Crisis Unleashed
To say the present era is one of crisis borders on cliché. Habitual and familiar, this crisis difers from the dystopias of George Orwell or Aldous Huxley, or hell in the paintings of Bosch or the last days of Earth as told in the Book of Revelations. It is unlike Europe during the Black Death or Central Asia as it faced the galloping Golden Horde. Here, instead, we inhabit a world in free-fall and yet we are all along for the ride.
Some aspects of this, like the European migration crisis, are highly mediatised and public. Here, people displaced by war and social breakdown migrate, often meeting with hostility in response. While for previous generations the Berlin Wall was totemic of division, only 235 people died trying to cross it. Compare that to the 3,770 souls who died or went missing in the Mediterranean trying to reach the shores of Europe just in 2015. And if, as an undocumented migrant, you are fortunate enough to safely cross the Mediterranean, or the US–Mexico border, or the fences and forests between Hungary and Bulgaria, your problems are only just beginning.
There are of course other expressions of our broken world that are equally profound, if less immediately obvious. One is a crisis of mental health, with suicide the leading killer of British men under the age of fifty and depression expected to be the leading cause of the global burden of disease by 2030.
Others still are less easy to personalise, remaining incomprehensible on a human scale. One is a crisis of the state, as agency ebbs to the market and an increasingly globalised economy undermines the ability of nations to act decisively. This process of market and capital integration – where commodities move more seamlessly than ever – is entirely at odds with the experience of displaced peoples and undocumented migrants as they face walls, surveillance and ever more securitised borders.
The Great Disorder
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