[PHILOS-L] CFP Beyond the Metacrisis
Ruth Irwin
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Beyond the Metacrisis: Educating for the Future World to Come
Special Issue of Australian Journal of Environmental Education
Guest
Editor: Ruth
Irwin, metacr...@gmail.com
Aim of the special issue:
We are calling for contributions from diverse authors with complementary expertise and research interests from the field of philosophy and education. The purpose is to learn from the frightening visions of the metacrisis and the existential collapse scenarios it entails. The risk of the metacrisis dissolves fantasies of progressive improvement, leaving a void in future imaginaries. Refracting back from the metacrisis brings current conditions, policy, and normative practice into sharper focus with pathways toward better futures (Heidegger, 1999).
What is the “Metacrisis”?
Humanity is facing a growing list of extinction-level threats, including climate change, ecosystem collapse, drought, flooding, soil runoff, resource exhaustion, ocean rise, acidification and warming, plastic pollution, and toxic forever chemicals (Ceballos & Ehrlich, 2023). There are also systemic threats from peak oil, nuclear war, increasing inequality, poverty and homelessness, anxiety, suicide, a rapidly growing refugee crisis, artificial intelligence, and the 4th Industrial Revolution. Summarily these crises have been called the ‘polycrisis’ (Lawrence et al., 2024). These complex and multiple issues have been called a ‘perfect storm.’ However, a perfect storm implies a short-term event of accidental if monumental proportions. The term polycrisis has a better handle on the entangled, uneven and long-term character of the many issues that are increasingly impacting planetary ecology and global civil society. The ‘meta’crisis reflects on the social underpinnings that are producing the multiple existential threats outlined.
With the best of intentions, individual’s feel that they cannot extricate themselves from the accelerating rat-race (Rosa, 2013). Immediate concerns over job security and so on, are more pressing. But longer-term anxiety of the metacrisis creates a hopeless anomie that is impossible to avoid. Liberal and neoliberal narratives of ‘progress,’ ‘innovation,’ and financial ‘success’ are no longer convincing (Irwin, 2008). All these factors are closely related to withdrawal into virtual spaces and a widening separation of the individuum from the ‘real’, the socio-ecological fabric that predicates our existence. Stein (2022) proposes that the metacrisis is the result of a “generalised educational crisis” (p. 8) and will require a substantial transformation of paideia, the system of education. The metacrisis can be viewed as a confluence of a crisis in sense-making, capability, legitimacy and meaning.
The metacrisis addresses the role that modernity plays in creating the polycrisis. Never before has a civilisation had such a damaging planetary impact on the ecosystem or social cohesion and equity. We need a meta-analysis of the crisis; a big picture philosophical critique, that understands how ideas from the Enlightenment and colonialism continue to shape modern normative assumptions and continue to justify an extractive economic system that regards human culture as separate from, and superior to, ecology. A meta-analysis of the metacrisis understands the intra-connection (Barad, 2007) between individual subjects and their ecological context. A meta-analysis may include ideas derived from Indigenous cosmology about the intimate symbiotic relationships that make up the fabric of eco-social society (Mika, 2017; Stein et al., 2023; Yunkaporta, 2019).
Addressing the crisis in meaning requires critical reflection on the philosophical and the accelerationist and extractive economic basis of modernity. It opens consideration of alternative philosophies and cultural narratives. Indigenous philosophies do not make the same dualistic alienation between nature and culture, subject and object as lies at the root of modernity. Considering the metacrisis opens up these questions and how a transformation of mores will impact multiple elements of eco-social society. An eco-social society recognises how intraconnected humans are with the wider ecological system. That makes all legal, economic, and technological decisions have a different resonance; one that recognises that we are all entwined in the same planetary biota, with all the protective stance that implies.
We invite contributions that engage with some, or all, of the following issues about the ‘metacrisis’.
The polycrisis has synergies, symbioses, and differences. It is not ‘one’ crisis, but multiple. Yet these multiple crises are interconnected into a self-reinforcing socio-ecological metacrisis. It emerges from Enlightenment concepts and fossil fuel driven industrialisation.
An unmitigated metacrisis constitutes the finitude of modern civilisation and the current planetary ecosystem.
Seeking pathways through the metacrisis can involve reflecting on the rich ideas in Indigenous and pre-modern cultures.
The modern philosophical premises of Idealism underpins neoliberal politics and economics. It lends itself to a faith in progressive technological innovation that ignores the ‘externalities’ of environmental and social harm and has justified the polycrisis as inadvertent collateral damage.
People do not want this ecosocial polycrisis, however, we are ‘thrown’ (Heidegger, 1962) into an ‘always already’ existing modern political culture that makes contribution and participation in the dynamics of the metacrisis impossible to avoid.
The metacrisis is also a crisis in meaning that results in alienation. The meta-angle to these crises expresses the existential distress of the overall impact on the human psyche. We each feel stuck on the accelerating treadmill of meaninglessness.
There is nothing essential about humanity as a species that necessarily evolves into a metacrisis.
Framing the situation as a metacrisis offers a new way of understanding ‘business-as-usual’ (IPCC, 1990) in modern civilisation.
Conceptualising the metacrisis provides a unique and powerful opportunity to rethink our modes of ecosocial, ecopolitical, and economic organisation.
Education does not have to explore each specific crisis (such as climate change) but can be guided by the pathways that circumnavigate the finitude of the metacrisis. If unmitigated business-as-usual results in unprecedented levels of extinction, then current education practices are dangerous. Considering how an intra-connected posthumanist society might contextualise the expectations for education makes much more sense. How would this vision shape our education system? Its policy, pedagogy, the hidden curriculum?
Implications of the metacrisis.
One of the significant differences between the metacrisis and similar threats to earlier civilisations is the problem of scale. The crises of earlier civilisations have always been localised. Globalised modernity has transported pollution and its impacts all over the planet. At the same time, local communities feel powerlessness to affect how modernity continues to progress towards calamity. But the questions stimulated by the metacrisis can transform the way we regard onto-epistemology, education, and the future.
Within the framework of neoliberal education, it is almost impossible for students or teachers to begin to see alternatives to neoliberal capitalism and business-as usual (Everth, 2024). Rather than address it, this approach to education continues to exacerbate the metacrisis. For education to overcome the illusion of mastery embedded in modernity, important philosophical consideration are sorely needed.
Technological innovation aligns with neoliberal narratives about economic growth and progressive market innovation (Smith, 1904). However, it is becoming increasingly questionable that even if every aspect of the technological world was ‘green,’ emissions would stop increasing if growth in consumerism continues to increase demand. Green technological consumerism is not a solution on its own. Accelerating economic growth is clearly connected to the acceleration of planetary warming. Ultimately, it is the normative assumptions of modernity that are producing a powerless population, that is stuck with lacklustre politicians. The dilemma of growth appears insurmountable and hopeless. We remain stuck in business-as-usual (IPCC, 1990).
Proposal
Surviving and eventually thriving beyond the ‘event horizon’ of the metacrisis is a make-or-break challenge for humanity and, implicitly, the ecosphere. Education research needs to respond to this challenge and assume the “driving seat of cultural transformation” (Irwin, 2020 p. 494). This special issue aims to promote this goal.
We invite submissions on a broad array of ideas that engage with the metacrisis, from economics or resources, to philosophy of ideas, individual, community, and social arrangements. Understanding the metacrisis itself is an important step in opening up the looming finitude of modernity. Thinking about the future beyond the metacrisis opens the gates to genuine alternatives, new meaning, and hope. In turn, these ideas will shape the context and content of education.
Timeline:
Call for papers: September 2024
Abstract proposals due: December 2024
Manuscripts due: August 2025
Publication of Special Issue: Volume 41 – Issue 5 2025 (manuscripts published on FirstView asap)
Please send abstracts emailed to: metacr...@gmail.com
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