Lists lack structure. They beg the question of order and weighting. What is the underlying principle that organizes the separate points? Are they an expression of our mental incapacity to satisfying synthesize or to discern the deeper underlying logic? Are they, indeed, something worse, a failure to face up to the stark fact that at the root of everything there is one basic causal driver? Capitalism, for sake of argument. To that extent is the “baggy” (not to say carrier bag) theory of polycrisis an ideological snare, a failure of intellectual backbone, of moral fibre on the part of the analyst?
Obviously, I think not. In fact, I’m persuaded by the opposite point of view. If you are not willing to face the “baggy”, inchoate nature of our current situation, if you are not willing to take seriously the possibility that our situation is historically novel (as in a product of the “great acceleration”, of which there is a dawning awareness in social and environmental sciences since the 1970s etc etc) and that this fundamentally challenges our existing frameworks of analysis (as grasped amongst others by Ulrich Beck), then you are involved in a kind of escapism that may turn out to be dangerous. But let’s come back to that on another, more leisured occasion.