The Polycrisis, Knowledge, And AI

“In the polycrisis the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts.” That truism and bit of circular thinking is what passes for responding to the multifaceted planetary crisis facing humankind.

In truth, what’s being called a polycrisis is not the “interaction of disparate shocks,” but invidious manifestations from an underlying source. Viewing the crisis in terms of separate crises converging is not only part of the problem, but prevents seeing and attending to its unrecognized roots.

Linguistically, polycrisis is a misnomer, since “poly” means “many.” It should be “polycrises.” At least that would signal the futility of trying to resolve humankind’s immense challenges at the external, manifested level.

The term “polycrisis” is tremendously disturbing. A more accurate word is “monocrisis,” since man’s many crises are collapsing into a single planetary crisis with many facets.

Yet at the conventional level, one hears things like, “It’s often unclear even to experts how global systems interact because they are siloed in their disciplines.”

It falsely follows that siloing is the problem, that it “limits our ability to confront intersecting problems: the climate crisis forces migration; xenophobia fuels the rise of the far right in receiving countries; far-right governments undermine environmental protections; natural disasters are more destructive.”

Though there is a synergistic effect of interrelated crises, the real limitation is the horizontal approach. The roots of the polycrisis lie much deeper than its many facets, and require a vertical approach.

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Besides, experts are inherently specialized in their knowledge; that’s what makes them experts. And their specialized knowledge strongly tends to make them siloed in their disciplines. Adding to the problem by giving them special status (implied by the phrase “even the experts”) misses the mark in polyways.

Separate disciplines cannot be united to form a whole view. We have to begin with a whole view, and experts are nearly precluded by their specialized knowledge from doing so.

Thinking in terms of experts, the solution becomes bringing experts in the climate crisis, the migration crisis and geopolitics together. That’s futile, as is the drive to “create a community of scholars and experts and scientists and policy makers around the world who are using this concept of polycrisis in constructive ways.”

Again, to frame the polycrisis as “how global systems interact” is to skate on the surface, to mistake effects, however much they interact, with the forces below the surface that are giving rise to a monocrisis.

Let’s cut to the chase. It’s inherently inadequate to use knowledge, much less specialized knowledge, to meet humanity’s multi-faceted crisis. Philosophical inquiry is required. Is there a single source to the converging crises confronting the individual and humanity?

Obviously, “we’ve got to get the diagnosis right before we can go to the prescription.” But it’s the wrong diagnosis to “look at how stresses on various systems – climate, geopolitics, transportation, information, etc – intersect.” And the prescription of “identifying high leverage intervention points -- places where you can go in and have a really big impact for a relatively low investment” is just a placebo.

In brief, the human intellect lies at the root of the “polycrisis.” Man (and I use the word advisedly) has accumulated an immense amount of knowledge, but is utterly lacking in the intelligent use of knowledge. And scientists and scholars do not have any greater claim to the intelligent application of the knowledge they hold than anyone else.

Indeed, experts are much more responsible for the polycrisis than the average person. So turning to them as oracles for the future of humanity can only compound the polycrisis.

The endless attempts to remedy the multifaceted planetary crisis through the intellect and in terms of knowledge are fruitless. And yet now thought leaders hope in vain that exponentially increasing power of the intellect through AI will solve the immense challenges of the polycrisis and lead to a better world.

In fact, AI is defining the inherent limits of the intellect and knowledge, and the failure to see this has opened the door to the anti-intellectualism and anti-scientism so evident in America today.

There is a way ahead that isn’t led by the intellect and knowledge. The human brain has an unlimited capacity for insight, which can be defined as the wordless moment or state of direct perception and understanding that encompasses both the head and the heart.

Insight does not have its source in knowledge or the intellect, but in the space and silence of the questioning, attentive brain. To this point in human history, insight has been the source of the expansion of knowledge. Now AI is making novel connections between bits of information or systems of knowledge, and people are foolishly calling that insight. But AI cannot and will not ever have insight.

The real and present danger of AI is that it will destroy the brain’s potential for insight if we continue to give primacy to the intellect and knowledge, much less merge with these thought machines we’ve created in our own image.

What is the solution to this aspect of the polycrises, and to the monocrisis in general? Let AI have preeminence in knowledge and cognition, while we humans fully awaken insight within ourselves. Then we’ll see how to use AI, and knowledge itself, to the benefit of humanity, rather than as they are, for waging machine-assisted wars, increasing greater disparities of wealth, and giving people avatar “companions.”

The polycrises/monocrisis is driving a leap in human consciousness. A new human being, despite and because of the overwhelming darkness and dead-endedness of man, may be about to emerge. God help us if s/he doesn’t.

Martin LeFevre: lefevremartin77@gmail

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