Complexity to inform issues of methodology, taxation and politics in a context of crisis

Basically a lot of this is down to boredom and spending too much time, particularly in Winter when it is harder to get out of the house, sitting around binge watching streaming services. However, having just finished a book with Gill Callaghan and Emma Uprichard on Researching Complex Crises: Complexity informed research for social transformation (now in production) at a time when the world seems to be going to hell in a handcart, I decided to publish various rants rather than just inflicting them on my nearest and dearest.

So the title of this means of communicating my rants is: “Complexity, Methods and Taxation in a context of Crisis” and I will be posting episodically on all of these topics as the spirit moves me. Here I will simply (odd to say that in a complexity informed blog) deal with what I mean by Crisis.

A complex interwoven (a word I will use a lot) system is in crisis when it is in a state which cannot endure over a relatively long term. A system in crisis must move to a new state or revert to the pre-crisis stable state. The terms goes back more than 2,500 years in Greek medicine to describe the process of an infectious disease in a human or indeed animal body. Before the development of effective antibiotics either the patient’s immune system overcame the disease the patient returned to functioning health or it did not and the patient died. So back to previous state or onto a new one – cannot remain as ill. Antibiotics are an external intervention in the system which interacts with processes within the system to generate a better outcome. A good example at a whole socio-ecological-technical system level is the impact of the Black Death in Europe which engendered a massive demographic transformation. In interaction with the role of protestantism (Gill Callaghan likes to use Weber’s idea of elective affinities here) and the existing opening that urban centres provided, the previously robust system of Feudalism replaced more or less (feudal elements remain across Europe) by capitalism. Hence the era of the Capitalocene which is the driver of climate crisis because capitalism has been based on carbon energy, first and still coal but also petroleum and gas.

By the way as an aside the availability of stored fish protein from salt cod and herring in the massive new fisheries provided a food source for urban populations of, to my mind as someone who would happily eat herring every day, a key factor in allowing urbanization.

Enough for now – later posts will be more focused and less discursive but signing off.

David Byrne