Why Modern Problem-Solving May Not Be Enough for the Metacrisis

Stephen Hicks advances a structurally modernist response to Civilizational risk: history demonstrates a recurring pattern where humanity generates problems and subsequently develops the tools to address them. The green revolution, urban sanitation, and countless other examples illustrate a ratcheting progress — messy, nonlinear, but ultimately directional. This is not naive optimism; it is an empirically grounded reading of modernity's track record. The modern project, on this account, is self-correcting.

Dempsey's challenge targets not the logic of this argument but its psychological and institutional implications. The narrative of inevitable self-correction can function as ideological comfort, reducing the felt urgency of present crises. The philosophical pivot is crucial: the question is not whether modern tools could solve the metacrisis in principle, but whether existing institutional, political, and motivational structures are adequate to deploy those tools at the necessary scale and speed. This is a question about governance capacity, Collective sensemaking, and coordination — not about technical possibility.

A genuinely metamodern position holds both claims in productive tension. Modern reason and its tools remain necessary conditions for addressing existential-scale challenges. But they are not sufficient if the social and political systems responsible for deploying them are themselves compromised — captured by short-term incentives, fragmented by epistemic polarization, or paralyzed by coordination failures. The metacrisis, properly understood, is not merely a set of technical problems but a crisis of the very Sensemaking and governance architectures that any coherent response would require.