What does the term meta-crisis mean?
After repeatedly seeing the concept of meta-crisis (also spelled metacrisis and meta crisis), I finally decided it was time to put together an introductory synthesis to educate myself. Here’s everything I learned. Enjoy!
Quick Housekeeping:
- All content in quotation marks comes from the original authors mentioned.
- All content is grouped into my own themes.
- I’ve added emphasis in bold for readability/skimmability.
Post Contents: Click a link here to jump to a section below
A Crisis of Crises: What is the Meta-Crisis? (+ Infographics)
Meta Defined
Meta means after, beyond, more comprehensive, or transcending. Meta is often used in the form of “x about x” or “x of x” (e.g. metacognition = cognition about/of cognition).
If only it were that simple! Today, meta is used in a multitude of ways. According to Jonathan Rowson (co-founder of Perspectiva):
- “Meta means many things. It’s simplest, it means after. But it’s sometimes used to mean between. It’s sometimes used to mean within. It seems to change its meaning slightly, depending on what it’s describing. It has chameleon quality in that way. So the first thing about meta is to realize it means many things.”
Some examples:
- “The meta in metanoia is mostly beyond—as in the spiritual transformation of going beyond the current structure of the mind (nous).”
- “The meta in metamorphosis and metabolism is a kind of ‘change.'”
- “The meta in metaphor has the composite meaning of the term because metaphor literally means ‘the bearer of meta.'”
There’s also the skill of going meta:
- “How we go meta—when we go meta—it can be done badly or well. And, it’s an intellectual capacity that one uses. When other avenues have been exhausted, other forms of inquiry have been exhausted, we go meta to get clear perspective in one way or the other.”
In many ways, we’re already meta:
- “Giving a speech about how to give a speech is meta.”
- “Writing about how to write well is meta.”
- “Learning how to learn is meta.”
- “If you ‘go meta‘ on oranges and apples you get fruit (or seeds, or trees). If you go meta on fruit you may get to food, and if you go meta on food you may get to agriculture, and then perhaps land and climate, and then either soil and mean surface temperature, or perhaps planet and cosmos.”
Meta-Crisis Defined
Similar to the definitions of meta, there are a wide variety of definitions of meta-crisis.
Daniel Thorson (host of the Emerge podcast & monastic at the Monastic Academy):
- “The meta-crisis = the multiple overlapping and interconnected global crises that our nascent planetary culture faces.”
Terry Patten (philosopher, author, activist, & social entrepreneur):
- “(The meta-crisis is) a single phenomenon. We may be thinking of it as an ecological crisis. We may be thinking of it as a psychological or spiritual crisis. We may be thinking of it as a cultural crisis and a breakdown of community, family, etc. We may be thinking of it as a crisis of government and economics and finance. And, it is all of these things. But, it’s not reducible to any one of them. That’s why it’s a meta-crisis.”
Terry Patten also has probably the most accessible video out there about the meta-crisis to date:
Zak Stein (transformative educator & co-founder of The Consilience Project):
- “There are a large number of crises drawing increasing amounts of public attention, such as the ecological, economic, immigration, geopolitical, and energy crises. But there is also an invisible crisis unfolding within our own minds and cultures that is getting much less attention. This is the metacrisis, which has to do with how humans understand themselves and the world. It is a generalised educational crisis involving a set of related psychological dynamics; systems and societies are in trouble, but it is the psyche—the human dimension—that is in the direst of straits.”
Jonathan Rowson (co-founder of Perspectiva):
- “The metacrisis is the underlying crisis driving a multitude of crises.”
- “We have to better understand who and what we are, individually and collectively, in order to be able to fundamentally change how we act. That conundrum is what is now widely called the meta-crisis lying within, between and beyond the emergency and the crisis. That aspect of our predicament is socio-emotional, educational, epistemic and spiritual in nature.”
- “You could say the meta crisis is the crisis of perception and understanding that lies within the range of crises humanity faces … However, this is another reason why I think the meta crisis language isn’t very helpful. Because things are getting so much better in so many ways, to talk of the meta crisis as if everything was going wrong just doesn’t ring true. It’s altogether more complex than that. So many things are going extremely well that we shouldn’t think that somehow everything is inherently flawed. What’s going on is altogether more tragic. It’s that there’s a hidden pattern laced within what’s going on that’s to do with how things are connected, how they’re evolving, and how they’re coming to a tipping point in which the positive effects will turn negative. And some seem to perceive that more keenly than others.”
Unpacking the Meta-Crisis
The most comprehensive attempts I’ve seen at unpacking the meta-crisis come from Zak Stein and Jonathan Rowson.
4 Aspects (Zak Stein):
This breakdown comes from the Perspectiva article: Education is the Metacrisis
“Welcome to the metacrisis. This is a generalised educational crisis in which, despite all the concrete problems faced by society, the most pressing problems are actually ‘in our heads’ (i.e., in our minds and souls, we are in a crisis of the psyche). This can be made clear by differentiating out the following four aspects.”
1. Sense-making crisis (what is the case?):
- “Confusion at the level of understanding the nature of the world. Everyday people and experts are struggling to say things that are true, unable to comprehend increasing complexity.”
- Worst-case scenario: “complete epistemic unmooring and descent into the cultural vertigo of an inescapable simulation.”
- Best-case scenario: “emergent forms of post-digital individual and collective sense-making spreading on a massive scale.”
2. Capability crisis (how can it be done?):
- “Incapacity at the level of operating on the world intelligently. In all social positions and domains of work, individuals are increasingly unable to engage in problem- solving to the degree needed for continued social integration.”
- Worst-case scenario: “results in catastrophic infrastructure failure due to a brain-power shortage.”
- Best-case scenario: “revivification of guilds and technical educational initiatives for a new economics of social system integration.”
3. Legitimacy crisis (who should do it?):
- “Incoherence at the level of cultural agreements. Political and bureaucratic forms of power are failing to provide sufficiently convincing rationale and justification for trust in their continued authority.”
- Worst-case scenario: “complete citizen-level defection from all organised political bodies.”
- Best-case scenario: “new forms of governance and collective choice-making that are built out from first principles, factoring in dynamics that are digital and planetary.”
4. Meaning crisis (why do it?):
- “Inauthenticity at the level of personal experience. Individuals from all walks of life are questioning the purpose of their existence, the goodness of the world, and the value of ethics, beauty, and truth.”
- Worst-case scenario: “peak alienation and a total mental health crisis.”
- Best-case scenario: “democratisation of enlightenment, sanity and psychological sovereignty.”
4 Patterns & 10 Illustrations (Jonathan Rowson):
This breakdown comes from the Perspectiva article: Tasting the Pickle: Ten flavours of meta-crisis and the appetite for a new civilisation
“I give 10 kinds of meta crisis as a way of showing how ridiculous it is to try and pin it down to one thing. Because once you really understand what we’re talking about here—we’re talking about what’s inside of the crisis, what’s in some ways between different aspects of the crisis, all of these different meanings of meta, what might lie beyond the crisis that we haven’t quite seen—all of the crises come together, it means all of these things, and therefore there’s a sense in which the way to approach the meta crisis is as a living, dynamic experience of being human in this historical moment.”
If you want to watch/listen to Jonathan explain everything:
Pattern 1: The socio-emotional meta/crisis (meta as with/within; the crisis of ‘we’)
“Concerns the subjective and intersubjective features of collective action problems relating to management of various kinds of commons, not least digital and ecological. In essence it’s the problem relating to the limits of compassion and projective identification, and of the world not having a discerning sense of what ‘we’ means in practical, problem-solving or world-creating terms.”
- Illustration 1: Meta/Crisis of Cosmopolitics (we don’t have a viable we): “We keep on talking about we as human nature when there isn’t really any such thing. The we is something to aspire to, to be fought for. We have to create the global we. It doesn’t exist already. One of the meta crises is that we think it’s already there, but actually it isn’t. So, we talk about we have so many years for climate change, or we have to do X, Y, or Z—it’s not adequate.”
Pattern 2: The educational metacrisis (meta as after/within and between; the crisis of education)
“Concerns the emergent properties arising from all our major crises taken together, which entail learning needs at scale, particularly how to make sense of the first planetary civilisation; how to confer legitimacy transnationally; how to do what needs to be done ecologically; and how to clarify collectively what we’re living for without coercion.”
- Illustration 2: Metacrisis in World System Dynamics (we’re not good at joining the dots): “We don’t typically see how the economy, and psychology, and sociology, and technology all fit together. It takes a certain cast of mind to do that.”
- Illustration 3: Metacrisis in Historiography (modernity and postmodernity struggle to procreate): “The major features of our world—and modernity and postmodernity—are struggling to procreate, to create something like metamodernity; or something that’s a new kind of civilization is struggling to be born because we’re caught up in the patterns of modernism and postmodernism.”
- Illustration 4: Metacrisis in Philosophy of Education (we are failing to learn how to learn): “There’s a meta crisis in the philosophy of education, and here I owe a debt of gratitude to Zak Stein. Basically, if you look enough at the world’s problems, you begin to see they all have educational aspects. They’re all calling out for some implicit skills and capabilities that are currently lacking. And, there’s a crisis in education which is, as (Zak) would put it, ‘autopoetic process of societal renewal in which one generation teaches the next how to live, is arguably breaking down.'”
Pattern 3: The epistemic meta-crisis (meta as with/self-reference; the crisis of understanding)
“Concerns ways of knowing that are ultimately self-defeating, underlying mechanisms that subvert their own logics. In essence it’s the problem of ideological and epistemic blind spots.”
- Illustration 5: Meta-crisis in Ideology (our underlying mechanisms subvert their own logics): “We have what Rowan Williams calls ‘underlying mechanisms that subvert their own logics.’ That’s something like: democracy is too democratic, capitalism has problems knowing what to do with money, liberalism has been too liberal.”
- Illustration 6: Meta-crisis in Epistemology (the territory is full of maps): “David Rook put it very elegantly when he said, ‘The reason the map is not the territory is because the territory is full of maps.’ That speaks to our crisis of meaning-making today because we’re trying to describe the world, but we all have different maps and those maps are somehow already in the world. They’re a part of what we’re referring to.”
- Illustration 7: Meta-crisis in Design (we have a suicidal generator function): “This is Daniel Schmachtenberger and Jordan Hall territory, which is we have a suicidal generator function. The world seems to be designed—or it seems to have an underlying logic—that’s leaning towards collapse and we have to redesign it.”
Speaking of the meta-crisis in design (suicidal generator function), here’s an infographic that tries to capture this particular take on the meta-crisis:
Pattern 4: The spiritual meta crisis (meta as beyond; the crisis of imagination)
“Concerns the cultural inability or unwillingness to ‘go meta’ in the right way, for instance to think about the political spectrum rather than merely thinking with it, or for economic commentators to question the very idea of the economy or the nature of money. More profoundly, it is about being cut off from questions about the nature, meaning and purpose of life as a whole as legitimate terrain in our attempts to imagine a new kind of world.”
- Illustration 8: Meta Crisis in Consciousness (we are increasingly disabled by dissonance): “We’re disabled by dissonance, and dissonance is arising because there’s a challenge in making sense of the world as it is—and an inability to go meta in the right way at the right time for the right reason.”
- Illustration 9: Meta Crisis in Arts and Humanities (the imagination is limited by the imaginary): “We struggle to imagine a future world. We’re stuck in some way by the existing imaginary. Our vision of society is somehow stifled. We’ve run out of metaphorical resources, and visions, and symbols, and images that will help us imagine something radically new.”
- Illustration 10: Meta Crisis in Cosmovision (a weakness for one of two kinds of spiritual bypassing): “Our apparent inability or unwillingness in public life to speak about the predicament as a whole, seen cosmologically, seen as this wonderfully unique and anomalous planet that may or not be unique in its life forms and consciousness and meaning-making capacity.”
And, that’s not all!
“In addition to these challenges, we have the underlying crisis in governance, which includes things like what to do with pervasive inequality, and how do you redesign the economy so that it’s no longer about indefinite economic growth? And then it’s also about the emergency. It’s about, what do you do about incipient climate collapse? … These things are all happening at the same time. They’re all part of one predicament that we need to somehow feel our way into and grow into so that we can become what we have to become to deal with these challenges of our time.”
What does it look like when you put it all together? Jonathan Rowson provides the infographic below which shows:
- Horizontal axis: “The nature of the emergency, the crisis, four different kinds of meta crisis, and what it would mean to resolve these things (what I call entelechy, or what we’re trying to get to. What’s the purpose? What’s the direction?)”
- Vertical axis: “What it’s asking us to do, what the path might be to get there, what the obstacles are, what the virtues in play are that we’re called upon to do, and some illustrative examples.”
How to Help in the Meta-Crisis
Whew! If you made it this far, you may be wondering how you can do your part to help in the emerging meta-crisis.
There are countless people and projects already working on various aspects of the meta-crisis. In an attempt to interconnect all of them, I launched a side project:
You May Also Enjoy:
Sources:
- systems-souls-society.com/tasting-the-pickle-ten-flavours-of-meta-crisis-and-the-appetite-for-a-new-civilisation
- systems-souls-society.com/education-is-the-metacrisis
- whatisemerging.com/opinions/how-to-think-about-the-meta-crisis-without-getting-too-excited
- jimruttshow.blubrry.net/currents-jonathan-rowson
- jimruttshow.blubrry.net/the-jim-rutt-show-transcripts/transcript-of-currents-041-jonathan-rowson-on-our-metacrisis-pickle
