Crisis just isn’t what it used to be. Much has changed, and fast, about the intelligibility the concept affords. Crisis-as-it-used-to-be authorized twentieth-century intellectuals in their role in making the unjust world newly—critically—intelligible. What-crisis-became changed this. What-crisis-is-now damages our prospects for intelligibility, the intelligibility of the modern world to selves conscripted to it, and the intelligibility of those selves to each other. Our so-called polycrises indicate the vanishing of the minimum shared intelligibility necessary for a sane human life.[1] So, what we need is a story of crises, of the crisis in crisis and of the crisis of intelligibility. 

A little over a hundred years ago, vanguardist progressives could rally around crisis and be emboldened by it. In 1910, W.E.B. Du Bois, when founding a magazine to speak truth-to-power at the NAACP, could aptly call it, The Crisis.[2] Du Bois exemplifies the relationship between Critique and Crisis,[3] between society and state, between injustice and intelligibility, which had held since the Enlightenment. As Reinhart Koselleck made clear, critique, through this relation to crisis, temporalized time. It drove a wedge between past and future, rendering the relation between them and the tasks of the present as that of problem and solution. Crisis-as-it-used-to-be lay ahead: it could be wholeheartedly welcomed, and its need for intelligibility justified the intellectual task of critique.

By 2010, crisis had become something else. Witness Obama’s uneasy sub-prime refrain: “We are in the midst of a deep crisis.”[4] Recall how his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, echoed Nobel laureate, previously Stanford Graduate School of Business professor, Paul Romer, in saying: “a serious crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”[5] Joe Masco, anthropologist of American crises-cultures and their fallout, declared of that bitter decade: “Crisis had become a counterrevolutionary idiom.”[6] Crisis now stabilized extant institutional arrangements of power, it promoted ugly affects, and it closed, rather than opened, routes to other-possible-better worlds. “A crisis in crisis” thus named the condition where old political expectations were repeatedly unmet in new crisis-moralities. But to consider crisis-as-it-is-now, today, in our half-done decade, is to come upon something a little more harrowing. Cameron Hu, ethnographer of successive connected climate crises, demonstrates that crisis is that observation that binds us to the fix, naturalizing the idea that all politics, insurgent and imperial, should be instrumental in these fire-putting-out ways. As Hu elegantly summarizes, we have all become kinds of crisis actors.[7] Crisis-now informs and disables, focuses and limits our actions as well as their frame: it blinkers our aspirations of shared intelligibility.

How do we circumscribe these claims of what-became-of-crisis? Starting in the 1940s, a dissident tradition in Moral Philosophy presciently argued against acceding to these crisis-set limits of intelligibility. In 1956, Elizabeth Anscombe refused to join her fellow Oxford dons in honoring Harry Truman for his use of the nuclear bomb.[8] In extending her reasons for this refusal, she commented upon the war-time spread of crisis-moralities, memorably naming them as consequentialist.[9] Anscombe so condemned the trolley problems we invent and occupy ourselves with, pointing out that when we focus on what a sufficient justification for the consequences of any action would be, we keep ourselves from attending to how the killing of innocents, then as now, had become intrinsic to modern life.[10]

Anscombe teaches us one non-crisis response is to refuse the urgencies by which every crisis reshapes actions and to instead characterize the emergent disturbing morality this promotes. Jonathan Lear recently outlined another response, drawing attention to a particularly modern kind of vulnerability, one of a crisis of intelligibility itself.[11] Lear shows us that a crisis of intelligibility is apprehended in a crisis of sensibility—of when the world ceases to make sense. It is not that our practices have become impossible (they could), nor that we have lost our concepts (which we also demonstrably could). Rather the entire field of possibilities, "the world," has become vulnerable, it no longer promises any necessity of intelligibility. Consider how we turn to protest, against the outrages of every passing day. It is perhaps the only good and virtuous thing left to do in an ever-more-vicious world. Yet, “nothing happens,” at least not in the way it used to when crisis was as-crises-used-to-be.[12] How could we follow Anscombe and Lear to comment on all that is afoot today? I offer three observations in this spirit: on rules, on selves, and on the emergent market morality of our age. 

Even a decade ago crisis-morality worried about the difference between just and unjust wars; today it abdicates from these niceties.[13] We live in a world of not unjust war but just war, war without end, at least until the stockpiles last. Mere war, just without the regulations or rules.[14] Rules are, of course, as Wittgenstein understood them to be, not commands inferred, but attitudes, sensibilities which a self must be trained into, so as to be disposed towards them.[15] There is much about our crisis-culture which promotes not rule-following, but a distinct rule-hollowing. If two decades ago torture was a scandal, we are sure it is not so now. If even a decade ago, a calculus of collateral had to be staged for empire to be empire, it doesn't now.

What is the self-image of this rule-hollowing age?[16] A post-financial-crisis principle of self-regulation quietly dominated 20th century public morality (from the Great Depression on). It authorized the SEC, NYSE and FINRA and other such self-regulatory organizations, which promote free markets within the hollows of liberal democracy. These successive responses to crises authorized self-regulatory fantasies across previously disconnected arenas. What was once applied to markets and corporations is now extended to technology and states and wars and selves. This self-regulationism, to coin a word for this morality of the now, has outstripped consequentialism. The self-regulatory impulse proceeds plainly, annulling regulations, protections and laws, relying on an existing consensus that governance and law need to be circumscribed for these market-ready authorities. Tellingly, the self here is not a particular nor even a human self: “Rather it connotes some degree of [non-governmental] collective constraint … to engender outcomes which would not be reached by individual market behaviour alone.”[17] The hollow self-regulationist “agent” knows they do not need to justify their actions by any necessary account of its calculus of consequences. While much commentary focuses on neoliberal hollowing of regulation, I want to stay with its hollowing of selfhood.[18]

What then of intelligibility between worlds and selves c. mid-2026? You might hold on to your revolutionary hopes of crisis-as-it-used-to-be, but those who await, even hasten, the next crisis relish how every successive crisis shreds our mutual intelligibility. The arc of market morality has bent from rule-hollowing financialized speculation (as in 2008) to the quest today to “transform every difference of opinion into a financial asset.”[19] If insider trading was once a scandal, now the market taunts and tempts it out into the open. Bet on your own team, we’re told it's fine. Generations of those adept in moving fast and breaking things have authored a world so broken, their instincts to break it again home in on the impasses which liberalism thrives on and reproduces. This disruptive jouissance innovates to set odds on opinions, knowing well that this further frays the agreements necessary for intelligibility. Even Truth, as polymarketed today, will self-regulate and follow the money. The law of the excluded middle no longer applies to our world.[20] Or, in other words, in these speculative probabilisms of polycontingent futures[21] non-contradiction no longer holds. Impossible worlds[22] arrive before promised possible worlds.[23]

Crisis truly isn't what it used to be. I’m not sure we can keep talking in the crisis-critical ways we were used to.