This is the penultimate piece for 2022, and is meant as a companion to yesterday’s note. I am in the final week of teaching an undergraduate course on peace and conflict. One of the starting points for it is a recognition of how deeply war has shaped, and is present, in how our world is structured. War is productive in the sense of producing outcomes. This might seem obvious, but it can be oddly overlooked or underappreciated.

Quotes taken from ‘Putin’s war’, New York Times (16 December 2022). Leo Tolstoy, Bethink Yourselves (1904). Ken Jowitt, ‘Undemocratic Past, Unnamed Present, Undecided Future’ (1996). Ken Jowitt, ‘Setting History's Course’ (2009). Adam Curtis in The Guardian on his recent series, Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone (2022). Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground (1864).Subscribe now

What to make of polycrisis - as a concept, as an underlying reality? It does appear to capture something in the air, but what exactly, that is still something we are collectively trying to figure out.

This is the image that Joseph Roth painted in ‘Smoke Joins up the Towns’ (1926), one of the vignettes from the collection, The Hotel Years : Wanderings in Europe between the Wars . Most of the entries are backward-looking and elegiac, final portraits of a Europe that was vanishing in front of his eyes.

This time a slightly different collection, some quotes and references taken from my recent conversation with PC. While the discussion traversed a wide range of issues, the fragments and references below relate to the challenges of how to deal with, and respond to, institutions corrupting, eroding, changing, and transmogrifying.

Earlier this year, with support from the Toshiba International Foundation, I produced a series of conversations thinking through how technology interacts with and shapes our world. It was a meaningful process, resulting in a collection of fruitful dialogues, which can be accessed here. While that project has finished, my hope is to continue to share some occasional conversations around broader themes.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland A year ago I wrote a note considering the appearance of a new coronavirus variant, Omicron. I stressed the difficulties of making sense in real time and the need for greater intellectual humility.

Turning in circles, Kyoto as seasons shift, Robert Musil's untimely reflections a century later; these themes from an earlier note I found myself revisiting. Some of this was prompted by a conversation I’ll be sharing later this week, which tries to think through the present moment, partly in reference to parallels and thinkers from fin de siècle Europe.

Imagining the real. Really imagining. There and here, blending and blurring, all together. Hayao Miyazaki, Shuna’s Journey. Christopher de Bellaigue on the possibilities of ‘an unstoppable spiral of state violence and popular fury’ in Iran. Alexander Baunov on Russia’s objectives. 2022 is set to be ‘a fabulous year’ for some. Ali Ansari on ‘failures of imagination’ in Iran.

Recently I found myself at Suirakuen, a Japanese garden located in Fukushima prefecture, and as I took in the landscape, my mind inevitably started drawing connections with themes of decline and decay. It is that time of the year. In a prior note, I suggested that polycrisis is effectively something of a placeholder concept for trying to name and narrate being caught up in conditions of socio-political entropy.

This was Karl Jaspers considering the ‘new fact’ of atomic weapons in his 1958 book, The Atomic Bomb and the Future of Man . As the ‘new fact’ became old, and the Cold War finished with a whimper and not a bang, the nuclear threat faded from our collective view. At some point, most of us stopped asking these questions that so concerned Jaspers. Yet the problem never disappeared.