“A State without the means of some change is without the means of its own conservation” (Edmund Burke (2009) [1790], 21)
1. Introduction
Unlike at other times in history, we now live in a society that is beset, not by external enemies, but by its own threats to itself. We face crises and catastrophes such as the pandemic, the climate crisis, flooding, wildfires and droughts that are, in some fashion, the result of our way of life. We believe we are fully aware of all of this—no one found the recent IPCC report surprising but the COP26 Climate Change Congress in Glasgow did not fulfil almost anyone’s expectations—and we have little hope about our practical ability to do what is necessary to overcome these crises. There is an increasing sense that we lack control over the world, which seems to carry on beyond the limits of our political will, in other words, beyond our ability to govern it, to implement necessary transformations, limiting risks and making its development more balanced. The current crises are taking place in a society that is not being challenged by external problems but is, instead, creating problem for itself, which means that our ability to overcome these crises would depend on certain social transformations. That being the case, instead of wondering about the nature of the crises that are affecting our society, we should examine the type of society we have that leads to these crises, why it is so difficult to change, even when the need for change is obvious, and what we should do, despite all this, to increase the likelihood of that improbable change.
2. What Crisis?
But are we, strictly speaking, dealing with a crisis? Perhaps not exactly, if we abide by the correct meaning of the concept. A crisis is an intense and exceptional moment, during which the survival of an organism or an institution is decided, leading either to the demise of those who undergo it, a recovery of previous normality or the implementation of the transformations necessary to guarantee one’s own survival. Some of the current catastrophes can be understood in this way, similar to other crises, which are resolved sooner or later with vaccines, economic assistance and reparations. But there are others that do not fit this mould. There are aspects of these crises that are not transitory or exceptional, and when we think about these, it does not make sense to talk about “a return to normal”.
The sociologist Bruno Latour (2015) expressed his best wishes, asserting the hope that we are only facing a crisis. Those who talk about a crisis at this point seem to want to reassure themselves by mentioning an event that is serious but temporary. The metaphor of the crisis refers to an infrequent malfunction, suggesting that, with the exception of that attribute or moment, the society is stable and balanced. “Crisis” is a term that singularises a complex situation. It limits it to a particular period of time, saving us many debates and seeming to give concrete and indisputable indications about what should be done (Luhmann, 1997: p. 1116). But the reality is very different: the diagnostics that are carried out are full of uncertainties and controversial elements. There is no unanimity about solutions, and we cannot assume that we have adequate instruments to address them. We should not fool ourselves into thinking that we only need determination and political will. Even when we know where we need to go, it is not clear how to make the transition, whether we have the proper instruments, who must shoulder the costs, what interests and values should be given greater weight in the balance. What should we sacrifice and to what extent when there is tension between the interests of different generations, where economic imperatives and health emergencies seem incompatible and the old debates between freedom and security or between growth and sustainability reappear with all their drama? The solutions refer to changes in our way of life, but the way of achieving them is not obvious and is beyond the normal approach of our institutions, which were designed to do other types of things that are much simpler.
We are not in the midst of a crisis (nor of several, as is often asserted with, for example, the term “syndemic”). We do not live in a society in which there are contagions but in a society that is contagious. Ultimately this is the thesis that Ulrich Beck defended with his idea of the risk society (1986) and developed by others (Lemarchand, 2003; Neyrat, 2004; Innerarity, 2016). We exist in an epidemic world, not in a world in which epidemics erupt from time to time. It is a world of systemic financial instability more than temporary economic crises. I do not believe it is an exaggeration to affirm that we are not prepared to live and govern a world in which there are no crises, but a world that is critical, with societies and governments that live in greater instability than they are capable of managing. The fact that society finds itself in a state of permanent crisis does not mean that there are many crises but that there is no external world from which those crises make their way to us and that it is very unlikely that we are capable of doing anything that could truly be considered a solution. This is best seen in the fact that we do not know how or when the crises end. People have a lot of arguments about the nature of the crises in which we are embroiled, but we find it harder to come to an agreement about the normality to which we should aspire, whether this is what comes after the upheaval or if it means returning to the time before the crisis or if it entails transformative change. If we could at least find something like a guilty party that is external to our society, but no, the problem is that society has a problem with itself. We do not have meteorites that fall from space but crises that we produce with practices and institutions with which we would also need to solve them. That overlap between those who create these crises and those who must resolve them is the real problem when it comes to addressing them.
There are reassuring interpretations that view these crises as temporary or exceptional situations, moments of change or inflexion points, but these interpretations are of very little help when it comes to responding to this situation. They make it seem as if financial instability, climate change, pandemics or political crises are things that simply happen and then go away, without questioning whether they actually reveal diverse structural problems in our social practices. It is also ineffective and not very honest to situate oneself as someone who exercises social criticism from the outside, as if this situation had nothing to do with us and as if the difficulty was all due to a lack of knowledge or political will. One can present oneself as an indignant intellectual, an environmental activist or even the queen of England who says she is irritated because “they talk, but they don’t do”. These are all actions and statements that can make us lose sight of the fact that this phenomenon is enormously complex and to some extent ungovernable. The criticism is very necessary, but it is more effective when we keep in mind the reasons why people and societies resist change, what institutional weakness is revealed in pleas that do not end up modifying the behaviours that bring us to these crisis situations, why people barely change when we know what we should do, but nothing more, even when that knowledge offers irrefutable evidence that we are heading toward disaster. The social criticism that is unleashed whenever there is a crisis has reflected very little about beings who can know what needs to be done and still not do it.
The situation is dramatic, but we must protect ourselves from certain epic narratives that lead to many errors, such as, for example, simplistic answers, the identification of guilty parties and the appeal to what must be done presented as something self-evident and removed from democratic debate. A risk society, as Ulrich Beck explained, is a society in which there are, in a manner of speaking, too many things connected with too many things in a way that is not easy to untangle. This produces catastrophic chains of events that are not resolved in cause-and-effect relationships, but as a result of unforeseeable emergencies. Many of the crises we suffer are not due to simple causalities but to complicated realities. Crises today come about in a quick and complex fashion; they involve many interactions between diverse aspects of governance, without respecting bureaucratic and jurisdictional delimitations. It is not possible to establish a moratorium and resolve them in parts. What seemed like a stable solution evolves into new problems that must be resolved in turn. All of that challenges the adaptive capacity of our systems of government, which proceed basically from the birth of modern democracy, the nation state and the industrial revolution: vertical, hierarchical, differentiated and mechanical.
If it is difficult to understand and identify the risks we are creating, it is even more difficult to manage them. We need to pay attention to so many factors that our ability to understand and manage becomes overwhelmed. Interdependence is equivalent to mutual dependence, to shared exposure, to insufficient protections, to not being able to do first one thing and then another; instead, everything must be addressed at the same time, so we have stopped enjoying the comfort of the division of labour or the principle that our own issues have primacy over other people’s. Would that we had dilemmas or trilemmas, instead of plurilemmas. The agenda of a risk society is a madman’s agenda.
3. Changing Society
Evidence that change is necessary does not always mean that it is possible. The climate crisis and the health crisis are a good example of that. The pandemic is connected to certain types of social interactions, and the difficulty with confronting it is largely due to our resistance to changing those interactions, in the same way that the climate crisis is a result of our habits of production and consumption that we are not in fact willing to modify to the extent necessary.
Having said that, the idea that societies must change is a frequent exhortation, but it does not eliminate the controversy about the direction and shape this change must take (Sloterdijk, 2012). Neither does it tell us whether we must speed up or slow down and what the crisis has revealed. It is even more unsettling to realize that, given the current situation and the structural configuration of societies, we may not be in any condition to do so. We can agree about the urgency of fighting climate change and show the best intentions, but that demand ends up being neutralized by the irrelevance of the states, their intractable diversity of interests and even our inability to modify individual consumption. We probably have the correct diagnostics and even the political will and interest to resolve those problems, but the fact is that we were never as in agreement as when they ordered the lock-downs to contain the pandemic (which were not without controversy and resistance) and recuperating the discord with which we normally live has been the true return to normality.
We find ourselves surrounded by the paradox that society can do so much and yet so little at the same time; it is concurrently so powerful and so fragile. It is capable of deploying unprecedented technological power, yet it cannot guarantee development that is balanced in legal, social or environmental terms. Society today is, simultaneously, what should change and the place where the greatest resistance to change is generated. We come from a civilization that has been constructed in the dualism of nature and culture-society, and that dualism suggests that our natural condition would be immutable while culture-society would be the domain of liberty. These great imaginaries seem to have traded places, as Bruno Latour claims (1991): nature has become an artificial construction while society is paralyzed, beyond the reach of our ability for modification. Nature would be malleable, and society, rigid. We have had relative success in providing biological immunity to a large portion of the population through vaccines, but now we are facing the most difficult part: social immunity, in other words, the idea that the rest of the systems (educational, political, economic) could manage to stop such serious crises from happening or that we could find ourselves better prepared and with a greater ability to repair the damages that are produced in society. It seems easier to escape our natural condition than our social conditioning. To say it in a somewhat provocative manner: it is easier to change sex than gender roles, to decide about the natural fact of death (through a law on euthanasia) than about the social reality of old age (with adequate policies and services).
In the concrete case of the coronavirus crisis, the question about necessary changes first requires examining whether the measures that were adopted in the decisive moments of the crisis have already realized the fundamental social modifications we needed. My response is that the exceptional nature of lockdown, useful when it came to halting contagion, did not sufficiently alter the social conditions of the crisis, but it produced an illusion of control. The intense intervention over society during the extreme lockdown has stopped the spread of the virus (with its side effects) and little more. As a mechanism for the transformation of society (and for the elimination of the causes that led us to the crisis), the concentration of power is absolutely ineffective. Society returns to its routines with little significant learning. The virus shakes everything up, but it does not change almost anything. It interrupts many things but modifies very few. Society interprets the crisis as an anomaly after which the previous normality must be re-established. After lockdown, there are those who maintained for some time the illusion that it was easy to keep people in check, that the evidence and corresponding lessons had been imposed, that the states had ordered appropriate changes and they were implemented with all due urgency. We lived a unique experience of control and compliance that could have led us to mistaken conclusions. The rapid return to old habits and practices reveals the extent to which large problems such as climate change or wasteful consumption can hardly be resolved through a direct and centralized intervention in social routines. Continuity and repetition are more plausible than an alteration, even after the upheaval of a crisis.
The use of military categories to understand that strange situation, no matter how inadequate these categories are, reflects the fact that war has been the only phenomenon capable of integrating in a similar way the centripetal forces found in the fields of healthcare, the economy, the law and politics. That is why wars have been a powerful element in the integration and construction of nation states. Only in war and in lockdowns is control of society and the alignment of its various points of view possible (temporarily). The lockdown produced a momentary integration of society, but after that, the logic of differentiation immediately returned. Some people demanded the reopening of schools, others pushed for the opening of businesses or culture, others believed that rights were finally coming back, and all of it was experienced with a euphoria that predisposed us for the wave of contagion the following autumn. The coronavirus crisis reveals that every actor has come to different consequences that depend on diverse and even incompatible approaches. Later, there is a return of various actors who also have to resolve distinct problems, and they do so in a way that does not allow for easy integration.
While we were caught up in the convulsion of the pandemic, many expectations of radical change emerged, although they pointed in diverse and sometimes opposing directions: some people thought that we were automatically going to globalize or that conversely, the triumph of the local had been confirmed. It was believed that the state would return, with all its sovereign splendour, that a change in the productive model was inevitable, that we would stop consuming the way we had been, that environmental awareness was finally firmly established. But what is really taking place is a renegotiation of all of that, a mixture of advances and set-backs in each of these areas, the true range of which is still undefined.
The most lamentable example of this euphoria was the magic transmutation without a subject, program, or definition that Zizek created when he announced the fatal blow that nature, not society, was attacking capitalism (2020). The hope that a blow dealt by fate would do what we ourselves should have done reveals how little we trust our own capacity for transformation. We compensate for that incapacity with the expectation that a natural catastrophe will automatically produce what should always have been the result of a social action.
We live in societies that contain a curious combination of stability and fragility; deadlock prevents both revolutionary disruptions and the transformations demanded by the crises we are facing. The behaviour of people and social structures is not directly modifiable, nor could we make the necessary changes with the rapidity that would be required. The critique rolled out at times of crisis seems to ignore this social condition. The critical discourse tends to appeal to the evidence that something should be done, and it reacts with surprise or outrage when that does not happen, little interested in examining what is causing the difficulties of implementation. The problem is that we do not have a problem with a lack of knowledge but of ability.
The solution to this difficulty with change would lie in improving our abilities to carry it out, not in insisting on its necessity. The historian Hedwig Richter (2020) claims that the strengthening of democracy does not stem from disruptive changes but from small changes and evolutionary achievements. It is easier to demand instantaneous changes than to make gradual changes possible. Incremental improvements are less exciting than large intentional changes, not to mention planned transformations or revolutions, but we should not lose sight of the other side of the story: that social achievements must also be protected from abrupt social changes or irreflexive technological innovations. The resistance to change found in democratic societies has a positive side because it makes them less vulnerable to the whims of new government leaders or to the arrival of extremist forces.
A society’s ability to change is improved, in the first place, by understanding the cause for the resistance to change and how to make it possible. The strategies for governing society cannot be made in opposition to its complexity but always by taking advantage of its dynamics, as is done by certain Asian fighters who use the force of their opponent, his momentum, to prevail over him. Rather than becoming obsessed with controlling society, it is better to learn why society insists on resisting attempts to be controlled, why order is so easily transformed into dispersal, the reason why all initiatives are confronted by resistance.
Ways of life do not tend to be the consequence of rational decisions but the result of settled practices. Our daily behaviour is so stable because it is daily. Our actions (including those that, for example, favour contagions or harm the environment, like certain modes of transportation or types of consumption) are resistant to change because they have become habits and we have not seen sufficient incentives for modification. To achieve social change, we must provide adequate means. It is only possible to stop individuals from driving their cars if there are modes of public transportation that facilitate their desired trips. The type of behaviours we must employ if we want to stop contagions must rely on adequate information. Moving toward more digitalization would demand greater training and concrete assistance so that no one falls behind. It is true that large transformations demand sacrifices, which society will not undertake if it does not trust that there will be personal and collective gain and that the costs will be born in an equitable fashion.
When we talk about the things that the pandemic has taught us, we tend to refer to things that should be done, but perhaps it is more interesting to establish the extent to which it is difficult to change society and what our attitude to that difficulty should be. If we are determined to change society, we should begin by understanding how limited our capacity to transform it is, how insufficient the knowledge we wield.
4. The Dissonant Society
Democracies have practical difficulties when it comes to managing crises, not because they are democratic but because they are designed for a world that is now largely non-existent. They assume that society continues to be harmoniously differentiated when the truth is that it is dramatically fragmented, as if we were in a global society composed of self-sufficient sovereign states. They assume they are capable of unifying criteria and mobilizing when, in reality, they barely manage to do so within themselves or with the rest of the states. If we do not understand the nature of this anachronism, we will not be able to take responsibility for the crisis in our society.
What do we mean when we talk about a differentiated society? The success of a modern society is due to what sociologists call functional differentiation, which allows for the autonomous development of the economy, politics, healthcare, the law and education. The instruments to resolve different social problems can do so only if their own logic is respected: the law resists political instrumentalization; the market is emancipated from political guardianship; cultural creators are freed from moral censorship; science can concern itself only with the truth; even religion stops being responsible for maintaining social cohesion. As a historic achievement, the nation state managed to make the evolution of each of those subsystems maintain a degree of coherence. The verticality of institutional hierarchy was respected, and the ability of the state bureaucracy to deliver public goods effectively provided the necessary legitimacy so the system could at least resist those crises for which they had been designed (such as social conflicts or wars). This essential idea became the basis for the configuration of a demarcation of powers, the division of labour and the differentiation between autonomous social spheres. We understood that the configuration of society would provide us with more freedom and we would be more productive; the balanced coordination of it all did not seem especially problematic to us. Today we are facing a very different context: both inside and out, that balance is put to the test.
Of course, we are not going to renounce differentiation (which would mean abandoning fundamental elements of our liberal political culture, such as the rule of law, secularization or the open nature of the market economy). Neither will we abandon the division of labour on which our productivity is based or the logic of decentralization without which political pluralism would be endangered. But actually, our problems do not stem from the lack of differentiation but from the difficulty with balancing those differences. We now find ourselves in a very different situation than the glorious age of the nation states, in spite of the nostalgic attempts to recover that coherence (in terms of state for the left or nation for the right). Our social crises are an example of that disorder: uncontrollable environmental externalities, governments that cannot control the price of electricity, executive powers that are directly challenged by the legal authorities when they impose states of alarm for health crises, a Constitutional Court that is not able to decide deliberatively and does so by slim majorities, in other words, it becomes a mere conveyor belt for the ideological divisions in society in other words, it becomes a mere conveyor belt for the ideological divisions in society, a co-governance that is not capable of achieving the necessary unity while simultaneously respecting institutional plurality (all these are examples of Spain)... The counterbalances have turned into vetoes, the division of labour into unproductive fragmentation, spheres of autonomy into self-sufficiency that ignores negative externalities.
There is, in our societies, an incongruence between the unity of discourses and the conflict generated when trying to carry those beautiful ideas into practice. They all call, with greater or lesser emphasis, for an ecological transformation. We are conscious that we have to change our transportation habits, our relationship with the territory, our use of resources or consumption, but discrepancies due to the different value we assign to the economic, the social or the ecological are immediately interjected. The impeccable slogan of the WHO’s “one health” (emphasizing the relationship between human health, animal health and the environment) is a desirable goal, but it is in fact only realized in its negative form. Our fundamental problem today is the configuration of common practice without a nullification of differences, achieving a unity of action based on pluralism and distributed intelligence, stopping the plurality of rationales and perspectives (for example, between politics, the economy and the law) from turning into a tragic incompatibility.
That fragmentation means that there is not strictly speaking one public space in which all those differences become explicit and negotiable; what we have is simulations similar to the great climate summits in which for a few days the idea that we live in one and the same society is acted out, because it unifies both the leadership and the protests. A world summit against the climate crisis suggests that humanity is united in a way that does not exist, because of the diverse interests of the countries and also the sectors that are most directly affected by certain mitigation strategies. This was revealed by the protests of the “yellow vests” against the rising cost of diesel in France and also in the demonstrations by coal industry workers in Poland or Romania, which are gloomy perspectives for the automotive world and the transitions that affected sectors will pay in different ways. In contrast to what is often said about shared threats uniting us, not even shared risks suppress the differences in impact.
Modernity impugned the idea of totality. It pluralized it and contributed to the division of power and the distinction between public and private. The problem we are confronting today could be formulated like this: how can we re-establish coherence between all those areas that are currently in opposition without sacrificing the freedoms that have been achieved due to their separation and knowing we can no longer depend on undisputed authorities capable of unifying everything? Getting down to concrete cases: how do we translate scientific evidence to political measures that achieve a parliamentary majority and, especially, that are understood by the people? In what way should we balance ecological and public health imperatives with economic productivity? Many of the issues that we are confronting originate in the intensification of this breakdown among the different points of view found in a single society.
Most of our crises are caused because that which was, in its moment, a victory of modernity (the freedom to trade, produce, question, travel) has become something irrationale that does not pay attention to its possible negative consequences, such as exploitation, pollution or lack of trust. We know that the markets have resolved serious problems, but they have created other ones, such as issues related to the environment. We know that democracy is a great invention when it comes to taking public decisions, but it does not free us from some collective errors. We know science and technology realize incredible advances that tend to be “socially inexact” and that the desirable expansion in educational opportunities can make the citizenry less trusting and more defiant of public authorities. We do not want to renounce the productive division between labour and power, but today we are attending to its incompatibility rather than its beneficial mutual limitation.
Many of the problems that cause these catastrophes and make it difficult to manage them have to do with the contradictions of contemporary society. Deep down, these crises that are now emerging are crises we already had and that we will not overcome when their most pointed version disappears. What will remain are the contradictions of which these developments are the most brutal expression. During the pandemic, some things that had been hidden by routine were made visible. Explicit crises tend to make implicit crises visible. Strictly speaking, the healthcare crisis (like the economic crisis before it) did not force the world into a state of exception but revealed the extent to which the world was characterized by a conflict of diverse points of view, languages that are not mutually comprehensible, ungovernability, the impotence of politics, the contrast between effectiveness and democratic legitimacy.
5. Solving Everything to Solve Something
In response to the question about how they manage their crises, contemporary societies should respond by indicating the types of crises we are unable to resolve. Our perception of reality and the institutions themselves are designed to solve isolated and well-defined problems, but they find themselves overcome when one problem is interspersed with another and requires the collaboration of diverse actors, viewpoints and institutions. The real problem is that society itself is in crisis because the management of these crises must be carried out in a world that is interdependent, decentralized, of distributed intelligence, radically plural, while its institutions are frequently none of those things.
Contemporary societies do not manage to articulate their disparate perspectives (for example, the tension, in the midst of the pandemic, between healthcare, science, economy and education). The problem is that we know how to do each of those things more or less well, but we are not succeeding, for example, at coordinating the scientific evidence with political measures and taking into account the institutions that focus on legality. There are problems of incompatibility between effectiveness, freedom, equality and legality, while many of the actors who intervene in the management of the crisis appear to be more of a problem than a solution.
A differentiated society possesses a great ability to resolve concrete problems that concern a specific realm—science very quickly produced effective vaccines, organizations digitalized in very little time—but it struggles when the problem is of a nature that transcends that sectorial competence and concerns the whole of society, especially the lateral effects that transformed those solutions into problems for other areas: a lockdown imposed by the political system that harms the functioning of the economy, the scientific community whose rapid success produces distrust in some sectors of society, a digitalization that threatens other forms of business, epidemiological heath that aggravates mental health, families that are not designed for their members to live very long without experiencing other social relationships. The criteria of success do not coincide, and our crises are a good example of this disparity: an economic success can be an environmental disaster, a lockdown reduces the contagion of the virus at the same time as it implies a disaster in terms of inequality.
We have institutions that resolve isolated problems relatively well—in accordance with the concept of differentiation—, that fail systematically when dealing with a problem that implies various areas and social rationales. They flounder spectacularly when the problem affects society as a whole, in other words, when it is not strictly speaking a problem but a crisis. At such times, societies find themselves overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task and with institutions designed precisely to resolve problems through division into segments (whether it is the division of labour, administrative logic, the separation of powers or the juxtaposition of sovereign states). The enormous ability to provide which we receive from modern functional differentiation stems from specialization, segmentation and a refusal to monopolize the social totality, but that in itself represents a problem when we would need to keep in mind environments of interdependence, a group vision and coordination.
How can we resolve that problem? If we want to solve something, we have no choice but to solve everything. How can that be done? It would be a question of aligning those areas that tend to be short-sighted and only focus on their own conception of reality (an economy that does not internalize its environmental externalities, a political system that only responds to the voters, healthcare that cures but does not invest in not needing to cure) knowing that the convergence will always be provisional, contested and changeable. A vital theme for reflexion in contemporary societies is the divergence of realities and the potential negative effects of that, the risks derived from not paying attention to criteria of compatibility. Our greatest political innovation would consist of creating spaces and dynamics for meeting and connection. Armin Nassehi has provided a lovely categorical imperative for this new world in which differentiation and sovereignty have reached their limits: “act in such a way that others can join in” (2021). Joining in does not mean consensus, submission or control, but it breaks the logic of indifference and externalization. We would be referring to all those operations that go from keeping other people’s perspectives in mind to the most intense forms of reciprocity, agreement, coordination, cooperation and integration.
If this is the true crisis of our societies and the recurring catastrophes are its reminders, then we must address these problems in another way, with more foresight, holistically, transnationally, collaboratively and horizontally; the crises are reminding us of the necessity to think in a new way about doing politics that is more receptive for the unprecedented procedures it will need to adopt in a society that is becoming increasingly unpredictable.