"If you think about it, everything has gotten worse and worse since the beginning of time. Air and water anyway, then manners, political personalities, cohesion among people, men's tennis and the aroma of tomatoes. Yes, the globe has Homo sapiens, and its only certain future is the crisis to which we are constantly giving new names, names like global warming, ocean acidification, melting glaciers, migration, burnout, drought, religious and trade wars, rising sea levels, desertification, resource scarcity, overpopulation, species extinction, multi-resistant germs. We can't hear it anymore, can we?" (translated from Roger Willemsen (2016): “Wer wir waren”, p. 8f.).
Is crisis the new normal? What does "crisis" actually mean? And how has our relationship to crisis changed in recent years? These questions are fundamental to our research work in the field of (systemic) resilience.
The great crisis construction
We are constantly living in times of crisis. According to Prisching (1986), the crisis is the "basic mood of an epoch" and according to Koselleck (1982), the crisis has become "the structural signature of modern times". However, crises are discursive and socially constructed phenomena, and what is considered to be a crisis "cannot be defined once and for all, but depends on the respective relevance criteria, and these are subject to historical change and vary culturally" (Nünning 2013). Accordingly, the concept of crisis is difficult to grasp - and enjoys frequent use.
In the media, crises attract attention, satisfy sensationalism and increase circulation. Politically, crises are instrumentalized in the battle between different patterns of interpretation. In every crisis constellation, there are various social forces and actors who have different interests with regard to the diagnosis of the crisis and the resulting therapies.
Is the crisis therefore the "new normal"? For Reckwitz (2018), modern societies are structurally "in a permanent crisis mode", and modern people can even be characterized as "crisis beings" (Schulze 2011). The crisis is thus normalized and loses its drama. The question of critical thresholds and benchmarks for crises, as well as the empirical measurability and theoretical justification of crises, "is one of the unresolved, theoretically abstract questions of crisis theory that perhaps cannot be fully resolved" (Merkel 2015). Nevertheless, we should make the effort to attempt a definition.
We are in crisis: a definition
"In ancient Greece, the term had the meaning of life or death (medicine), right or wrong (law) or salvation or damnation (theology). In Roman times, the Latin term crisis focused on the field of medicine. The crisis here is the culmination of an illness that leads to healing (life) or danger (death); in China, the term crisis is represented by two characters that have the meaning of danger (wei) and chance/opportunity (ji)" (translated from Bünder 2020).
Crisis therefore refers to a "decision", a "decisive turning point" and means a "difficult situation, a time that represents the climax and turning point of a dangerous development" (Duden). However, the fact that this is a turning point can often only be established after the crisis has been averted or ended. If the development takes a permanently negative course, it is referred to as a catastrophe - although the outcome is open in the term "crisis". In neutral terms, crises lead to developments that are uncertain as to whether they would or would have taken place without a crisis. In this respect, every crisis actually contains an opportunity, in line with Churchill's philosophy ("Never waste a good crisis.").
However, not every critical situation is already a crisis. Crises generally consist of a collection of critical situations. Critical means that these are decisive phases for the further course of the overall process. Critical situations can be planned, foreseeable or occur completely unexpectedly. Steg (2020) has compiled some characteristics of crises:
Crisis is the unintentional deviation from normality.
Crises can basically be understood as escalating decision-making phases with a basically open outcome. As a result of previous events and as a preliminary stage of future developments, they are both a product of development and a producer of development and determine the further course of the phenomenon in crisis.
These phases of escalation are dramatic as a crisis because society, a social context or an organism reaches the limits of its ability to function, its identity or even its existence. Crises have a specific logic and momentum of their own, so that to a certain extent they are beyond control and management.
Crises reveal undesirable developments so that previous routines and rules, familiar forms of action, ways of thinking, structural patterns and systems of order are called into question and open up options for criticism, intervention and design.
As their outcome is fundamentally open, crises systematically produce a moment of ambiguity, uncertainty and insecurity and point to a contingent future.
Not one crisis, but many: the polycrisis
"In the past two decades, we have been confronted with the so-called refugee and migration crisis, the banking, financial and economic crisis, the sovereign debt and euro crisis, the crisis of democracy, (popular) parties and representation, the crisis of the welfare state, the media crisis, the education crisis and the demographic crisis. In addition, there are humanitarian crises as well as intra-societal and inter-state conflicts and wars that are perceived as crises. Not forgetting relationship, marriage or family crises and individual crises such as depression, burnout or midlife crises. Individual economic sectors or companies are constantly in crisis, while athletes and sports clubs report crises of form or results" (translated from Steg 2020).
The "Krisennavigator - Institut für Krisenforschung", a spin-off from Kiel University, records all internal or external events that pose an acute threat to living beings, the environment, assets or the reputation of a company or institution and comes up with a figure of over 40,000 crises per year. Even if the broad spectrum of "crises" already indicates that some are more crisis-prone (as they threaten the existence of their system) than others, the sheer volume alone is striking. We live in times of upheaval.
"We have entered a time of unprecedented and destabilizing change: an entirely new era of human society and economic organization - what I call the exponential age" (translated from Azhar 2021). The world is changing at an enormous pace due to digitalization. The pressure to make decisions and shape change is correspondingly high. However, according to Azhar (2021), the claim to shape change is encountering and failing in reality due to an exponential gap between rapid technological development on the one hand and old institutions, tools and thought patterns on the other. In addition, according to his thesis, we are currently hardly in a position to assess or even predict future technological developments.
As a result, a whole series of new crises are emerging and will continue to emerge in the foreseeable future, but they can no longer be viewed and resolved in isolation. The French philosopher and complexity theorist Edgar Morin (1999) coined the term "polycrisis" (today sometimes also referred to as "stacked crisis").
A polycrisis can be defined as a situation in which the whole is more dangerous than the sum of its parts. In other words, the individual crises do not simply exist side by side, but influence each other. They are interconnected via a variety of impact channels. Complexity is increasing in a globalized, multi-networked and interdependent world.
The crises of individuals exacerbate our social crises
In all crises, there is also an individual level to which psychology usually turns. There, "crisis is described as the decisive or problematic point or stage in the course of a development, illness or interaction." According to Cullberg (1980), this point is "characterized by the loss of emotional equilibrium when a person is confronted with events or life circumstances that they cannot cope with at the moment because they exceed their previous problem-solving abilities".
In summary, a crisis is a moment of decision, as previous systems, processes and routines no longer work (due to external or internal changes). At the same time, individual crises are characterized by the fact that people experience the momentum of an event without being able to take action themselves - with emotional destabilization, loss of control and paralysis as possible consequences. In this state, clear decisions and actions are hardly possible; negative feedback effects occur and the crisis worsens.
In times of great uncertainty, the probability of individual crises increases - and at the same time the scope for resolving systemic crises is reduced to a certain extent.
What to do in times of crisis?
In 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the first theorist to use the term crisis in a modern sense and to associate crises with political and social revolutions. Rousseau's reflections mark a significant turning point, as he not only understood crisis to mean the choice between catastrophe and the restoration of the old order, but also saw them as moments of social transformation.
In principle, Rousseau was pointing towards today's understanding of resilience: Resilience is the ability of a system to respond adequately to setbacks by adapting to new conditions - in other words, by continuously evolving.
In view of the coming (poly)crises and the associated individual psychological stress, creating and strengthening systemic social resilience will be essential in the coming years. How can we provide society with the tools it needs to make future-oriented decisions that are geared towards the common good without deepening social divisions? The necessary and constant balance between stability and continuity on the one hand and flexibility and openness on the other will be a central challenge of our time.
In our research project "The resilient civil society", funded by the Deutsche Stiftung für Engagement und Ehrenamt, we are investigating ways of strengthening resilience at both organizational and sectoral level.