it does to “every extreme position defended to the last vote, almost to the last breath by one unyielding group or another.” In part, his speech lays out the government’s response to rising energy costs, inflation, and over-dependence on foreign oil imports. But the tone is also somber; Carter opens with a lengthy recounting of conversations he had with alarmed citizens and his assessment of the ills plaguing the country.3
A Short List of crises we are in, have been in, or are about to be in:
crisis of confidence (amiright?)
climate crisis
cost of living crisis
financial crisis4
food crisis
water crisis
housing crisis
energy crisis
economic crisis
ecologic crisis
humanitarian crisis
health crisis
mental health crisis
Cuban missile crisis
Berlin crisis5
civic crisis
crisis of faith
crisis of care
crisis of conscience
crisis of freedom
crisis of democracy
constitutional crisis
Then there’s the midlife crisis. Also: the quarter-life crisis, an unimaginative term for uncertainty that is neither of the mid-teens, coming-of-age variety nor the middle-aged, seeking-reassurance-and-renewal type.
Too young for a midlife crisis, too old for the quarter-life version. And my Saturn return is already finished.
“What crisis am I in?” I ask my dear friend Vanessa. She’s known me since I was 15.
“Maybe life is one long crisis,” she answers sanguinely. General Crisis, indeed.
Situations might arise quickly but the aftermath of crisis likes to linger, long and slow. Whereas once a crisis was defined by its resolution, either in death or recovery, so many life-threatening troubles feel like they’re on a dimmer switch. And crucially, some threats progress at length before experts and leaders are prepared or willing to respond to them. Imagining the medical equivalent is frustrating and yet, all too real.
These are more like chronic illnesses than medical emergencies — recovery is partial and danger recedes without a concrete ending. So, what happens to us within this modern paradigm, when the time for decisive action has already passed but the panic lights are still on? How do we experience renewed urgency if we’re narratively saturated with it?
I think the war in Ukraine is a sharp example of this. In the circles that I move in, the acute crisis of Russia’s initial invasion has dulled to a chronic, guilt-ridden hum. The dimmer switch has been turned down, even though the situation still warrants international attention.
Crisis is “central to politics and the possibility of justice and participatory communal life,” writes D. Brendan Johnson. And even though we have since created a “separation of meaning between ‘subjective decision’ and ‘objective crisis6,’” which didn’t exist in classical Greece, ideas of crisis hold possibilities for how we conceptualize justice and community. They continue:
Exploring notions of crisis, discernment, and thresholds allow us to respond well to contemporary challenges both medical and social.
This is where we have, in my opinion, failed in regards to Ukraine. I haven’t heard enough discussion of how the crisis in Ukraine has crossed a threshold over the course of the year and is now drawing a different kind of attention. (If this discussion exists somewhere, please loop me in!) The acuity has evolved, but we haven’t collectively regulated.
There’s an awareness, at least within my personal circle, of how frayed our individual nervous systems have become in the past several years. I wonder, though, inspired by the title of Margo Jefferson’s new memoir, Constructing a Nervous System, what work we could do to reconstruct and regulate the nervous system of our body politic.
We’ve stripped crisis of its urgency and uncertainty.
New questions, then: What would that work look like? Could we we restructure how we discern crises? Let’s not apply the term to every scrap of bad news that floats across our collective consciousness. Let’s try, for a change, having challenges, issues, problems, difficulties, and situations. For increased drama or devastating events, there are plenty of other words that we can turn to: disaster, catastrophe, calamity, tragedy, cataclysm — the thesaurus goes on. Through overexposure, I think we’ve stripped crisis of its urgency and uncertainty, which is a duality that it’s uniquely able to express.
Or what if, perhaps, we articulate more clearly how crises — and our feelings about them — evolve over time? With the pace of global change, it can feel impossible to focus on last week’s crisis when a new one is bearing down on us this week. But that lack of regulatory processing doesn’t leave us in a state that’s very conducive to building the justice and community to which (I think) most of us aspire. In the book, Jefferson reimagines a personal nervous system as a “structure of recombinant thoughts, memories, feelings, sensations and words.” Could we ritualize this kind of recombination at a collective level? What would become possible if we could?
The list of valid concerns is long. I don’t think it’s helpful, though, to see our trajectory as a General Crisis: a permanent state of dysregulation and helplessness. It’s more like a series of contraction and inflection points, where life narrows and splits off again afterward, only to run up against the next decisive moment. Sometimes urgent action is needed, sometimes not. Some of these inflection points deserve thoughtful attention as they evolve. They may look less like crises in the rearview mirror, but yes, alright, some of them are justly unprecedented.
Questions to Ask by candlelight.
The synonymity only goes one way: unprecedented is different, but different isn’t necessarily unprecedented. Ahem.
Credit here to my brilliant friend Judith, who pointed out that the Greek origins of the word also bring to mind the function of tragic crisis in ancient Greek theatre as a propellent for plot.
Speaking of ills plaguing the United States, I hadn’t expected to feel so acutely aware of American democracy in action when the November 8th midterm election came around this year. Being in the U.S. on that date, watching a ballot being filled out and then riding along to the post office to mail it: I had a small surge of relief and gratitude that conscientious Americans are still showing up to vote in these elections that have potentially significant consequences all over the world.
For your further reading enjoyment: a history of finance in five crises.
Here, Johnson is citing the work of Reinhart Kosseleck.