Growing up
As the week draws to a close, I want to emphasize a significant point of agreement with S&N.
If I may, let me quote myself:
It's tempting to think that if you scare the shit out of people -- really convince them, down to their bones, that hurricanes, diseases, and starving refugees are hiding just around the corner -- mass mobilization against global warming will at long last ensue.
There's good reason to doubt it. Fear causes fairly predictable reactions, which do not include international cooperation, equitable distribution of resources, cost-benefit analysis on a multidecadal scale, and short-term sacrifice in the service of long-term problem-solving. They do include increased xenophobia, reactionary moralism, and susceptibility to demagogues.
That is to say, the language of fear intrinsically serves the needs of authoritarian-leaning politics, regardless of the fear's particular object.
This is, more or less, the core insight that animates S&N's work, and obviously I agree entirely. Environmentalists have historically been too wedded to a message of looming apocalypse (though I, unlike S&N, see that changing). That kind of message can work when the object of fear is close-at-hand and can be overcome locally and on a fairly short-term time scale. But for something like global warming -- where our effort, if it is too succeed, will be generations long -- it is counter-productive. Fear drives people inward; it makes them feel hopeless, selfish, and tribalistic. It is a tool of the right. This isn't just S&N's opinion -- it's backed by plenty of psychological and sociological research. It's also supported by the fact that despite years of campaigning, and polls showing that a majority of people acknowledge the danger of climate change, the rate of increase in greenhouse gas emissions has not flagged.
Some of S&N's critics deride this point. They say, "look, global warming really is scary, it's going to kill us all, and you're asking us to coddle and deceive people." That's bunk. No one says we should lie about global warming. It is in fact an enormous problem, potentially existential. But the existence of a threat does not dictate that we react to it out of fear. In fact, decisions made in fear are almost invariably bad. (See: war on terrorism.)
We might instead react to the threat of climate change as an epic historical challenge, a call to greater purpose, a chance to sacrifice on behalf of our children and grandchildren. We might relish the opportunity to remake the world. But we will react that way only from a place of prosperity and confidence. People are more likely to do the right thing when they feel good, not when they feel frightened and guilty.
That's what S&N want: a message that inspires confidence and hope. In this, I am entirely simpatico.
Now, where do you go from there? As I wrote here, on a policy level I think they underestimate the power of reshaping markets and overestimate the power of public investment, but we agree on the Obama plan, so I doubt there's all that much distance between us. As I wrote here, it's unfortunate that they frame the entire book as an attack on a crusty right-wing stereotype of environmentalists -- thereby insuring that the majority of the ensuing debate would create more heat than light -- but I'm in alignment with their basic political valence.
The important question, then, is this: what message of confidence and hope? At root, S&N believe that climate change is part of a larger story about sustainable development, and I agree. But what is that story, and what does it say about who we are?
The task ahead is to decouple the growth of our happiness, health, and spiritual fulfillment from the growth of our our material possessions and waste. We need to learn how to grow economies and bring people to a level of safety and comfort without growing CO2 emissions or depleting non-renewable resources. That's never been done before, anywhere. It's an entirely new way for human beings to live in the world.
As I see it, S&N somewhat miss the mark on how we get there. The picture they paint -- of humans celebrating their power, overcoming, conquering new frontiers -- strikes me as a poor man's mix of Nietzsche and Ayn Rand. It is a story that pretends there are no limits, that our cleverness can transcend the laws of ecology and even physics. That's just not going to wash any more. Atmospheric carbon isn't even close to the only material limit we're nearing.
If you think of humanity as a person, S&N are advocating a return to youth, to a sense of limitless possibility and invulnerability. But that's gone irretrievably. Humanity is currently in somewhat bitter adolescence, discovering that the world doesn't revolve around it, that nobody's going to clean up after it, that it is not an unfettered individual but part of a community of life, in a web of obligations and responsibilities to others in the community. Teenagers resent that, but part of growing up is discovering that there are unique and durable joys to be found in the obligations of community, in accepting its limits even while enjoying its grounding sustenance.
Rather than returning to youth, we should be moving forward, to maturity, to adulthood. We need to grow up.
Comments (6)
I agree on the counter-productive politics of fear as revealed by study of both individual and mass pschological response.
But, what about the response to the response?
Whatever the constructive and well informed say on the environment or about nuclear proliferation, say, the GOP is going to play the politics of fear across a whole spectrum of matters: "xenophobia, and reactionary moralism" are their stock and trade -- "chicken" is their game.
As part of a calming and constructive counter-posture, I would note certain lapses on the part of our politics-as-usual crowd:
First, there is a notable lack of conspicuous daring and risk-taking among those as would promote large outlays on mitigation technologies. They really plan to throw money at a problem, set-aside some for their cronies, create a new investment bubble, and push-down critical decisions to prestigious academics, well-known defense contractors and brand-name concession-tenders who will make problems go away through the magic of cartoons, air-brush renderings of a wonderful future, and pro-forma charts and graphs.
The Vichy (DLC/DSCC/DCCC) Democrats are, in fact, the Enron (Clinton) Democrats.
Everything about that accomodationist deal-culture of risk-averse petty patronage and legalistic corruption -- shall I call it -- plays into the hands of GOP fear-mongers.
Missing from this "Hold Harmless" and "Jes' He'p Ever'body" culture of bi-partisan log-rolling is any indication of brave leadership or principled discipline by what are just conspicuously self-serving individuals living in a cocoon of comfort and obsessive sensitivity to political slights.
Second, there is simply the hollowness of environmentalism as special pleading and the reduction of justice to plaintiff-lawyery with the settlment of any question for attorneys' fees and other artifacts of cringing and process liberalism.
Sorry, but a bi-partisan Anglo-American political establishment that caters to the rentier-class exclusively and cannot deal with, say, mine-safety or provision of armored vehicles and small arms for the infantry its precious heirs never serve in will be rightly crushed by anger:
That would be righteous or unmanaged, either fanned by "demogogues" or covered up with salves until the pus bursts out by "soothsayers".
No, the medicine of "spin doctors" is not actually economics or engineering.
::JRBehrman
October 11, 2007 10:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks, first of all, for actually commenting on the book (as opposed to some of the other posts in this book discussion).
If nothing else, the book provides a starting off point to have the discussion. Before S&N, there wasn't a big debate in the environmental community about whether or not we should speak in terms of catastrophe or asipiration. And it's debate that we need to have on the left. I doubt anyone has all of the answers (and I wouldn't trust anyone who said they did), but they've convinced me on the need for a new kind of narrative, and I look forward to participating in the discussion.
But it's important, I think, to note that it's not just a new "message" or "frame" that's important. Coming out of the Vietnam era, many of left's baby boomers, it seems, have a hard time envisioning a vision of greatness for America because they naturally fall into a narrative about how bad America is. Words like imperialism, racist, and sexist fall off their tongues with ease. To be sure, we need a new foreign policy, have real issues with both racism and sexism in our country and we should never create an environment where dissent is anything but celebrated.
But as a politics -- where we're trying to convicne the American people that we can lead their country -- aspiring to greatness needs to be a the center of who we are. And we should get to define that greatness, not leaving the definition of what is patriotic or American to Frank Luntz or Karl Rove.
That is, I think, the challenge for the post-boomer progressives.
October 11, 2007 11:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
Coming out of the Vietnam era, many of left's baby boomers, it seems, have a hard time envisioning a vision of greatness for America because they naturally fall into a narrative about how bad America is. Words like imperialism, racist, and sexist fall off their tongues with ease.
I think this mislocates the source of the problem. The decline of visionary politics is primarily the consequence of the ascendancy of two distinct right wing trends. The first is the “end of history” triumphalism ushered in by the end of the Cold War, and under which we are still languishing. You cannot persuade people both to envision and work energetically toward a substantially better future, with focused and precise long term goals, if they believe they already live in something close to paradise.
The unfortunate lesson some drew from the collapse of the totalitarian statist communisms of the Cold War was the total rejection of every form utopian hope, social organization and planning, vigorous self-governance of economic activity and deliberate egalitarian reform of society. For market triumphalists, heavily represented in both parties now, the future isn’t something to be envisioned, debated, chosen and then achieved by organized social effort. It is just what happens as a result of the exertions of self-seeking individuals, and the role of politics is to liberate entrepreneurialism by getting government out of the way.
The other trend is the resurgence of the end times apocalypticism of the religious right. This is a style of American thinking that has been around for a very long time.
Both of these trends are destructive of social imagination and vision. While the first is more optimistic than the second, they both claim we are at the end of the great historical drama, that fundamental social change and political-economic reform are finished. The only vision that remains for the end timer is the vision of the final destruction of the temporal world and the dawn of the supernatural world to come. The only visionary goal that remains for the market triumphlist is the vision of individual achievement, and the indeterminate faith in undirected and purposeless material progress.
But what we need to liberate now is not entrepreneurial spirit. America has more than enough individual initiative. What we need to liberate now is our latent capacity of planning, organizing and executing a visionary social project – the kind of project represented by the Second World War, for example.
The potential energy for social change is stored in a profound sense of dissatisfaction with the present time, coupled with courageous confidence in our capacity to build solidarity, wrest power from established interests and repair what is wrong. The left is not to blame for a lack of social vision. Those people who have been the most vocal about racism, sexism, imperialism, militarism, exploitation and oppression are the very same people who are most responsible for keeping alive the vision of a better world. The left is full of visionary dreams and schemes. But the left has been silenced, ignored and systematically attacked by the current commanders of our society in business, government and the media.
October 14, 2007 3:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
First, there is a notable lack of conspicuous daring and risk-taking among those as would promote large outlays on mitigation technologies. They really plan to throw money at a problem, set-aside some for their cronies, create a new investment bubble, and push-down critical decisions to prestigious academics, well-known defense contractors and brand-name concession-tenders who will make problems go away through the magic of cartoons, air-brush renderings of a wonderful future, and pro-forma charts and graphs
This is right on target. And this is one reason I am so opposed to the rhetorical strategy of attempting to build social support for a comprehensive environmental and climate change strategy purely on luminous, soft-focus images of an indeterminate future filled with untold material riches produced by green entrepreneurs.
You rightly mention brave leadership and political risk-taking. Great risk taking only happens when the stakes are high, and there is something vital at hazard. And as everyone who has written perceptively on the topic from Aristotle downward would point out, the virtue of courage is only exemplified in the context of fear. A social project to stop climate change must still be centered on climate change itself, and the threats posed by climate change must be made vivid and healthily feared.
Some of the discussion of fear in this book club debate has focused only on cowards' fear, the kind that paralyzes people, makes them huddle together, and makes them turn over their destiny to usurpers. But the fear of the brave is exhilarating, not paralyzing. It makes the senses more acute, heightens alertness, quickens the mind and releases stores of untapped energy. People often do amazing things in battle.
It's a good thing to build hope, confidence and optimism. But the narrative we are looking for must be a compelling drama. And every drama has a nemesis - the enemy and pursuer over which the hero triumphs, or by which the hero is defeated. If one writes the villain out of the drama, you have no drama left. The you only have lassitude and politics as usual.
A program of public investment based only on seeding entrepreneurial wealth-creation schemes, but without a coherent social goal and clear definitions of victory and defeat will degenerate into just more corporate welfare, pork-barrel spending and public boondoggles, empowering the Duke Cunninghams of the world and doing nothing in the end to defeat the problem. We might get dozens of individual products that are in themselves incrementally greener, but which stimulate an aggregate pattern of growth that is even more environmentally destructive than what we have now. We'll get politicians delivering the funds for new airports and highways, with some tripe about how these are new-fangled "green" airports and "green" roads for new "green" planes and "green" internal combustion automobiles - and thus how this spending is all part of the plan. We'll get more fuel efficient engines, that go the same distances with half the carbon emissions, but which are used four times as often because they are so damn efficient. This is what happens if we leave everything up to individual choice and acquisitive desire, and pump money into the system without a disciplining social goal.
October 14, 2007 4:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
Virtual "10".
I'd like to add to this but can't see how to improve the argument.
October 14, 2007 11:28 AM | Reply | Permalink
David, good to see you at Talking Points. This site hasn't paid a whole lot of attention in the past to environmental issues such as global warming, so I'm glad you've wandered this way. Your post is, as usual, thoughtful and nuanced. Yes, we need to grow up as a society.
I haven't read S&N's book, but I did spend considerable time with their white paper. Frankly, I think the reaction from mainstream environmental leaders has often had a knee-jerk quality that obscures some of S&N's valuable contributions. You help flesh them out here.
Where I get a little bored with the intenseness of the debate is the implication by many that we are playing intellectual king of the hill -- that this is a fight for the soul of environmentalism. I suppose in a sense it does matter which meme dominates, but it still seems to me that the game has become too shrill and shrouded in insider baseball.
Fact is, in a pluralistic society there will always be different shades of "environmentalism." This will likely become even more the case as the culture continues to fragment into a postindustrial neo-tribalism of sorts. But even looking backward 20 years, it has been rare in my community (a hotbed of enviro activism) where there was anything close to a consensus on key issues. We've always been a cantankerous bunch of misfits and malcontents.
If S&N are positioning themselves to become the DLC of environmentalism, so what? This is just one point on the ideological spectrum. If this particulare meme does prevail I suspect it will do so because it is in greater sync with the underlying dynamics of the American political economy than more "leftist" alternatives.
I don't say the above because I buy into S&N's ideology. Nor do I think we should accept it in a fatalistic way. My only point is that at the end of the day, different people will buy into addressing global warming for differing ideological reasons. We need a "big tent" strategy to reach critical mass. That's a bitter pill for many activists to swallow, but is there really any other choice?
To me one of the greatest values of S&N's writings is that they have cultivating a badly needed discussion on what constitutes effective social change. That some of us might strongly disagree with some of their answers does not detract one comma from the importance of raising this critical question.
October 16, 2007 1:26 AM | Reply | Permalink