James Cairns (Layne Beckner Grime)

In an age of doomscrolling clickbait, atrocity porn, and the three Ts – Trump, tariffs, terror – anyone could be forgiven for concluding the world is in a state of perpetual crisis.

Responses to such chaotic times range from psychic numbing and end-times carpe diem splurging to repurposing personal priorities and, in some cases, throwing sand in the gears of a system seemingly trapped in an inevitable death spiral.

How human beings endure such epochs fascinates James Cairns who, as a professor, father, and perhaps the most atypical Marxist you’re likely to meet, has undertaken an admirably thoughtful dive into history, philosophy, language, literature, and politics as he seeks to parse the diverse meanings of a perpetually overused word: “crisis.”

The result is a refreshing, provocative title that links a personal journey through parenting during ecological breakdown, a decades-long addiction, and the struggle to answer the angst-ridden questions of his students with an eclectic canvassing of apocalyptic culture’s contemporary and historic touchstones.

Along the way, Cairns addresses pointed questions: Have we truly reached a breaking point, or does the 24-7 news cycle simply make us more attuned to disasters that have always plagued human beings as far back as Plato? Is democracy really at risk, or has it always been an illusory notion given the celebrated system’s disturbing compatibility with slavery and genocide?

Cairns’s accessible essays are like self-administered doses of cognitive behavioural therapy: separating out facts from delusions, testing hypotheses against real-world experience, and naming very real fears and feelings. This approach allows readers to identify with the personal and societal conundrums he posits as he patiently walks us through the multi-layered permutations of each issue. His takes on climate catastrophe, fake news, the health of democratic states, overcoming fatalism, and the potential uses and misuses of crisis often branch out from his own reflections on having survived 1,000 alcohol-induced blackouts, uprooting his family from Hamilton to small-town Ontario in a pandemic move, and the power of touch and proximity to his baby as grounding mechanisms.

Cairns is a rare academic who skilfully avoids ivory tower claptrap while reflecting on and crystallizing key thoughts from everyone – from revolutionaries Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg and poets Sylvia Plath and Franny Choi to Indigenous writers Lee Maracle and Waubgeshig Rice and philosophers Albert Camus and Hannah Arendt. His impressive grasp of the subject matter provides a solid, enlightening foundation for analysis.

Despite the heavy subject matter, Cairns is a reassuring voice who, while admitting he possesses no magic bullets (and confessing to his own vulnerability when he is overwhelmed by a sense of futility), nevertheless finds cause for hope in the sudden outbreaks of democracy (e.g., the Arab Spring, a Quebec student strike) that remind him of the innate capacity of humans who’ve had enough to push back and assert their right to a better world. Like Arundhati Roy’s much-quoted aphorism about the COVID-19 pandemic being a positive portal to possibility, Cairns’s In Crisis, On Crisis invites us to consider different ways of living long dreamed of and still, given the right admixture of chaotic circumstances, within our grasp.