Histories and crises: modern, global, natural and social (original) (raw)
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Sixteen Related Crises and the Limits of Civilization in the 21st Century
2013
BackgroundCivilization is a whole greater than the sum of its parts. The added value for civilization is generated by relations amongst its parts, the elements of civilization. As these elements function, they influence other elements bilaterally. Thus, a growing population increases the pollution of the environment. This speeds the exhaustion of strategic resources. Devastated environments then increase yet further the depletion of strategic resources. Sixteen crises of the 21st century are explored and their multilateral influences and relations considered in an attempt to enhance our understanding of the direction civilization is now taking.The Centrality of Crises in the Early 21st CenturyOne central and founding crisis is the crisis of science; it's the level of this crisis that sways the future of civilization. Science is a measure of the current power of the human mind, the motor of civilization. The great acceleration of current civilization took place in the 16th centur...
History in Times of Unprecedented Change: A Theory for the 21st Century
London: Bloomsbury, 2019 June [Introductory chapter preview] Book info: Our understanding of ourselves and the world as historical has drastically changed since the postwar period, yet this emerging historical sensibility has not been appropriately explained in a coherent theory of history. In this book, Zoltán Simon argues that instead of seeing the past, the present and the future together on a temporal continuum as history, we now expect unprecedented change to happen in the future (in visions of the future of technology, ecology and nuclear warfare) and we look at the past by assuming that such changes have already happened. https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/history-in-times-of-unprecedented-change-9781350095052/ Reviews: “Among an expanding literature, Zoltan Simon's challenging book will quickly become a landmark. A clear vision of what is at stake, a well informed and precise inquiry starting from a fascinating question: how to think the novelty of an “unprecedented event” or “unprecedented change", such as the anthropogenic one? And an ambitious proposal to rethink the very concept of history.” – François Hartog, Chair of Modern and Antique Historiography, École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), France “The idea that the devastating wars of the twentieth century and the unprecedented growth of technology and environmental concerns of the twenty-first have, taken together, permanently destroyed the appeal of history in the West, has been dominant for a while. Simon mounts a vigorous, provocative, and imaginative challenge to that thesis. A powerful intervention that will rekindle debates about history and its nature in our uncertain times.” – Dipesh Chakrabarty, Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, University of Chicago, USA “In a world that seems both bewildered by and disassociated from history, Zoltan Simon brings a sharp and deep argument in favour of philosophy of history that embraces disruption. His is a deft and thought-provoking account of why novelty, historical ownership and singularity need to be understood on more than narrative terms. This will be an invaluable book for anyone wanting to dig into and to break past the sense that theory cannot speak in a world of so many fractured voices.” – Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Professor of History, Australian National University, Australia “History understood as knowledge of the past can never be the same after reading Zoltan Boldizsar Simon's book. It offers a future-oriented perspective on historical thinking which is challenged by times of unprecedented change. We are living through an epochal transformation marked by nuclear warfare, anthropogenic climate change, bioengineering and radical enhancement. How can history as a conceptual strategy help us to cope with these novelties? How might the future be pre-figured through a different approach to historical change? And how would this reorient theories of historical writing? In exploring these questions, the author presents a thought-provoking book that belongs to the emerging fields of anthropocene and posthumanist history. It is a must read for anyone interested in critical history as realistic scientific-fiction.” – Ewa Domanska, President of the International Commission for the History and Theory of Historiography, Professor of Human Sciences, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland “History is in trouble, or even in crisis. At present, this is almost a truism. What sets Zoltan Boldizsar Simon's book apart from other publications making the same claim, in the footsteps of Francois Hartog, Aleida Assmann and others, is that he actually knows why. His theory of unprecedented changes presents a radical - indeed unprecedented - attack on history as developmental process and narrative form, penned by one of the most original new voices in the theory of history.” – Helge Jordheim, Professor of Cultural History, University of Oslo, Norway
Environmental History as Sustainability Science 2.1 History and the Crisis of Modern Civilization
There is no doubt about the profound crisis currently experienced by the industrial civilization that has exerted global dominium during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, its foremost myths gradually collapsing one by one. The industrial growth has failed to visibly close the gap between the rich and the poor countries, thus clearly revealing the lack of connections made between economic growth, industrialization, and development. Neither were social inequalities abolished, although they dimmed during the peak of Fordism, currently reappearing with a particular virulence that is reaching to even a growing sector of the population of the rich countries (Milanovic 2003, 2006; Acemoglu and Robinson 2012). The feeling of deprival of the myriads of commodities offered by the markets—now boosted by globalization—spreads throughout the world. This deprival becomes a powerful motivation that—contrasting with misery and violence—thrusts migratory movements that endanger the positional privileges of the affluent countries. The modes of political organization of the nineteenth and 20th centuries, which accompanied industrial capitalism, show unequivocal signs of exhaustion in front of the constant transference to transnational decision domains of important shares of sovereignty, at the same time that small cultural communities regain their political identities in reaction to the process of globalization. The orthodox paradigms of science—together with its hegemonic core of scientific-technological rationality—have for some time sinking into an irreversible crisis. Crisis also regarding many dominant values, while others appear that some have labeled as postmaterialistic, but that are maybe only expressing the need for a new moder-nity—as claimed by Beck (1998). But it is the ecological crisis what perhaps better depicts the civilization crisis, its severity and its planetary dimension, and what will surely force the adoption of highly relevant changes in the conformation of society. The greenhouse effect, the gap in the ozone layer, the exhaustion of mineral resources and fossil fuels, deforestation, overexploitation, the depletion of water resources, atmospheric pollution, acid rain, erosion and desertification, among others, are tightly linked with the modes of production and consumption brought about by economic growth and industrialization.
Post-Crisis Reckoning: Making Sense of Early 21st-Century Civilizational Ruptures
Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica, 2021
As the world is struggling with the Covid crisis and its numerous aftereffects, it is easy to forget that the present pandemic is only the latest of a whole series of paradigm-changing 21st-century crises. Indeed, the word “crisis” has become one of the key concepts for the understanding of the early 21st century. Thus, crisis seems very much to be the default position of the 21st century, the new norm. In this paper, I argue that the 21st century has a recognizably different cultural logic from what the previous one had: most of our social, ideological, political, financial, and ecological paradigms are either changing or will (or must) change soon. As most of our critical concepts, intellectual tools, and ideological frameworks were made during the boom years of the late 20th century, they are clearly outdated and inadequate today. Thus, in this paper, through taking account of these shifting intellectual and artistic paradigms, I attempt to indicate how the present crisis of know...
2nd International Conference in Contemporary Social Sciences: "Public Policy at the Crossroads: Social Sciences Leading the Way?" - At: Faculty of Social Sciences University of Crete, University Campus Rethymno, Greece, 2018
This paper focuses on the structural and evolutionary examination of the current global crisis and restructuring of the global socioeconomic system. It supports in terms of methodology that in every interpretation of the global crisis it is a prerequisite to analyze and perceive the historical and evolutionary character of the dynamics of global socioeconomic space in a unifying perspective. All the dynamic dimensions of the modern world-economic, technological, social and geopolitical-should be examined together, in their narrow dialectic co-adaptation and co-evolution. The multi-faceted crises of every socioeconomic system are both the products and the producers of globalization crisis in a co-determinatory and co-evolutionary course, while contemporary capitalism, respectively, intensifies unceasingly the dialectic reproduction of the global interdependence. This crisis therefore is sustained, nourished and reproduced by the absence of a 'new wave' of effective innovations, throughout all the levels of socioeconomic activity, and it requires the installation and assimilation of new effective change management mechanisms in order for any socioeconomic system to escape from it. Arguably, the challenge of building a new global developmental trajectory engages with all the levels of analysis and intervention: the individual and the collective, the material and the symbolic, the national and the local, the social and the economic, the microeconomic and the macroeconomic, the cultural and the political. The only sustainable way out of the global crisis, as a result, needs a progressive adaptation to a new evolutionary thinking of perceiving the global crisis dynamics.
IDS Bulletin - Showdown or Crisis? Restructuring in the 1980s, 1985
SUMMARY This article addresses the issue of ‘civilisational crisis’. The nation‐state systems upon which the world economy is built require for their survival the reassertion of nationalism at ever higher levels, finding its most recent expression in the revival of the Cold War. At the same time the continued internationalisation of the post‐war world economy threatens and undermines traditional geographical and political units and concepts. This process has accelerated in recent decades with the arrival of modern nuclear and microelectronic technologies with their capacity to destroy civilisation itself. The potential resolution of this crisis is to be found in the emergence of anti‐systemic grass‐roots organisations in both East and West.
Beyond the Global Crisis (Sergey Bodrunov, Radhika Desai, & Alan Freeman)
Institute for New Industrial Development (INID), 2022
The aggravation of global contradictions of the world civilization, which has been analysed for a long time by the leading theorists, is becoming more evident as of late. In contrast, the drastic acceleration of STP, the development of the “smart” knowledge-intensive manufacturing created the premise for the necessary qualitative changes in the existing social model, making it possible to define survival and the progress of the human civilization. Under new conditions there is an unprecedented political-economic repartition challenging the leadership of the nation states and the capabilities of the global supranational organisations. However developing a long-term and robust strategy of making a way out of this raging sea of troubles remains an open question. Assuming that the aforementioned problems seem diversified, they are essentially a single set of issues, resolving which is of current interest. The present book is devoted to finding the answers to these questions.