If we were the kind of people who considered coincidences worth investigating or retrieving we could use the idea of coincidence to look more closely at any thoughts we might have about causality and our experience of it. After all a crisis is, if nothing else, a way of showing us that whatever kind of people we thought we were we're not, and however we got to where we are is not how we thought we got there. In other words there is something in the nature of causality that we have ridden over the top of. It is crisis and coincidence that disrupt our narratives of the world, give us pause, give us breath, give us anything other that what we have been taking.
The cusp of irreversible climate change and the precipitous global collapse of supposedly steadfast financial institutions are some way to being versions of each other. They are not two disparate but somehow coincidental events colliding like asteroids that have lost their orbit or their sense of home.
One could be forgiven for thinking that a financial 'crisis' needs a more immediate response than mere climate 'change', as though of two patients, one needs immediate surgery while the other can be safely left on a drip for a while. Our response to crisis is very much about how we mask crisis, manage it out and so on, and our ways of masking crisis are very much part of the problem, if not the problem itself.
It could be said that the global disintegration on the financial markets gives a voice to the increasing terror lurking behind the thought of tomorrow, as the planetary climate upon which we depend far more than on the Dow Jones begins to go haywire on an apocalyptic scale. This displacement of terror works precisely because we know that these events are linked. It promises that we might come back to some kind of financial equilibrium, calm our frayed nerves, create at least a semblance of an illusion of a predictable future of happy consumerism and material prosperity.
We are so wired, in these times, into viewing the process of living as an act of utilitarian consumption, that even profound ruptures in the very fabric of reality are converted into economic anxiety.
It is this confluence of crises that might — that could only — give us some intimation of the immense shift of the