Matthew Pye
Part 1
Pocket Edition - Januari 2019
No common sense
Philosophy tackles climate change.
“In the following pages I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense; and have no other preliminaries to settle with the reader, than that he will divest himself of prejudice and prepossession, and suffer his reason and his feelings to determine for themselves; that he will put on, or rather that he will not put off, the true character of a man, and generously enlarge his views beyond the present day”. Opening to Chapter 4, “Common Sense” (1776), Thomas Paine.
Colophon Author: Matthew Pye Guest Authors: Vappu Väänänen, Ginny Tyson, Jules Pye (‘3 Essays for Childpress’) ISBN/EAN: 978-90-74730-40-2 First run: January 2019 Published by Fysio Educatief in coöperation with ChildPress.org Copyright ©2019 Fysio Educatief Proofreading: Sean O’Dubhghaill & Generation Z Cover Illustration: Stijn van der Pol Cartoons: Carl Jonsson Design: www.thisissaf.com Graphs and Photography: All sources listed with image, unless the original source could not be tracked. In case you find a copyrighted image, please let us know. Fysio Educatief • Groenburgwal 59 • 1011 HT Amsterdam www.fysioeducatief.nl • office@fysioeducatief.nl
No common sense Philosophy tackles climate change. An Examination of the State we are in. - Part 1 By Matthew Pye
“Remember that teacher who inspired you? Maybe they radically changed your view of yourself or your world? Maybe they changed the direction of your life? This book opens up the classroom door again…” - Team Fysio Educatief
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Foreword I had the privilege to challenge Matthew Pye and some of his colleagues from around Europe with the project of constructing a new Philosophy syllabus. It was my task to convince them of the value of crystalising clear competences and scaffolding explicit learning targets. As the working group went through the different stages of building the syllabus, the value of Philosophy has become more and more evident to me. I am convinced that young students (and adults) are hungry for this level of reflection and guidance. With the book, Matthew Pye continues the work of the syllabus and the teaching by opening up the classroom to everyone, breaking down walls between school and real life, and between different generations. The reading of this book will enable young students to examine the topic of climate change and simultaneously become more autonomous thinkers, move beyond their egocentric thinking, and go into dialogue with great thinkers. I look forward to discussing the book with my young adult daughters with whom I share the strongest concerns about the most astonishing ‘senseless’ transformation of the planet that is going on.
Els Vermeire
Inspector for the European Schools Coordinating Inspector of Education (Flanders)
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An astonishing transformation of the Earth is happening right now. This change is affecting every living species on the planet. If this change is not stopped, it will move through human civilisation like a wrecking ball. - II -
Photo by Niels Kuiper
You have the right to know the truth.
Matthew Pye Teacher of Philosophy Full Member - Club of Rome (EU Chapter) - III -
No Common Sense (Part 1) Preface - VII The Plan - XV 3 Maps - XXV The Book - XXXV Credits - 255 Essays - 262
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Chapter 1 - What is Real? The Basic Science of climate change
with graphs and Pye charts
Chapter 2 - A bridge
THIS BOOK: PART 1
A Bridge from ‘What is Real?’ to ‘What is Right?’
with Friedrich Nietzsche
Chapter 3 - What is Right? Confronting the basic ethics of climate change
with Hannah Arendt
Chapter 4 - Common Sense Living on the edge of revolutionary change
with Thomas Paine
Chapter 5 - The Science of climate change The main co-ordinates of the science
with René Descartes
Chapter 6 - Fake Science Dealing with climate change scepticism
with Karl Popper
Chapter 7 - Political Philosophy The psychological and ethical roots of the problem
with Rousseau
Chapter 8 - Reason The importance of reason and Philosophy
with Plato and Socrates
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PART 2
COMING LATER IN 2019
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Preface An astonishing transformation of the Earth is happening right now. This change is affecting every living species on the planet. If this change is not stopped, it will move through human civilisation like a wrecking ball. This is not a Hollywood movie trailer. This is not the blurb for a science fiction novel. This is simple, mainstream science. The change that is happening is climate change. Yet, we have no common sense of it, even though this shift is radical and deeply damaging to human life.
The Extra-ordinary truth of Climate Change. There have been major dramas in the planet’s history before. For example, 66 million years ago (66.043 ± 0.011 Ma) a massive asteroid marked a massive full stop (over a hundred miles wide) at the end of the dinosaurs’ paragraph of history. The Chicxulub crater, which still marks the Yucatan Peninsula, was the result of a blast that was as strong as 10 billion Hiroshima A-bombs. The dinosaurs did not see it coming. How could they? The Ampelosaurus had the biggest brain of all of them, but it was only the size of a tennis ball1, and their club-like feet would also have made it difficult for them to grip a telescope. By contrast, homo sapiens have brains the size of a decent melon and it is filled with about 16 billion neurones. Although we have puny bodies, we have managed to construct high-precision scientific instruments with our intellectual and physical dexterity. We can see far into the past with our satellite dishes, and quite clearly into the future with other high-tech equipment.
1 https://www.livescience.com/26539-giant-sauropods-small-brains.html
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The Moa Loa Observatory in Hawaii, for example, can measure the make-up of our atmosphere to the accuracy of 1 particle per million. It has been collecting samples since 1956, and the steep upward curve of the data points in a truly alarming direction. The details will follow, but the main consequence is clear. Unchecked emissions will push the eco-system over an irreversible tipping point in the near future. It will not be pretty for us. The headlines of that change will result in mass migration, catastrophic floods and storms, alongside food and water supply failures. Atlases and geographical charts will have to be redrawn extensively. Geologists, at their research desks, have drawn lines through the planet’s deep history to divide time into the main blocks of life that have come and gone. Sometimes these lines can actually be seen in the Earth itself. The Chicxulub asteroid left a band of compacted quartz in Mexico. Furthermore, the wider fall-out of this impact created the K–Pg boundary. This is a band of sediment filled with ‘stardust’ that has been identified all around the Earth. The thin layer of rock at this level of our lithosphere has such a high level of the extremely rare element iridium, that scientists are now quite sure that something really cosmic happened to the dinosaurs. The Industrial Revolution has forced geologists to get out their big marker pen once more as they prepare to draw another decisive mark across planetary time. The Chicxulub asteroid notwithstanding, it could be argued that the Earth has never seen anything so dramatic happen to it in such a short space of time before. Absurd as it might be, how thick and bold this line will be depends on the political decisions that will be taken in the coming few years. If ever there was something to write about, this is it. Human genius and stupidity is on display in equal and astonishing measure, and we urgently need to make some common sense of it. This is true at two levels. Firstly, we have no common sense of its reality. Secondly, we are not making a common sense response to it. The first problem concerns perception, while the second problem concerns ethics. However, whilst it might be helpful to set out the problem of climate change with these two categories, it will become clear that these two domains are intimately connected. Epistemology (the analysis of knowledge) and Ethics (the analysis of what is Right) complement and overlap with each other.
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The title of this book has been taken from the famous pamphlet, “Common Sense”, written by Thomas Paine in 1776 because he was tackling a similar set of problems. Paine wanted to get the American colonists to see the absurdity of their situation with their mother country. “No Common Sense” is closely positioned to that, as an attempt to portray the absurd situation we are in as clear as possible. We are in the middle of a constitutional crisis with mother nature, and those in power are simply not acting in the economic and democratic interests of their people. The reason we cannot see the crisis is because we are stuck in various illusions about reality – and there is an urgent need to be woken up. As Paine so eloquently wrote, “The Sun never shined on a cause of greater worth. ‘Tis not the affair of a City, a County, a Province, or a Kingdom; but of a Continent—of at least one eighth part of the habitable Globe. ‘Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected even to the end of time, by the proceedings now. Now is the seed-time of Continental union, faith and honour. The least fracture now will be like a name engraved with the point of a pin on the tender rind of a young oak; the wound would enlarge with the tree, and posterity read it in full grown characters”.
(Common Sense, Volume 1, line 85).
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Really looking into space. It is time to get philosophical. We live our whole lives only perceiving a very thin slice of reality. Right now, pet dogs are tuned into sounds that we cannot catch, pet cats are tracking smells well beyond our range. Right now, millions of quarks are passing imperceptibly through the earth and Supernovas are spilling their enriched guts into countless areas of the universe. The English school master Edwin Abbott Abbott [sic] was very very [sic] aware of these limitations of human perception and wanted to pass this ignorance onto his students. Writing satirically as ‘A Square’, he admitted his limited understanding of the world in a multi-dimensional work called, ‘Flatlands’. Taken at surface value, the book is about how A Square (a 2 dimensional shape) encounters real problems when he visits different dimensions. Firstly, A Square has a disturbing dream about a visit to ‘Lineland’ in which no one can recognise who he really is because they just see him as a sequence of dots. In fact, the monarch of Lineland feels so threatened by the absurd notion of an extra dimension that an attempt is made to kill him. Then, after waking up from this awful dream, things get more disturbing. A Square encounters A Sphere. And so, in a shocking twist, the problem is reversed. No matter how hard A Square tries, he just cannot understand what A Sphere is talking about. A Sphere tries to show the depth of the 3-dimensional world that it comes from, but all A Square can see is a series of linear circles and ovals. That is until he visits Sphere World. In Sphere World he comes to understand how limited his previous experience was. After seeing these deeper dimensions to existence, he returns to Flatland. However, his insights are suppressed by those in power. Abbott’s ‘Flatland’ not only questions the veracity of our perceptions, it also functions as a cultural critique. He was putting forward a critical view of the fixed social strata of Victorian England; not only does A Square realise the conceptual limits of his normal sense of the world, he also observes how tightly knowledge is controlled between the dimensions and how much resistance there is to seeing the world in a different way. Indeed, towards the end of the novella, A Square tries to convert his Grandson to the ‘Gospel of 3 dimensions’ but his attempt to explain the radical difference between
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going ‘Up’ and going ‘North’ is a futile one, as he cannot point to it in two-dimensional space. The Grand Council of Flatland eventually arrest him for his subversive attempt to challenge the status quo. It is during his imprisonment that the novella ‘Flatland’ is written. The novella is a memoir, attempting to explain the fuller reality of things so that future generations might see the truth. Abbott writes in his Preface:
To The Inhabitants of SPACE IN GENERAL And H. C. IN PARTICULAR This Work is Dedicated By a Humble Native of Flatland In the Hope that Even as he was Initiated into the Mysteries Of THREE Dimensions Having been previously conversant With ONLY TWO So the Citizens of that Celestial Region May aspire yet higher and higher To the Secrets of FOUR FIVE OR EVEN SIX Dimensions Thereby contributing To the Enlargement of THE IMAGINATION And the possible Development Of that most rare and excellent Gift of MODESTY Among the Superior Races Of SOLID HUMANITY (Preface to the Second and Revised Edition, 1884.)
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The book was largely ignored after its publication in 1884. However, after Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity was published in 1915, the common sense understanding concerning the dimensions of space and time was radically shaken up, and interest in ‘Flatland’ spiked. Abbott was a teacher and he wanted his students to confront the limits of their common sense of the world. There are many more dimensions to existence than those to which we are habitually used. Similarly, the conclusions of modern climate science are an offence to our common sense of the world. We should be shaken up by the climate scientists’ summary reports for the IPCC. Something appalling is unfolding in front of us, and yet we are not responding. The physical and social realities of climate change expose a great number of paradoxes and contradictions in the human condition. They require a genuine openness of mind and heart to see. Knowledge and understanding is not simply acquired by the intellect, it requires courage to think outside of our normal boundaries. Within an individual, just like within society, there is often a moral fight for control over what is permitted to be known.
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This is the plan Dear Students, You have the right to know the truth. You have the privilege, over the two years of the course, of becoming acquainted with many of the great minds of Philosophy. Each of the chapters here work as a selfcontained unit that can be used to pursue a particular interest. However, each chapter also belongs within an overall plan. It looks like this:
No Common Sense - Part ONE Overturning Common Sense Before inviting the different philosophers to examine our predicament with climate change, it is essential to first get an accurate and clear picture of what is going on. Millions of people are very anxious about what is happening above their heads, and they would appreciate some guidance in sorting through the different, often disturbing, headlines that appear with increasing frequency. How do I keep track of where we are up to with climate change? What are the important statistic? How close are we to a 1.5°C rise? What would the consequences of going over a 2°C rise be? The aim of Part One is to lay out the main conclusions of climate science into some sort of clear and ordered view. Getting a clear view of climate change is not just difficult because it lies beyond our sensory experience, there are numerous obstacles in the way to attaining a decent vantage point. Firstly, not everyone has the time to chew through the scientific literature – and even if someone was qualified and motivated to do so, the technical detail of those research papers, and even their summaries, are difficult to decode. Secondly, the media only provides us with a limited and fragmentary view of the situation, and trying to do independent research to fill in the gaps through the internet
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is very demanding because it is awash with the junk of so many uninformed opinions. Thirdly, human beings are very skilled in the art of censorship, both at a political level and a personal level. The Philosophers in Part One have been selected because all three of them were particularly good at seeing through the clutter of cultural life. Nietzsche, Arendt and Paine were prepared to take on social taboos and to overcome comforting illusions in order to establish a more authentic view of reality. The other major theme that links thinkers in Part One is that all three of them were also sharply aware of the power interests that shape how we perceive the world. Broadly, Part One starts with questions of what is real and progressively unfolds the questions of what is right as it moves towards Thomas Paine in Chapter 4.
In more detail: Chapter One will deal with the mainstream conclusions of the science. There has to be a sound empirical basis for any discussion, and the following chapter on “What is Real?” will set out the headlines from the science of climate change research. When the main conclusions from the data are put alongside our social responses to the issue, some significant questions about human psychology arise. Chapter Two will invite Nietzsche to develop our understanding of how our impression of what is real, can be heavily influenced by our sense of what is right. Our perception of the world is not just a simple case ‘looking’. Not only do we always see reality from a limited perspective, but we are also deeply moral creatures who instinctively filter our experiences according to basic psychological instincts. To that end, Nietzsche offers a bridge from Epistemology to Ethics. Chapter Three opens up the ethics of climate change further with Hannah Arendt. She takes on the challenge of understanding how people can become part of thoughtless totalitarian regimes – having experienced first-hand the devastating brutality of the Nazis. Her insights, arrestingly perceptive at the time, remain extremely pertinent today. Thoughtlessness can have catastrophic consequences. Finally, Thomas Paine’s life and work are examined in Chapter Four. His revolutionary book, “Common Sense” (1776) spoke truth to power. There is an unavoidable tension
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between the high-mindedness of Philosophy and the mucky reality of climate change, but one of the most striking achievements of Thomas Paine’s life and work, is that he managed to remain utterly committed to both ideals and reality at the same time.
No Common Sense - Part TWO (2019)
Developing our Common Sense The Science - What is Real? Part Two takes broadly the same shape as Part One - it starts with the empirical evidence of the science and then moves on to consider the political implications of the main conclusions. The difference is that in Chapters 5 and 6, the science sets off from a more basic level. The elementary building blocks of the climate change consensus are put together piece by piece. As most of the reality of climate science lies beyond the senses, it is informative to start with the work of Descartes. He was engaged with establishing a proper space for scientific enquiry away from the traditions and dogmas of the Church. The theory that the sun lay at the centre of the solar system (put forward by Copernicus in 1543) seemed rather counter-intuitive to common sense. However, when this model was bolstered by the observations of Galileo through his telescope (in 1609), it became impossible for the church to ignore the findings. Science was creating some uncomfortable truths for those in power, and Chapter 5 shows how Descartes’ deploys his ground-breaking philosophy in ‘Meditations’ (1641) to find a constructive way forward out of the impasse. Dogmatic reactions to science are still prevalent today. The work of a handful of fossil-fuelled climate change sceptics to stall the political debate has been remarkably successful. Chapter 6 reluctantly takes on the task of actually discussing something so intellectually and morally impoverished with the help of Popper. These two thinkers also represent the two main branches of Philosophy: Descartes is a Rationalist, while Popper is an Empiricist. The former represents the power of reason
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to slice open reality in a clean and analytical way. The latter represents the importance of supporting any claims with an open-minded approach to the evidence. Philosophy is not some airheaded speculation; it must always respect the data. These two thinkers show the contrasting methods through which philosophy can probe reality.
The Politics – What is Right? Chapters 7 and 8 deal with the major social and ethical questions posed by climate change. In Chapter 7, the psychological and ethical roots of the problem are examined through the probing work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His deep but qualified respect for democracy points in the right direction for finding some solutions to the key political dilemmas we are faced with. Rousseau was one of the founding fathers of “Social Contract Theory”, a branch of Political Philosophy that established the main co-ordinates of our Western social order. The dull title of this tradition conceals the huge impact it had on our political lives, especially with its concern for Human Rights. This book will argue from within its bandwidth. Plato and Socrates were two Athenians who kick started Philosophy in the Western world. The enduring value of Plato’s ‘Republic’ becomes clear again. Chapter 8 emphasises the importance of having our desires and our spirit guided by reason. The final conclusion of this book is that we urgently need new binding laws rooted in national governments, that will frame our democratic lives in a realistic way, inside the laws of nature. These actions require all the different bodies of the United Nations to think clearly too. Billions of people are concerned for the future of their children. Billions of people are broadly aware of the dangers of climate change. Yet there have been no significant shifts in policies or action – our emissions are consistently and rapidly rising. We are in an absurd situation. Yet, social change can be extremely swift. Hopefully, these 8 philosophers can do their part to sharpen the broad social consensus on climate change into a focused and loud call for effective legislation.
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Climate action needs to be faster than climate change, it is the most important race human civilisation has ever had. (My apologies to Aristotle, Hobbes, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Thoreau, Rawls and all the other great thinkers, who have so much to say, but had to be left on the substitute’s bench for now)
A Modern Meditation Picking out Chapter 5 for particular attention: Descartes wrote his ‘Meditations’ in 6 chapters, one for each day of work before the Sabbath. He intended his readers to take the time each day to reflect on each one progressively. He was emulating the style of a prayer book2, whilst at the same time setting the modern world in motion. Descartes was living on a fault line in human cultural history. He understood the need for a radical overhaul in human thinking - about themselves and the planet. The scientific knowledge of his day could simply not be accommodated inside the old systems of thought and culture. When faced with a new scientific reality of climate change that poses an offence to our minds and society, a step-by-step guide is needed to get our heads around it all. This book, of course, is written by a normal bloke with a normal teaching job; there is no genius anywhere here. Indeed, this is not an original work of Philosophy, each chapter simply uses the insights of different philosophers from the past, to illuminate the present. However, the general intention of this book is similar. Descartes’ book invited his readers to see how quickly our common sense of the world unravels when the simplest lines of thought are followed through to the end. Likewise, the fuller reality of climate change is a brutal shock to our common sense. And finally, Descartes attempted to offer a constructive conclusion to his book, after all the radical uncertainties that he raised. These eight amateur chapters will try to follow his example. Descartes lived in a time that respected the Sabbath. He limited his book to only six chapters – one to be read every other day. By contrast, our 24/7 society is moving so fast towards a crisis that such a luxury is not affordable and so, this book overflows into 8 chapters.
2 For example, the “Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola” (1548)
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Who is this book for? Those inside the classroom Philosophy is a subject that makes demands on both the head and the heart. For those fresh to the subject, the aim has been to provide a comfortable starting point - without diminishing the impact of the thinkers or the issues at stake. For those with some experience, the aim has been to recapture some of the vitality that these revolutionary thinkers brought to the world. Philosophy is a subject that keeps on giving; and the great thinkers of the past always reward those who continue to revisit their work. For those Philosophy students holdling this book who are going to be tested by the European Baccalaureate, I have tried to model each chapter with respect to the demands of the syllabus that we are both tested with. Importantly, I have tried to open up a ‘trialogue’ between the world, the philosophers and ourselves. But really, it is all about helping you become autonomous. The shocking truth of climate change, both scientific and social, has to be persistently dragged before our minds. There might be some repetition of the main points throughout the book, because each chapter should also be able to stand alone for any teacher or student who does not have the time to make use of the whole book. Indeed, repeating the main riffs of climate change in the different contexts of each thinker is oddly necessary; this is because it is remarkably easy to be too casual about the disturbing reality in front of us. We have ‘No Common Sense’ of the physical truth of climate change and ‘No Common Sense’ in response to it. It therefore seems important to keep the key truths clearly visible. The world needs autonomous thinkers and autonomous citizens more than ever before. For this most important of examinations about the State that we are in, Philosophy is your remarkable tutor.
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Leaving the classroom door open One of the more banal prompts for writing the book came from the problem that presents itself when a student misses a lesson for a good reason, and is keen to catch up. It is never easy to summarise 45 minutes of deconstruction, reconstruction, detail and debate into a short explanation – so these eight sequential chapters are offered as a ‘take-away’ to chew over. But what if you missed out on studying Philosophy all-together? Predictably, this book offers an open door for anyone to engage in Philosophy. Some adults express the regret that they did not have the option to study Philosophy when they were younger. Whatever the reason for this feeling, unlike a Philosophy class, there is no problem about arriving late to the discipline. The clear disadvantage of the reader not being in a classroom is that you cannot enter into a live dialogue with the thinkers and those around you. However, there are some evident advantages of holding a book: you can pick your nose, chew gum, swing on your chair, shout out-loud whenever you want, or simply take everything outside into the fresh-air and sit on the grass, if things start to get a bit claustrophobic. Although there is no live debate, each chapter tries to raise each philosopher up from the past with all their contexts and concerns – and these great minds can then help us interrogate our present. Indeed, Thomas Paine wrote “Common Sense” in a polemical style, and he did so for a range of reasons. For example, his approach enabled him to write with a directness and an urgency. It also provided a way for him to grapple openly with the key issues surrounding the critical question of American Independence, because he wanted the reader to join in the struggle to understand and to act. What is plainly true is that he did not adopt a polemical tone in order to mask the limitations of his arguments. It often serves a Philosophy teacher to be quite confrontational by inhabiting the person and the ideas of the thinker at hand because it can help keep the students awake on a Friday afternoon. However, the more important reason is that by adopting a bold attitude to the material, it brings to the surface of the students’ minds some surprising assumptions about the world that would have otherwise lain dormant - being frank thereby creates a genuine point of contact and interest.
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Can these bones live? At the turn of the 6th century BC, the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel addressed his fellow Israelites. They were faced with a truly formidable threat to their existence3 in the shape of a very mean looking Babylonian Army out in the East. God commanded Ezekiel to shave off all his hair, bake his bread over the fuel of human faeces - and whilst laying on his left side for 390 days, he was to contemplate the future of his society that had really lost touch with some of its core values. After following these symbolic orders, God eventually shows Ezekiel a vision of a ‘Valley of Dry Bones’, and he then asks him the now famous question, “Can these bones live?” (Ezekiel 37:3). Faced with our own very real existential threats, we can ask ourselves the same question. Can the bones of our rich cultural past take on flesh and speak to us again? The answer is surely “Yes”, and the good news is that doing Philosophy does not require Ezekiel’s lifestyle choices to get started.
3 In 597BC, Israel had become a vassal state to King Nebuchadnezzar, and the prophet Ezekiel was writing from exile in Babylon back to his people with words of warning. The fist of the Babylonian Army was about to smash through Israel (it did, in 586BC). Ezekiel’s warnings also came with a vision of how things could be restored.
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Space for your own reflections - XXIII -
“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” - Robert Orben
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Three maps to help you navigate around this book. For our basic geographical need to find a bank, a friends’ house, or a museum in a foreign city, we now have smartphones. This same bit of technology can also enable us to look up a simply astonishing range of opening times, sport results, or quirky facts. Yet modern life remains bewilderingly confusing. Society is extra-ordinarily complex and busy, and so finding our proper place in it is rather challenging. We need help developing our cognitive maps of the social reality around us. This book offers 3 maps to get started:
1) A map of a slice of time 2) A map of the U.N. Institutions 3) A map of what Philosophy is All three maps are to be found on the following pages.
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Science The Earth is round
c600BC
Copernicus: Heliocentric Solar System
Watt: Patent of the Steam Engine
1543
1784 First Telescope
1608
History
The Tennis Court Oath
The Inquisition of Galileo
1789
1635
The Execution of Socrates
US Declaration of Independence
399BC
1777
Philosophy
Descartes ‘Meditations’
1641 Plato ‘Republic’
423 BC
Ancient Philosophy
Scholastic Philosophy
Rousseau ‘The Social Contrast’
Paine ‘Common Sense’
1776
1751
Modern Philosophy
Map 1 The Timeline
headline the chapters of this book are put alongside the major cultural and scientific events that are significant for climate change - in a three layered timeline.
Having a clear family tree can help us understand ourselves. Map 1 lays out the place of each of the Philosophers in our deep family history. The 7 thinkers that
In a society that seems to be continually pressing on the refresh button to update the present, understanding our past has become especially important.
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Fourier: Disovery of The Greenhouse Effect
Hansen: Testifies to US Congress about the reality of Anthropogenic Climate Change
1824
Lyell: ‘Principles of Geology’
2019
1988
1830-33
First Solar Panel Human Population reaches 1 Billion
1804
Three consecutive years of record breaking average temperatures
1884 Discovery of Oil
1859
2014-16 WWI
1914
Nietzsche ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’
1887
WWII
1939 Popper ‘The Open Society and its Enemies’
1953
Arendt ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’
1963
“Direct self-observation is not nearly sufficient for us to know ourselves: we need history, for the past flows on within us in a hundred waves.” - Nietzsche
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Science
Established 1951
Map 2 - The U.N. Institutions In various air-conditioned offices dotted around the globe, from New York to Nairobi or/and Geneva, there are thousands of desks, computers and people who are dealing directly with Climate Change - all of them established by the United Nations. Anyone who would like to follow the latest news on Climate Change will be confronted with their acronyms: UNFCCC, UNEP, IPCC, WMO... and so on. Map 2 sets out how they all fit together.
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Established 1988
Politics
UNITED NATIONS Established 1974
*A Treaty The UNFCCC Ratified by all 196 UN Member States
Established 1972
One Objective:�Stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.�
Informs with the best available science. Signed 1994*
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Map 3 -What is Philosophy? It takes some time to understand what Philosophy is about, and what is supposed to be happening in a Philosophy book. It takes some time to figure the rules of the game. Philosophy is a subject that can seem a bit intimidating, and frankly, sometimes it can just seem a bit odd. Map 3 is an attempt to draw a picture of what is going on. At the bottom right of the image is the reader - the self. This is the starting point - our everyday life. Through a dialogue with the Philosophers we are drawn away from common sense assumptions about ourselves and our situation. This movement out of our corner enables us to see the world from a different angle and it enables us to take a critical distance from ourselves. The space in the middle of the triangle is where Philosophy happens - at first this unfamiliar place can be a challenging zone to find our feet in. However, through a continual ‘trialogue’ with the Philosophers, our world, and our own experience, we can build up the strength and skills to become autonomous thinkers and agents. Philosophy is not just the understanding of different arguments, it is not just the history of ideas. It is a subject that interrogates us and our world. It draws the mind and the heart out of clichés and comfortable illusions - and invites us to be more fully ourselves. In the simplest terms, as it says on the label, Philosophy is literally the “love of wisdom” (from the Greek, φιλοσοφία).
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Philosophers
The World Experience
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Space for your own reflections:
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“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Shakesper, Hamlet (Act 1. Scene 5. 167-8)
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No Common Sense Part One
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No Common Sense Love can do it to you. Grief can do it to you. Nature can do it to you. War can do it to you. An act of kindness can do it you. A road accident can do it to you. A strange co-incidence can do it to you. Sometimes it can just happen to you as you eat a bowl of cornflakes. After it has happened, our normal sense of who we are, and our basic understanding of what we are doing here, can be powerfully and irreversibly overturned. Everyday events have a new significance that can feel wonderfully full of potential, or unbearably heavy. What used to seem familiar, now looks utterly alien. After it has happened, what used to look like common sense, now appears as seriously odd. It is the same old life, but it is also radically not the same. Philosophy can do it to you. Philosophy can overturn common sense. It is a subject that can upend our understanding of ourselves and it can transform our expectations of society. In contrast to love and grief, war and accidents, we can choose to do Philosophy and attempt to see ourselves and the world in a significantly different way. This overcoming of common sense often involves a feeling of vertigo as we adjust to our new perspective. But the mental buzz is not the goal. Philosophy is not some mystical meditation, or an effort to achieve a weird high-mindedness. At level zero, Philosophy is the pursuit of truth. It is an attempt to get a better understanding of what really is the case. The plain fact is that Philosophy is simply committed to finding out what is real and what is right. It is just that during the exercise of trying to get to the root of things, Philosophy does throw up some dizzying conclusions and it offers some arresting vantage points. So, for anyone willing to engage, there is a real possibility that Philosophy can do it to you.
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If the upheaval of a world view has never happened to you, why go looking for it? If most things seem to be going OK, what is the problem? A change of perspective is tough to achieve. It requires a lot of critical thinking and determination to move the boundaries of our thoughts. Moreover, whilst there might be some upsides to seeing a new dimension to the world, the shift might also bring along some uncomfortable consequences. It is fair to say that following our common sense of the world is normally enough to get us through most situations. So why bother? What is wrong with the status quo? The problem is that sometimes the ordinary and the conventional are just broken by reality. So, whilst Philosophers spend their time trying grasp reality, sometimes reality just barges in and grasps us. No matter what we think, no matter how much we are committed to the truth or not, sometimes our lives are just invaded by the truth. Even if we thought we had a good map of how things work, reality can trash it. Even if our common sense has told us that we were pretty much on the right lines with our way of life, reality will not hesitate to disturb our plans. Reality has no respect for human opinions, it is intolerant of sentiments, it just stubbornly exists. The bald fact of the matter is that it is the human who is then forced into doing all of the adjusting.
What is Real? What is Right? Philosophy, in its efforts to make proper sense of the world, has two major concerns. ‘What is real?’ and ‘What is Right?’ The rich history of philosophical enquiry has thrown up some very alarming problems that sprang up when we started to think about life in a focused and probing way. There are a startling number of paradoxes, contradictions and puzzles behind our spontaneous understanding of the world. Both of the subject’s branches have had to deal with a wide range of offenses to common sense, when our ordinary view of the truth has been overturned. We have lived with a real world all our life and have made ourselves more or less busy, and so some of these issues may never have presented themselves. Yet, any inquisitive step into either of these two fields of enquiry immediately throws up a maddening number of questions and difficulties.
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Right Real
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Chapter One - ‘What is Real?’ with graphs and Pye charts
Philosophy – an offense to Common Sense Climate Change - an offense to Common Sense The science of climate change in six graphs Conclusion – a medical emergency
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5
5 6 11 30
Chapter 1 ‘What is Real?’ Philosophy - An offense to Common Sense The bluntest offence to our everyday reasoning comes from the brute fact that we exist. Why is there anything at all? Why is there something and not nothing? More pointedly, why am I even able to ask myself these questions? In fact, if the universe is made up of material stuff, then why should this matter give rise to something which we call a psychological experience? Where does this whole ‘watching TV’ experience come from, it is so mental, but I am just a physical object? Indeed, I have been watching TV my whole life through these eyeballs and I have been listening to the quiet soundtrack of my own mind that has offered a narrative to all of the events, and yet, there is no clear account of why this is happening inside my tiny carbon lump of the universe. I am not even sure if I am controlling this soundtrack - the ghostly scriptwriter in my mind is connected (somehow) to a physical brain, and this greyish blob is under the totalitarian control of the laws of chemistry and physics. So how could my shadowy mind ever wrest any proper control over the content of what is going on with the matter in my brain? It gets more problematic. That last paragraph has assumed that there is a clear distinction between mind and matter. Modern Physics, through Quantum mechanics, has thrown into question if there is such a clear boundary between the observer and the observed. At the deepest level of stuff that we can get to, everything looks a bit loopy. Through science’s probing of the subatomic world, it has discovered that our capacity to find any sort of conceptual frame for reality is under serious stress. The truths of Quantum Physics simply violate our experience of the world at the humanoid
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level. Modern Physics is utterly incompatible with common sense, yet it is a highly sophisticated and remarkably precise type of knowledge about reality. Indeed, the progress of science has pushed humans to realise the limits of our regular ideas about life. It was science that brought us the first telescope in 1608, and since then the gap between what is real and what we can sense has widened further and further. The accuracy and depth of the data has developed at a remarkable pace. Those privileged enough to look through Galileo’s telescope in November 1609 were agog at the corrupt surface of the moon and later swooned as they observed the hairy legs of a bug in his microscope. Yet these scientific instruments are now available as birthday presents for children in the Argos catalogue. The progress of science since Galileo’s time was made clear by the readings taken from a NASA telescope in 2014, which was able to measure the diameter of exoplanet ‘Kepler-93b’ to an accuracy of 120 kilometres4; an impressive level of accuracy given that this planet lies 300 light years away from Earth. Looking in the opposite direction, science now knows that 1 million atoms can be lined up along the width of a human hair. By pushing the limits of what we can know, science has pushed us into new fields of knowledge and it has overthrown whole systems of belief. Sometimes a new scientific fact has implications way beyond the field in which it was discovered. Chapter 5, on Descartes, will explore the revolutionary effect that the observations from Galileo’s telescope presented to the political, social and religious orders of the 17th century. Galileo’s observations confirmed that the common sense view of the solar system needed turning on its head, and it was not a comfortable episode for those in power.
Climate Change An offence to our Common Sense Science can measure, in a precise manner, which particles make up the atmosphere above our heads. Since 1958, the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii has been measuring the make-up of the atmospheric molecules, expressed as parts per million (ppm) or billion (ppb) (the number of molecules of a gas per million/billion molecules of dry air). This data has been plotted onto a graph that is known as ‘The Keeling Curve’
4 https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.3659
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after the scientist, Charles David Keeling, who set it up. The latest readings show that there are now 410 particles of CO2 in every million (410ppm). Nitrogen (N) makes up over three-quarters of the rest with 780,900ppm, alongside Oxygen (O) that occupies 209,500 ppm. Science has known since 1824, through the work of French physicist Joseph Fourier, that carbon is a greenhouse gas because it traps thermal radiation. For CO2 to be such a minor component of the atmosphere is a reminder of how highly finely balanced the equilibrium of the Earth’s systems are. Although 410 parts per million does not sound like a lot, a carbon reading of 410ppm informs us that we have bumped up the level of CO2 by 46% since the start of the Industrial age. It tells us that humans are heading for a catastrophic collision with the forces of nature. It is a concentration of CO2 that is unprecedented in 4 million years5 and when geologists look back in time to previous epochs that had the same levels of CO2 they do not see a world which is compatible with human civilisation as it is now. “Current levels of CO2 correspond to an equilibrium climate last observed 3-5 million years ago, a climate that was 2-3C warmer than today, and sea levels were 10-20 m higher than those today”6 Climate change is real. It is happening and if it goes on unchecked, it will impose itself on human life with an unacceptable level of disruption and violence. This scientifically demonstrable fact is an offense to our common sense on a number of levels. Firstly, if the climate has been so temperate and accommodating in the past, then it is hard to imagine that it would switch so dramatically to become such a dangerous enemy. Human beings have just experienced an unusually balanced climatic period known as the ‘Holocene’ that lasted from 11,700BC until the modern day. This interglacial period provided a benign equilibrium for Neolithic homo sapiens to grow up in; these are conditions that our more immediate ancestors in the Bronze Age and Iron Age enjoyed too. In fact, moving beyond this into the Palaeolithic, for the last 800,000 years the level of CO2 was entrenched in a stable range, between ~180ppm and ~280ppm7. Therefore, a reading of over 410ppm is not an historic level, it is a very deeply prehistoric level.
5 Science 04 Dec 2009: Vol. 326, Issue 5958, pp. 1394-1397, “Coupling of CO2 and Ice Sheet Stability Over Major Climate Transitions of the Last 20 Million Years”. 6 World Meteorological Organization Greenhouse Gas bulletin 2017 7 Ibid.
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The greenhouse emissions of the Industrial Revolution, which continue to flourish across the globe, has suddenly jolted the planet into a new geological period tentatively known as the ‘Anthropocene’8. It is defined by our massive range of impacts: radical changes to flora and fauna, massive extractions of metals and minerals, deposits of nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizer in the soil, radioactive fall-out, development of new minerals and ubiquitous materials like plastics, and greenhouse gas emissions. This new epoch has already started to show its teeth. The turkey who has been fed so regularly and diligently by the farmer all year cannot imagine when he hears the shake of the grain bucket on December 24th that things are going to turn out so badly after breakfast. Likewise, it is truly difficult for us humans to imagine a different set of coastal maps from the ones that we have all grown up with. It is hard to imagine a whole city going under water because it all seems so concrete. Secondly, climate change is a truth that is essentially non-sensory. The climate can only be seen in scientific graphs. By contrast, we sense the weather because it blows in our face, chills or warms our bodies and gets our clothes wet. The weather happens to us. Fudging the difference between the climate and the weather is a common tactic used by sceptics and activists alike. But the distinction can be made clear by simply thinking about the difference between a forest and a tree. When you are in the middle of a forest you can only see the trees around you; each tree is like a weather event. By contrast, the whole forest is out of sight. Not only can you not see the trees hundreds of miles away, but the forest has been around for hundreds, thousands or perhaps millions of years. The forest, in this fullest aspect, is like the climate. One dead tree does not signify anything about the forest, you need to be able to look at the bigger picture. One flood or storm, one cold or warm winter, does not signify anything about the climate, you need to have much deeper and wider data to be able speak scientifically. By extension, a third challenge to our common sense about climate change stems from our inability to experience change. For obvious reasons, the human mind is set up to see the world in the present tense, we just get to see our lives moment by moment, and
8 In July 2018, The International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) updated the Holocene and divided it into 3 parts, which means that we are now officially living in the ‘Meghalayan Age’. How and exactly where the Anthropocene might be inserted into this requires further reflection.
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so observing long term change9 is generally elusive to us. We are shocked to see an old passport image of ourselves from a decade ago, we are shocked to see relatives after a long break. The imperceptible change, cell by cell, of our faces is not something that we can see in the conventional sense of the verb. The late Physics Professor Al Bartlett famously gave a lecture about the human inability to grasp change. Starting in 1969, for 36 years he gave his (unchanged) talk about change a total of 1,742 times10. He always opened with the same arresting claim, “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function”. By just playing around with simple arithmetic, he demonstrates the real world consequences of steady growth rates. For example, he calculated that if the 1999’s population growth of 1.3% per year continued, it would lead to a population density of 1 person per square meter on the dry land surface of the earth in 780 years11. That is not enough room for anyone to swing a kitten in. Yet we would have to farm this square meter for all our food, park our car in it, whilst also squeezing our share of all the houses, hospitals, schools, factories and shops into it too. Similarly, the headlines for climate change sound diminutive, between 1-2% growth per year; since the 1970s, though, our GHG emissions grew on average 1.6% per year, and had doubled by 201312 - and on current trends it will be up four times by around 2050. Thinking about environmental issues in percentages and rates is clearly a necessity
9 The word “change” is used modestly here, out of respect to the deep thoughts of Zeno. This is because as soon as an object changes, it is no longer the same object. So, in the very moment of change the notion of change simultaneously becomes irrelevant, because change implies continuity and as soon as change happens there are two different and clearly distinct objects that have a tenuous link to each other. 10 Which is an average of one lecture every 7,5 days. 11 http://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_population_energy_transcript_english.html In the 1970s, the population grew by 1.9% per year on average, which was about 75 million people per year. In comparison, we grew by 1.3% per year on average, 85 million people per year, in the 2010s. 12 Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR), release EDGARv4.3.2
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for some types of analysis, but it does not always help us to get a common sense of what is actually going on. There would be intense media attention and debate about population growth if it were to become an annual event. Having 83 million13 extra people disembarking off a giant spaceship every New Year’s Day would cause the current residents of Earth to ask some critical questions about how they might be fed and located. Given the current stress marks that can already been seen on the planet’s resources, the fact that we are adding the equivalent of the entire population of Germany to a closed mass system every year is one of the most remarkable silences in our current political thinking. This political silence about population growth is equally bewildering when the negative implications for climate change of having to factor an extra 83 million people every year into the carbon emissions calculations are considered.
Bartlett’s point is not that we would ever reach a point of one person per square meter in 780 years, because the stress would snap civilisation and the planet much earlier. His point is that humans have to concentrate to be able to see the real action that is actually occurring inside a steady, long-term trend. This lack of awareness makes humans very prone to making disastrously passive responses to critical issues.
13 We are currently adding about 83 million people a year (a growth rate of 1,1%). United Nations World Population Prospects, the 2017 revision, medium estimate
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In Munich, a 43 year old female patient was admitted to hospital in October 1978. Suffering from a lesion in section V5 of her brain; patient ‘LM’ complained of extreme headaches and vertigo, but more puzzlingly, she could now only see the world in snapshot images. Her disorder is known to medical history now as Gross Akinetopsia14. It is more commonly known as ‘Motion Blindness’. Patients suffering from Akinetopsia, with their strobe-like vision, find it very challenging to pour a glass of water and cross a road. They have also reported difficulties in following a conversation as the fluent soundtrack does not match the stuttering images of the lips that they see. LM is the only extensively documented case of severe Motion Blindness. Yet, perhaps we are all suffering from that condition in a sense. We can see the evidence for climate change, but for various cognitive reasons, as this massive wrecking ball speeds towards our society, we really struggle to perceive what is coming our way.
The science of climate change in six graphs Science can put reality on hold so that we can get a good look at it. A graph can provide a good sense of the timing of events. The following 6 graphs illustrate the most fundamental facts about climate change. They are made from the baseline data that human civilisation is dependent upon. Indeed, before any philosophers are invited in to talk, a proper base of evidence about climate change has to be established. The latest conclusions of the best available science have to underpin any philosophical enquiry. Every graph and claim made in this first chapter is supported by the relevant references to the scientific literature. Philosophy’s respect for the truth demands that this foundation is put down. 7 chapters of philosophical exploration will follow, but the science must speak first.
14 Zihl J; von Cramon N Mai (1983). “Selective disturbance of movement vision after bilateral brain damage”. Brain. 106: 313–340. doi:10.1093/brain/106.2.313.
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3.0
CAUSE OF CLIMATE CHANGE Long-lived greenhouse gases in the atmosphere WMO Greenhouse Gas Bulletin 2017 projected to 2018
Watts per square meter (W/m2)
Radiative forcing (warming effect)
2.5
2.0
CO2 1.5
1.0 CH4 0.5
N2O CFC-12 CFC-11
0.0 1988
15 minor
1998
2008
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2018
Graph One – The cause of Climate Change These are the long-lived greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. They are the cause of climate change. The graph is from the global atmospheric authority, the ‘World Meteorological Organization’ (WMO)15. The data shows that our emissions have been increasing and are continuing to rise relentlessly. The projection for 2018 (in a paler colour) and beyond continues in the same direction. Stating the obvious, we are not controlling our emissions. The line on the graph is going up, and new records are being set every year16,17. In the last 30 years, radiative forcing (the technical label for the ‘warming effect’) has risen 46%. The overall average increase was 0.03 w/m2 per year, but the last 5 year average was 0.04 w/m2 per year.18 These blunt facts mean that we are not decreasing our emissions. Conversely, we are accelerating them19. A rise from 2.1 to 3.1 W/m2 radiative forcing might not sound like a lot, but when the 1 Watt per square meter increase is cashed out into a different set of units, the reality of it all is rather amazing. A 1W per m2 increase across the entire earth’s surface amounts to a 510 trillion Watt force. This upturn is the equivalent of 600,000 Hiroshima nuclear A-bomb explosions per day20. When geologists create images of the planet of how it must have looked in the deep past, as a snowball earth or a greenhouse earth, it is hard to imagine the forces that
15 World Meteorological Organization Greenhouse Gas Bulleting 13 (2017) 16 UNEP The Emissions Gap Report 2017, United Nations Environment Programme (2017). 17 PBL Tabellen mondiale CO2 en broeikasgasemissions 1990-2016, PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (2017). 18 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Earth System Research Laboratory, The NOAA Annual Greenhouse Gas Index. 19 The National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, Annual Greenhouse Gas Index (AGGI), updated Spring 2017, table 2 (https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/aggi/aggi.html) 20 Increase of 1W = 1 J/s, earth surface 510.1 trillion m2 , thus increase 1W/m2 equals 510 TJ/s for total earth surface. Energy content of Hiroshima bomb ‘Little Boy’ is estimated to be equivalent to 63 TJ. Increase of 1W/m2 is the equivalent of 510 / 63 = 7.6 ‘little boys’ per second or about 600,000 Hiroshima nuclear bombs per day for earth.
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must have been at work over millions of years to make such transformations possible. When we look at our earth from satellite imagery today and see a giant disco ball, we might simply be reminded of the streetlights at home. Yet these lights represent just a fragment of the power that human beings are affecting the planet with, on each spin. The lights don’t flash red, blue and green, but if they did it might help us to visualise the reality behind the glitz. A ‘Disco Ball Earth’ could be a very apt symbol for the Anthropocene.
Graph 2 – Energy Sources The reason why our emissions are increasing is due to the fact that we are still meeting the large majority of our energy demands with fossil fuels. The chart below shows that 82% of all our energy is produced by either Coal, Oil or Gas. These statistics are taken from the latest data of the International Energy Agency. It shows that wind and solar power has dramatically increased from around 100Twh to over 1,000Twh, a whopping 1000% increase. However, increasing the size of an apple pip by 1000% does not change much if it is in competition with slowly inflating Beach Balls and Hopper Balls that had a sizeable head start. In fact, although fossil fuels use increased by a much smaller percentage, in absolute terms it outstripped green energy growth by 19 times. In COP21 in Paris, President Obama proudly underlined the “ambitious investments” [sic] that the USA had made in tackling climate change by talking about the size of
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his ‘apple pip’. “Over the last seven years, we’ve made ambitious investments in clean energy, and ambitious reductions in our carbon emissions. We’ve multiplied Wind power threefold, and solar power more than twentyfold”. Globally, Wind, Solar, Hydro and all other renewable non-emittive energy sources still only account for 4% of humanity’s energy supply. Nuclear Power, for all of its other complications, is at least carbon friendly, so we get to 9% with this included. Biomass, which is emittive and has great unsustainability issues, was at about 10% The impression that we might have, from casually observing solar panels on people’s roofs or wind turbines in the open fields by motorways, is that green energies are significantly replacing fossil fuels. Politicians may frequently cite their commitments to huge-percentage increases in green energy supplies. However, the data that matters shows very clearly that we are not making any inroads into curtailing our reliance on fossil fuel. In fact, all of the recent policy commitments to new investments in green energy are not even sufficient to deal with the increased demand for energy that will come in the years ahead from factors such as population growth. Therefore, fossil fuel use and emissions will continue to increase until 2030 and beyond21,22.
TWh
World wind-solar electricity energy production (TWh)
Mtoe
1,100
14,000
1,000 12,000
900 800
%
Gas 22 %
8,000
,0
0%
600
, other 1.5 % ean, heat e/wave/oc al, tid lar, geoth e rm Bio, Waste 10 % Wind, so Hydro 2.5 % Nuclear 5 %
10,000
>
=
0. 7
700
World total primary energy supply (Mtoe)
500 400
d+ in W
300
la so
r1
Oil 32 %
6,000 4,000
200
Coal 28% (2015)
2,000
100 0
0 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
21 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Updated synthesis report on the aggregate effect of the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) May 2016.
22 PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, Climate Pledge NDC Tool, Global emissions, http://themasites.pbl.nl/climate-ndc-policies-tool/
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Graph 3 On 4th June 1992, every single Member State of the United Nations agreed on a document that brought the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change into existence - the UNFCCC. It had become very clear that humanity was stepping into very dangerous territory with global warming. The UN understood that the politicians needed regular updates on the science and regular reviews of the progress made in achieving the Convention’s objective. The ultimate decision-making body of the convention is the Conference of the Parties (COP) and as part of the plan, they established annual COP meetings in which these reviews would take place. The first COP meeting started in Berlin on March 28th 1995. These decisions’ importance was underlined when NASA scientist James Hansen gave a testimony to a Congressional Committee in 1988 in which the key conclusions about climate change were strongly stated.
Realization: Objective of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change UNFCCC, Article 2, Objective: “stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” Year
Location
Negotiation Outcome
Emission Outcome CO2 parts per million
Emission Outcome Gigatonnes of CO2 per year
Emission Outcome Limit for 1.50 C Gigatonnes of CO2
COP 1
1995
Berlin
Berlin Mandate
360.1
27.8
880
COP 2
1996
Geneva
Geneva Ministerial Declaration Noted
361.8
28.3
852
COP 3
1997
Kyoto
Kyoto Protocol
362.9
30.4
821
COP 4
1998
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires Plan of Action
365.5
28.4
793
COP 5
1999
Bonn
Bonn Agreement
367.6
28.3
765
COP 6
2000 The Hague
Bonn Agreements Consensus
368.8 as
29.3
735
COP 7
2001
Marrakesh
Marrakesh Ministerial Declaration Adopted
29.4
706
COP 8
2002
Delhi
Declaration on Climate Change & Sustainable Development ee
372.4
30.4
676
COP 9
2003
Milan
Climate Change Fund & Least Development Countries ed Fund
375.0
32.0
644
COP 10
2004
Buenos Aires
Complete Marrakesh Accords
376.8
33.1
610
COP 11
2005
Montreal
Global Environmental Facility Guidelines
378.8
33.8
577
COP 12
2006
Nairobi
Nairobi Framework Welcomed
380.9
35.0
542
COP 13
2007
Bali
Bali Roadmap
382.7
35.0
507
COP 14
2008
Poznan
Adaptation Fund
384.8
36.2
470
COP 15
2009
Copenhagen
Copenhagen Accord
386.3
37.4
433
COP 16
2010
Cancun
Cancun Agreements
388.6
38.5
395
COP 17
2011
Durban
Durban Platform for Enhanced Action
390.5
39.6
355
COP 18
2012
Doha
Doha Amendments to the Kyoto Protocol
392.5
40.5
314
COP 19
2013
Warsaw
Warsaw Agreements
395.2
40.9
274
COP 20
2014
Lima
Lima Call for Climate Action
397.1
41.1
232
COP 21
2015
Paris
Paris Agreement
399.4
41.6
191
COP 22
2016
Marrakech
Marrakech Action Proclamation
402.9
40.8
150
COP 23
2017
Bonn
Fiji Momentum for Implementation
405.0
41.1
109
COP 24
2018
Katowice
...
408 ?
42 ?
67
UNFCCC Conference of the Parties (COP)
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The UNFCCC has a clear overarching goal, “To stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level which would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”. A list of the meetings is presented on the previous page. There have been a long list of negotiated outcomes that often carry the name of the location in which they were agreed and purposeful slogans. However, despite all of the signatures, the troubling fact is that not a single COP (Conference of the Parties) meeting has been able to witness progress in meeting its declared objective. The reason for gathering hundreds of politicians, diplomats and scientists together was to achieve the goal that the UNFCCC was set up for, which is “to stabilise emissions”. The outcome of those meetings might achieve secondary targets, but it must ultimately be judged by the data on global emissions. The red line which cuts across the years and the places is going up23, we have gone from 360ppm of CO2 to 410ppm, we have gone from an annual output of 8 excessive gigatonnes of CO2 to 9, to 10, and onto 11. This is a very basic observation, but it has to be stated. The UNFCCC has many sub-groups, from Climate Finance to Climate Technology, from Deforestation to Gender, but it has one singular overriding purpose. It has to keep anthropogenic interference in the atmosphere to a safe level. All of the other targets and outcomes only have any value in how they relate to this central aim. The UNFCCC is not doing its job. At COP21, Obama announced the positive news about the bike that we are all travelling on at an impossibly fast speed, “… the good news is this is not an American trend alone. Last year, the global economy grew while global carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels stayed flat24. And what this means can’t be overstated.” When the scientific reality is put squarely against his use of the word “stabilisation”, Obama’s statement does indeed sound like a major overstatement.
23 There was one year (2008) in which, after the global financial crash, economic activity dipped so significantly that it also dragged CO2 emissions down too. 24 This much hyped ‘lull’ in energy related CO2 emissions in 2015-2016 was short-lived, energy CO2 emissions grew at 1.5% in 2017, and are predicted to increase even more in 2018.
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In graph 3, it can be seen that there have been some years during which the rate of increase started to flattened out, but this is hardly a comforting fact. Hearing your dad scream at you through the wind-noise that, “there is no need to worry!” because the speed of the bike going downhill has now stabilised at 100kmh is not very reassuring. What is needed, is a firm and sensible application of the brakes to actually slow down the bike down to a speed that is compatible with your survival25.
UNFCCC – A School Report In the European School system where my students study, the pass mark is 5 out of 10. A failure to meet this average mark means that they must repeat a year of schooling26. Throughout the year, the students are presented with their grades in tests and homework across all of their subjects with marks out of 10. Their continual assessment is provided so that they can know if they are on target, and it helps both teachers and parents to make the right interventions in adequate time. A student with homework scores of 3/10 in Maths and French, a 7/10 in Art, but with 4/10 in all the other subjects will clearly be in danger of having to repeat the year. It is a clear method of assessment. Going back to Obama’s speech at COP21 Paris, this level of clarity is absent: “For our part, America is on track to reach the emissions targets that I set six years ago in Copenhagen. We will reduce our carbon emissions in the range of 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. And that’s why last year I set a new target: America will reduce our emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels within 10 years from now.” No, there is not a problem with the microphone, there was no problem with the autocue. That is how Obama presented his emission goals.
25 In fact, we need to go in reverse, but first we have to slow right down and eventually stop. 26 There are some qualifications to this rule.
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What is the concrete reality behind these confusing numbers? Do these commitments bring us closer to the UNFCCC’s target or not? If they do, how much closer? Why do the media and the public tolerate being given their information in such a jumbled way? The USA was not alone in making things cloudy in Paris. Obama was following what has become the standard way in which the vital statistics for climate emissions data are released and published. In COP21, the EU affirmed its intention to reduce emissions by 40% by 2030 based on the level of 1990. Japan is committed to reducing its emissions by 26% by 2030 based on the level of 2013, and so on. By contrast, Economics would not tolerate such numerical ambiguity. It is informative to make a comparison with another institution. For example, The Bank of England has a clear mandate like the UNFCCC. It must keep the UK’s inflation (CPI) “as close as possible to 2%”. The Bank must write an open letter of explanation to the Chancellor of the Exchequer if the CPI index roams more than one percentage point away from this target in either direction. In the letter, it has to explain how long it expects the inflation rate to remain off target, and the bank must also explain the policy actions it is taking to rectify the problem.
At the top of the homepage of the Bank of England’s website, the target (2%), the current rate (2.4%, as of June 2018) and two other key statistics (QE and Bond Buying levels) are clearly shown. This is just common sense. In a democratic society, government institutions are accountable to the public and whether they succeed or fail in their goals, everyone has the right to know what is happening. This is especially true with something as fundamentally important to the economy as interest rates and inflation.
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A visit to the UNFCCC website is very different. Anyone, whose interests include treasure hunts and wasting valuable time, could spend several days clicking around the website looking for the key information. There are interesting articles about beating plastic pollution, how people in the Sahel are developing solar energy, and so much more. It is a busy webpage with many layers and hundreds of articles that are related to climate change. All of which creates the impression that something is being done.
However, the fundamental question about climate change remains unstated and unanswered. The essential target for humans is buried far away from the home page, and the essential data that demonstrates our progress towards that target is missing. It is a systemic problem that extends from the webpage to the podium. It is a systemic problem that is also mirrored in the way the media reports on the UNFCCC; their motivation to get to the roots of a story has been undermined by commercial pressures to appear interesting and busy.
Back to School There are two school-related issues here. Firstly, returning to the problem of reporting emissions targets as percentages; imagine that as a parent you receive a report for your child which reads like this: “In History, we expect Antoine to achieve a 2628% improvement in his grade by 2025 based on the results he attained in 2005�, “In Geography, we expect Antoine to increase his mark by 40% by 2040 based on the level - 20 -
of 1990”. Given such a foggy and muddled format, you would rightly insist that the school provide another document. It would be reasonable to ask for the overview to be given in grades like 7/10 and 8/10. It is a notation system that is transparent, and it enables the reader to draw the main conclusions easily. They show where improvements have been made, and where more effort or interventions are needed. Every child in a class has the right to know how well they are performing, for better or worse. Every citizen has the right to clear information about the atmosphere. Secondly, many students who fail an exam or an assessment do so because they do not answer the question. When appropriate, my Philosophy students’ essays are assessed on a ‘shit’ scale. At the bottom of this scale is horseshit. These responses are characterised by various features: they cover a large area, they have little shape but a large volume, they don’t really smell of anything because their content is rather bland, and they are not very memorable. Although it is a very unpleasant thought, at the top of the scale is dogshit. These are outstanding essays, characterised by a very meaty content, a compact size and a strong impression that is difficult to forget. Most importantly, dogshit essays point somewhere. If I invited my students to assess any of the speeches made in all of the COP meetings, or indeed any political comments about climate change, they would be graded as horseshit. They simply do not answer the question that they have set out to answer. Although teachers can monotonously repeat the same message about focus, and although many students struggle to see why this is so fundamentally important in an assessment, the dull fact is that not answering the question posed makes all of the knowledge and understanding they might have used irrelevant.
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And so, whilst it might seem tedious, the press must continually hold the delegates at COP25 in Katowice accountable to their own mission of “stabilising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level which would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system” In order to keep this properly in focus, there are two very simple questions that must be posed: “How many more gigatonnes of carbon can be released before we commit ourselves to a 2°C rise?” and “When are we currently projected to exhaust that carbon limit ?” The truth is, these are not actually boring questions. In an odd way, they are the most exciting questions, because nobody is asking them. It is weirdly mesmerising that every year thousands of delegates, with thousands of scientists, accompanied by thousands of staff, tracked by thousands of reporters, all assemble in one town for 2 weeks – and the main reason for them all being there is not directly addressed or openly discussed. The notion of ‘The Absurd’ is always a good place to start in Philosophy.
Graph 4 – The Gigaclock “How many more gigatonnes of carbon can be released into the atmosphere before we commit ourselves to a 2°C rise?”27 Researchers are always refining their modelling of how the biosphere would respond to heightened CO2 levels. They have to consider so many variables when making the calculation. The figure of 2900 GtCO2 is the figure used in the IPCC AR5 report, it was chosen from within a range of between of 2550 GtCO2 to 3150 GtCO2 depending on these various factors. The detailed qualifications to these figures will be explored in Part Two of the book.
27 There are some important qualifications to this graph. Firstly, it is for 2°C average warming since pre-industrial average – it is not the budget for “well below 2°C, preferably 1,5°C”. The calculation of the GtCO2 also assumes a >66% probability to remain below 2°C, it does not include any negative emissions or temperature overshoot (then cooling). It also assumes that the speed of global emissions remains the same as today.
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The simple point of this graph is to show that there is a limit to what can be put up into the atmosphere. After decades of scientific enquiry, we have a clear understanding of where that limit is. It is an absolute number. At current speeds of emissions, we are due to spend this budget by 2036. It is a number that should be clearly displayed on the UNFCCC website, as it rolls down to 0.
The Carbon Gigaclock
Carbon Emissions since 1880 Remaing Carbon gigatonnes before 2°C
The total carbon budget since 1870 is 2900 GtCO2.
The total amount of carbon emitted since 1870 is 2282 GtCO2.
This leaves 618GtCO2 left before 2°C of warming is established.
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Graph 5 - Where are we now? The safest interference with the atmosphere would be as close to a 0°C rise as possible. However, the World Meteorological Organization confirmed in 2017 that we have already achieved a 1°C increase28. At a 1°C rise, human society is standing on the threshold that scientists advised that we not overstep decades ago. Given that anything over this line carries significant risk, the definitive boundary for a global warming rise was set at 2°C in Paris in 2015. This COP21 agreement committed nearly every nation of the world agreed, “ to limit global warming to well below 2°C, preferably 1.5°C”. However, here is a strange fact. The level of CO2 that is in the atmosphere now basically guarantees that a rise to 1.5°C will happen in the near future29. This is because of what scientists call ‘lock in’ – certain CO2 levels ‘lock in’ temperature rises, even if it takes a few years to materialise. There is a time-lag between the CO2 going up into the air and the thermal effects taking place. To avoid a 1.5C rise, truly gigantic amounts of CO2 will have to be removed from the atmosphere - something we do not know how to do. There are many other aspects to this issue, that would take too long to open up here, but underneath all of the debates about what is ‘plausible’ and how they should pin the parameters of stating an ‘average’ temperature, the bald truth is that unless something close to miraculous happens, 1.5°C is effectively guaranteed. This mechanical detail about the climate system is well understood by science, but that was not evident at COP21 when the targets for climate action were being set up. Neither the highest-ranking politicians, nor the media seemed to be aware of the implausibility of even negotiating anything relating to a 1.5°C rise. It was almost surreal to follow the coverage of the COP21 in Paris because this most basic fact about the situation was simply not on the table. For example, the BBC’s Science Correspondent, Matt McGrath published an article just before the conference in which he reported that 15 leading Buddhists, including the Dalai Lama, called for the Paris Agreement to limit
28 https://public.wmo.int/en/media/press-release/wmo-confirms-2016-hottest-year-record29 Rogelj, J. et al. Energy system transformations for limiting end of century warming to below 1.5 °C. Nat. Clim. Change 5, 519–527 (2015).
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warming to 1.5°C. However, no comment was made about this ambition being such an improbable goal30. A BBC Sport correspondent would not ask a football manager what result he might be hoping for in a match, in a post-match interview. He should have watched the game and questioned the manager about the performance and the result. With 1°C already here and 1.5°C surely coming, the scientists have insisted in the strongest terms that going over a 2°C rise will invite an unmanageable amount of damage and risk for human civilisation. In fewer than 20 years, with Paris fully implemented, GHG in the atmosphere will likely cause dangerous 2°C, the upper limit of the COP21 agreement. Despite this, none of the major industrialised nations are even on track to fulfil their Paris commitments.
Where are we going?
150
4.5°C
Global Greenhouse GasEmissions (Gtons CO2 / year)
8.1° F
No
Ac ti o n
120
90
t ren Cur
60
IN
Pr nued onti oC N ( s DC
Ra t
30
ch et Su c
ogress)
3.5°C 6.3° F
ce ss
1.8°C 0 2000
3.2° F 2020
2040
2060
2080
30 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34658207.
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2100
The declared intention of the UNFCCC is represented by the green line that shifts sharply downwards towards 1.8°C. The red line shows what would happen if we took no further action. Chapter 5 on Descartes in part Two will spell out just how bad a rise over 4°C will be. The gap between the red line and the green line is known as ‘The Emissions Gap’31 – it is the difference between where we are now and the policies and actions that are required to get in line with the green path. All nations of the world agreed to put forward their NDC, their Nationally Determined Contribution (to stabilize GHG in the atmosphere). 190 nations made an intended commitment and 173 proceeded to submit their national commitments. Interestingly, Nicaragua neither offered an NDC, nor did it sign the Paris Agreement. This was not because of some delusional leader like Donald Trump, but rather nobly, it was because they simply wanted to point out the size of the emissions gap and they wanted to protest the lack of serious action. Indeed, even when all of the NDCs are added up, and assuming that every nation will follow through on its commitments (and all major industrialised nations are failing to meet their pledges32), humanity is still heading for a climate that is an intolerable 3.5°C warmer. That is bad news. However, it is bad news in another sense. This graph is taken from a commonly used source, ‘Climate Interactive’, and represents the climate scenarios that scientists are using. What this graph does not disclose is that this emissions gap makes a huge technological assumption. It imagines that we are able to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere on a truly massive scale. Without dabbling in the scientifically and ethically dubious potentials of geoengineering, and with carbon capture still a far distant reality for the scale required, we are committed to overstepping a 1.5°C rise33.
31 UNEP (2017) The Emissions Gap Report 2017, United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Nairobi 32 Victor, D.J. et al. Prove Paris was more than paper promises. Nature 548, 25–27 (2017) 33 Rogelj J., et al. Paris Agreement climate proposals need a boost to keep warming well below 2 °C. Nature 534, 631-639 (2016)
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If the media reporting was more transparent about the current path that we are on, then the projections would show that we are actually heading for a rise of around 4°C by 2100. Another way of stating the facts is to acknowledge that the current NDCs only add up to a commitment that is one sixth of what is required34.
Graph 6
Responsibility for Objective Failure > collapse
UN human development
Low
Medium
High
Very High
This final graph will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 7 on Rousseau. However, it needs to be placed up front, in this first chapter, because of its significance.
34 These figures were all correct at the time of going to press. As different editions of the book are published, these figures will be updated. Corrections will have to be made, for example, after the ‘Emissions Gap Report’ (UNEP) for 2018 and after COP24 in Katowice.
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Most media coverage of climate change points to China as the world’s worst emitter of CO2. To get a sharp picture of who is causing the emissions, the figures require some adjustment. Given that the atmosphere is shared by every human being, the statistics should show the figures divided on a per capita basis. Everyone has an equal right to the earth’s resources, and therefore to an equal share of the air. For example, China has 1.42 billion people, 19% of the world’s population, and accounts for 30% of global CO2 emissions. In comparison, the USA with only 0.3 billion people (4% of the world’s population) accounts for 16% of emissions. In other words, Americans emissions are 17 ton CO2 per person, and Chinese are 7 ton/person per year35. This is true for ‘territorial’ emissions. This calculation of emissions measures the volume of CO2 that are emitted from within each national boundary of the globe. Indeed, that seems like the common sense way of counting emissions. Portugal and Peru, Bulgaria and Brunei should all be held accountable for what they produce within their territory. However, the map of emissions looks quite different if the emissions are calculated as ‘consumption emissions’. This means that if a European buys a product that was made in China, then the emissions that occur because of their consumption are counted as European, not Chinese. This way of calculating emissions accounts for the major industrial powers ‘outsourcing’ of the external costs of their lifestyle, and is therefore fair and representative. If emissions are only calculated ‘territorially’, then China has 30% of the volume of CO2 emissions and Europe has 10%. If emissions are calculated based on consumption, then China only bears 26% responsibility for the CO2, and Europe bears 12% of the responsibility. By lining up the data in this more realistic way, Luxembourg comes out as the worst country with 42 ton CO2/capita and Rwanda as the least culpable with 0.1 ton CO2/capita per year. Once all of this has been taken into account, a clearer map emerges of the distribution of CO2 emissions. Therefore, throughout this book the emissions will be counted both as ‘consumptive’ and ‘per capita’.
35 Le Quéré, C., Global Carbon Budget 2017
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Overall, the nations which the United Nations classifies as “Very Highly Developed” (USA, EU) cause 33 times more emissions per capita than those nations classified as “Low” (Nigeria and other African nations), 8 times more than “Medium” (India), and twice the amount of those classified as “High” (China)36,37,38,39,40. Apart from the basic inequity of these proportions, it is also instructive to remember that those countries who contribute the least to the problem also have the least resources to stop it from happening. Indeed, the final adjustment to the proportions that is required to get the most accurate image of climate change responsibility is also to consider ‘historical emissions’. Most of the countries classified as “Very High Developed” have a strong economic position because they were the first nations to industrialise their economy. This historical fact means that they had a large head start in filling the atmosphere with CO2. When this is recognised, the figures show that the “Very High Developed” nations cause 70 times more per capita than “Low” Developed nations, they cause 19 times more than “Medium” and 5 times more than “High” (also see footnotes 35-39).
Nicaragua with the final words In an interview covered with Democracy Now!41 during COP21, Paul Oquist, the chief UNFCCC negotiator for Nicaragua expressed his dismay at the progress in Paris, “…3 degrees Celsius is not acceptable. Three degrees Celsius is a disaster. It is catastrophic. So, we think that we have to get out of this spin and back to where the problem can be solved. Ten countries have 72 percent of the emissions—10 countries”. 42
36 United Nations World Population Prospects 2017 Revision (medium estimate) (2017) 37 United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report, Human Development Index Database (2017) 38 Le Quéré C et al. Global Carbon Project, Carbon Budget and Trends (2017). 39 World Resources Institute CAIT Climate Analysis Indicators Tool, Climate Data Explorer (2015). 40 Boden T. A. & Andres R. J. Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) National Fossil Fuels CO2 emissions 1751-2014 (2017). 41 https://www.democracynow.org/2015/12/4/we_do_not_want_to_be 42 10 countries if the emissions are calculated territorially.
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“Nicaragua has 4.8 million tons of emissions a year, and that’s 0.03 percent of [global] emissions. Do we feel responsible for having caused climate change? No, not at all. Are we doing something about it? Yes, we’ve gone from 25 percent renewable to 52 percent renewable since 2007, and in 2020 we’ll be 90 percent renewable”. Oquist had framed the whole discussion in a clear way that helps wrap up this section of key data. He explained that Nicaragua had not signed the Paris Accord for three reasons:
1. It was non-binding 2. It was insufficient 3. It was unfair
Conclusion Medical emergency A fit and healthy baby that enters the world kicking and crying can score 9 or a maximum 10 in the ‘AGPAR Test’ that is measured by doctors at birth. It was much too quiet when my son was born, he had scored only 1. He was taken to an intensive care unit where the doctors and nurses rapidly hooked him up to multi-coloured tubes and wires that fed him and continually measured and monitored all of his body’s key indicators 24 hours a day. The ward was busy with general checks and moments of paper work, close family visitors were ushered in during the afternoons, sometimes behind portable green curtains, key surgery was carried out. But in the reverential atmosphere of the unit, one thing was always familiar - the background chimes of the monitors that kept watch over every babies’ vital statistics. If the oxygen level in their blood dropped below a certain level, the digital numbers would turn blue, a small light would flash, and the tone of a slow ticking chime would start to accelerate and rise in pitch. Someone in a medical uniform would then swiftly appear to make the right adjustments. Thibault pulled through. On the day of his discharge from the hospital, I took a moment with a coffee in the bar downstairs and thumbed through a copy of ‘The Economist’. After skimreading the articles on ‘Orban versus the intellectuals’ and ‘Zuma versus his
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people’, I absent-mindedly reached the back pages. Here, all the vital statistics of the global economy were presented (perhaps tellingly, just before the Obituaries on the very last page). The data on these ‘Economic and Financial Indicator’ pages show all the key signals from around the world, from the Greek GDP to the Columbian CPI, and from the rates of Belgian Bonds to the value of the Russian Ruble. The Nikkei 225 and the CAC 40 are monitored alongside the movements in the dollar price of Gold and West Texas Intermediate Oil. These indices can control the social and political weather - a drop in the price of oil had given a boost to the profit margins of the Pirelli in Italy, but it was causing social unrest in Venezuela. The long term unemployment data in France and the UK had swollen the numbers of voters on the political edge, especially towards the Right. However, Thibault was born into a world in which the most fundamental index of all was not recorded. The most recent measurement of carbon concentration particles per million had been recorded at 408 parts per million. Very dangerous territory. But in the pages of ‘The Economist’ there was no tracker of how many gigatonnes of carbon we can safely emit before our whole economic system is placed into a situation in which all economic activity will be critically undermined.
The Earth’s vital statistics Anyone who wanted a reliable and clear statistical update about climate change, would have to go looking for them in scientific journals. However these publications are mostly far too technical and complex for concerned citizens to understand. Indeed, getting a clear understanding about the significance of the various climate change statistics and graphs requires so many qualifications, it is hard to keep a secure view of what really matters. Given the scale and significance of the problem, regular TV and Radio do not accord these most basic facts the prominence and clarity they deserve. Worse, anyone who choses to go surfing on the internet for their understanding of climate change will find a huge amount of flotsam and jetsam of uninformed opinions. There are numerous articles about climate change from different angles in mainstream journalism. However, the core conclusions of the mainstream science seem to get crowded out or badly skewed by improper assumptions. - 31 -
What everything comes down to Returning to Graph One. This really is what everything comes down to.
CAUSE OF CLIMATE CHANGE Long-lived greenhouse gases in the atmosphere WMO Greenhouse Gas Bulletin
2017 projected to 2018
Watts per square meter (W/m2)
2.5
Radiative forcing (warming effect)
Human civilisation needs to use its extraordinary capacity for technological invention and social organisation to tip the slope in the opposite direction. The human race is utterly remarkable and it is not too late to act decisively.
3.0
2.0
CO2 1.5
1.0 CH4
When Thomas Paine wrote his “Common Sense” with tremendous polemical power, he backed up his words with reason and evidence. For example, he did detailed calculations about how the American Colonists could match the might of the British Navy43. His prose was not just tub-thumping, his convictions were rooted in a firm grip on reality. 0.5
N2O
CFC-12 CFC-11
0.0 1988
15 minor
1998
2008
2018
In contrast to the ‘pragmatic’ cynicism of his opponents, Paine had an optimistic view of people and their capacities for change. He was not afraid to look at the full reality of being a human being. “The world could not then have persuaded me that I should be either a soldier or an author. If I had any talents for either, they were buried in me, and might ever have continued so, had not the necessity of the times dragged and driven them into action. I had formed my plan of life, and conceiving myself happy, wished everybody else so. But when the country, into which I had just set my foot, was set on fire about my ears, it was time to stir. It was time for every man to stir”.
– Thomas Paine, “The Crisis - No 7” (Philadelphia, Nov 21st, 1778)
43 Thomas Paine, (1776) “Common Sense”, Chapter 4.
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Space for your own reflections:
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Chapter Two - A Bridge with Friedrich Nietzsche
35
Nietzsche ‘Light’ Introduction Climate Change is not just a problem of perception Cultural illusions Nietzsche the Pyschologist Looking through the Overton Window Watching the BBC Melting Points – In Science - In Society A new Overton Window? Nietzsche the Prophet Choose your own Adventure
35 37 38 44 50 62 70 79 81 81
Nietzsche ‘Full’’ Introduction ‘Ecce Homo’ - Nietzsche – The Man 84 ‘God is dead’ - Nietzsche - The Philosophy 87 Nietzsche tackles Climate Change 1. The importance of Language 99 2. The importance of irony, metaphor and paradox 105 3. The importance of ‘Sublime Madness’ 107 4. The importance of not retreating into a cave 111 a. The cave of denial 113 b. The Christian cave 116 c. The Climate Change cave 117 5. The importance of thinking things through until the end. 119 a. God’s Shadow 119 b. Christian Shadows 121 c. Climate Change Shadows 124 Conclusions 129 - 34 -
Chapter 2 A Bridge: from ‘What is Real’ to ‘What is Right’ with Nietzsche
Introduction Climate change is not just a problem of perception We have made long strides forward in climate science, especially in the last few decades. Although our models and projections require constant revision and improvement, the basic summary of where we are is unambiguous. It is true that many of the problems that we have with understanding climate change are simply problems of Epistemology – or more specifically, problems of perception. Our routine understanding of the world is sometimes just not good enough. However, it was also evident in Chapter 1 that some moral and political influences are at work in our lack of awareness. Some of the forces that prevent us from getting a clear picture of climate change are simply rooted in our natural human reactions to danger, suffering, or perhaps just plain inconvenience. We often recoil from difficulties and prefer to push problems away, in order to tend to the peace of our own lives. These individual instincts become powerful political forces when they play out at a social level. Gaining a more reliable understanding of what is real (more often than not) is connected to ethical issues about what is right. Epistemology and Ethics are tightly bound together. There are so many examples throughout the history of human culture where certain fields of knowledge were blockaded because of some very forceful ethical or political concerns.
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In fact, there are often very interesting consequences when the truth pushes against power or desire, fears or anxieties, tradition or authority. These confrontations are a pervasive problem in human affairs and, unsurprisingly, they will continually surface in a book about climate change. When confronted by an uncomfortable truth, we have a remarkable capacity for hiding reality with illusions. The human psyche is a fascinating and curious thing. There is a rich tradition of thinkers who have explored how we can create fictions around reality because of a deep ethical impulse working at the base of our minds. Schopenhauer, Feuerbach and Freud (to name a few) all have quite brilliant insights in this field. However, it is Nietzsche who will help to build this bridge from Epistemology to Ethics.
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Nietzsche ‘light’ Cultural Illusions (His teachers would have called him ‘knee-cha’, and the UK has followed this pronunciation. In the USA it is ‘knee-chee’, or if you are debating the key influences on post-modern culture in a Parisian café on the left-bank, speaking in french, then it is simply, ‘kneech’) Why Nietzsche? The most basic answer is that Nietzsche was a philosopher who was concerned with social illusions. In our current Western society, there is a serious mismatch between reality and people’s beliefs and lifestyle. As explained in the opening, we have already started walking into the minefield of climate change. The further we go into this minefield of a warmer planet, the more likely it will be that we will trigger major damage to our civilisation. Moreover, if we do not dramatically choke off our emissions, the overall level of disruption will become unmanageable – and once some major cogs of the climate system come loose, they could in turn trigger cascading feedback loops that would lead to a ‘Hothouse Earth’. Despite this existential threat, there is has been no meaningful impact on government policies. We are still striving for maximal economic growth without decoupling it from carbon emissions44. Population growth is not considered to be a critically urgent debate. We still invest more in fossil fuels than in green technology. Citizens’ voting or habits of consumption have remained largely unruffled. Climate change is a seismic event and yet millions of people have not really understood it. Indeed, even if it was to be explained, there are hundreds of possible bypasses in the network of the human mind that can see the problem, so that we somehow do not react.
44 For example, the Government Budget announced by Philip Hammond in 2018 came immediately after the dark conclusions of the IPCC’s 1.5°C report. Yet, no explicit reference was made to it, and the only policies that had any relevance to climate change was an almost farcical endorsement of tree planting and a plastic tax.
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Nietzsche faced a parallel problem at the end of the 19th century in Germany. He was an atheist, and he had observed that even though the idea of a Christian God had just been through some bruising cultural battles, most people had not really shifted their lifestyle or their beliefs to fall in line with the reality of a godless world. The theological questions posed by Newtonian Physics, Darwinian Biology, Psychological Reductivism and Biblical Criticism (to name a few) had really shaken the viability of Christian belief. Yet even though many of these new scientific theories and critical methods of thinking about God had progressed from academia into popular culture, Nietzsche was frustrated to see that the implications of these ideas were having a small impact on the ground. He thought that important psychological and social forces were at work in this inertia. Indeed, there are two major reasons for picking out Nietzsche to make the bridge from Epistemology to Ethics for this book on climate change: Firstly, Nietzsche was intolerant of the comfortable social illusions that he saw around him. He understood that many of the ideas that governed people’s lives and behaviour were difficult to shake off because they were plugged into issues of power and control. Secondly, Nietzsche’s commitment to the truth is a valuable reminder of the role of the philosopher in a society. Nietzsche thought that he lived in a culture that had lamentable attitudes to the truth. He argued that they were sloppy at best, and manipulative at worst. Crucially, he was disturbed by this lack of respect for critical thinking because he thought that it was behind some very unhealthy social realities.
Nietzsche the Psychologist Nietzsche was very perceptive in his examination of how our beliefs are affected by psychology. His work poses interesting questions about how the complex drives and desires of our subconscious are plugged into the mind. It now seems so normal to accept that we do not hold our beliefs simply because they are logical or coherent; we are very aware that there is a whole matrix of psychological forces at work under the surface. It was Nietzsche who did so much to put the notion of psychological and social illusions forward as a mainstream idea. Indeed, it is probably wise to approach Nietzsche as a psychologist first, given that it provides an accessible entry point to his ideas before
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things get a bit heady later on.
A short ‘thank you’ note to Ludwig Feuerbach Just 3 years before Nietzsche was born, a hugely influential book was published, “The Essence of Christianity” (1841). Its author, Ludwig Feuerbach was a thinker who had a massive and lasting impact on Philosophy. However, his own work tends to get overlooked because the thinkers he most markedly influenced went on to become the major constellations of 20th century culture. The three stellar thinkers of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud are all indebted to him for his pioneering contribution to psychology45.
Looking at the major social thinkers that were roughly contemporary with Nietzsche, it seems like the extent of facial hair was somehow related to the depth of psychological insight. Feuerbach’s central thesis is fairly easy to summarise quickly: He argued that God was not real, it was merely an ideal projected out of human’s deepest hopes and fears. He is often classified as a ‘Psychological Reductivist’ because (with unusual frankness for the time) he reduced the notion of God down to simply a product of human psychology. If we fear death, we imagine an everlasting afterlife awaits. If we suffer from prejudice or poverty, we imagine a God that will act with justice. In Feuerbach’s own words, “Consciousness of God is self-consciousness, knowledge of God is self-knowledge. By his God you can know the man, and by the man, his God; the two are identical.”
45 There have been flashes of inspiration from thinkers such as Augustine (born 354AD), and Thomas Hobbes’ political philosophy is wonderfully insightful. Schopenhauer (born in 1788), dealt with psychology systematically but it is telling that Schopenhauer leans a huge amount on Eastern Philosophy for his insights. Indeed, Eastern Philosophy has an ancient and astonishingly rich tradition of psychological examination.
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Furthermore, Feuerbach was a Humanist and he argued that this illusory projection of ‘God’ was not just false, but it was also diminishing of human life and values. God is always “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger…” (rather like the Daft Punk track goes). Therefore, Feuerbach argued, it was time for mankind to step out of his long shadow. We could, and should, stand alone. Feuerbach had planted Psychology into the middle of Philosophy and it took root quickly. Reading Feuerbach46 provoked in Marx something akin to an inverted religious epiphany. He suddenly saw that the workers were being exploited by the owners of capital under the illusion of an afterlife (and various capitalist values). The promise of a utopian reward after death served as an ‘opiate’ to calm their nerves and soften the pain of their earthly poverty. The promises and hopes that were provided on Sunday enabled the workers to face work again on Monday. Freud read Feuerbach47 and he saw that men needed to create a huge range of illusions to cover up their dark drives and sexual impulses from themselves. His pornographic use of Feuerbach was centred on his famous ‘Oedipal Complex’ which stated that men’s sexual urges to be with their mothers [sic]48 was such a social taboo that it had to be repressed deep into the subconscious mind. Any male reader who is offended by such a suggestion is simply confirming the existence of the suppression in their mind. Freud would argue that a closer inspection of their dreams at night, some analysis of any compulsive behaviour, or deeper reflection on their genuflexions in church on Sunday morning, might prove to be more revealing.
Ethics according to Nietzsche Finally, (the moustachioed hero of this Chapter) we turn to Nietzsche. With typical boldness, a touch of irony, and lot of self-belief, Nietzsche wrote of himself, “That a psychologist without equal speaks from my writings – this is perhaps the first
46 For those interested in Marx, he is the leading thinker for ‘Left-wing Hegelians’ (but this is a very long story). 47 Freud also admired Nietzsche, although in a rather immodest (and blatant) contradiction, he claimed he had never read his work. 48 Indeed.
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insight gained by a good reader.” (Ecce Homo) He was very attentive to the effects of psychology on ethics. Nietzsche thought that the governing rule of most beliefs and behaviour was human being’s subterranean “will to power”. Sometimes this drive can be simple and explicit, as exemplified in the value that most Greek and Roman culture placed on strength and overcoming. Sometimes this will has to find subversive and more complex routes to power – something that he thought characterised the Christian revolution in the Roman world, or the French Revolution’s usurping of the ‘Ancien Régime’ in 1789. In both cases, those without power, realising that they could never beat their masters on their own terms, decided to reverse the value system in order to get it. More specifically: Poverty, weakness, humility and suffering became values in the Christian revolution, because they had them in abundance. Conversely, wealth, strength, power and comfort were made evil because they were simply permanently out of reach - the powerless Jews, after centuries of frustration under the Babylonians, Persians, Greeks and Romans, could never conceivably take back their land and laws from the fist of the occupying Army. Likewise, the ‘sans-culottes’ of the French Revolution made democracy and brotherhood into the ultimate value, given the fact they could never legitimately put on a fancy wig. Nietzsche’s summarised this psychological insight into history as ‘The Slave Revolt’. I am reminded of Nietzsche’s idea each time I punish my own children with some sort of confiscation or a prohibition, and they say, “well… you know, I didn’t want it anyway” with a grouchy face. History for Nietzsche is dominated by the story of a struggle between people who are trying to define good and evil on their own terms. Indeed, Nietzsche thought that in order to understand our own ideals we have to look back through our “Genealogy of Morals” (1887). We have to examine the family tree of where current values came from. Or as Nietzsche put it in his work, “All too Human” (1878) “Direct self-observation is not nearly sufficient for us to know ourselves: we need history, for the past flows on within us in a hundred waves.” More details will follow later, because Nietzsche’s life and times need to be understood for the fuller picture to become clear. For the moment, it is simply important to note that Nietzsche’s philosophy, in both its understanding of ethics and epistemology, is powered by psychology. Nietzsche teaches us to examine our culture with a sceptical distance. This is especially true for the values we prize the most, and which direct the
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subplot to the story lines that we are born into. Nietzsche’s work on morality argues that the values that we consider to be the most basic, the most deeply wired, are in fact not in any way transcendent or divine. They are only merely fashions that switch. Moreover, these fashions are an expression of a human drive for power in all its diverse appearances. Nietzsche is, therefore, a thinker who can help us lift the rug of our beliefs to see what might be hiding underneath them. This is a skill that will be particularly useful if we are trying to get underneath the psychological blocks to our civilisation’s failure to act on the clear dangers of climate change.
Getting a clear vantage point It is illuminating to explore what might have caused the collapse of different ancient civilisations, especially if the fall was abrupt. How did the people involved in the final years of such powers understand what was happening around them? As members of advanced societies with evident flair for technology and organisation, how did they not see what was coming? For example, much sociological, anthropological and historical ink has been spilt over end games of the civilisations Angkor, Easter Island and Maya. It is widely accepted that one of the primary causes49 of the collapse of the Polynesian civilisation on Easter Island was their extensive deforestation on an island with a fragile ecosystem. By the time Europeans started dropping in (in 1722), the population had already sunk from a high of around 15,000 (a century earlier) to between 2,0003,00050. The details of their demise remain very cloudy for this remotest of islands, but one darkly ironic aspect to their trouble is the transportation of their monumental heads, the moai. These huge sculptures now look out with long faces towards the rest of the world. They required large pathways to be cut through the forests and they were probably rolled into place on logs51. These desperate appeals to the gods, summoned with such art and a huge commitment of resources, highlight the fact that they could
49 Over-population and the effects of hosting an invasive species of rat (Polynesian) were also major factors. 50 West, Barbara A. (2008) Encyclopaedia of the Peoples of Asia and Oceania. Infobase Publishing. p. 684. 51 It seems that they mainly felled trees to plant crops and construct deep-sea canoes for fishing.
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just not achieve a proper perspective about what was going on and in the process they simply sped up their demise through more deforestation.
Closer to home, Barbara W. Tuchman’s compelling book, “The Guns of August” (1962) unravels the details of all the characters and blind forces that pulled civilised Europe into World War One in the summer of 1914. Tuchman writes with such insight into the human condition, and she also writes from the high and advantageous vantage point that time affords to a historian. Reading her book throws up a painful contrast: the clarity of her vision, and the assuredness of her historical dot-to-dot, contrasts deeply with the failings of the fumbling egos and the poignancy of all the poor decisions made inside the fog of war. In the bluster of all of these events, there seemed to be no route to a better perspective of what was taking place. So once all the nationalism had been blown aside, and there was no noble cause to be found uniting the dead, the war became a monument to human irrationality. Nietzsche was very sensitive to how our instincts and drives can warp our perspective on life, his psychologically informed philosophy is well-placed to help us grapple with the irrationality of climate change. In “Beyond Good and Evil” (1886), Nietzsche commented, “In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule”. From the Mayans to the Brits and the Germans (and the Easter Islanders in between), history offers us a view that enables us to see how combustible human affairs really are. The 360° vision of Philosophy offers us some help in finding a safe route out of our troubles.
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The Overton Window Nietzsche wanted to put right his culture’s metaphysical52 illusions. Many people would imagine that we have moved on from the main illusions of the past - many of the ancient statues of the gods now live behind glass in air-conditioned museums. What could Nietzsche tell us that might be useful for our modern, high-tech world? Apart from his reductivist account of traditional religious beliefs, can he still speak to us? Are there any major illusions about reality that we still live with? This chapter will make the case that Nietzsche’s case for meta-physical illusions has great relevance for climate change - as we are currently living with some deeply rooted illusions about physical reality. To help get a mental map of the current gap between culture and reality, it helps to look at the image below.
52 Metaphysics: the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, identity, time and space.
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This chart provides an approximate sketch of the situation that exists when scientific knowledge and media coverage are superimposed onto each other. The lines and curves in this image by US scientist Michael Tobis53 are not based on a statistical study. However, people familiar with climate change at a serious level will recognise its basic accuracy. Indeed, the rest of this book will provide a full range of the most recent54 scientific conclusions about the different degrees of climate change dangers – in the chart, this is represented by the “Most informed opinion55”. The reason for the spread of the informed opinion is that the climate system is so complex and that working out how quickly all the different mechanisms will interact, and on what timescale, is very demanding. Yet despite all the numerous variables that lie behind this sketch of the predicted impacts, the overall image remains informative. Without any viable technology to capture enough carbon from the atmosphere, and without an appropriate set of changes to government policies, the probabilities will move against us. The arguments put forward in the following chapters will be based on the mainstream conclusions of the science that informs the IPCC. However, the arguments will also be mindful of the fact that there is a strong consensus that an even more negative outlook is looming. The climate does not tend to behave in linear, predictable ways, but a simple rule guides most of the scientific thinking: the longer that we stay in our heated conditions, the shorter the odds are that substantial damage will roll on into an uncontrollable catastrophe. Upon the basis of the legal ‘precautionary principle’, this seems like the reasonable summary position to adopt for a book that is providing an entry point into the issues.
A disjunction It is very likely then that some of the conclusions reached in this book will be jarring. This is simply because the coverage that is afforded to climate change in the general media is mostly out of step with the science. The problem is solvable, but it is only solvable once we look at it.
53 http://climatechangenationalforum.org/author/michael-tobis/ 54 Up until late October 2018. 55 A scientific opinion, not a casual opinion about the best kind of pizza.
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The ‘box’ that depicts the range of “debate in the popular press” has a technical name, it is “The Overton Window”. The media might touch upon some of the substantial impacts of climate change, but most commonly they are individual weather events that are tagged at the last moment as “possibly” related to climate change by “some” scientists. Climate change is almost never addressed as a central, headline concern. By always framing it as a weather event, it makes the core science projections appear to be distant or improbable. Most damagingly, climate science is often ‘counter-balanced’ by the fallacies of the climate change sceptics. The disjunction between what is known by science and what is permitted to be known by our natural psychological make-up and the interests of the media is very significant. Compared to the scientific consensus, this ‘Overton Window’56 is pushed far away to the side, towards the idea that the impacts of climate change are neutral. Sometimes this box is called the ‘Discourse Window’, because it describes the width of a debate that is permitted on any political issue. It looks like this: Po opular
Po opular
More Freedom
Unthinkable
Less Freedom
Radical
Radical
The Overton Window Acceptable
Sensible
Common Sense
Sensible
Unthinkable
Acceptable
(Actual Policy)
For example, in the 18th century a vote for all women would have been an unthinkable policy. Likewise, the abolition of slavery would have probably been unthinkable for some and radical for most57. Now they are considered as common sense policies. Moves like this along the Overton window can take centuries, but sometimes the cultural shift is dramatic. For example, after the Fukushima disaster in 2011 there was a dramatic swing in public perception about the merits of Nuclear power, not only in Japan but in Germany too.
56 Named after Joseph Overton, see later footnote 62 for more details. 57 Although Chapter 3 will show that Thomas Paine in 18th century America, thought that the abolition of slavery was just Common Sense.
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In the case of climate change, this distance between the science and the public debate is due to a couple of reasons. Firstly, our natural instincts to shy away from negative news; this is something that politicians are also very reluctant to handle. Secondly, climate change is very often lumped in with other environmental news, like plastic straws, recycling, or natural disasters. The problem is that this gives the public no sense of proportion about the scale and the depth of the problems. If a child asked a relative (who happened to be a geologist), “What different kind of rocks are there on earth?”, it would be a little misleading for the adult to respond with the following response, expressed with the same tone of voice throughout: “Well… there are sedimentary one, igneous ones, metamorphic ones, and there is one very large rock that is heading towards our planet at a fast speed which threatens to wipe out some, possibly most of human civilisation”. There is something really quite disconcerting and very odd about the current preoccupation with plastic straws when it is juxtaposed with our relative lack of action about climate change. It is almost like the MGM cartoon where Tom, having scooped up Jerry by the collar, is proudly holding Jerry with an outstretched arm to the side, whilst Jerry’s legs flail helplessly around. However, there is a huge rock that was launched high into the air several hundred frames previously. This rock starts casting an increasingly large shadow over the two of them – and as Tom slowly pieces the evidence together in his head, we all know what happens after his smile disappears… Comical. Thirdly, climate change is a bit of a downer for advertising revenue. Moreover, for some major multi-national companies who have commercial interests in the status quo, it is not that sensible to allow the media companies that they own to publish or broadcast information that will damage their short-term profits.
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However, perhaps most significantly, the small bump on the left is very influential in pulling the public discourse away from reality. For decades, right-wing think tanks have been flooding the media with content and messages that are empty of any genuine scientific content (as explained in Chapter 6). Their strategy has been incredibly successful. ‘Doubt’, or just simple lies, have been used in a powerful way to influence public opinion and thereby to stall governmental policy changes. The alignment of the Overton Window with any social issue is determined by a combination of numerous social and psychological forces. Trying to understand the disjunction between the science and our perception of will require of a lot unpicking – Nietzsche is rightly labelled a Philosopher, however, his work would comfortably sit alongside a line of Psychology books.
More reasons why Psychology is important for Climate Change A very simple example of how our experiences and emotions can form our beliefs about climate change was observed in a study published in December 2016 by the ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’ (PNAS). It found that those Americans who were surveyed about their belief in the warming of the Earth would respond more affirmatively if they had experienced a high frequency of extreme weather events in their life58. Perhaps any presentation about climate change should then be made in rooms where the air-conditioning fails unexpectedly, or maybe in rooms where the heating is turned up to the maximum? More seriously, in Europe the ‘Overton Window’ of public views seemed to shift towards the science consensus in the summer of 2018. Even the right wing newspaper ‘The Sun’ ran a headline on July 25th, “The World’s on Fire” (‘as Britain bakes in 95°F heat’); followed by “Bake To The
58 “Spatial heterogeneity of climate change as an experiential basis for scepticism”, PNAS December 19, 2016. 201607032.
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Future” two days later when temperatures went up to 99°F (37.2°C). It quoted experts warning that this would become the new norm under climate change. This is the very positive upside that extreme weather has on the public perception of climate change – of course, it goes without saying that the heavy human price that such events carry is a totally unacceptable way of shifting public opinion. The significance of our increased propensity to absorb climate science in extreme conditions might be demonstrated in the next few years. This is due to the fact that there is plenty of extreme weather in the pipeline – according to a scientific paper of August 201859. The study published in the journal, “Nature Communications”, shows that from 1998-2010 the natural ocean and weather systems had been putting a brake on overall temperature rises. However, they predict that this natural diminishing of warming has finished and the next few years will see these natural cycles turn around to boost the overall temperature rises, “until at least 2022”. Natural climate fluctuations can offset or amplify man-made global warming There have always been natural fluctuations in global temperatures due to the climate‘s natural variability.
+0.8C warming
But climatic forcings, such as greenhouse gas emissions, are driving temperatures up.
0.4
Previously, natural factors have offset part of man-made warmings. Forecasts say we have now entered a period where this effect is reversed, adding to total warming.
0
-0.4 1900
1920
1940
1960
1980
2000
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/ science/2018/aug/14/extreme-temperaturesespecially-likely-for-next-four-years
One of the key authors, Sévellec commented, “Natural variability is a wriggle around the freight train that is global warming. On a human scale, it is what we feel. What we don’t always feel is global warming. As a scientist, this is frightening because we [the general public] don’t consider it enough. All we can do [as scientists] is give people information and let them make up their own mind.”
59 “A novel probabilistic forecast system predicting anomalously warm 2018-2022 reinforcing the long-term global warming trend”, Nature Communications Volume 9, Article number: 3024 (2018)
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It could be that the next few years will be a very bumpy ride for human civilisation, but if there is one positive consequence - it could wake us up.
Watching the BBC This psychological tendency to be more accepting of climate science was notable during the exceptionally dry and intense heatwaves of the European summer in 2018. A case study of the BBC shows that this improved sensitivity to climate change science is unfortunately often stuck within the usual limitations of the Overton window. However, it is also possible to make the case for some genuine optimism. The extreme weather of 2018 did also show that the public discourse does have the potential to suddenly shift.
A Case Study – The BBC The BBC’s ‘Newsnight’ dedicated a long section of their programme on July 24th 2018 to climate change. After illustrating the rising bar chart of temperatures since the turn of the century, and the run of record temperatures in recent years, the segment was particularly concerned with how the current weather might related to climate change. They used a graph very similar to this one:
1.5
Difference from average temperature (°F)
1
0.5 20th century average 0
-0.5
-1 1880
1890
1900
1910
1920
1930
1940
1950
Source: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/summary-info/global/
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1960
1970
1980
1990
2000
2010
However, even though the scientific experts provided important explanations, the framing of the material by the BBC was interesting. The material was centred by the Overton Window. It was not framed by the science. For example, the chair of the programme, Emily Maitlis, started by noting that if the weather was not as hot next year, people might easily forget about climate change, and then at the end of the segment she asked the scientists, “Are there any savings on fuel? Do you worry less about security on fuel? Could it be that there is an upside to all this?” Given all the details provided by the scientists this was a rather bizarre concluding question. In fact, these final questions are outside the Overton Window in the sketch above - but by suggesting that there could be some positive impacts, the questions are even more askew than most of the right-wing thinktank’s positions. Admittedly, the context for these was how climate change would impact the UK. Climate change is great news for the vineyard owners in England, it will probably reduce energy bills60 and in the shake-up of the economy there will be numerous winners. But then, why not ask if climate change will lead to many employment opportunities in security as the borders become stressed with migrants, or perhaps comment on the boom in the construction industry as a consequence of flood damage? The final questions were dissonantly ‘isolationist’ in the sense that it only picked out one small aspect of climate change, and they did not consider how the UK is connected to a global system of trade, such as food supplies. Indeed, the burden of the programme was trying to solve the riddle of how individual weather events fit into climate change. Again, this is a valid question; however, by starting with posing questions to the experts that focus on the difficulty in ascribing particular days or months of weather to climate change it could be suggestive of a general ambiguity about the core science. By contrast, the link between smoking and cancer is an established scientific fact, so the news coverage of smoking has moved on, mainly to the policy decisions, or further research conclusions into the impacts of smoking. By approaching climate change through the weather, it almost as absurd as interviewing some poor casualty of lung
60 As with all projections, this is very difficult to firmly establish because climate change will make the weather patterns more erratic and extreme, and if the Jetstream starts to behave in a different pattern it could lead to a very large range of outcomes.
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cancer in hospital and asking the doctors around his bed if this one case of cancer offers proof of the link between smoking and cancer. As with cancer, complex issues would be involved in ascribing an individual case to an overall theory; maybe the patient worked in a mine, maybe he cycled to work in a busy city, or perhaps his mum was a smoker, and that is before the mysterious deep biological behaviour of our DNA is approached. Climate change is so overwhelmingly obvious now at the research level that this line of questioning is frankly a bit silly. Indeed, it was rather peculiar for the BBC to be preoccupied by the complex probabilities of how the weather connects to the climate when some much more pertinent and pressing questions could have been asked. In July 2018, there were some unusually clear examples of the major wheels of the climate system starting to come off – these events were not only highly significant for the future of humanity, they were also of huge importance for scientific research. Yet for a rare moment, July 2018 was also a brief period when some of the long-term and most pressing questions about climate change were actually part of our common sense. The unusual condition of the Arctic Circle and the corresponding slowing down of the Jetstream had caused the unusually hot patch of weather to take a long summer stay over the top of the UK and Northern Europe. Hot and bothered Northern Europeans, seeing their farmers struggle with drought, seeing their trees and grass looking a scorched and brown, would have been much more receptive to some proper analysis. However, analysis not of the popular expectation, but by the main concerns of science. (The scientific significance of the Arctic and Jetstream climate hubs acting out of character will be examined in the second case study on Sweden.)
The BBC – Intelligent Speech? To give a clear example of how misaligned our public debates are with the science, here is a more definitive example from the BBC. Nigel Lawson (an economist and politician, not a climate scientist) was given airtime on Radio 4 (“Intelligent Speech”) as recently as August 2017 to broadcast his views
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as a climate sceptic61. He was not corrected or challenged. Ofcom charged the BBC with breaking UK broadcasting rule 5,1 which states that “news, in whatever form, must be reported with due accuracy and presented with due impartiality”. Rather astonishingly, the BBC defended itself by stating, “The BBC’s role is to hear different views so listeners are informed about all sides of debate and we are required to ensure controversial subjects are treated with due impartiality”. Does this mean that any segment of news that involves assumptions of Darwinian Biology might have to be balanced by a Creationist? Or any technology feature about satellites might need to be balanced by a member of the Flat Earth Society? Would such counter views also be unchallenged? The webpage on the BBC site that reported the complaints was rather unrepentant. It still put the word untrue into inverted commas, with Matt McGrath’s headline reading, “Anger over ‘untrue’ climate change claims”62. This is utterly remarkable for an institution that is loaded with Oxbridge graduates, and which nobly prides itself on ‘The Truth’ in an era of fake news. A BBC science broadcaster and physicist, Jim alKhalili joined in the shocked reaction, tweeting: “For @BBCr4today to bring on Lord Lawson ‘in the name of balance’ on climate change is both ignorant and irresponsible. Shame on you.” Brian Cox added, “I agree with @jimalkhalili. Irresponsible and highly misleading to give the impression that there is a meaningful debate about the science”. This mistake was not an isolated error. Precisely the same thing happened on the same programme in 2014:
Justin Webb [BBC Radio 4 Presenter]: So [the warming is] there somewhere? Sir Brian Hoskins: Oh yes, it’s there in the oceans. Lord Lawson: That is pure speculation. Sir Brian Hoskins: No, it’s a measurement. Lord Lawson: No, it’s not. It’s speculation. Justin Webb: Well, it’s a combination of the two isn’t it? As this whole discussion is. Lord Lawson and Sir Brian Hoskins, thank you very much.
61 Lord Lawson claimed that, “official figures” showed that “during this past 10 years, if anything... average world temperature has slightly declined”. 62 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40899188
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For the BBC to allow another interview with Lord Lawson after the flood of complaints, after this blunder, shows a grating level of incompetence to handle the issue of climate change. In the light of how sharp the science has become in the most recent years, it is almost eye-watering. However, this major mistake does also help to explain all the other minor editorial mistakes too. In a world where democracy and society are so vulnerable to the manipulation and subversion of the truth, the science needs to be shown genuine respect. If the BBC is getting it so wrong, then this poses real concerns for the wider media. Indeed, the Radio 4 interview of Nigel Lawson is also a good example of a recent trend to weaponise63 the ‘Overton Window’ by some political strategists. For example, on the far right, Trump came out with his staggering claims about Mexicans being “drug dealers, criminals and rapists” when he announced his Presidential ambitions at Trump Tower in June 2015. By simply being brash enough to repeatedly offend the common sense view, the window of what is ‘acceptable discourse’ either shifts or it widens64. This use of Social Psychology (known as the Door-in-the-Face (DITF) theory) in negotiation65 has proven very effective. You start by asking ‘Big’(ly)66 in order to establish an advantageous starting point, from which later requests seem more reasonable. Climate Sceptics like Lord Lawson know how powerful this tactic is.
The BBC - “to inform, educate and entertain”. As a backdrop, a study published in 2009, “The thirst to be first”67 argued that the quality of journalism in general had significantly declined, due to the growth and character of 24 Hour ‘Breaking News’. In another report in 2009, the ‘Foxification’ of the news was
63 After Overton’s death, his friend and colleague Joseph Lehman, from the Libertarian “Mackinac Centre” thinktank, promoted the potential uses of the window for political strategies. 64 It could be credibly argued now that in social policies the ‘centrist’ Overton Window simply does not exist anymore as the political landscape has been so fragmented. 65 The opposite strategy has become FITD (Foot-in-the-Door). 66 Bigly is a word. This was confirmed by the Merriam-Webster reference book company, after President Trump was heard to use it in September 2016. 67 The thirst to be first: An analysis of breaking news stories and their impact on the quality of 24 hour news coverage in the UK. Journalism Practice 3 (3), 304- 318.
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examined68 and it concluded that although the BBC was not immune from some of the consequences of these general changes, it had acted as a brake on them69. However, at the time it had also been noted that around half of the sources used by BBC news were “from politics, business, law and order or news media”, whereas scientific academics made up less than 10% of their sources70. In 2011, the BBC Trust commissioned a “Review of impartiality and accuracy of the BBC’s coverage of science”71; this was led by Professor Steve Jones. It concluded that, “there was a demonstrable public appetite for more information about science, and its policy, social and ethical implications and most people glean this information from the media”. It acknowledged the BBC’s role in “fostering a scientifically literate society”. However, the BBC was found to be confused about how to apply ‘impartiality’ to science. The report also concluded that the BBC did not work closely enough with science specialists and “too narrow a range of sources for stories and a tendency to be reactive rather than proactive”. The BBC has been rather lethargic in its response to this report. For example, in 2014, the BBC was once more criticised by Professor Justin Lewis72 for its poor level of science coverage. Perhaps it is not just extra science specialists that the BBC needs to employ? Perhaps they should also employ more philosophers? The main findings of Jones’ report are extremely close to some of the main assessment criteria for the European Baccalaureate course in Philosophy. The syllabus identifies key attainment targets: for example: • Construction and justification of an autonomous view; • Links are made between the theoretical/conceptual, and contemporary experience, culture, etc.73
68 Towards a `Foxification’ of 24-hour news channels in Britain? An analysis of market-driven and publicly funded news coverage. Sage Journals, Volume: 10 issue: 2, page(s): 131-153 69 It should also be noted that these reports in 2009 were also written before social media had established a more pervasive presence, and amplified some of these changes. 70 Extract: ‘How the BBC leans to the right’. Justin Lewis, ‘The Independent’, Friday Feb 14th, 2014. 71 https://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/our_work/science_impartiality/science_ impartiality.pdf 72 “Is the BBC in crisis?”, ed. J.Mair, R. Tait. (2014). 73 European Baccalaureate Philosophy Syllabus (www.eursc.eu/Syllabuses/2017-07-D-10-en-2.pdf)
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The course also aims to make students attentive to the different types of truth that exist (mathematical, logical, social, scientific…). However, this is not the place to do any sort of prolonged audit of the BBC’s performance. Indeed, looking at the BBC in some detail like this is problematic, because any one segment or programme has to be examined in the context of all their other material. However, the small errors made in the ‘Newsnight’ programme and the repeated use of climate sceptics, are common features of the BBC’s climate change coverage.
The BBC Barometer The other problem with selecting the BBC is that it is only a singular broadcaster in the world, and it might not be typical of the overall media coverage. However, the particularity of the BBC is precisely the reason for its selection as a case study. The BBC should be different. The BBC is an interesting test case for looking at the media coverage of climate change because as a public corporation it not only has the capacity, but it has the duty to be “financially and politically independent” compared to a private media firm that might be reluctant to take it on. The BBC’s charter seeks to, “inform, educate and entertain”74, in a media world in which the overwhelming imperative is simply to entertain. Looking at the BBC is a useful barometer of climate change coverage. Picking it as a case study exposes the lag and the gap between the science and our public awareness. As the first, the world’s largest and as one of the most prestigious public broadcasters, ‘The Beeb’ does deserve enormous credit and support in general. The nature documentaries produced with the wisdom and skill of David Attenborough are some of its world class productions. They have brought a stunning close-up view of the biosphere to people’s homes. Furthermore, its position as a touchstone of the truth means that it has an important role in setting the standards of independent and analytical reporting. In this respect, the BBC has a key democratic and psychological function – for the British it is a way of checking out the veracity of an issue, and its ‘World Service’ has often been a valuable
74 https://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/insidethebbc/whoweare/publicpurposes
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point of connection for people who live in countries with a constricted free press. If something major is happening in the world, it would be on the BBC and it would normally be reliable75.
“Let me entertain you…” Does climate change not present the BBC with a remarkable opportunity to be a world leader? The problem is wrapped up in so many concerns that the BBC is celebrated for - such as a commitment to the truth, a fascination and love of the natural world, and also its aspiration to provide probing and independent political analysis. By taking on this gap between the media and the science, it could show itself to be entertaining in a truly informative and educational way. The BBC’s mandate to “inform, educate and entertain” are not targets that are mutually exclusive. It does not need to be explained that when we chuckle at a comedy, get hooked on a series, or are drawn in by a TV drama, that we are being entertained. These arts are a beautiful part of the human condition (or perhaps just a great way of escaping the human condition)76. Furthermore, teachers find out very quickly that if their lessons are just informative, but not entertaining, the class will become restless. Conversely, a series of lessons that only aims to entertain, leaves the students with a similar disenchantment. One of perennial challenges of teaching a class is how to properly balance the informative with the entertaining, how to deliver a heavy challenge in an engaging atmosphere. Human beings are curious creatures, hungry for understanding and anxious to find out their place in the world. They know if they are being sold a dud. Any class that is only given a diet of entertainment will also become restless in the end. We have come to associate entertainment with comfort and happiness, but one of the first lessons of doing the Philosophy of Ethics is that human beings are much more
75 Or, aspiring to be reliable. Again, it is not possible to make well-qualified comments here given the diversity of issues, and the essentially impossible task of being ‘impartial’, but the basic point about reliability is a very plausible one. 76 One of the main influences on Nietzsche, who inspired him to consider ‘the will’ and ‘The Arts’ was Arthur Schopenhauer. His exploration of this paradox of art is a very rewarding body of work.
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complex and deeper than this. To dismiss climate change as a difficult subject because it will make us ‘sad’ ignores the fact that we crave so much more than being ‘happy’. This depth is obvious when we are faced with a rather weird choice on Facebook to either ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ something that has touched us, but what we are observing cannot be summed up with the blunt word ‘like’, or its opposite. Nietzsche is a thinker who can help us to get over these simplistic divisions of life. It is no surprise to find out that Nietzsche really did not admire the English Utilitarians, like Jeremy Bentham, who cashed out all ethical considerations into a simple balance of pleasure against pain. He aimed instead to understand our moral condition “Beyond Good and Evil” (1886). This is not to criticise ‘pointless’ Game Shows, Bake-Offs, or any other light entertainment; they do what they do very well. It is just that these programmes are not the full picture of what it is to be human. The media is at its most powerful when it also manages to harness all the aspects of our will to be “informed, educated and entertained”. Few people would have bought a book on climate change and Philosophy to giggle; the burden of the scientific prognosis is no joke, but is a powerful kick that humans get by being able to look at themselves and the world from a higher perspective – either scientific or philosophical. It is not entertainment in the narrow sense, but we are more alive for it.
Brief Conclusions Pulling together a couple of loose threads: Firstly, it seems quite plausible to argue that one of the main reasons why many people do not have a sharp concern about climate change is that it is simply not frequently or predominantly in the news. If the dangers posed to human civilisation are so potent, then it would be a core news item. The fact that it is not a central concern of the media suggests that the opposite is true. When my students have made presentations about climate change to adults, even if highly qualified scientists have been present to back up the statistics that they use and the statements they make, there is often an odd lingering doubt that becomes quite obvious in the question and answer sessions at the end. Many adults, on hearing about the reality of the mainstream science for the first time in stark detail, cannot reconcile the truths to the fact that they have not heard these conclusions repeatedly on the news. - 58 -
Why would the BBC report the emissions gap77 with such a sizeable assumption that we can achieve massive negative emissions in the very near future? Why would the BBC talk about the Paris target of 1.5°C as if it were remotely achievable, when it requires almost miraculous breakthroughs in technology and politics, almost immediately? If the slowing down of the Jetstream and the rapid melting of the Arctic ice are not hugely significant, then why is this not headline news? If plastic waste and recycling feature more often on the news, then it strongly implies that these are the most pressing environmental issues. Things cannot be that bad if they are not being reported, surely? After my students have made a climate change presentation, there is often lingering suspicion from the way that some adults frame or tone their questions that either these children have been on a weird website, or they have been listening to too much grunge music. Or perhaps they are tapped into some sort of conspiracy or anarchist theory against the state, or worse, they are watermelons – thinly green on the outside, but deep communist red to the core. All of the main conclusions of climate science that this book makes are all out there in public, all the essential data is referenced and available to anyone with the interest to pursue it. The problem is that there is simply a gap between the scientific publications and news agendas.
Pictured, to the left is: Sebastian Kaye (back) (then 17, now studying Geography and International Development, and a leading member of ‘Plan B’ which is taking the UK to court over its emissions). Ana Catarina Barbedo (middle) (then 17, now studying Environmental Economics (MA) at LSE). Take questions with Michael Wadleigh (front) ((then older than 17) Oscar Winner, Director Best Documentary, ‘Woodstock’ 1970) about their presentations on climate change.
77 The gap between where our emissions are now and how much we have to reduce them to stay under 2°C.
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Everyone has at least some cynicism about governments and the state. We all have our critical views about the media too. But somewhere at the back of our minds it is very difficult to believe that we could be allowing a total catastrophe to unfold in our full view. The fossil fuel industry have been very smart to dig a big trench for climate debate so far away from reality. A new centre of gravity for this public debate is urgently needed. Secondly, we tend to think of nature as being ‘there for us’. Just as Feuerbach thinks that we build an image of God in our own image, we also tend to build an image of nature in our own image too. At a basic, instinctive level of our mind, perhaps we simply cannot accept that the planet might let us down. The earliest human societies were very explicit in their anxieties about the natural world, they worshipped the rain, the sun, the crops and the animals out of respect and fear. Through modern science, because we have come to understand many of the rules and laws that govern ‘Mother Earth’, these pagan sacrifices are no longer needed. Yet, it is almost as if we have become over-familiar with her78. ‘Nature’ has almost become the thing that you visit on an expensive package tour, a herbal scent for the bath, or a beautiful wooden floor for the lounge. As will be shown in Nietzsche’s deconstruction of culture and language, there is a very real level of unfettered life and energy that we have almost forgotten lies underneath our description and modelling of a hugely complex system. Leaning on his knowledge of Ancient Greek culture, Nietzsche’s philosophy is centrally concerned with getting the balance right between the ‘Apollonian’ and the ‘Dionysian’. The Apollonian aspect of existence celebrates order and symmetry. The iambic pentameters of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the pulse of funk music appeal to our artistic Apollonian nature. Likewise, the Apollo
78 Many commentators have noted that some of the earliest pictures taken of Planet Earth from Space in 1972 (by Apollo 17) contributed to this very pacific view of nature. Something most famously mapped out with James Lovelock’s Gaia Theory. Whatever the psychology, it is certainly true that the last 17,000 years of human history took place in the Holocene that was an unprecedentedly favourable period of climatic stability.
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cutting simplicity of Newton’s equations and the beauty of Euler’s Equation in mathematics, have a similar Apollonian appeal. Conversely, the ‘Dionysian’ celebrates the raw chaos and power of nature. It enjoys the instinctual, primal, and anarchic reality. Too much of this potent truth and our hearts and minds are simply overwhelmed. Too much Apollonian order and we reduce ourselves and nature to sterility. Nietzsche thought that the Greek tragedies were a real high point in human culture because they achieved a magnificent fusion of the two. The Apollonian was to function as thin cover to the Dionysian, framing it and alluring the reader towards its power. A full exploration of these ideas can be found in Nietzsche’s ‘Birth of Tragedy’ (1872).
Dionysus
The notion that this co-operative, generous mother might turn against us and unleash powerful and devastating attacks on our ambitions with fitful and unpredictable carelessness is just too much for our psyche to deal with. Human civilisation has become so advanced - in our technological age we have become so accustomed to our high level of control over nature. Our supermarkets are full of food from all of the seasons and from every continent, all year. We have lost sight of nature’s chaotic underbelly. We can design artificial realities to live in just with our minds, and artificial realities to live in with our bodies – with homes that can be heated or chilled, and everything else to make life tame for us. These are not complaints, these are not the observations of a luddite, it is simply the case that all of this makes it so easy to forget what our economy79 is actually rooted in – a planet with both physical limits and extraordinary raw power. Facing the reality of a crashed computer that takes with it all of our investments in time, our completed work and our uncompleted projects, is a truly gut-wrenching experience. Trying to restart it in an increasingly frantic state, stroking it, talking to it, cursing ourselves for not backing up our work more systematically, promising to
79 Economy in the original and more holistic Greek sense, ‘Oikonomia’ is a word used by Aristotle that denotes the management of the whole household, including all the people, property, land and animals. They were all to be considered with their end purpose in mind (which for Aristotle was the ‘good’, or virtuous life). Aristotle might cynically comment that modernity has largely moved away from this ‘ecosystem’ thinking, to ‘egosystem’ thinking.
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ourselves never to be so dumb again. But in our technological age there is often a backup, or recovery version – and if we manage to reinstall everything we are flooded with such an intense relief. For our relationship with Planet Earth, this recovery version is still available to humanity for a few years – we can still reconfigure things to keep the system running. The technology is there, the understanding is there, we just have to do it.
Melting Points in Science A Case Study – Sweden The Kebnekaise mountain In between July 2nd and July 31st the Kebnekaise mountain lost 4 meters of ice80, a melting which meant that Sweden had to move the location of its nations’ highest point. This is because by the end of the summer, this melt had taken the Southern icy peak of the mountain to down below the 2,096.8 meters of its (purely rocky) Northern brother.
Gunhild Ninis Rosqvist, a Stockholm University geography professor who has been measuring the glacier for many years as part of climate change research, commented, “It’s quite scary. This glacier is a symbol for all the glaciers in the world. This whole
80 In 1901, when the southern peak was first measured, its elevation was 45 meters higher, at 2,121 meters.
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environment is melting, the snow is melting, and it affects the entire ecosystem: the plants, the animals, the climate, everything,” ... “You see the effects of climate change so clearly here”. Climate change is so rarely a sensory experience. Rosqvist added, “I saw meltwater trickling down the sides, I’ve never seen that before.”81. The week after the reports about the Kebnekaise mountain, Sweden was in the news again in relation to climate change. A significant contribution to the study of climate change had been published by the Stockholm Resilience Centre. A lot seemed to be melting in the summer of 2018 – and not all of it was ice.
Johann Röckstrom – The Stockholm Resilience Centre. First the bad news. On August 6th 2018, Johan Röckstrom and his team of scientists from the Stockholm Resilience Centre published their latest summary of the climate change papers concerned with potential ecological tipping points. Its title, ‘Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene’82 does not make it sound like a best seller. Indeed, it is a serious piece of scientific research, edited by Harvard and Cambridge University, and here are the opening lines, “We explore the risk that self-reinforcing feedbacks could push the Earth System toward a planetary threshold that, if crossed, could prevent stabilization of the climate at intermediate temperature rises and cause continued warming on a “Hothouse Earth” pathway even as human emissions are reduced. Crossing the threshold would lead to a much higher global average temperature than any interglacial in the past 1.2 million years and to sea levels significantly higher than at any time in the Holocene. We examine the evidence that such a threshold might exist and where it might be. If the threshold is crossed, the resulting trajectory would likely cause serious disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies. Collective human action is required to steer the Earth System away from a potential threshold and stabilize it in a habitable interglacial-like state. Such action entails
81 https://phys.org/news/2018-08-arctic-sweden-highest-peak.html 82 www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/07/31/1810141115, “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene”.
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stewardship of the entire Earth System—biosphere, climate, and societies—and could include decarbonisation of the global economy, enhancement of biosphere carbon sinks, behavioural changes, technological innovations, new governance arrangements, and transformed social values.” The rubric of scientific writing did not allow the scientists to make this opening statement rhyme like a limerick or pulse like a Shakespeare sonnet.
Temperature
When the details of the article are opened up, here is what a plan view of the dense science looks like as an image:
D C
2°C
B
Hothouse Earth (millennia)
Temperature Earth
A Sea level
Glacial-Interglacial Cycle (100,000 y)
In the bottom left corner, the Earth has been going in and out of different ice-age epochs for millions of years, each time with undulating temperature and sea level changes. In ‘recent’ geological times (partly due to the Milankovitch Cycles that are explained in Chapter 5) the rhythm of these changes has occurred in roughly 100,000-year beats.
In the top right corner of the image, at point A, we exited this stable cycle because of the sudden jump in CO2 emissions produced by the Industrial Revolution. Having been knocked out of a long-term loop, we are now heading towards point B. This still gives us a chance to turn back towards the relatively stable conditions that human civilisation grew up in. If we cross the threshold at 2°C then we might effectively give over control of our destiny to the natural forces that could swing us up through various temperature and sea level rises - eventually towards a ‘Hothouse Earth’ which will be catastrophic for human life. Chapter 5 (on Descartes) will map out the details of what those different degrees of climate change will look like, degree by degree.
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However, one of the notable conclusions reached by Röckstom’s article is the possibility that even a 2°C rise might not be enough to retain control. Therefore, huge efforts to improve artificial and natural carbon capture would be needed in such a scenario to pull the temperature down even lower, as carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for thousands of years. This is what that trajectory looks like from side-on:
Starting at the back. From within a long-established trench of temperature variations, the Earth settled into a warm equilibrium at the start of the Holocene (at the top end of its ‘recent’ geological temperature swings). For the most recent 11,700 years, this position afforded humans a benign climate to establish and advanced their civilisation (including the development of major cities on the coastlines and rivers). Since (roughly) 1776, humans have rolled the Earth towards a new pathway that puts it in line to become a ‘Hothouse Earth’. The first thing to note about this pathway is that the temperatures will increase. The second thing to note is that the trench gets deep with steep contours, which makes it more and more unlikely that we would be able to swing the Earth back into a stable set of conditions. The last thing to note is that the ‘planetary threshold’ is a dotted line.
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This signifies that it may not be possible to establish where such a tipping point exists, but if it were to be crossed, the feedback loops latent within nature kick in. After such a point, the contour lines start to work powerfully against us. Why 1776? Two hugely important events happened in 1776. It was the year that Thomas Paine published his “Common Sense”, that focused the hearts and minds of the American colonists’ to kick off the illusions of British rule and to fight for their democratic independence (see Chapter 4). It was also the year in which James Watt had his first steam-powered engine used in a commercial operation. These two events put humanity onto a fast track to modernity. Together they capture the key signature of the modern western lifestyle - the ‘three sharps’ of democratic, technological and commercial power. This key signature has framed the progress of human civilisation ever since and have defined which developments are in or out of tune. The transformation of human life and the planet has been truly astonishing. For just two hundred years of work, this is quite A major achievement83. In fact, if some precise cosmic maths is done, these two events both happened 242 years ago. 1776 is the date that many consider that the Anthropocene began. If we imagine that this was also the moment for the starting gun for the planet Pluto’s orbit of the Sun, then there are only 6 years left before the outer ring of our little section of the universe will complete its circuit. It is remarkable to think that within one lap of the solar system by Pluto, humans on planet Earth will have shunted the planet onto such a markedly different path. 6 years is the time we have left84 before we officially load the ecological dice to deliver a 1.5°C rise.
83 This does not redeem the terrible pun, but for keen listeners, not readers of music, A major has 3 sharps in it. 84 See Chapter 8 on Plato for the details on how such summary conclusions are reached.
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The Triggers This scenario makes more sense when the triggers to the feedback loops are identified. From a Northern European perspective, a simple example was part of everyone’s common sense whilst we drove to our holidays along the roads in the summer of 2018. The trees that border the traffic had often turned into autumn colours at the end of July. Apart from looking a weird mix of green and bronze, this also meant that they were not sucking out CO2 from the atmosphere at their usual rate. On a huge scale across the Northern hemisphere, including the burning forests in the Swedish Arctic Circle, this meant that Planet Earth would not be taking such a deep gulp of CO2 during the summer. With this smaller breath, the level of CO2 for the next year would be higher, and therefore would make another heatwave and drought that bit more likely in the years to come. And so on… This is one small aspect of a much bigger map of feedback triggers. Indeed, the forests of Northern Sweden are part of an immense biome85 that includes massive landscapes of northern Canada and Russia – it is known as the ‘Boreal Forest’. Forest fires in this section of the Earth are increasingly common, but a full collapse of this ecological zone is, for now, a distant possibility. If it did go under, it would function as one of the tipping points that Röckstrom refers to in the article. Here is a full map of those triggers, published by The Guardian.
85 Biome: A community of plants and animals that have common characteristics. It is a broader term than ‘habitat’.
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If you were going to play God, and set up the co-ordinates of your planet before you brought it into existence, this is the sort of network map that you would draw. Each coloured disc is a major node of the system; they are the main cogs that determine all life on earth today. The rest is details. As the arrows demonstrate, each cog is locked into the Earth System with other cogs. Röckstrom’s report highlights the risk that low level tipping points (in yellow) can eventually trigger higher-level tipping points (in red). If the high-level components are put into play, such as the melting of the permafrost or the East Antarctic Ice sheet, it will signal the reality of a ‘Hothouse Earth’ with formidable consequences for human life. As mentioned previously, Chapter 5 of this book also explains the main highlights of this possible cascade of consequences. For a full and accessible explanation of these tipping points and how they might play out, Mark Lynas’ book, “Six Degrees” is an award-winning contribution to popular science. The yellow tipping points are already in play because we have recently achieved a 1°C rise above the pre-industrial average. The bleaching of the coral reefs and the melting Alpine glaciers are already evident. The 40 meters of ice that has been lost on the Kebnekaise glacier is typical of many glaciers all over Europe. These images are taken of the fast-retreating Pasterze glacier in Austria. Pictured on the left, is the popular ‘Mer de Glace’ near Chamonix (France) where a 100m set of ladders is now needed to reach the glacier because around 80m of ice has melted since the earliest tourists were visiting in the 19th century. The melting permafrost in the mountains has made many rocks unstable and this has forced mountain guides to switch their routes. The melting ice had previously held together loose rocks in the highest European peaks, and although this creates dangers and difficulties for mountaineers, it does not pose a large wider threat to the Earth system. However, it offers a small glimpse into the future when a defrosting layer of ice will pose a massive threat to humanity. When the permafrost thaws on a large scale in the Arctic regions it will not only loosen the ground, it will enable potent methane gas to escape into the atmosphere. Methane is global warming dynamite – it is around 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide for
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warming the atmosphere (although it only hangs around for about 10 years on average – compared to the thousands of years for CO2).
The Pasterze Glacier, Austria. Which has roughly halved in size since records began in 1851.
A huge planetary burp of methane (CH4) would not be funny. There is currently unease amongst some scientists about the stability of the ‘The Permafrost’ because the Arctic is playing the global warming game at a much faster speed than the rest of the planet (for reasons which are not all that clear). In 2016, land surface temperatures were 2.0°C above 1981-2010 average, which represents a 3.5°C rise since records began in 190086. However, the good news is that mainstream scientific consensus is that the permafrost (and the East Antarctic Ice shelf) are not expected to be pulled into play for a century, or perhaps centuries. Good news if you belong to this side of the century. The next most significant yellow trigger is the melting of the Arctic summer ice. In 2018, the decline of the sea ice to a widespread depth of barely 50cm in July 2018 was something of a metaphor for the whole situation with climate change. On the surface, the visible ice cover is shrinking but still extensive – however, it is under the surface that the major change is taking place.
86 Aaron-Morrison et. al. (2017), “State of the climate in 2016”, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Vol. 98, No. 8, p.Si-S280
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Melting Points in Society It is about time for some good news. The Arctic Ice could also offer a good metaphor for the media coverage of climate change. In July 2018, some important cracks appeared in the public discourse about the science. Perhaps a dramatic change is on the way? (Or, as scientists might describe it: Perhaps a threshold is about to be crossed that will trigger a non-linear, abrupt change in public perception?) The report compiled by the Stockholm Resilience Centre vividly illustrates the perilous situation humans are in, but in all honesty, the text is a hard read. It is full of technical vocabulary and presumes a lot of understanding of the climate system. The graphics do help, but this is no bedtime story. Advanced scientific writing requires extensive qualifications, technical details and it must follow an established rubric. Yet, amazingly, within a week of its publication, this article was downloaded over a quarter of a million times by the public. The co-author of the article Hans Joachim Schellnhuber commented, “I think that in future people will look back on 2018 as the year when climate reality hit. This is the moment when people start to realise that global warming is not a problem for future generations, but for us now.” As the outgoing director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts, he has observed the gap between the science and the public for a long time, and he has also seen some of the difficulties of accelerating government action. He comments, “Politicians prefer small problems that they can solve and get credit for. They don’t like big problems that, even if they succeed, leave the rewards for their successors. But once you pile up public pressure, politicians find it hard to avoid taking responsibility.”87 Indeed, just as the ice was visibly melting at the top of the Kebnekaise mountain, there were some signs that the public discourse on climate change was also moving towards the science. Summer 2018 seemed to be a season when some of the critical science not only poked through the surface of the news, but it actually affected an important shunt
87 “World is finally waking up to reality of climate change, says ‘Hothouse’ author”, The Guardian, August 17th 2018.
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of the Overton Window towards reality. At the start of this chapter, some examples were given of how the July 2018 heatwave caused an unusual level of press coverage in the UK, which even had some right-wing newspapers taking a huge jump in the correct direction. When Noam Chomsky wrote, “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media” (1988) he backed up his claims about the constricted level of US media coverage with a full empirical base of evidence. His insights into the different filters of media coverage remains a powerful critique of modern culture. The same Procrustean Beds still frame and shape our awareness of the news. However, as yet, no large-scale statistical survey has been undertaken to provide a database of evidence to show how climate change news is reported (or not). However, there is one quick route to see the cultural trends behind the media, and that is by observing long-term survey data. The USA offers the most recent statistical evidence to back up this possible shift. Published in July 2018, a report from the National Surveys on Energy and Environment88 summarised their latest findings (this survey has tracked the data twice a year since the Autumn of 2008):
“1. More Americans think that there is solid evidence of global warming than at any time since 2008 with 73% maintaining this view in the latest version of the NSEE conducted in late April and May of 2018. 2. A record 60% of Americans now think that global warming is happening and that humans are at least partially responsible for the rising temperatures. 3. While half of Republicans think that there is solid evidence of global warming, the divide between the 90% of Democrats that hold this view and the 50% of Republicans that maintain this position is as large as any time since 2008. 4. The divide between Democrats and Republicans on the existence of anthropogenicinduced global warming is also at record levels with 78% of Democrats now holding the view that humans are at least partially responsible for warming on the planet compared to only 35% of Republicans.”
88 Issues in Energy and Environmental Policy, Number 37, July 2018.
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Among Republicans: 13%
15% 15% 14%
26% 26%
10%
19%
12%
8%
19%
8%
20% 15%
16% 11%
13% 16%
13%
15%
14%
15%
14%
16%
16%
14% 17%
28%
18%
11%
17%
15%
18%
20% 13%
20%
21%
26%
15%
20% 15%
16% 9%
8%
25%
10% 18%
20%
14%
15%
12%
12%
13%
16%
13%
12%
15%
Climate change caused by human activity Climate change caused by a combination of human activity and natural patterns or not sure of cause Climate change caused by natural patterns Not sure if climate is changing
11%
34%
15%
12%
17%
12%
11%
10%
13%
13%
10%
35%
35%
13%
12%
13%
18%
26%
15%
26% 35% 43%
45%
40%
42%
34% 41%
50%
15%
31% 40%
34%
42%
13%
15%
Climate is NOT changing
35%
49%
54%
Fall Spring Fall Spring Fall Spring Fall Spring Fall Spring Fall Spring Fall Spring Fall Spring Fall Fall 2017 2017 2016 2016 2015 2015 2014 2014 2013 2013 2012 2012 2011 2011 2010 2009 2009 2008 (n=148) (n=239) (n=174) (n=214) (n=187) (n=186) (n=172) (n=191) (n=193) (n=213) (n=180) (n=205) (n=159) (n=212) (n=140) (n=214) (n=123) (n=217)
Spring 2018 (n=164)
Among Democrats: 51% 35%
32%
33% 28% 34%
35%
34%
31%
31%
36% 31%
25%
13%
13% 5%
10%
15%
8% 10%
33%
32%
22%
37%
47%
37%
45%
38%
43%
10%
15%
10% 7%
7%
15% 16%
23%
14%
14% 7%
7%
5%
9%
7%
11%
10%
30%
30%
24%
27%
24%
20%
16%
15%
12%
27% 26%
12%
13%
14%
19%
15%
12%
12%
12%
10%
14%
13%
13%
13%
9%
16%
10%
7%
5%
8%
10%
8% 8%
Climate change caused by natural patterns Not sure if climate is changing
8%
2%
23%
Fall Fall Spring Fall Spring Fall Spring Fall Spring Fall Spring Fall Spring Fall Spring Fall Spring Fall Spring 2008 2009 2009 2010 2011 2011 2012 2012 2013 2013 2014 2014 2015 2015 2016 2016 2017 2017 2018 (n=197) (n=345) (n=235) (n=374) (n=248) (n=284) (n=230) (n=311) (n=317) (n=318) (n=291) (n=328) (n=260) (n=322) (n=252) (n=309) (n=281) (n=270) (n=224)
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Climate change caused by human activity Climate change caused by a combination of human activity and natural patterns or not sure of cause
7%
11% 16%
52%
23%
17%
6%
24%
45%
29%
36% 31%
37%
Climate is NOT changing
Party loyalty runs deep in the American perception of reality. The discrepancy between the Democrats and the Republicans is quite a clear example of Nietzsche’s concern about ‘tribal’ loyalty and power issues that affect our understanding of the truth. This very revealing pattern of fault-lines in American beliefs about climate change will be further explored towards the end of the Chapter 6 on Popper. However, despite these qualifications about the data, on the back of the hottest May on record (May 2018 in the USA even eclipsed the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s), there was a shift in public opinion. Democrat confidence in anthropogenic climate change notably strengthened and although Republican views remained resiliently sceptical, the overall trajectory of their position is slowly softening towards the science (despite the gestures and tweets of their President).
Oniomania is a strange name for a common problem:
Shopaholicism. If we were to do a quick audit of all our shopping over the last year it would be curious to identify how much of it was driven by necessity, and how much by the odd belief that it was somehow therapeutic. We don’t need to have overloaded credit cards to buy into the brief solace of our purchasing power. The public perception of climate change has nothing to do with the science of course, just like a child’s guess about the number of planets in the galaxy does not cause the reality to change. No flicker of imagination from a 5 year old ever caused a super-nova. Yet, this shift is very significant, because it demonstrates that these sensory events do have an impact on our perception of the science - and there will a great deal of nudging of the window towards the right position in the coming months and years.
The two great European Narcotics Nietzsche wanted a cultural upheaval. He thought that his culture had been put into a torpid state by religion. He argued that Christianity had worked like an anaesthetic on people’s brains because, by endorsing values such as weakness and humility, it had dulled the incentive for people to deal with
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the root cause of their problems. If a believer was being exploited, Nietzsche thought that Christianity encouraged people to turn inward and cherish their lowly position and suffering as if it were a virtue rather than express their anger and fight to achieve proper recognition in the real world89. Rather than going through a proper diagnosis of their problems, Nietzsche thought that Christian values simply masked the pain. He thereby understood that churches and pubs were similar places of comfort. Both offered solace, but it was not healthy because the problem would still fester behind the comfort. In a section on ‘What the Germans Lack’, he writes, “But this people has deliberately made itself stupid, for nearly a millennium: nowhere have the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity, been abused more dissolutely”90.
Sudden melts Rather like a cultural psychiatrist, Nietzsche wrote in observation the many twists and turns that human culture had taken in its re-evaluation of morals. He thought it was about time for another one. In fact, he enjoyed the fact that cultures can suddenly spin in different directions. Sometimes it was for the better, sometimes it was for the worse. However, for those who might be daunted by the challenges facing our society, and when we get so weary of looking at how closed and entrenched this world set-up looks, Nietzsche points out to us the astonishing capacity of human society to swivel around on its feet and to create another world order and a fresh set of priorities.
Idiopathic Hypersomnia affects about 2 in every 100,000 people; those who suffer from the condition can sleep for over 48 hours. Almost nothing can wake them up, and even when they do wake up they still suffer from real lethargy and drowsiness. 89 He used the French word ‘ressentiment’ to capture the idea of an intense churning anger that is turned inward – often because the political reality meant that it could not be expressed outwardly. An ancient example would be the Jewish anger towards the might of the Romans that turned inward to ritual purity, or eventually the Christian “Slave Revolt” of values. A modern example would perhaps be the inner turn to self-harm or eating disorders, common when young people are presented with an impossible external ideal to live up to – a form of control and power typically accompanied with guilt. 90 “Twilight of the Idols”, What the Germans Lack. Published 1889. (I am not one to judge the current German capacity for critical thinking, or their church attendance, but they do still rank very highly in the EUROSTAT data for alcohol consumption!)
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It is a condition with significant social consequences. It provides a medical example of what Nietzsche had diagnosed in European culture.
Who would have thought that LGBT rights91 would have shifted so dramatically in the last few years? Especially for an issue that showed little sign of major change for so long. The intransigence over LGBT seemed so embedded in old patriarchal systems of power, so webbed into some general cultural assumptions about what was ‘natural’ or not, and it was also such a deeply entrenched media taboo. Yet, it was remarkable how quickly the shift in attitudes cascaded into most levels of society. Having taught Ethics for some years, this speed of change rather caught me off-guard when I was recently given a coverlesson to do, on the topic of ‘Homosexuality’. I began by giving the class (who were roughly 15 years old) a blank piece of paper. They needed to write down, in a couple of considered sentences, what they thought about it; this was just to see where the burden of work or interest was, and to establish a starting point. The most interesting response was from Gaia Cacciato, who simply handed in a blank piece of paper. Given that a teacher is naturally on the back foot with a cover class, I enquired as to who had handed in a blank sheet, and why? She was not being petulant or cynical. She explained with a full and wonderfully balanced answer that could be summarised by the first sentence she said, “Why did you not write ‘Heterosexuality’ on the board?” (echoing Simone de Beauvoir’s account of ‘The Second Sex’ (1949)). In fact, all the comments in the class demonstrated that in just a few years, since the last time I had directly taught lessons on Homosexuality, a massive shift in public perception had taken place.
91 And all the different variations on that base.
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Who would have even entertained the idea of a black President of the USA in the 1950s, when the black community could not even vote? Many of the Americans who walked to work as part of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 were probably still thinking about the open coffin of Emmett Till. Jet Magazine had recently published the pictures of his brutalised corpse from the funeral. His mother did want the world to ignore the sheer barbarity of his death - and the thousands of other black people who were lynched with regularity and impunity at that time92. Indeed, as Rosa Parks famously refused to move seats on that bus, she said that as she sat resolutely in her place, she fixed her mind on Emmett Till. Emmett was an effervescent 14-year-old black boy, who had left his mum in Chicago to go on his cottonpicking summer visit of 1955 to the Deep South. The town where his cousins lived was called Money93 (near Mississippi). It was outside their local store where Emmett, a naïve city boy from the North, allegedly wolf-whistled at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant. The details are obscure, but the ending is not. th A few days later, on August 28 , Emmett was kidnapped in the middle of the night, taken away in the back of a green pick-up truck, brutally beaten and shot. His skull was in bits because of the bullet that passed through it. An eye was out its socket, and his body was swollen because he had been dumped into the Tallahatchie River with a 35kg metal fan blade chained around him. Emmett’s mother stepped in to stop a quickly organised burial, and the casket was put on the train back to Chicago. Those who saw the photo in Jet Magazine on September 15th 1955 never forgot it -the beautiful, but mutilated body in a suit. “Emmett Till’s body proved iconic because it could simultaneously express the brutalisation and the dignity of black life. It told them simultaneously what they were fighting against, and what they were fighting for”94.
92 Extrajudicial racist killings are unfortunately not something that belong only in the past tense. 93 Perhaps the early colonisers had run out of family names, hometown names, and noble euphemisms as they moved further into the Wild West in search of their agricultural riches? 94 Adam Green, author of “Selling the Risk” speaking on the BBC, “The Ballads of Emmett Till”, Saturday 25th August 2018.
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In September of that year, an all-white jury acquitted the two white men who murdered him95. Yet another bitter ‘Strange Fruit’ of institutionalised oppression for the black community to swallow. Could those walking on the crowded rush hour sidewalks of Montgomery in December 1955 have imagined that in just 10 years’ time they would be celebrating the signing of the ‘Voting Rights Act’? It was passed into the US law books by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965.96 Human psychology is a strange thing. Just like water, there seems to be critical point at which it just suddenly starts to switch state.
Thin Ice There is a very fine line between the current perception of climate change – where all the information is framed at some distance away from reality – and a situation where the penny drops and then all the reporting and the analysis shifts gear. It is analogous to the thresholds between different states of H2O. The freezing point of water at 0°C97 marks the line between two utterly distinct conditions. Underneath this level, the molecules are bound together in a compact state, above this level everything is loosened up. They are the same individual molecules, but the external temperature changes everything about the state that they are in. There is a critical melting point, and it is wafer thin.
95 They admitted just a year later that they did it, but were protected by the principle of ‘double jeopardy’. 96 This is not to understate the residual, systemic racism that still exists in the USA. Indeed, Martin Luther King is too often assimilated by Western Culture simply for his aspirational ‘dream’, and not for the radical, deep rooted change that he was fighting for after 1965 and before his assassination. 97 In normal conditions.
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The situation that we are faced with in climate change is not dissimilar to these major social issues in our past. There are simply billions of people who are very anxious about environmental damage, and the impacts of climate change. They would willingly make some compromises in their lifestyle to retreat from the dangerous tipping points, they would vote for policies that decoupled our economic growth from carbon emissions. In a very bizarre state of affairs, all these billions of people feel isolated in their concerns. For millions who see the danger sharply, and who understand the need for dramatic action, this sense of isolation is even accompanied by anger and sometimes desperation. What is the difference between the billions who are concerned in general, and the millions who are acutely worried? It must primarily be the framing and the absence of climate change in the media. Only the most haplessly irrational human being would want to sacrifice the future (and the past) of our astonishingly beautiful human place in the universe to a few fat cats that run the multi-trillion dollar fossil fuel industry? Of course, this an oversimplification, but it is not much of one. Moreover, there are huge profits and jobs to be made in green investments, there are massive benefits to decarbonising our whole economy, we have the scientific capacity to understand and resolve the problem. There is little doubt that largely unrestrained markets have been responsible for so much of the Anthropocene, for a full and wonderfully engaging account of this, the book ‘The Shock of the Anthropocene’98 (2016) provides a wealth of data and analysis. Some radical new boundaries need to be fixed, but when was human inventiveness and resourcefulness ever intimidated by a boundary? Human intelligence is a simply remarkable faculty. As a young boy, I lost a whole summer in 1985 inside my Cobra MK III spaceship travelling around the galaxy. I was a fighter pilot and trader inside the ZX Spectrum game ‘Elite’. The two programming geniuses of David Braben and Ian Bell had invented an entire interactive 3D galaxy inside 32k of memory. (Today, 32k is about the size of one fuzzy jpeg picture).
98 “The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us” (2016), Verso. Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. Translated by David Fernbach.
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A current example of human inventiveness in very tight spaces can be noted with the example from Chile. “Solubag” TM was designed by two engineers who were researching different configurations of the PVA formula to make plastic bags dissolve in water – in anticipation of stricter controls on the standard plastic bag that is such a damaging addition to the oceans. We have millions of laws to frame capitalism already, no-one is allowed to sell poisonous pizzas for example, no-one is allowed to build a block of flats in a National Park and any pharmaceutical company must do their research and development within a tight regulatory framework. Which reasonable people would be against a few more boundaries, just to save human civilisation? The rest of this book will hopefully make all the necessary qualifications to this section clear enough. There are many ideas here that could be challenged, but sometimes it is important to just look at the most basic truth, undistracted.
A new Overton Window Is it that difficult to imagine a world in which the framing of the media coverage of climate change flips to acknowledge the problem squarely? Billions of people recycle and try to reduce their plastic and energy use with a genuine motivation to make a difference, and they would do much more if they knew where their efforts could have a real impact. Billions of people have a strong emotional investment in the preservation of the natural world. Billions of people care deeply about their children’s future and the future of their communities. There is a massive latent energy and capacity stored up in people’s concern for their world – it has simply not been given many appropriate channels of expression because the media has kept climate change inside such a constrained window of thinking and action. If a certain momentum builds in our collective anger about climate change, even the right-wing media would fall into line to protect and affirm their audience – climate change is a national security issue, it causes millions of migrants, it damages global markets, it is a basic affront to people’s rights to property, family and life. Failing all that, it could frame the political inertia about climate action as an example of ‘big government’ subsidising doomed industries (the fossil fuel industry still receives trillions in state aid globally). The voice in the readers’ head that wants to see this as a very plausible switch is confronted by the voice of experience which claims that this has never happened - 79 -
before. However, Nietzsche’s analysis of our psychology, a glance over our shoulder at our history, shows that it has happened before. There had been many thousands of black people who had suffered the savagery of lynching before Emmett Till had a gun pointing at him in the dark, and then a journalists’ camera pointed at him in his pine casket. There was no particular reason why his death should have been such a tipping point in the Civil Rights movement. There is no reason why a certain hurricane, flood or tragic death caused by climate change might function as our tipping point. Indeed, apart from the sheer scale of some of the ecosystem failures that are now appearing, there are already important movements in place. In parallel to the activism of the civil rights campaigns, all their protests and all their initiatives to inspire change - there was a fierce legal battle. The same is true with climate change right across the world – as will be explored in the final chapter of Part Two on Plato. Indeed, under the thin ice of the media’s general representation of the problem, a major shift has already started in the finance sector. For all its faults, the Paris Climate Change Agreement in COP21 did provide an abstract recognition of the problem in the political world, and a negotiating framework to move forward with. Yet perhaps even more significantly, it was an emphatic signal to the markets to invest in the green economy. Since 2015, the price of renewable energy has plunged. In conclusion, once the real science becomes widely known and accepted, then every major weather event will drive home the point. Just on a basic biological level, we get stressed and irritable when we are over-heated. Given the fact that we would become very protective of our food supplies, and our private space - will the media pressure not become intense and unforgiving on politicians and industries that do not pull their weight? Indeed, we just hate to see injustice. The updates to the scientific research will then start to confirm the collective frustrations about the lack of action to match them. At the level at which it matters, the science and consequences of climate change are simple to grasp. Getting the truth out there really matters. Being informed really matters. The melting point of public perception might be extremely close, and once the Overton Window lines up with the science, there could easily be a huge momentum for change. “It’s been a long time coming…”, sang Sam Cooke, “but change is gonna come.”
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Nietzsche the prophet There is always something compellingly ridiculous about our situation with climate change. It is so absurd when it is all thought through, it forces you to continually reexamine the science and human nature. When such head-banging problems arise, you need a thinker who is not afraid to bang his head. Nietzsche was one of them. At the back end of the 19th century, Nietzsche understood himself to be a modern prophet. He was an atheist - an inverted, conflicted prophet. Like all prophets, he was sharply critical of his culture; he was eccentric, mostly unloved and rather a marginal figure in his lifetime99. Indeed, his extraordinary work, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (1885) is subtitled, “A book for Everyone and Nobody”. There is a profound joy in this book. However, to appreciate it the reader has to accompany Nietzsche on his difficult path through years of probing analysis of himself and of the traditions around him.
“Choose Your Own Adventure Book”TM A confession. The previous outbursts of optimism in the last section might simply borne out of a “sublime madness”100. Moreover, the prose has become rather loose and speculative. It is time to fasten the ideas down with some due diligence, lest some might think that philosophy is some sort of dreamy, creamy intellectual indulgence. Soberly, there are now two options:
Option 1: Some readers might want to rubberneck at the car crash that Nietzsche
caused when he was in the driving seat of Philosophy towards 1900. He tried to smash through the roadblocks that he thought existed between the truth and ethical reality. Having seen some of the shots across the bows of our culture that Nietzsche can make, the next section offers a chance to take a closer look at his thinking.
99 Although this should not be overstated. For example, Gustav Mahler uses Nietzsche’s ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’ (1885) for the ‘Midnight Song’ of his 3rd Symphony (the 4th movement)(1896). Both men were innovative supermen in their field. 100 A beautiful phrase from Reinhold Niebuhr that will be returned to at the end of this chapter.
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Here are some reasons why a more sustained level of attention with Nietzsche might be rewarding: Firstly, Nietzsche was utterly committed to the truth whatever the social or ethical implications. His work is especially poignant today because being resolute about the truth is no longer an issue for vexed philosophers. The truth about Planet Earth and our relationship to it, is now a matter of survival for civilisation as we know it. At the very moment when we need to have developed societies that have a developed approach to the truth, we are suffering from a rather acute problem of truth decay. Unfortunately, the current trend is a retreat towards tribalism and totems. This modern swing that emphasises polarisation rather than shades, simplification rather than detail. It is not a new phenomenon, and it has been reversed before. However, for the moment ‘Fake News’ presents a particular set of problems for modern western society and they relate directly and pressingly to climate change. Our incapacity to see the plain truths of our ecological debt are a product of some very basic human instincts. Yet they are also a product of some clearly mendacious efforts by a minority of people who want to protect their own power. Seeing why knowledge so persistently gets wrapped up in our emotional and political interests is something that Nietzsche was particularly good at. Secondly, Nietzsche wanted a cultural shake-up. In fact, he was fascinated by the fact that cultures can suddenly spin in different directions. Therefore, for those who might be daunted by the challenges facing our society, and when we might get so weary looking at how closed and entrenched this world set-up appears, Nietzsche points out to us the astonishing capacity of human society to spin around on its heels and create another world order and a fresh set of priorities. A few brief snatches of Nietzsche’s ideas have been pointed at already, but it is time to put the man on centre stage. As he said of himself, “I am not a man. I am dynamite!”101
101 “Ecce Homo”, from the chapter “Why I am Destiny.”
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Option 2: Some readers, perhaps dependent on your experience in philosophy, the
time you have, or simply your appetite for late Romantic, Continental Philosophy, might want to jump directly onto Chapter 3. Nietzsche’s writing is very challenging. He was both a poet and a vandal, his philosophy is full of paradoxes and contradictions. To keep the speed of the book moving at a reasonable pace, the more testing material on Nietzsche has been cordoned off into a separate area that follows now, in the second half of this chapter. He is a thinker who requires a bit of time and experience to handle. Nietzsche’s unrestrained deconstruction of beliefs and cultural illusions was so complete that our common sense of what is real and what is right has never quite been the same since. In doing so, Nietzsche brought the philosophical traditions of epistemology and ethics to a very dissonant climax. His work casts a long shadow. However, the rest of this book can be understood without a fuller awareness of Nietzsche. In the next chapter, a broad view of the ethics of climate change will be offered in dialogue with Hannah Arendt. And even though it is hard to write assertively about values after the attacks levelled by Nietzsche, it will be argued that it is not only possible, but important to do so. For those who want, it is possible to progress to Chapter 3 now.
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Nietzsche ‘Full’ “Ecce Homo!” - Nietzsche, The Man Ecce Homo! (Behold the man!) Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. A German punk philosopher. Although you don’t have to read his philosophical graffiti with a pin stuck through your nose, it probably helps. Nietzsche was born (in Röcken, 1844) into a pious Lutheran household. His father was a country pastor, but when Nietzsche was only 5 years old, he saw him die of some pathology of the brain. This earthquake in his life was followed by an aftershock just a few months later when his little brother Carl Ludwig also died (aged 2). A tsunami had been triggered that would express itself so powerfully as Nietzsche matured. As a teenager, Nietzsche had a crisis of faith and for the rest of his life he would hold a deeply iconoclastic attitude - not only towards the church, but towards a wide range of ethical traditions, cultural traditions, and even philosophy itself. In a letter he wrote to his sister on June 11th 1865, he explains his decision to renounce his faith, “Here the ways of men divide. If you wish to strive for peace of soul and happiness, then believe; if you wish to be a disciple of truth, then inquire.” Nietzsche wanted to excavate everything to get to the truth. His precocious talents and energy soon made him into an intellectual superstar – he was a professor of Classical Philology at 24 [sic]102, and he hung out with the biggest cultural figure of the time, Richard Wagner. However, Nietzsche quickly became claustrophobic in the stuffy bourgeois world of academia. And so, in the summer of 1881, accompanied by severe and repetitive headaches, he took himself into the solitude of the Swiss Alps to think, to walk and to write.
102 “Sic” to notify the ridiculously young age for a professorship. But for those who think that there was no good rock music produced after the 1970s, the word ‘sick’ can also mean ‘great’. The double meaning of the Latin and of street talk works well here.
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Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dullhunk/202872717
In the attractive village of SilsMaria, Nietzsche led a modest and quite regular life. He would write from early in the morning, and walk around the mountains in the afternoons. His harsh climbs were rewarded by remarkable views at the top – these solitary walks would become an excellent metaphor for Nietzsche’s writing.
His unconditional commitment to finding the truth can be seen in some of the opening lines of his autobiographical, “Ecce Homo” (1888). From his alpine guest house, he wrote: “In the midst of the agony of a headache which lasted three days, accompanied by violent nausea, I was possessed of a most singular dialectical clarity and very coldbloodedly I then thought out things, for which in my more healthy moments, I am not enough of a climber, not sufficiently subtle, not sufficiently cold enough.”103. Nietzsche had a visceral need to philosophise. Richard Wagner (1813-1883) There is much scholarly discussion over the cocktail of factors that led to his exit to the mountains. For example, Wagner let it be known very publicly (in a tangled story involving a doctor that they both shared) that Nietzsche’s headaches were most likely due to his excessive masturbation. For the record, both men were geniuses, but Wagner’s anti-Semitism surely made him the complete wanker.
More severe headaches Apart from the developing syphilis that Nietzsche might have picked up in a brothel in Bonn as a university student, there was something else that was causing his headaches
103 Students are not generally impressed if I quote this to them if they miss a homework deadline due to illness.
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to worsen. His search for truth was proving to be extremely problematic. Nietzsche was writing at the end of the 19th century, and his work was in direct conversation with the great minds of Philosophy that had gone before. From Plato, through Descartes to Kant and Hegel (and all of the others in between), these thinkers had already exposed just how difficult it was to get a reliable handle on reality through our perceptions or through reason. In parallel with this, they had also seriously undermined the moral beliefs that Western society had grown up with - from so many angles. As Nietzsche wrestled with these traditions of thought, he found that the truth was becoming highly elusive. The context for his book ‘Ecce Homo’ is that by the summer of 1888, Nietzsche’s writing had become increasingly strident and urgent – he could see ahead to a European culture that would be either decadent or nihilist. It was also a book that was written as the doors in his mind were coming loose. ‘Ecce Homo’ is an autobiographical work that is slightly unhinged. It is full of brooding irony; his chapter headings, “Why I Write Such Good Books”, “Why I Am So Wise”, and “Why I Am So Clever” are clear gestures to Socrates104. Both thinkers were starkly aware of their own limitations in trying to get to the truth and aware of their lack of wide social recognition. They both understood their rare ability to see the problems of truth so sharply - and both of them ‘went down’ because of their commitment to it. Under the heavy burden of his syphilis105 and his thoughts, Nietzsche’s sanity eventually broke. In Turin, on January 3rd 1889, Nietzsche had reportedly seen a horse being badly treated in the Piazza Carlo Alberto and threw himself on it - in a gesture of protection and empathy. He was having a major mental breakdown, and within a week his friends had taken him to a psychiatric clinic in Basel. Shortly before this incident, he had written these wonderfully pungent lines of prose towards the end of ‘Ecce Homo’:
104 ‘Ecce Homo’ most directly points in an inverted way at Jesus. 105 Huenemann has recently argued, to wide acceptance, that Nietzsche probably suffered from a ‘retro-orbital meningioma’, a slow-growing tumor on the brain surface behind his right eye. “The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche”, article, ‘Nietzsche’s Illness’ (2013).
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“I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with a memory of something tremendous, a crisis without equal on Earth, the most profound collision of conscience conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded and hallowed so far. Where you see ideals, I see what is human, alas, all too human”. Before his tragic descent into madness, Nietzsche had indeed achieved something tremendous. Simply considered as literary texts, his body of work is widely accepted as the best German written after Goethe. In terms of philosophy, he wrote his probing critiques with astonishing flair and vision. Now that the man has been introduced (and in Nietzsche’s case his life is so integral to his output that it cannot be overlooked) it is time to look more closely at his work. The best place to start with Nietzsche is his assault on the ideals of his time. The greatest ideal that Nietzsche attacked was the notion of God, and the centre of gravity in this assault is Nietzsche’s now famous aphorism, “God is dead”106. This is a phrase so full of meaning that it is celebrated today in so many ways: either as a slogan for a t-shirt or a tea towel, a tattoo or a cap, a mug or a fridge-magnet. There are two aspects to his re-evaluation of ideals: Firstly, epistemology ideals. Secondly, ethical ideals. And to re-emphasise the point of this bridge - they are linked. The next 10 pages will seemingly take us far away from the issue of climate change. However, patience with this technical and highly abstract material is the necessary, as it forms the basis for the climate change analysis which then follows from page 119.
“God is dead!” - Nietzsche, The Philosophy Nietzsche’s prodigious rise to the Chair of Classical Philology107 at Basel shows his deep love and commitment to language and its role in human culture. So it seems appropriate to approach the epistemology wrapped up in this famous aphorism by examining it with a tight linguistic focus first.
106 Stated for the first time in ‘The Gay Science’ (1882). “Die fröhliche Wissenschaft”, is also translated as “The Joyful Pursuit of Knowledge and Understanding”. 107 Definition - Philology: the branch of knowledge that deals with the structure, historical development and relationships of a language or languages.
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What could “God is dead” mean? At the simplest level, it meant that society was becoming increasingly secular. Churches were less populated, the arts and sciences had moved far from its influence, and independent moral systems, that had no dependency on God, were gaining popular ground. More significantly, the phrase snags our attention because, by definition, Gods cannot die. The classical meaning of the word ‘God’ is “a supreme being” – they are neither born, nor do they die. This obvious problem with his aphorism directs the reader to where the real action is taking place. What Nietzsche would actually like to say is this: “Truth is Dead”, because in the tempest of his philosophical enquiries, he has not found anything to anchor the Truth to. At this point, it would seem quite reasonable to object that Nietzsche is using very flowery language to communicate something very simple. Why does he have to indulge in metaphorical language? Would his writing not be much more understandable if he just spoke in clear, straightforward German? For example, is Nietzsche not just saying, “It is true that there is no truth”? Of course, it now becomes obvious that we have a more serious problem. In order to affirm the idea that there is no truth, we have to claim that this state of affairs (of no truth) is itself true. There is then, an unavoidable self-contradiction; it is blatantly selfrefuting. What is to be done? We can understand what Nietzsche is trying to say, but he is caught up in a system of language that does not permit him to say it. This is why the words, “God is dead” are put into the mouth of a madman. By saying, “God is Dead” he is performing the contradiction without getting trapped in the logical knots that go along with trying to communicate something so paradoxical. Metaphor is where we often end up when normal language breaks down. And who better to express all this than a madman?
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Butterflies Perhaps it is appropriate to use an alpine metaphor to help understand Nietzsche’s point: As a young girl, my daughter Madeline loved to catch butterflies on our mountain walks. She would trap them in her hands, proudly walk back to us, and then slowly open her fingers to show the latest specimen. The problem was that she would often open her hands to reveal rather mangled butterflies, and so we had to ask her to stop – for the love of nature. Her eagerness to connect with the wildlife was undimmed, and after some nagging, we reached a deal. She could run with butterflies. I have not yet explained to Madeline the Nietzschean significance of her inability to catch something with human hands without destroying it. Nor have I tried to explain how her impulsive joy, running alongside those beautifully fragile creatures108, mirrors Nietzsche’s eventual affirmation of all the contradictions and paradoxes of life, truth and reality. Some things are tricky to say to your daughter.
The problems with language Before he had compressed his thoughts into the phrase “God is dead”, Nietzsche had already explained his idea more fully: “What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms -- in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical,
108 The grubby origins and metamorphosis of these spectacular creatures could also work as a reference to how Nietzsche understood that we acquire the truth. For a time, Nietzsche considered pursuing his interest in horticulture – most plants have rather ugly roots, but the most incredible blossom. Moreover, Nietzsche wrote about different levels of responding to reality using the metaphor of metamorphosis – from the enslaved understanding of a camel, through to a courageous lion, and finally the transformation into a child – a spontaneous, joyful, self-spinning wheel.
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and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors - in moral terms, the obligation to lie according to fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all...”
On Truth and Lies in a Non-moral Sense (written, 1873)109 Even in this relatively early text in Nietzsche’s career, he has the role of language as a central target110. He was one of the greatest choreographers of words – and one of the key functions of his work is to display how humanoid and limited any system of language is. In doing so he shows how haplessly constricted we are in our attempts to capture the fullness of reality with words. If we were to communicate in smoke signals, it would be obvious that this method of exchange is extremely approximate to the relevant situation. By contrast, words and the grammar that invisibly underpins their use, are a much more particular and sophisticated set of signals. However, although words can be used in a wonderfully pointed way, they are also simply approximations, and just a human method of exchange. We naturally tend to think of language as something quite transparent. It is easy to forget how vocabulary and grammar only offer up extremely thin pathways of thinking. And as we continually tread down the same routes, mapped out by the language that we use, it is easy to be unaware of all the areas of reality that our language does not permit us to go. Getting to the bottom of Nietzsche’s view of language really enables a reader to understand what is going on in his work – especially the playfulness of his prose. More specifically, these insights into language expose the deeper levels of his ‘death of God’.
109 ‘On truth and lie in an extra-moral sense,’ The Viking Portable Nietzsche, p.46-7, Walter Kaufmann transl. 110 This text also alludes to his ethical concerns about how power functions - to be examined in the following section.
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If we cannot construct a reliable system for talking about things that are real, what hope is there of making any plausible steps towards some kind of transcendent reality like God?111
Words are primary Again, perhaps some analogies can help. In the earliest years of our first child’s life (Jules), we banned the word ‘bored’ in the house. This was not part of some mad set of linguistic prohibitions, there was not a laminated list pinned to the front door with a huge rusty nail. It was just that one word. Indeed, Jules had access to a very wide range of adjectives, verbs, pronouns, prepositions and conjunctions. Words such as ‘drab’, ‘annoying’, ‘frustrating’, ‘tiring’, etc were all freely available to his spongey toddler brain. However, the word ‘bored’, or ‘boring’, was out. (Just for the record, there are probably some weirder idealistic plans for first-born children that have been attempted by other over-anxious parents.) In justification, the idea was that the word ‘bored’ had embedded within it a kind of ‘self-entitlement’, a sort of ‘I-deserve-to-be-entertained-ness’. It is a word that takes a range of emotions and puts the ego in the centre of it. Waiting for a long delayed train at a station is all the more painful as an experience if it is an event that is experienced with the ego at the hub of it112. Of course, there was a major flaw in the plan: a few weeks after starting school, the word passed through his eardrum and into his dictionary – along with the connotations that went with it. However, in defence of this little policy, the point that is relevant to Nietzsche is that words are not some casual ‘sticky labels’ that we put onto reality – conversely, words make reality. Giving a word to a child provides access to a whole web of meanings and inferences about the world, and we live through these words. Words are primary, not secondary to human life.
111 There are many very stimulating answers to this question that have pre-occupied theologians for centuries. For those readers interested in the Arts, then Schopenhauer, who had such a formative influence on Nietzsche, also offers the atheist different exits from these linguistic problems. 112 In fact, ‘Hannover Hauptbahnhof’, Summer 2004. A 2-hour delay with a 3-year old proved to be quite a tricky test of the policy.
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No singular culture could claim that their language had a ‘better’ vantage point or more complete access to reality. All truth claims are made from within one ‘language game’, from within one set of cultural assumptions that have shaped the way that language has evolved113. Nietzsche punctured many of Philosophy’s epistemological ambitions by noting how any one language is just one mobile army of metaphors.
Woof! To follow this point up on a more banal auditory level, the primacy of words to reality can be observed as children learn a foreign language. A French textbook will have a dog barking with the word, «Ouaf» - something incredulous to a native English speaker. There are a huge range of dog barks around the world, from a Danish “vov” to an Icelandic “voff ”, or a Turkish “hev” or “hav”. In a naïve way, each nation provides its people with a word for a dog bark that determines the experience of the noise114. English dogs are actually heard to go “woof ” (“W-O-O-F”) in England. The word crops the sound. If we move away from individual words and the auditory borders they create and move back again to the view the whole operation of any language system like this, Frederic Jameson would call it, “The Prison House of Language” (1975)115.
113 After Nietzsche, the giant of Philosophy in the twentieth century was Ludwig Wittgenstein who advanced the Philosophy of Language to another level – in his ‘Philosophical Investigations’ (1953) Wittgenstein developed his own idea of “language games”. 114 Typing ‘chicken piou’ into YouTube provides many more examples of these different animal noises. 115 For anyone interested in reading further in this direction that Nietzsche sets up, then Jameson’s book is a brilliant start. He summarises and examines Russian Formalists, and French Structuralists, direct descendants of Nietzsche’s work in linguistics.
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Humans and Mosquitoes, Horses and Cattle Nietzsche opens up “On Truth and Lies in a Non-moral Sense” with typically playful prose. These two paragraphs are a wonderfully compact and biting summary of his epistemology: “In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of “world history”—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die. One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission that would lead beyond human life. It is human, rather, and only its owner and producer gives it such importance, as if the world pivoted around it. But if we could communicate with the mosquito, then we would learn that he floats through the air with the same self-importance, feeling within itself the flying centre of the world. There is nothing in nature so despicable or insignificant that it cannot immediately be blown up like a bag by a slight breath of this power of knowledge; and just as every porter wants an admirer, the proudest human being, the philosopher, thinks that he sees the eyes of the universe telescopically focused from all sides on his actions and thoughts”.
The Opening, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense”. To return to where we started with the aphorism “God is dead”, those three words hopefully now make fuller sense. Especially when Nietzsche’s thoughts are put alongside the famous lines of the ancient Greek thinker Xenophanes, who does not talk about mosquitoes, but horses and cattle: “But had the oxen or the lions hands, Or could with hands depict a work like men, Were beasts to draw the semblance of the gods, The horses would them like to horses sketch, To oxen, oxen, and their bodies make Of such a shape as to themselves belongs.”
Clement of Alexandria quoting Xenophanes ‘Clement, Miscellanies V.xiv.109.1-3’ - 93 -
“Alas, all too human” Because all languages have a regular and established mode of operating, this rulebased network of thinking encourages the users (people who talk) to think that the consistency of this system is actually matched by some kind of logic and purpose in the reality that they are talking about. As noted previously, Nietzsche was a great student of Greek culture, and he particularly admired the way in which the Greeks achieved a balance in their art between order (symbolised by Apollo) and chaos (symbolised by Dionysus). Too much symmetry and order would leave the art sterile, while too much chaos and it would be too raw and incoherent. The mere operation of language imposes an order on reality that Nietzsche thinks can so quickly lead to its immodest and misleading use. As he remarked, “I am afraid we are not rid of God, because we still have faith in grammar.” In this little introduction to such a mountainous thinker, there is no time to explore all the other paths to the main viewpoints of Nietzsche’s epistemology. However, by approaching his main ideas via his understanding of language it exposes some of the important layers behind what Nietzsche meant when the madman declared the ‘death of God’. This linguistic approach also sounds out some of the resonances that Nietzsche wants to affect when we wrote, “Where you see ideals, I see what is human, alas, all too human”.
Back to the beginning In fact, we can now return to where we started with Feuerbach and re-read his summary of what is going on when we think about God. Now, instead of reading these lines like Feuerbach intended them to be read, as a comment on our struggle to find a big enough home for our deepest hopes and fears about life, these lines can be read as if it was Nietzsche explaining the linguistic level of his notion of the death of God: “Consciousness of God is self-consciousness, knowledge of God is self-knowledge. By his God you can know the man, and by the man, his God; the two are identical.”
(The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach) The key words in this account of Epistemology, such as ’reductivism’ and ‘deconstruction’,
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infer a rather negative end game for Philosophy. In one sense, it is. Nietzsche made knowledge and language fold in on themselves. Readers of Kafka will be well aware of the claustrophobic atmosphere that Nietzsche’s philosophy could create. Indeed, Nietzsche himself was wrestling with the implications of the death of God. Here now is the fuller quote that frames one of his famous assertions of the aphorism: “Where has God gone?” he cried. “I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I. We are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Where is it moving to now? Where are we moving to now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not more and more night coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whosoever shall be born after us - for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto.”
The Gay Science, Section 125. (1882)
So in the end, is it a Yes or a No? The background to the publication of this work is that Nietzsche had been spending a lot of time in a culturally (at least) intense threesome with Paul Rée, a writer and thinker, Lou Salomé, a hugely talented author, and Nietzsche. Snatching a moment alone on May 13th 1882, Nietzsche had proposed marriage for a second time to Lou Salomé. She rejected him for a second time. He was infatuated.
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By October, sensing that things could only get worse, both Lou Salomé and Paul Rée headed off without Nietzsche and with no plans for them to meet up again. Nietzsche himself had a big decision to make now. In many ways his love life was a mirror of his philosophising. He found both of them deeply problematic, porfoundly moving, and elusively attractive. Indeed, Nietzsche often portrayed the truth as feminine - something for which he has rightly been excoriated for by feminist thinkers. It would have been quite predictable if he were to have reached some negative conclusions about the human condition after finding himself in such a philosophical and romantic cul-de-sac. Nietzsche returns to his ‘cave’ in the mountains and after a period of further deep reflections he emerges with his conclusion. Instead of rejecting existence and all of its messy contradictions he embraces it. Fully.
A “Yes” to Existence Nietzsche’s next major work is the emphatically affirmative, ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ (1883). A book that would inspire Richard Strauss to write a titanic musical tribute to Nietzsche with a tone poem of the same title. Anyone wishing to find a short-cut to understand the rather wild but deep and ecstatic text of Nietzsche’s book can type its title into YouTube and listen for a couple of minutes with the volume turned right up116. Nietzsche embraces his pain, his fragmentary understanding. He affirms the contradictions and the paradoxes. His “Yes” to life is a final, undimmed emotional and intellectual response to the fullness of it all. ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ work has a very loose sense of narrative and order –something that emphasises, at a structural level, the main points Nietzsche is communicating.
116 The ‘BBC Prom Youth Orchestra’ performance of the opening that is uploaded on YouTube is worth a listen.
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Gustav Mahler, a symphonic composer shared many of the struggles and ambitions that Nietzsche did. In fact, he used some of Nietzsche’s text in the “The Midnight Song” of Symphony N°3 (mov. 4). Like Nietzsche, he attempted to capture the whole universe in his work - including all of its paradoxes, contradictions and irony. Mahler (1860-1911) grew up in Iglau (now Jihlava, CZ) above a pub on the main town square, run by his irascible dad. His music is frequently in conversation with his earliest childhood memories in that place. From the bustle of the street songs, folk melodies and dance tunes that would have been heard through his bedroom window, to the tranquillity of nature on the edge of town. Mahler’s work has intensely romantic moments that can arise out of a cacophony of noise, or dreamy melodies that can suddenly be undermined by a dark shift in the bass. A well-constructed theme can abruptly be interrupted by a marching band stomping across the score. In the 3rd movement of his Symphony N°1 (1889) he puts a child’s lullaby (Frère Jacques) into a minor key, making it into a funeral dirge played by the double basses. Mahler once explained that opening moments of Symphony N°1 came from the deep peace he had felt when sitting in the forest as a young boy. He had run away from home after witnessing another incident of domestic violence. The listener is presented with the violins just playing a high-pitched abstract noise, evoking the wind in the treetops. The sound is soon punctuated by the sound of cuckoo (on the clarinet), but he resists the temptation to provide any tonal melody for over 30 seconds. An outrageous gesture in classical music history. It was also a sign of his youthful bravery to confront the fullness of the world before trying to make sense of it. Mahler’s music is a celebration of chaos and order. Nature and mankind - from womb to tomb - and everything in between. In 1897, Mahler comments, “I am hitting my head against the walls, but the walls are giving way”. Later adding, “A symphony must be like the world, it must embrace everything” (Mahler to Sibelius in 1907). Mahler’s ambition to express all of reality led him to massively increase the size of the orchestra - his Symphony N°8 is a monumental cathedral of sound. He stretched the rules of harmony and structure to their breaking points. Mahler wrote his final completed masterpiece, the 9th Symphony (1909), under the strain of his intense love of existence and an awareness of its limits. In the last movement, he finally lets go. As the score slides away from its base, as the harmonic tension gets more knotted, and the angles of sound more obtuse, instead of making the music come back home with a traditional finish, Mahler allows it all to float off. Huge orbs of sound are left hanging. As Leonard Bernstein commented, “It is terrifying, and paralyzing, as the strands of sound disintegrate ... in ceasing, we lose it all. But in letting go, we have gained everything”.
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“I tell you: one must still have chaos within oneself, to give birth to a dancing star”. “I will make company with creators, with harvesters, with rejoicers; I will show them the rainbow and the stairway to the Superman”. “I have learned to walk: since then I have run. I have learned to fly: since then I do not have to be pushed in order to move. Now I am nimble, now I fly, now I see myself under myself, now a god dances within me.”117 There is no way to justify this optimism of Nietzsche, because all things have been unanchored. Justifications need accepted standards and rules… Nietzsche simply affirms the raw joy of existence. Because nothing is sacred, everything is.
A perfectly tragic ending After the incident with the horse in Turin in 1888, Nietzsche spent over 10 years in an asylum. At times, he was found dancing naked around his room, claiming he was the Buddha, Napoleon or other great people from the past. The rather sad images that remain of him from this period are probably the result of over-determination. Such mental conditions have complex causes; however, the main determinants of his full breakdown seem to have been the lack of antibiotics for his syphilis (or treatment for his tumour) and some have speculated that it was simply the sheer weight of his thoughts. Whatever the cause, in the end Nietzsche died with perfect tragic timing in the year 1900. 1900 would become a clear fault line for so many cultural and social trends.
117 On a very different note, and in honour of those on the backrow of the classroom, Nietzsche also wrote, “Blessed are the sleepy ones: for they shall soon nod off.”
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Nietzsche tackles Climate Change Epistemology is the most heavily abstract aspect of philosophy, but it is the basis for all the other fields of enquiry. Epistemology is concerned with what could be qualified as the truth, and as such it underpins the validity of all the other branches of the subject. Philosophy is not pub-talk, it is a serious and sustained attempt to establish a proper understanding of the world and the human condition. Sometimes Philosophy requires a long runway to achieve its take-off. This is often true if the starting point for engaging with a thinker is in the high altitudes of Epistemology. All of this mountain walking with Nietzsche might seem like a far distance away from the pressing concerns of climate change. Indeed, this is why this extra material to get from Epistemology to Ethics was pushed to the end of the chapter, into a more discreet space. However, it is now time to draw some conclusions that will, in turn, lead us back to his ethics and to a fuller understanding of the psychology of climate change. These conclusions are broadly sequential:
1. The importance of language The upside to reflecting more deeply about language is that it demonstrates how we might improve our thinking. People with more than one language in their head have a much larger surface area through which they can sense reality, especially if they use languages from very diverse roots. European languages do not have the notion of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ that is so central to the structure and use of Japanese language. There is no comfortable French equivalent for the English word, “awkward”, and in reverse, the French word, “patrimoine” is bigger than just the word English ‘heritage’. The continual tension in the brain of a translator or bilingual speaker shows how any one language can only open up certain limited pathways and systems of thought.
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An important benefit of studying Philosophy is the extension of language and concepts that it brings. The A-Z guide that accompanies this book is rather like the old British A-Z road maps of cities. The words are selected as an invitation to roll out the ‘surface area’ of the mind, and to provide better access to parts of our inner self, or outer world that would otherwise be quite difficult to navigate around. A fuller range of words, and a fuller appreciation of their meanings is empowering. Ask any 3-month-old baby who has just spent an hour screaming that he has a terrible itch on his back to parents who think that he is hungry, tired, or maybe getting an early tooth. Some of the suffering baby’s problem is the lack of recognition by the parents to understand the problem. But some of the frustrations are within the small child himself, who simply has not yet developed the sharpness of mind to clearly identify the problem to himself. There are no clearly formulated cartoon speech bubbles going on inside his head that the muscles in his mouth are struggling to perform - there is just a very unsatisfactory fog. In child development, the articulation of the bodily joints improves alongside the articulation of mind. The art of pointing at an object with a finger, develops in parallel with the art of pointing at a feeling or a thought with a word.
The talking cure The thinker who most famously examined the development of child psychology was Sigmund Freud. In “Studies in Hysteria” (1895), authored with Josef Breuer, the importance of the words to help bring subconscious frustrations and conflicts to the surface of the mind is illustrated with the case of ‘Anna O’. Her real name was Bertha Pappenheim, and although the success of her treatment for hysteria remains highly disputed, it established the hugely influential notion of the ‘talking cure’. The core idea that emerged from her case is that talking about something makes it better. Putting words on things makes visible those - 100 -
hidden phantom feelings that might otherwise spook us and control us. Once these subconscious parts of our mind are identified, they can be more easily managed. Indeed, for Freud, as it was for Nietzsche, the victory of words over the chaotic underworld of our subconscious self is not a pyrrhic118 one. Our hidden energies and drives need to be harnessed with some sort of order. For both thinkers, a life without this reasonable aesthetic cover over the strong impulses of the psyche, even if it is just an ‘Apollonian’ fiction, is too unstable and anarchic to be healthy.
The Mirror Recognition Test (MSR) or ‘Rouge’ Test, was developed by the psychologist Gordon Gallup Jr in the 1970s. If a red dot is placed unknowingly onto the forehead of a child, when they see an image of themselves in
Words matter.
a mirror two different reactions are possible, depending on the age of the child. Up to around 18 months,
Social media?
the child will look at the stranger in
However, one regrettable social trend is that we seem to be using fewer words. We seem to talk less - both with other people and with ourselves. Mobile technology can either distract us in those short moments of boredom that life throws up, or it distracts us from engaging with others. Moreover, this technology has blunted our methods of communication. In the broadest terms, we have moved from a culture of hand written letters to emails, and then from the text down to the emoji. We have gone from the inky detail of a broadsheet newspaper, down to a tweet. This is a sketch, but the trends in communication are clear – we have moved towards briefer, faster, simpler forms of expression.
the mirror and either be curious or anxious about them. After around 18 months, the child see themselves in the mirror, and be surprised to see the red dot on their own head - often reaching up to touch or wipe it. Some
other
primates
such
as
Bonobos, and even the Eurasian Magpie have passed this ‘Mirror Test’. However, in the case of homo sapiens this basic notion of the self develops much further into an extremely complex interior world. It is the explicit privilege of a parent or a teacher to support children as they grow and negotiate their place in the world. It is the role of a healthy society to keep that conversation going.
118 King Pyrrhic of Epirus beat the Romans in the Pyrrhic War of 280-275BC. However, the horrendous losses that he suffered to gain the victory made the win tantamount to a defeat.
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The sixth ‘Good Childhood Reports’ published by the Children’s Society in August 2018 reported that that 1 in 4 girls aged 14 had self-harmed in the last year. There is a vast web of social factors behind the graph below that would require extensive study to put into a proper context. However, the graph is an interesting dot of evidence, and perhaps it provides a good starting point for an informative discussion about the overall level of psychological fitness in our society? How significant are the trends towards the inner world of the self(ie)? Are we living in a society that is dominated by misnomers? - Social media? Communication Technology? Self-harm by low and high well-being and mental health measures
70%
Had self-harmed in the past year
60%
61.3%
50% 47.4% 40%
30%
31.9%
20%
10%
13.9%
11.6%
9.8%
0% High life satisfaction
Low life satisfaction
Low depressive High depressive symptoms symptoms
Low emotional High emotional and behavioural and behavioural difficulties difficulties
Source: Millennium Cohort Study, Wave 6, 2015 (when children were aged 14)
If we are indeed pruning our thoughts with ourselves and others, it could lead to a situation where our deepest drives and emotions are less securely tied down. Our need for security, identity and purpose require definition and placing. Having our big emotional cargo unsecured in the large ‘hull’ of our psyche, is a dangerous situation for anybody who enters into troubled waters. The same is true of a society that has no developed networks of debate to cover the major questions of the day. Superficial public discussion can leave potent concerns to slide about very hazardously below the deck.
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Having a social debate that is blunt and inarticulate is advantageous for those on the far right who are at the forefront of creating unrest about complex social issues. Instability, confusion and frustration suits their agendas because it heightens the appeal of their simplistic solutions. Their slogans are targeted at our basic emotions. In contrast, the diffuse debates that actually try to handle the complex realities of society and science often just look rather cerebral – even if they are driven by deep concerns. Philosophy offers an invitation to push-back on the trend towards slogans and clichÊs - for the health of our own brains and for the health of our culture. Engaging in Philosophy, fighting with the words, concepts and arguments, develops the agility of our thoughts so that we can get a firmer grip on the world and ourselves. This is not to say that democracy needs everyone to talk as if they were drugged up on Nietzschean metaphors, or informed about the depths of Quantum Science. Neither is it true that some of the truths of climate change are simple and obvious. However, the overall social trend towards a public space that values speed and comfort in its communication does not help us to address testing problems like climate change in a meaningful way together.
Thinking Allowed Crucially, the importance of talking about climate change is not just to service our individual or collective psychological health. Talking about the major points of climate change is important simply because it gets the democratic process moving. At the moment, there is no debate about climate change which is centred on reality. There is no place in our media or our democracy at the moment where we can think through the main points of what is going on because the Overton window is so misplaced. We talk about Trump and Al Gore, we talk about electric cars and solar panels for our roof, extreme weather events provoke a few comments; however, we do not deal with the truth about where our emissions are now, and what we are heading into,
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when. The catastrophic costs of unmitigated climate change are little known. And a frank discussion about the deep cuts in our emissions that are immediately required, is something that is simply considered to be too ‘negative’ or ‘radical’. Nietzsche called for an unfettered discussion about values, fearing that nihilism would dominate European thinking once people were awake to God’s death. The human tendency to become more protectionist and isolationist under stress (both as individuals and as nations), it is hugely important that we have the unfettered discussion about climate action now, before we find it harder to use our capacities for cooperative thinking. Everyone needs to start talking. The taboo on profound climate action has to be broken. We have to demythologise climate change. Even if the science and the consequences are very uncomfortable, it makes no sense at all to ignore it. Every country has to normalise a debate about the real problems and the real solutions. Not just in the media. Without being over-earnest or over-cynical it needs to be talked about in pubs, cafés and restaurants. Schools cannot afford to be timid about the truth in geography, economics, or science lessons, in school projects, or in Assemblies. (Can we really call any child fully educated if they do not know this?) Children should not be timid about asking their parents difficult questions about their actions and their views, and parents need to affirm both the fears and the hopes of their children. We have to get far beyond clichéd jokes about putting things into the recycling bins. Even if we do not normally vote, or write to our MPs, we could sacrifice 30 minutes of one singular weekend and write. Our MPs should be asked if they know about the full reality of where we are with climate change. They should also explain what actions they are taking towards to publically acknowledging the problem, and what actions they are pursuing towards the policy solutions. Talking and acting with frankness about climate change might seem a bit prickly at the beginning. Any affront to the social order is always thorny when it starts, it was true for the Civil Rights Movement, it was true for the Gender and Sexuality movements. But it can suddenly just become plain common sense. It is true that western democracies have become rather complacent and withdrawn. It is also true that these are strange times, when the norms of what counts as truth and what is publically acceptable have lost their shape. However, there is not much use in trying to read the political landscape; the data of climate change simply demands that
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we insist on the right to know what is happening - and all the rest that follows from that. Given that all of this democratic movement requires time, it is highly likely that western parliamentary democracies will be too slow to get climate change under control without being put into the right place by their justice systems. Indeed, the courts are an essential part of any democratic state, and they are answerable to evidence, reason, clarity and principles of justice. If parliamentary processes fail us, the democratic system should be wide enough to deal with it. The final chapter on Plato will provide this position’s details. Either way, such a process will require at least some public understanding of what is going on. Also, if we overstep our climate change targets by any distance, then our societies are going to need a robust level of public debate to handle the fallout from the major social problems it will cause119.
2. The importance of irony, metaphor and paradox. Nietzsche’s books are quite challenging because of the playfulness of his prose, this is especially true of ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’. Some of the reasons for his fruity writing style have been opened up, – at the end of the day (or perhaps more precisely, “at the end of the 19th century”), it was clear that standard modes of communication were not adequate to capture the complexity or the depth of what was being understood. One of the most striking features of his work is the extensive use of metaphor and irony. Both of these literary features create a large gap between the words and their meaning. Metaphor and irony make the space between the object (the text) and the subject (the reader) very explicit. They create some room for creative thinking. Although this rather arty observation of his work might not appear to have much political significance, it actually does. Totalitarian regimes aim to constrict freedom at every level of society. Most obviously through control of the press and a constriction of free speech, or just by use of a rifle. However, these regimes also seek to control meaning as deeply as possible. One of the
119 Failing that, the Extinction Rebellion and other movements from around the world could set in and speed up the process through non-violent civil disobedience.
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most effective ways of doing this is to promote Literalism, where everything is taken at face value. Once people are not looking to interpret, decode or analyse themselves or their culture, then it becomes much easier to dictate your ideas to them. Take Hitler for example. In his radio broadcast as Führer to the German people in 1937, he explained the reasoning behind the “Degenerate Art” exhibition in Munich, “works of art which cannot be understood in themselves but need some pretentious instruction book to justify their existence will never again find their way to the German people.” Indeed, his own rejected artwork does not brim with irony or metaphor – as this painting named simply, “Farmstead” (1914) demonstrates. Literalism can be observed in the regimes of the Taliban and ISIS – where the Qur’an and the Hadith are taken at face value and dictated into law with no latitude for interpretation. Their atrocious application of Sharia Law is the latest dark example of what happens when humans lose the capacity to take a critical distance from themselves, and force others to do the same. However, closed totalitarian societies are not always aggressive and bellicose. In the following chapter on Hannah Arendt, it will be argued that our consumer society has dulled our capacity for reflection, decoding and analysis - simply by encouraging us to be placidly thoughtless. A consumerist society is dedicated to making things comfortable – which has the general effect of making things that are uncomfortable seem deficient or wrong. It is not a coincidence that both Plato and Zarathustra come out of caves after a struggle, and that a central theme in their message is that the truth is uncomfortable to deal with. Both Plato and Nietzsche use metaphor and irony extensively to poke at the status quo. Muffling uncomfortable questions can be done with a tightly bound gag, but it can also be done with a beautifully soft feather pillow. Nietzsche’s artful prose is an important reminder about how important it is to have the space and the tools to ask the big questions. Metaphor and irony are the first clues that a society is alive to itself. Whether we are presented with totalitarian truth claims, fake news, or any other attempt to control our understanding of reality – being able to adopt a critical distance is an essential feature of democracy. Moreover, Nietzsche
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used his rich range of language and literary devices to deconstruct the main narrative lines of his culture. We do not live in a predominantly Protestant world anymore, but the ability to take a step back and to question the assumptions of any culture remain as important as ever. In fact, getting entrenched into a way of thinking that has dangerous consequences is more important than ever because humans have developed the technological capacity to inflict monumental damage on themselves. Matthew d’Ancona writes in defence of genuine and robust journalism in his article in the Guardian: “To underline the importance of a literate and informed level of journalism, that can deal with nuance, paradox, absurdity, complexity - I wish this approach to politics were not increasingly rare. But it is. In an age of post-truth populists, fundamentalist fervour, digital echo chambers and history-hugging ideology, there has never been a greater need for irony and the shared understanding and intelligence that it fosters. Its decline is disastrously timed. It is, one might say, ironic”120. Most of the conversations and debates that we need to have about climate change lie beyond the usual narrative lines of our culture. It would indeed be quite ironic that just at the moment when we have a system of global communication to tackle a deep global problem, we lose the ability to think with any real depth.
3. The importance of ‘Sublime Madness’ In fact, it is not just the form and structure of our language that needs a large range. We also need the ability to think beyond what seems possible. The potent reality of climate change could turn into something absurdly catastrophic for humanity. And whilst we are now into the jaws of the problem, the public debate is still a far distance away from where it needs to be. We are distracted by Trump and tokenism. Climate change (the real scientifically informed version that recognises the range and depth of the problem) cannot really be discussed without an ability to bend the rules of our thinking. The size of the challenge does not fit within our
120 “Jeremy Corbyn is to irony what Donald Trump is to feminism”, The Guardian, August 2018.
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comfortable, everyday conversations. It probably cannot be solved from within the normal institutions like the UNFCCC. It cannot be solved within the current, limited understanding of economic growth. We have to be willing to think and talk well beyond the usual boundaries of the normal debate. Perhaps we need to scrap the circus of the COP meetings and just put the EU with the other top 5 major global emitting nations into a room and lock the door until a concrete set of accountable proposals that actually deals squarely with the emissions gap is set out. We also have to pursue with genuine urgency what we mean by ‘Economic Growth’. Or perhaps we need to accept that climate change is simply too big a problem, too embedded in our existing life, for humanity to deal with it, and we should start making plans for a societal collapse to minimise the damage? Professor Jem Bendell’s paper, “Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy” is a uniquely bold look at this most terrible final question. “I am aware that some people consider statements from academics that we now face inevitable near-term social collapse to be irresponsible due to the potential impact that may have on the motivation or mental health of people reading such statements. My research and engagement in dialogue on this topic, some of which I will outline in this paper, leads me to conclude the exact opposite. It is a responsible act to communicate this analysis now and invite people to support each other, myself included, in exploring the implications, including the psychological and spiritual implications”121. These ideas and proposals cannot be discussed here, but it is critical that such things are discussed. The starting point of philosophy is not limited to what seems reasonable or solvable. We have to be willing to ask the seemingly unanswerable questions and look unflinchingly at huge difficulties. We need the capacity to think through contradictions, and the audacity to think far outside of our comfort zone. Not just to think in the abstract, outside of our comfort zones, but to think with our guts. Nietzsche revelled in paradox and he did not write with the burden of resolving all of the problems that he posed. Sometimes the truth is just very uncomfortable, sometimes we just have to throw ourselves into the impossible.
121 Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy, IFLAS Occasional Paper 2, ww.iflas.info, July 27th 2018.
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Looking at the scientific curves that summarise our emissions and their effect, makes it very hard to imagine how or why they should suddenly start to dip towards safety. Whilst it is true that slamming the brakes on our emissions is the only rational thing to do, it takes a big gulp of optimism to imagine how such radical change might take place. Yet at the same time, once a social tipping point is reached and consensus about climate action is established, it is hard to imagine how it could be stopped. Once political and market forces turn in a certain direction, it would have such a powerful momentum of common sense. But getting to that point from here can seem like a long way away. The prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges writes powerfully about the importance of this imagination: “To endure what lies ahead we will have to harness the human imagination. It was the human imagination that permitted African-Americans during slavery and the Jim Crow era to transcend their physical condition. It was the human imagination that sustained Sitting Bull and Black Elk as their land was seized and their cultures were broken. And it was the human imagination that allowed the survivors in the Nazi death camps to retain the power of the sacred. It is the imagination that makes possible transcendence. Chants, work songs, spirituals, the blues, poetry, dance and art converged under slavery to nourish and sustain this imagination. These were the forces that, as Ralph Ellison wrote, “we had in place of freedom.” The oppressed would be the first — for they know their fate — to admit that on a rational level such a notion is absurd, but they also know that it is only through the imagination that they survive. Jewish inmates in Auschwitz reportedly put God on trial for the Holocaust and then condemned God to death. A rabbi stood after the verdict to lead the evening prayers”122. References to the Holocaust only look overstated if the full dangers of climate change are not held clearly in view. Indeed, this is one of the major problems that climate change presents because the threat is so beyond our common senses and the regimes that have to change their systems are bureaucratic not military, they are productive not destructive. This is part of the absurdity of it all.
122 Chris Hedges, “A Time for ‘Sublime Madness’”, Truth Dig, Jan 21st 2013.
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It is easy to be dismissive of ideals, as if they are only really for utopias123 . This non-existent place has now come to also imply a ‘good place’ from the Greek (εὖ) (meaning good, or well)). It is easy to think that ideals only for the young, the mystics, or the naïve. However, this is not the case. The ideals of climate justice have to be held onto against the cynical responses of those who pretend that they are the pragmatists. The ugly truth is that those who are fighting for climate justice are the pragmatists, and those who pretend to themselves that solutions will arise quite naturally are fantasists who committed to the status quo. Ideals today are not luxuries, quite the opposite, they are the hard truths that only those who are prepared to look at full reality can see are necessary. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, captures the importance and the power of ideals with real craft. His book, “Moral Man and Immoral Society: a Study in Ethics and Politics” was written in Germany in 1932, in the face of the most appalling existential threats of the Nazi regime. His defence of seemingly absurd ideals in the face of implausibly large threats is strikingly relevant today – even if the ‘malignant power’ looks very different. He writes: “Yet there is beauty in our tragedy. We are, at least, rid of some of our illusions. We can no longer buy the highest satisfactions of the individual life at the expense of social injustice. We cannot build our individual ladders to heaven and leave the total human enterprise unredeemed of its excesses and corruptions. In the task of that redemption the most effective agents will be men who have substituted some new illusions for the abandoned ones. The most important of these illusions is that the collective life of mankind can achieve perfect justice. It is a very valuable illusion for the moment; for justice cannot be approximated if the hope of its perfect realization does not generate a sublime madness in the soul. Nothing but such madness will do battle with malignant power and “spiritual wickedness in high places.” The illusion is dangerous because it encourages terrible fanaticisms. It must therefore be brought under the control of reason. One can only hope that reason will not destroy it before its work is done”.
123 Places which literally don’t exist - Greek - A word coined by Thomas More for his book, ‘Utopia’ (1516) - from the Greek οὐ (“not”) and τόπος (place)
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4. The importance of not retreating into the cave Literal cultures only afford their people a very limited mental and emotional bandwidth. There is no question that a real engagement with climate change requires people to adopt an open and bold outlook on reality. It demands that we imagine an utterly different world-order. It is literally (ironically) like trying to imagine life on another planet. Either unmitigated climate change will wreak havoc with human civilisation, or we will manage to reconfigure our economies away from fossil fuels in a revolutionary way. Either we will have new maps, and an almost continual news feed of climate related disasters, or we will be celebrating human foresight and ingenuity to overcome technical and political challenges from within an economy that has turned a deep green. Trying to imagine both of these worlds presents a serious challenge to the imagination. Given the extent of the existential threat posed by climate change, there is a strong temptation to flee rather than to fight. Yet, one of the skills that Philosophy bolsters is the courage to confront different worlds and systems of thinking that are unfamiliar. Nietzsche serves as a remarkable role model - his unflinching examination of truth and culture was not just about his brainpower, but his guts too. He was someone who was able to take a distance from common sense and tried to think beyond traditional frameworks of thought - as his book titles suggest, such as “Beyond Good and Evil” and “The Twilight of the Idols”. He was capable of seeing to the end game of all the Epistemology that had been written before him, and he thought through the ethical implications of it all with real tenacity. By contrast, the literalism observed in the previous section is often the result of an emotional retreat from a threatening problem. We prefer certainty over ambiguity. There is a strong impulse in our psyche to seek security in clear solutions.
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Im Memoriam.
Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate. Ostensibly, ‘In Memoriam’ (1849) is a poem about the death of his beloved friend, Alfred H. Hallam – who died of a stroke, aged just 22. However, the poem resonates with the confused angst that Western culture was trying to handle in the middle of the century, in the light of the advances in science and culture. Both in its content and its structure, it is a poem that circles around all the maddening memories and emotions of grief. Just as ‘Nature’ lost its meaning and purpose in the 19th century, Tennyson expresses his own bewildering sense of loss. The poem tries to move forward, like a Eulogy should, but it is drawn back all the time by the rhyming 4 line stanza structure of ABBA - where the final word of the final line (A) always brings you back to the start (A). This circularity moves from the personal: Be near me when my light is low, When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick And tingle; and the heart is sick, And all the wheels of Being slow (Lines 969-984) To the universal: There rolls the deep where grew the tree. O earth, what changes hast thou seen! There where the long street roars, hath been The stillness of the central sea. (Lines 2605-2609) There are moments in the poem where the 4-beat pulse of the lines is snagged by sharp shocks of grief, like here where Tennyson finds himself outside Hallam’s front door: He is not here, but far away The noise of life begins again, And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain On the bald street breaks the blank day Instead of “dadom-dadom-dadom-dadom”, we get “didi dom dom, didi dom dom”, as if Tennyson’s heart misses the beat and he stumbles over. Tennyson tests the traditional rules of rhythm, structure and style of elegiac poetry in order to allow the deep turbulence of his heart and mind to find its fullest expression on the page. This bulging tension between structure and content that Tennyson is just about holding together in this poem, will be heightened to its breaking point in Nietzsche.
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These tendencies could be clearly seen in the Protestant background to Nietzsche work. The conservative religious reaction to the latest science and cultural trends was to withdraw into the shelter of an intellectual dugout. Nietzsche was scathing in his criticism of such retreats. There were two main challenges to Christian belief: Firstly, Darwin’s Evolutionary Biology challenged the literal reading of Genesis. In ‘On the Origin of Species’ (1859), instead of Adam and Eve, it looked like we were descended from a range of primitive life forms from Algae to Eels (and so on). Nature appeared ‘red in tooth and claw’ and rather than being handcrafted by some benevolent God, it looked like the product of some spasmodic, sinister deity – or just the upshot of plain random chance. Secondly, Biblical Criticism had been gathering pace in the 1800s. Of great significance was David Strauss’s book, ‘The Life of Jesus – Critically Examined’ (1835). A hugely controversial study of the Gospel texts that had identified human fingerprints all over the divine texts. These threats might seem academic now, but they were deeply felt at the time. Tennyson’s epic poem, ‘In Memoriam’ (1849) is testimony to that (see textbox). There were many other threats to Christian belief, but just these two were enough on their own to force many believers to unfortunately polarise science and religion, reason and faith. This kind of denialism was regrettable because the new breakthroughs in science and the arts could have enriched, rather than undermined, their beliefs.
The cave of denial Denialism is as old as human culture, and membership of that club remains very varied. From the Flat Earth Society to those that dispute the Moon Landings. More malignantly, there are some who deny the reality of the link between HIV and AIDS, ‘Anti-Vaxxers’ who deny the safety of the MMR vaccination and most appallingly, racists who deny the reality of the Holocaust.
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There are climate deniers too, whose ideas will get debunked in Chapter 6 with the help of Karl Popper. Indeed, there are all sorts of variants to climate change denial. Perhaps, given the catastrophic nature of what could unfold, it is probably healthy for even those who have a complete picture of the science to indulge themselves in a bit of self-censorship to avoid going a bit loopy about the future. More common forms of denial about climate change concern our capacity to do something about it; or they just trust in ‘technology’ or ‘the young generation’ to find a solution, for example. Returning again to some Protestant responses to danger - perhaps the most moronic example of climate change denial comes from those like US Congressman Tim Walberg. Speaking in Coldwater, Michigan in May 2017, he said, “I believe there’s climate change. I believe there’s been climate change since the beginning of time… Do I think man has some impact? Yeah, of course. Can man change the entire universe? No.” He concludes, “Why do I believe that? Well, as a Christian, I believe that there is a creator in God who is much bigger than us. And I’m confident that, if there’s a real problem, he can take care of it.”124 If it was not such a long quote, it could serve as a great epitaph for the human race. However, such duff thinking must not simply be held at a cynical distance. We are all guilty of censoring uncomfortable truths, cropping our thoughts and shrinking from challenges. Which is why Philosophy is so grippingly relevant today, as it provides us with the support and the tools to think beyond our normal limits. Philosophy always had traction, but now the major issues that confront human society make the subject edgy, critical and acutely poignant. There have always been good academic and personal reasons for studying Philosophy. However, being in a classroom in 2018 with young people who will probably live their adult lives in a world with such deep splinters in the fabric of nature and society -the classroom feels very different to how it did 20 years ago. The 360-degree vision of Philosophy, and the way in which it creates a three-way conversation between the self, the world and the past is sharply relevant. In such an interconnected world in which humans have developed an extraordinary capacity to shape the planet, it is so important that we sustain genuine public debates.
124 http://time.com/4800000/tim-walberg-god-climate-change/
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The European School System insists that the study of Philosophy is a mandatory component of the Baccalaureate, and during the writing of the new syllabus, it was striking how often the importance of that status felt. When I was close to their age, and studying at university, Fukuyama declared ‘The End of History’ (1992) - it certainly seemed to be true that the future of humanity looked increasingly mild. However, it looks like History is back - with a bite. Philosophy has a value far beyond its appearance, but it is often the case that from the outside it seems rather obscure and somewhat of a fringe interest. Nietzsche embodies this curious double fact about the value of the subject more than most. His unreasonably large moustache was ridiculed by his friends, well before it became hopelessly untrimmed in his final years of madness. He was a lonely figure, and his character seemed just as unreadable as some of his writings. His elitist and lofty prose seems so far removed from relevant reality. Yet getting inside his head and following the struggles of his spirit, observing his fight with his culture and himself, demonstrates how important some of the central goals of Philosophy are for our human civilisation today. Climate change presents our head and our hearts with profound challenges. The looming threat of climate change and the political and economic storms that accompany it, make a retreat into our caves a tempting option. Yet, Nietzsche has Zarathustra emerge from his cave to engage with the world and affirm it.
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The Christian Cave In ‘The Genealogy of Morals’ (1887) Nietzsche had observed how tempting a retreat from the world is, when faced with steep, seemingly insurmountable challenges. He offers us a probing analysis of the psychology involved in situations where people are confronted by massive threats. As explained previously (p41), he pays particular attention to how the Jews responded to the imposition of overwhelming Roman power - especially in the figure of Jesus of Nazareth. After centuries of occupation, the Jewish hopes of restoring a theocracy on their land were impossibly remote. They had occasionally attempted to outwardly express their anger and frustration against their Roman oppressors, but any terrorist strikes by the Zealots (for example) were always hopelessly futile. Yet, because Nietzsche did not think that the energy of their anger could simply evaporate away, it was a force that had to be discharged somehow. The ‘will to power’ was real and indissoluble. Therefore, since the bitterness of the Jewish people could not be released outwardly onto the Romans, Nietzsche argued that they had turned inward and released their anger and resentment onto the themselves. He argues that this is inner fury is known to us as guilt. Nietzsche thought that the true ingredients of guilt are ‘ressentiment, powerlessness and hurt’. ‘Guilt’ provides a mechanism to release a potent negative energy onto a safe and easy target, the self. He thought that Christianity was a clever way for the powerless to construct a universe in which they could not only regain control over their destiny, but they could also set up emotional networks to manage their strongest drives and frustrations. Powerlessness is a very common and a very powerful feeling for young people today; there are so many issues that our young people face. The recent publicity surrounding various child sexual abuse scandals and the strength of the #MeToo movement have brought to the surface how tragically common such profound suffering is. More commonly, in situations where children cannot mend their parents’ broken marriage, they find themselves with an irrational sense of responsibility and guilt. More generally, many young people feel powerless when they are faced with the standards set by an aspirational society – because they think that their brains or bodies are not good enough. Indeed, for many students, the constant imperative to ‘Enjoy!’ and ‘fulfil yourself ’ cannot be met by even the most enthusiastic member of a predominantly consumer society, and so when many young people experience a sense of boredom or - 116 -
fatigue, it is flavoured with a touch of guilt too. Their feelings of anger and resentment are often not recognised by the institutions or the individuals around them; sometimes they are not even recognised by the children themselves. Also, these emotions cannot easily be discharged onto those responsible, because it is rather impossible to fight back against a faceless ‘Big Other’ or a deaf bureaucratic system. If the problem is a dangerous and manipulative adult, then it is close to impossible for a child to challenge such an authority. A problem compounded by the fact that such an individual will be trying to make sure that they keep full control of the situation. It would not be a surprise for Nietzsche to observe the increasing number of young people who self-harm or who suffer from eating disorders. The causes to such conditions are always complicated and particular; however, Nietzsche’s insight that we often find internal solutions to an external problems is a very illuminating one. On a broad cultural level, Nietzsche once described Christianity as “Platonism for the masses”. He thought that it was a type of escapism that retreated from the dangers and difficulties of the physical world. Indeed, Nietzsche pointed a very accusing finger at the apostle Paul whose teachings (that make up more than half of the New Testament) had been so decisive in this respect for Western culture. He thought that Paul had morphed the impulse for earthly joys and justice into a cosmic inner battle between the body and the soul. The material desires and drives of the body were to be supressed; a negation of life that Nietzsche thought also dimmed the will for a personal growth, and political battles on earth.
The Climate Change Cave This interiority to our moral thinking and action can be seen in our responses to climate change. Although our culture is no longer predominantly Christian, the shadows of this belief are clearly visible. So much of our thinking about climate change is focused on the individual and it is framed with guilt. For the millions of people who are very concerned about climate change, there is a constant background noise to our lives: every car journey, every wasted item of the fridge, every plastic wrap, even our emails and data use have a carbon weight. Every transaction has a carbon footprint.
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In the entertaining handbook to carbon footprints, “How Bad are Bananas?” (2010), Berners-Lee sketches out some details about how different human activities have different carbon weights. Starting from the light: such as a text message (0,014g CO2e) an email (4g CO2e without attachment, 50g CO2e with), or a plastic bag (10g CO2e for a standard supermarket type). To the significant: a pair of shoes (11,5kg CO2e average), an average night of B’n’B including dinner and drinks (25kg CO2e), to a mobile phone use at one hour per day (24kg CO2e weekly, 1250kg CO2e annually). To the heavy: a £500 new Welsh gold necklace (22Kg CO2e) a London-Glasgow return trip (by bike 53kg CO2e (if you eat bananas for your energy), by coach 63kg CO2e, by plane 500kg CO2e, or by large 4wD 1100kg CO2e). To the very heavy: having a child (life expectancy 79 years, living an average UK life)(373 tonnes, CO2e), A public swimming pool (400kg CO2e per year), The World Cup (SA, 2010) (2,8 million tonnes, CO2e) or the world’s data centres (c250 million tonnes CO2e per year). There is something strongly Protestant, perhaps even Calvinist, about how climate change is experienced for those who have ‘seen the truth’. Dedicated Protestants are conscious that their every move and thought is known to God, they are therefore very mindful of how every action and impulse has an impact at a higher level. At a time when I was reading, ‘Bankrupting Nature’ (Anders Wijkman and Johan Rockström, 2011) my uncle died. On the way to the funeral, we were stuck in a horrendous traffic jam – everything added up to an intense moment of absurdity. Every square meter of tarmac so full of ‘population’, every lorry full of ‘widgets’, for what? In that short existential moment the particular details of the view out of the car windscreen took on a totally different texture - the reality of the broken systems and the abstract truths of society flooded over the surface of perception. Of course, normal life is never so intense. However, holding a ‘green attitude’ (as the clichés call it) involves an important background drone to the rest of our thinking and decision-making. Having an awareness of our carbon footprint creates a negative kind of noise, but Nietzsche would probably note that it serves a psychological function. It provides a storyline where we have a sense of control and a feeling of making an impact on the world. Although a mindfulness about our actions as humans inside an ecological system is something that it is crucial to any deep-rooted change in our societies, it is hugely important that this mindfulness is not self-indulgent and escapist. There is little point in purifying our ecological conscience if the system that we are living in remains
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unredeemed. If our economies radically reformed their infrastructure, we would not have to be so self-negating in our attitudes. Achieving this state of affairs can only be achieved if we demand strong external (policy and legal) change. Decisive action, against global warming can only really happen through far reaching legislation. This feels disempowering at first. It cuts against the modern mantras of self-determination and personal ‘choice’. It robs us of a sense of control over our destiny because it throws us against the powerful and impersonal forces of society, but unless our consumer actions are matched by political engagement the speed of change is simply not going to be fast enough. Achieving legislative change is the truly empowering act, because it is the change that gets to the root of the problem. We cannot retreat into a green cave. We have to ‘go down to the Pireaus’.
5. The importance of thinking things through until the end God’s Shadow These shadows of God are important. When Nietzsche sprayed the words ‘God is dead’ with his aerosol on the walls of cultural institutions and the walls of academia, it was a truly radical statement125. It was not radical in the sense that he was saying, ‘God does not exist’, because atheism has always been around. Many human cultures do not (and did not) require God in their universe – Buddhism and the Ancient Greek Atomists, for example. Indeed, the Western culture that Nietzsche inherits had many notable atheists not far downstream from his work - from Mill and Marx, Feuerbach and Schopenhauer, back to Hume and Hobbes.
125 In fact, Hegel had said it before Nietzsche, once in ‘Glauben und Wissen’ (1802), and twice in ‘Phänomenologie’ (1807). God’s death was part of his/God’s understanding of a panentheist universe – and ‘simply’ an antithetical moment in the unfolding consciousness of ‘geist’. If these technical words from his work sound appealing, Hegel has so much more to give!
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What was radical about Nietzsche’s declaration was the epistemological depth of his charge. Furthermore, Nietzsche was totally committed to bringing the consequences of God’s death to the surface. The idea was so important that he would insist that it should comprehensively reconfigure how people understood their world. Moreover, it should therefore have a far-reaching impact on our values and way of life. The very first time he drops his 3-word bomb in the ‘The Gay Science’ illustrates this concern well. Given the gravity of the declaration that he makes, it is informative that Nietzsche rolls straight into the consequences. There is no pause, or repetition for dramatic effect, there is not even a full stop. Nietzsche just swings right through with a semi-colon into the implications: “God is dead; but given the way people are, there may still for millennia be caves in which they show his shadow.—And we—we must still defeat his shadow as well!” (Section 108) It was no great surprise in the late nineteenth century for someone to be so explicitly atheist. What was fresh was Nietzsche’s sheer tenacity and energy. If God was dead, a casual response to such a fact would just be absurd. The death of God did not merely mean that some appendix to the universe had been removed. The consequences were much more fundamental, the significance of God’s death was absolutely basic to a huge range of issues. Nietzsche understood that his prophetic role was to wake people up to the radical implications of it all. For example, in the very next section (Section 109), he explains one aspect of the significance of his vandalism. This extract is also a good example of his particular sensitivity to the Apollonian effect of language on how we understand the world: “Once you know that there are no purposes, you also know that there is no accident; for only against a world of purposes does the word ‘accident’ have a meaning… When will all these shadows of god no longer darken us? When will we have completely de-defied nature? When may we begin to naturalise humanity with a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?”
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The ethical implications of God’s death are put even more explicitly in ‘Twilight of the Idols’ (1889), he writes: “When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident… Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole.” In summary, knowing something in the abstract is categorically different to accepting all the implications of it in reality. Killing God is one thing, but killing his shadow is another. Although the ‘death of God’ is the central act in Nietzsche’s work, he understood that rewiring our thinking and our lives to such a reality would go against so many of our instincts and so much of our culture.
Christian Shadows We are all guilty of living under God’s shadow. Some shadows are trivial (like never walk under a ladder); some are not (like Fascist Nationalism). Some shadows are just harmless clichés, others are used to oppress and violate basic human rights. Some shadows are a healthy type of storytelling – in which we join up the dots of our life and create a way to engage in the world. Whereas we can also be tempted to write stories about ourselves that, under a vague notion of fate, lead us to think that we have no agency to make meaningful decisions. Our habitual way of thinking about the world can be full of false necessities. Nietzsche took a very negative view of the shadow that the God of Christianity cast. He thought that those living under the shade that it creates had retreated from the world. Nietzsche argued that the glorification of submissiveness, humility and poverty offered Christians the chance to escape from asking tough questions about political and social reality. By making a value out of the things that they did not have – such as power, strength or wealth, the Christian world offered a false comfort that kept its followers in an infantile, shady state. Now is not the time to question if Nietzsche’s reading of Christian psychology is correct (for example, is humility a weakness or a strength?). It is simply appropriate to note that Nietzsche was philosophising ‘with a hammer’. Indeed, the alternative title to his last ‘sane’ work “Twilight of the Idols” (1889) is “How to Philosophise with a - 121 -
Hammer”. Nietzsche’s withering assault on the Protestant world that he grew up in was uncompromising. He wanted to knock through the traditional walls of our thinking to get to more important psychological material. Given that God was dead, Nietzsche was passionate about liberating people from what he perceived were the negative and life denying values of the Christian faith. Why live inside a system that is not good for your mental health? Why continue to behave as if nothing had changed? What was there to lose in coming out of the shadows and reconstructing a whole new world order that affirmed creativity, engagement and most importantly for Nietzsche, “overcoming” (where his famous notion of the Übermensch comes from).
God’s Shadow and the Birthday surprise. Once on a school exchange programme in Shanghai, after a guided tour of the city, some of the students were expressing their curiosity about how such a modern city, with all its bling and savvy modern atmosphere could be so preoccupied with ancient numerology. For example, the modern hotel that we stayed the first night in had no 4th floor – it just went from 3rd to 5th and upwards, even the lift had no button with a number 4. The guide explained that for different reasons, the number 4 had come to symbolise death and misfortune (The number 4 四 sounds very similar to “death” 死 in Cantonese; pronounced “sei” (4), and “séi” (death)). It was an anxiety that has become more prominent in Eastern China since “The Return” of Cantonese speaking Hong Kong in 1997. The reasoning seemed implausibly dated in contrast to the modernity of the streets and modern outlook of the people. The guide left us to go to bed and readjust our body clocks, but before going to the 5th floor, there was one final job to do. Whilst in the lobby, we presented a huge cake to our Swedish birthday girl, Melina Benz, who was just about to turn 17. We would not all be together as a whole group for the actual birthday later in the week, so the staff had decided to surprise her and celebrate it ahead of time. However, there was another little birthday surprise: many
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of the students refused to eat the cake. They all explained how dangerous it would be to eat it - it would present such a temptation to the dark side of fate. They were uneasy because Melina was not 17 yet, and the eating of this particular arrangement of atoms would jeopardise her chances of getting there. Who would want to take on such a responsibility for the momentary pleasure of some chocolate? There was genuine anxiety in some students’ eyes when the other students began to stick their forks through the cream and the layers of sponge. Our distant Chinese neighbours had a worldview that was extremely attentive to the symbolic importance of numbers. After a busy day of sight-seeing, where so many ancient sites needed decoding with these number codes, some students had started to fight a small inner battle with some thoughts that seemed to feel like western colonial pride. The extra surprise of the Birthday cake was that it shone a new light on their own beliefs and habits. They suddenly found themselves standing in the shadow of God together with a great number of Chinese people. Niels Bohr, the Nobel Prize Winning Physicist, recognised this common contradiction with a lovely piece of irony. He was once questioned about the horseshoe hanging on his front door. Asked if he really believed if it worked he answered, “No. But I am told that it works, whether you believe in it or not�.
There is no rational justification for not eating the cake. Likewise, not moving from the sofa when your beloved football team is winning a tense game has no impact on the result. When we invoke fate as we wait to meet Mr or Mrs Right, at what level does that gesture work at? Just mathematical probability, or is there indeed some sort of supernatural hope involved? When a series of mishaps or trouble happen frequently in a day, is our imagination about how they are connected together just an expression of frustration, or is there a lingering sense of an actual higher force at work? What about adults who avoid cracks in the pavement? What about those adults who sit in powerful boardrooms, or around important political tables - who reach out to
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touch wood after commenting on a major decision? … Really? When pressed, a remarkable number of students resolutely insisted that not eating the cake was a meaningful decision. They also affirmed that all the other little superstitious rituals they had were also important – even though, at the same time, these students all accepted that it was an entirely baseless conviction. If Nietzsche would have been there to hear some of the comments made in the lobby of that Chinese hotel lobby, he would have started eating his socks. Friggatriskaidekaphobia is a fear of Friday 13 th. It affects an estimated 17 to 21 million people in the United States, which leads to an estimated drop in national income of between $800-900m on that day because those people are anxious about flying or doing other kinds of business. Source: The Stress Management Center and Phobia Institute in Asheville, North Carolina. (2011)
There are shadows of God throughout human civilisation.
Climate Change Shadows There are strong parallels between the cultural response to God’s death that Nietzsche observed and our social response to climate change. In both cases, a monumental truth had been revealed and, in both cases, it has been followed by an absurdly limp response. The problem then faced by those who want to insist that the implications of the new reality are far deeper and wide ranging is that they can look a bit mad. If the truth were really true, then common sense tells us that it would be more widely known and understood. If a massive meteorite was on a clear path towards Earth we would be preoccupied by it – so if we are not that bothered, it cannot really be such a threat. Indeed, there are many who even say that there is no meteorite, or that it is just a small rock. It is tricky to look rational and authentic in such circumstances – surely most human beings on the planet would not be missing something so big and so basic to their welfare.
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Broadcast news coverage of climate change was dominated by Trump in 2017 Number of coverage minutes on ABC, CBS, NBC, & FOX*
Total minutes of climate coverage
97m 42s
68m 55s
Minutes of Trump administrationrelated climate coverage
63m 30s
57m 0s 49m 59s
ABC
45m 10s
CBS
NBC
41m 40s 41m 5s
FOX
*FOX Broadcasting Co. has only a Sunday news program.
The fact is, the total amount of broadcast TV News coverage in the USA that dealt with climate change in 2017 was only 260 minutes126 – and most of that was just driven by President Trump’s Pantomime. Are there good reasons to suppose that the figures are much higher in other Western democracies? The average American spends 1,448 hours per year watching TV127. The most enthusiastic viewer who tuned in to watch every minute of climate change coverage - that was not about Donald Trump - on every major TV broadcast channels, would have watched a total of just 55 minutes of coverage. A stark fact, especially if the average American watches 413 hours of TV adverts every year. Non Trump-related news about climate change on Fox News totalled just 35 seconds in 2017, which is about the same amount of time it takes to go and put your shoes on and to walk out the door.
126 www.mediamatters.org/research/2018/02/12/how-broadcast-tv-networks-covered-climatechange-2017/219277#extremeweather 127 www.statista.com/statistics/186833/average-television-use-per-person-in-the-us-since-2002/
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The Madman The madman is met with incredulity when he addresses the crowd: “THE MADMAN — Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!” — As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Emigrated? — they yelled and laughed The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Where is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him — you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving to now? Where are we moving to? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. … Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. “I have come too early,” he said then; “my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars---and yet they have done it themselves.” It is very difficult to look at the mainstream science conclusions and then look at the social reality without a touch of the absurdity expressed so potently by the madman.
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The NASA chart above shows that 17 of the 18 warmest years since modern recordkeeping began have happened since 2001. We have known about climate change for nearly two centuries and the science has been extremely solid for decades. The data and the curves are now clearly entrenched in lines that point towards totally unacceptable levels of warming for human civilisation. There are no signs yet that society has properly recognised climate change, despite all the lip service. In the starkest terms possible, these are the fundamentals behind the graph: 1. The global population is increasing. 2. Consumption is accelerating. Therefore: 3. Greenhouse gas emissions are still increasing. Even though more people are using bikes, the number of vehicles on the roads of the world are set to increase from the current 1.1bn to 2.4bn by 2040128. The efforts in green energy still do not eat into our growing demand for energy that is driven by (1) and (2). OPEC predicts that by 2040 our demand for oil will have increased from around 100 million barrels a day to 115 million, and it predicts that green energy will still only run 20% of our economy by then. OPEC’s projections are in line with current policy commitments by nation states and the trends of global emissions. We are due to hit 2°C in 2036129 by which time we should have hit a carbon neutral economy if we do not want to go any further over that line.
128 OPEC, Annual Report 2018. 129 See Chapter 1 and 8 for qualifications.
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Is it meaningful to talk about an energy transition when all our extra green energy capacity is taken up by the load of higher population and economic growth? The idea of ‘transition’ is appealing, but it does not exist in the real world. We prefer to hear positive slogans than look at the raw data. The institutions of the modern world and media simply do not reflect the reality of the state we are in. For every ecological gesture that is made, it is trumped by a lack of attention to the fundamentals of population and the type of economic growth we are promoting. The vital statistics outlined in Chapter One are nowhere near the surface of our public debate, nor are do they appear on the auto-cue screens of our newsreaders. George Monbiot, the large-hearted, big-minded columnist wrote: “So how come oil production, for the first time in history, is about to hit 100m barrels a day? How come the oil industry expects demand to climb until the 2030s? How is it that in Germany, whose energy transition (Energiewende) was supposed to be a model for the world, protesters are being beaten up by police as they try to defend the 12,000-year-old Hambacher forest from an opencast mine extracting lignite – the dirtiest form of coal? Why have investments in Canadian tar sands – the dirtiest source of oil – doubled in a year? The answer is, growth. There may be more electric vehicles on the world’s roads, but there are also more internal combustion engines. There may be more bicycles, but there are also more planes. It doesn’t matter how many good things we do: preventing climate breakdown means ceasing to do bad things. Given that economic growth, in nations that are already rich enough to meet the needs of all, requires an increase in pointless consumption, it is hard to see how it can ever be decoupled from the assault on the living planet.” Nietzsche’s madman walked into the market place with a lantern in the daylight hours. The people he encountered did not believe in God anyway, so what could the madman say that would be helpful or illuminating? There was atheism, so was there really a need to update it to atheism version 2? Why write about climate change in an age when the term is so familiar and there are thousands of projects that are trying to deal with it? What is the point? Most people accept that climate change is basically real, so what more is there to say? Can we not see
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things clearly enough already? It is like carrying a lantern130 into the market place in the daylight hours. However, there is a huge difference between understanding something vaguely, and understanding the full implications of it. As with the difference between the death of God and his shadow, it is often ‘the shadow’ that is hardest to identify, and it is also the hardest part of our thinking to deal with because it seems familiar already. This book tries to explain the fuller significance of climate change. Even though we know about it, we don’t know about it.
Conclusions To conclude this chapter, here are some of the most significant ways in which our thinking about climate change is still influenced by clichéd thinking, that is reminiscent of “Gods shadow”. These bullet points will hopefully bring together the main ideas of the chapter: 1. There is a loose awareness of climate change, but this is categorically different from the knowledge presented in Chapter One. Very few people have been told these most basic truths about our objective failure to deal with the problem, and everyone has the ‘Right to Know’ them. 2. Just because the systemic threat of climate change is not central to the news, or political and economic debate, it does not mean that a catastrophic outcome is not imminently possible. We would expect rational and democratic institutions to act robustly to such a major threat. However, not all parents are nice, not all parents can see what the right thing to do is. We should not invest our big social institutions, from local governments to the UN, with misplaced confidence - as if they were wise parents. Institutions are just as self-centred and self-censoring as we are. The continually rising slope of emissions demonstrates it.
130 A solar powered lantern.
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3.0
CAUSE OF CLIMATE CHANGE Long-lived greenhouse gases in the atmosphere WMO Greenhouse Gas Bulletin 2017 projected to 2018
Watts per square meter (W/m2)
2.5
Radiative forcing (warming effect)
It does not matter how many politicians, scientists, media or celebrities figures have been put into all the COP meetings organised by the UNFCCC. It does not matter how tough or determined the sound bites sound, the only way to judge their words are with numbers. The only question that matters is: Are we reducing our emissions? (And then, are we reducing them fast enough?)
2.0
CO2 1.5
1.0 CH4 0.5
N2O
3. We have been encouraged to progress little by little, small gesture by small gesture, one recycled bin and one reusable bag at a time. Individual actions, individual responsibility. It has not worked for 30 years, why would that approach suddenly start to work now? We have to take a critical step back from this narrative. Nietzsche was against alcohol and Christianity because their false comfort prevented the people from dealing with the real problems. These soft storylines have kept us quietly comfortable whilst an enormous ecological debt has built up in the background. We need to step of the shadows of these little rituals and face up to the bigger systemic questions. CFC-12 CFC-11
0.0 1988
15 minor
1998
2008
2018
We must not be distracted by celebrity endorsements or celebrity distortions. It has to be made very clear where we currently stand with climate change and what we are heading into. 4. Just because the planet has provided a comfortable environment for human development in the past 11,700 years, this is not the product of some essential characteristics of ‘Nature’. We should not anthropomorphise the ecological system. If we built God in our image, we should not be naïve about how we understand the natural world either. ‘Nature’ is not our parent. It is neither evil nor kind, it has no ‘essence’. ‘Nature’ is simply utterly indifferent to our plans. 5. It is a grand idiocy to assume that we can overshoot our emissions targets and then suck carbon out of the atmosphere to drag the Earth system back to a manageable
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equilibrium. Nature is not Apollonian, it is far more chaotic and complex than we can model in our minds and computers. The main trends do seem predictable, the main thresholds of the system are fairly well understood. However, pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at an unprecedented rate is asking for big trouble that could suddenly cascade profoundly damaging consequences onto our society outside of our computer modelling. ‘Dionysus’ needs to be paid a great deal of respect. Nature often changes in a non-linear way, our emission targets cannot just be understood as a simple matter of addition and subtraction. The balance of the current biota is the product of tectonically slow alignments of all the flora and fauna, the lithosphere and atmosphere. We cannot scramble these deeply established layers of nature in a few decades of frantic technological activity and then just extract a single egg from the omelette. 6. Society also changes through non-linear movements. Climate change is plugged into so many deep social issues, such as inequality and human rights; it will cause mass conflict and migration and cause major economic damage. Therefore, any shift in the framing of the problem towards the most important conclusions of the science could trigger a surge in public anger and demands for action and transparency. We have some very basic human instincts for survival and justice that once awakened to an issue, can become unstoppably powerful. When our cage is rattled enough by the forces of nature, it could easily speed up our thinking. 7. Ancient people might have put their trust into ancient pagan gods to look after the basic needs for survival. Having achieved control over so much of nature, we should not now make the opposite mistake. We should not be over confident about our technological power. We should throw huge resources and energy into research and the development of various carbon capture techniques. However, for the moment, geoengineering does not have the capacity to get much beyond a superficial impact on greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere. To count scientific breakthroughs not yet achieved in our climate calculations is neither honest nor helpful.
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8. Eight (八) is the luckiest number in Chinese numerology. And I have heard that it works, even if you don’t believe in it. Therefore, for the sake of the future of human civilisation and all the maddeningly rich and beautiful cultures that are part of our collective history and future; for the sake of all that bio-diversity that has been billions of years in the making – here is an Eighth bullet point. Indeed, 88 looks rather like 喜喜 which means ‘double joy’. Which is the most appropriate way to finish thinking about Nietzsche. But this hope is not built on wishful thinking, or ‘positive attitude’ platitudes that can be seen on glossy psychology magazines, the posters of air-conditioned offices, or on our Facebook feeds. Nietzsche’s joy and hope came from a deep engagement with the truth and the human condition. Maybe it is a sort of sublime madness, but Nietzsche helps us look at the fullness of reality, which includes our capacity to overcome.
PS. It would have been a nice touch to have a picture of an actual bridge named after Nietzsche, to illustrate how his writing builds such a thoughtful crossing between Epistemology and Ethics. However, perhaps due to the fact that Nietzsche’s work was indefensibly appropriated by the Nazis (mainly through his sister Elisabeth), Nietzsche’s name was shamefully blackened for several decades. Therefore, there are very few monuments, streets, statues or indeed, bridges named after this brilliant, but lonely, philosopher. As he was often a very ironic thinker, it is perhaps a nice gesture to put in an image of bridge anyway - in honour of his contribution to our culture. So here is one of those bridges, not named after Nietzsche.
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A negation of a negation. Another bridge not named after Nietzsche
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Space for your own reflections:
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Chapter Three – What is Right? with Hannah Arendt
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Establishing Common Sense ‘Beating the Bounds’
Step One – Looking back at the messy past Step Two – Rejecting Moral Relativism Step Three – Establishing what is Right through what is Wrong
140 141 144
- Hannah ArendtOverturning Common Sense Why our Common Sense is not enough Separating the doer and the deed Should we ban recycling?
148 151 152
The Central Concerns 1. Thoughtlessness 2. Thought Control 3. Public – Private Space 4. Hopelessness 5. The danger of “Pure Thought”
158 172 184 194 197
Conclusion
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Chapter 3 ‘What is Right?’ with Hannah Arendt Pressing on. Just because philosophers have uprooted the basis to our reality and morality, there is no opting out of either the real world or the moral world. Whatever the raw (‘noumenal’) reality is behind our senses, we are all bound to a life on Planet Earth, with all the limits that this imposes. Whatever the truth about our morality is, we are irrepressibly moral creatures and we are compelled to deal with this complex aspect of our existence. We have to deal with various scientific laws and moral codes, whether they are easy to handle or not. A failure to recognise the scientific laws that govern us will make human civilisation untenable. Likewise, a failure to recognise our values will make the adjustments that we need to make, in the face of this reality, much harder to adopt. Given that climate change is a global problem, as the atmosphere above our heads is a common space, the only possible way to find a solution will be through a global recognition of the problem. However, just as we do not have a common sense of the problem of climate change as it exists in reality, we also have a minimal common sense about how to work together to solve it. Moreover, is it possible to speak about a common sense of right and wrong at all? Where is the moral consensus in modern life? What values could we agree on in the face of the threat posed to us by the natural world? How could we arrive at ethical agreements when there are so many diverse interests and cultures? These are such problematic and wide questions to pose that there are no obvious starting points, and no obvious limits to the discussion. Maybe a Medieval ecclesiastical ritual might help? - 137 -
When maps were rare and when parish boundaries might easily be disputed, local populations had to find ways to safeguard agreements about districts. One ceremonial way of doing this was to take a group of young boys, equipped with fresh green willow boughs around the parish borders on Ascension Day. The procession was led by priests and the elders who would follow the boundary paths, and steer the group towards the main territorial markers. As they walked, the boys would beat the ground with their branches, and they would give particular attention to any notable features like stones or trees. Sometimes at these key points, the elders would use the branches to beat the boys themselves, just to make their educational experience at the boundary edge truly memorable. The ritual also included the reciting of prayers that would bless the area sealed off by the walk, but the main purpose of the event was to establish agreed borders of jurisdiction, taxation and community. In Anglo-Saxon England it was known as ‘going a-ganging’, it was preserved by the Normans after their conquest in 1066, and came to be known as ‘Beating the Bounds’131.
131 In the Reith Lectures 2017 (Number 2), the artist Grayson Perry demarcates the probable boundaries of Art with this metaphor.
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Given the large expanse that ethics covers in Philosophy, this second half of the introduction will be an attempt to ‘Beat the Bounds’ of our ethical thinking into a relevant size for dealing with climate change. As stated at the end of the previous section, it is quite impossible for a book of this scope to handle the long historical disputes in philosophy about the valid basis for ethics. This chapter will just walk forward in an attempt to establish the common sense of values that are needed to respond to the threat of climate change with a pragmatism that is hopefully justified by the urgency of the situation. This chapter will therefore make three wide opening moves to establish the main borderlines of our moral map. However, it will also be argued that this large common sense of the ethical is not enough and so some key aspects of our common sense need to be overturned. This walk away from the normal boundaries of our thinking into unfamiliar territory will be led by Hannah Arendt. Her philosophy will helpfully disturb our everyday understanding of morality in a way that is crucially important for understanding the ethical dimensions of climate change.
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ESTABLISHING OUR COMMON SENSE
‘Beating the Bounds’ Step One – Looking back Looking back to the Medieval times again, their ethical world appears to have been a lot simpler at first glance. The ritual of Beating the Bounds was part of a whole cycle of ceremonies and feasts that made up a regular and stable symbolic order. Everyone knew their place in the system and interpreted their lives under a fixed constellation of values. The average Feudal man had to milk his cow and pay his tithe. He had to get up off his knees to fight and get down on his knees to pray, all out of a loyalty to the crown. Whatever the details of a particular life, whatever the class or denomination, the hub of our values was the fulfilment of earthly and divine duties. In the days of a more culturally monochrome Europe, our common sense of what was right seemed fixed and well-anchored. With the arrival of the Enlightenment, these old religious and social certainties loosened, and people looked to find common values in other domains, such as reason or trade. Moreover, it was hoped that these new bonds between people would be more flexible and resilient than the brittleness that came with aristocratic or theocratic rule. However, the sorry fact is that whatever the cultural background, human beings seem to have an inbuilt capacity for conflict. We have repeatedly failed to get our values aligned effectively in the past. Most pointedly, World War I put paid to any notion of human being’s inevitable social progress and reason. 1914 was a desperate example of irrational and destructive human tendencies, as we somehow managed to get ourselves tangled into barbed political alliances that resulted in a global and catastrophic loss of human life. ‘The Great War’ was not really all that great. Now, in ‘The Waste Land’ (TS Elliot, 1922) of modern life, without the major narratives of religion or human progress to plug into, we have to make some sort of sense of the ethical world on our own, with the disorientating cacophony of cultural voices around us. This is the busy and confusing backdrop to any ethical considerations of climate change. And so, in order to avoid the worst of the dangers ahead, we will have to foster a
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common sense of purpose from all of the divergent outlooks of a truly globalised world. It seems like a formidable task.
Step Two – Rejecting Moral Relativism The next step is to recognise that, despite this confusion, we all have values. Somehow, a prevalent idea has emerged that people can be value-neutral in our postmodern culture, as if we can opt in or out of values. “Whatever you think is right, is right for you”. It is often implied that values belonged to for a previous era, perhaps for those times when knights were brave, or when a holy book or a flag meant something to people. Yet, we are all committed to the game of life in some direction. While it is true that the values and dogmas of the radicals are spoken in bold capital letters, and sometimes underlined by acts of violence, no-one is exempt from a set of values. We have all been indoctrinated into some way of life with standards of behaviour and thought. We are all committed to something, even if it is simply our own self-interest. It is evidently true that there is a vast spectrum of beliefs and values in the modern world. But that is just a statement of description. It is just a sociological fact. Jumping from the descriptive claim that there is a disagreement about values, to the normative claim that all values are therefore relative, is a big jump to make. It needs justification and argumentation. If there was a disagreement between a group of schoolchildren on a visit to a farm about how many chickens there were in the yard – because they all kept moving about – this disagreement would not then mean that the number of chickens waddling about would be determined by the thoughts in each child’s head. Moreover, the reality of the 63 chickens might be difficult to work out with precision, but it would not be rational to conclude that because there was a disagreement of opinions it was therefore wrong to make a claim about reality. The children would be confused if the teacher went around the farmyard insisting on the rule that no child could be right about the chickens, because no-one could be right, as a matter of principle. The teacher would be imposing a weird kind of rule on the children without any justification.
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However, in the common sense view of ethical relativism (‘whatever is right for you, is right’) this odd self-contradicting rule is not so clearly visible. It needs a certain clever irony to bring it to the surface, like the famous quip of Groucho Marx: “These are my principles; if you don’t like them… well I have others.” Indeed, relativism presents itself to us as a tolerant position, yet it is a position which is itself loaded with a very odd type of totalitarianism. At its baldest, ethical relativism makes a self-contradictory claim: ‘There are absolutely no absolutes!’ It dismisses anyone’s right to take a moral stand that claims that one value is more significant than another, and then the theory places itself above all values by announcing that it has the privileged view of ethical reality – that all ethical views are in fact equal. Ethical relativism is simply not logically coherent. There is no neutrality in ethics, simply because it makes no sense. In fact, our common sense view of morality gives the incoherence of ethical relativism an extra bounce. Implicit in many adverts, films, lyrics and TV shows is the assumption that one of the highest values is to not have any values. As Icona Pop sang, “I got this feeling on the summer day when you were gone, I crashed my car into the bridge, I watched, I let it burn, I threw your shit into a bag and pushed it down the stairs, I crashed my car into the bridge, … I don’t care, I love it. I don’t care.”(“I love it”, 2012) It almost appears as if ‘values’ are a dangerous step too far, because commitment to something outside of ourselves involves a loss of control or freedom. In the case of Icona Pop, even a commitment to yourself is a step too far, and the real freedom is in a full on, self-abnegation – it is just hard to find something that rhymes well with ‘self-abnegation’. And so, we are encouraged to carefully guard our so-called ‘neutrality’. The modern thinker Slavoj Zizek likes to recount his anecdote of browsing through an aeroplane magazine and noticing an advert placed by a dating agency that promised, “Love, without the fall”. The freedom to choose should never be compromised, it is the ultimate moral imperative. This dating agency had understood this principle, and promised the ‘experience’ without the loss of control. However, my wife was not that impressed when she asked me if I was still committed to her and I proudly responded that I was remaining neutral. Pause. Her rightful complaint was that I was either committed to her or I was not committed. Being neutral, whatever that could mean in answer to her question, was not an empty gesture (in this fictional case). How could we be radically neutral? How could we shake off all values? Perhaps a - 142 -
thrash metal band that struts around on stage screaming out their rage against the machine to the frenzied adoration of the crowd could be held up as a credible example of nihilism. But, after hours of anarchistic delirium, after pummelling their fans with their discordant view of life, they might sit back once the crowds had gone home and reflect with pride on an epic performance of their nihilist art. But pride in what? Nothing? A true nihilist has no cause for pride, as if there is no value in anything. Whatever could the be proud of? Their pride betrays the inescapable paradox that we are all bound to a set of values somewhere. Pride is a basic emotion like shame, guilt, jealousy, respect and admiration, each emotion is plugged into a value. Perhaps it was an awareness of this ensnaring paradox that put the zing in their strings? If Nietzsche could have played the electric guitar he might have enjoyed such iconoclastic punk music; when the mad man walks through the streets carrying a lantern in the daylight hours shouting: “God is Dead… and we have killed him”, there is a deep, ironic madness behind his words. Nietzsche’s edgy philosophy was able to embrace life and its paradoxes. Zarathustra emerges from his cave to embrace the sun. His ‘Perspectivism’ is a rich and powerful one – and it stands in sharp contrast to the cynical relativism that is common in popular culture that just limply says “whatever”. There are some things for which having a preference of taste is adequate or appropriate. We can have a preference for Hawaii Pizza over a Regina Pizza, for coffee over tea. However, it does no justice to the human condition to state that we have a preference for consensual sex rather than rape, a preference for nurturing children rather than abusing them. Saying ‘whatever’ to this would be a perverted stance. We are committed to a set of priorities whatever we do, and it is the same with the climate. Either we are resolved to fix it or we are not. Maintaining a stable environment - 143 -
is not like the optional tip that you make in a restaurant after consuming a meal. Nor is it like the 10 pence gesture to help fund a school for some Guatemalan children that comes embedded in our Starbucks Coffee132. Our whole lifestyles are either a commitment, or not, to staying under a 2°C rise. We all carry a measurable carbon footprint, even if it is very difficult to measure. There is a certain number of carbon gigatonnes left to be released, before the atmosphere reaches a concentration that is not compatible with staying underneath a 2°C rise. This number can be simply divided, equitably, by the population of the planet. Objectively, each of us is either over or under this limit. Moral relativism is not only a false idea, but it is a dangerous one. It functions as an anaesthetic on our moral senses and it stifles genuine analysis and action. It stops us thinking, because there is no point in making any judgements if the conclusion is always just a shrug of the shoulders. This might seem like a lot of paragraphs to make a seemingly small point, but a great deal of our civic inertia is rooted in this very abstract problem. Being casually relativist creates a major bypass for much of our ethical energy. Moreover, for such an obviously flawed ethical position, it is amazingly common. Indeed, it quickly becomes clear to any readers engaged in philosophy how fundamentally important critical thinking is to the well-being of any society. Although on the surface it might sound like an outdated idea, today, perhaps more than ever, we need more judgement133 in society, not less.
Step Three - Establishing our common sense of ‘What is Right’ (… through ‘What is Wrong’) However, despite the confusion and cynicism and in the face of our horrendous failures in history, it is possible to observe some common sense of what is right and wrong. Just because we look at the world through a kaleidoscope of meanings and
132 Zizek’s often used anecdote is a clear example of what Oscar Wilde meant when he said, “But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease. … Charity creates a multitude of sins”. Systemic change is needed with global poverty, and it is also needed to stop climate change. 133 (reasoned judgement)
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although we perennially get ourselves into senseless conflicts, it does not mean that we do not care. Indeed, the good news is that we have also shown ourselves as capable of overcoming the most horrendous existential threats. Human beings have astonishing reserves of resilience and solidarity. We are resourceful and creative, and we have shown remarkable skills in planning and strategy. In fact, it is precisely in the times of most suffering and stress that we can most clearly identify our values. Love can be known most keenly through its intense negation. An unrequited love is acutely aware of what is missing. Justice can be sharply understood by its denial, through the profound helplessness of a travesty of justice. Karl Rosenkrantz eloquently explored this inverted method of progressing in Philosophy in his book, ‘The Aesthetics of Ugliness’ (1853). In the cases of genocide and terror attacks, murder and rape, there is a carnal power in the act that deeply violates our moral fibre. There is a unified conviction that these things are utterly, profoundly wrong. They are wrong without any qualification. Criminal courts hand out their harshest punishments for these brutal acts as emphatic confirmations of what we hold to be the highest good and the basest evil. So appalling are the cases of men such as Pedro Alonso Lopez, who claimed over 300 rape and murder victims throughout South America in the 1970s and André Chikatilo, ‘The Butcher of Rostov’, that they are often designated as mad, i.e., their acts are so repugnant to our moral sense that no-one with any functioning human faculties could possibly have carried them out, and so we push them off our moral map as wretched anomalies. This is perhaps most true for the seemingly charming Ted Bundy from New York. He was in fact a serial rapist and killer who was at large during the 1970s; he infamously kept some of his victim’s heads as souvenirs in his apartment and slept with their corpses. What we find abhorrent is the place in which a moral consensus is simplest to find. It is in the very absence of good that, paradoxically, it is easy to identify it. The macabre pageant of the Third Reich, as it stomped its destructive warpath into the 1940s, might best illustrate this point. The Nazis held a despicable array of characters within their ranks. The standard uniforms of Hitler’s personnel cloaked the diversity of carnal impulses that drove these people forward. The detailed psychological and contextual autopsies of the Nazi leaders undertaken by historians on characters such as Heinrich Himmler, Oskar Dirlewanger and Reinhard Heydrich confirmed our worst fears about how deeply - 145 -
depraved and vicious a human can be. At the head of this parade was Hitler, the paternalistic ‘living dead’ icon, whose cultic status was able to arouse and mobilise some people to the most monstrous crimes. The genocide, murder and rape of the Nazi war machine tragically embodied our acutest sense of what is evil, and it stands as one of the bleakest moments of human history. When the Allies secured victory in Europe on May 8th 1945, the world paused to draw its breath, wiped its brow and resolved again to uphold its fundamental values. Judge Robert H Jackson spoke with celebrated vigour and power at the opening of the Nuremburg Trials on November 21, 1945, as he laid out the shattering reality of the Third Reich to the world. Those who followed the trials were at once devastated by the sheer scale and the depth of human depravity and, in a perverse way, became acutely conscious of their highest values. Rarely has the scale of human suffering presented such a challenge to human vocabulary and concepts. “The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated… The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberate and concerted use of it to set in motion evils which leave no home in the world untouched. It is a cause of that magnitude that the United Nations will lay before Your Honors.” At the conclusion to the trials, on October 1st 1945, SS General Ernst Kaltenbrunner and General Hans Frank were two of the names hammered by the gavel into the criminal records. They had both been involved in the Polish extermination camps. The millions of deaths that they orchestrated during the Nazi occupation of Poland were an abysmal use of power. In the face of the enormity of their offenses, on October 16th, as their necks jerked in the noose, many felt that there was a momentary balancing of the moral books. The Nuremburg Trials’ measured setting allowed the rest of the world to put a safe distance between themselves and these malignant despots. Across this divide, the civilised world was able to point a straight finger at them and declare their acts “evil”. Even though the declarations of justice spoken in Nuremburg were just speech acts, in some respects just pale afterthoughts in comparison to the visceral reality of the Nazi - 146 -
regime, they did at least provide a moment for the world to declare it’s understanding of what is right and what is wrong with absolute conviction. The ruthless evil of the Nazi crimes requires little moral philosophy; they were nakedly obvious. The sheer criminality of the Third Reich remains like a granite monument to the darkest side of the human condition; in so doing, and in an utterly perverse way, they illuminated what our common sense of what is right is. We do have values, we are all profoundly moral creatures. Climate change will cause tremendous human suffering – it really will matter to us, and in order to avoid the worst of the damage to society, it is imperative that we find a consensus for a just system that can share the task of stabilising emissions. Without such a resolution in place, the social and ethical choices will get unforgivingly tough as the world gets increasingly inhospitable to our plans. For the sake of those who will suffer the most from the unravelling of the current fabric of the natural world, it is better that we use our reason and experience now to sort out a properly robust agreement. World War Two broke us down to consider our most basic commitments, the catastrophe of unchecked climate change will also confront us with fundamental economic and moral choices. Science affords us the privilege of thinking in advance, in peacetime, about how to avoid a dreadful collision with nature.
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OVERTURNING OUR COMMON SENSE Why our Common Sense is not enough After this triangulation of our moral borders, it is time to overturn our common sense understanding of morality, as our current common sense of morality has not proven good enough to mobilise us into action.
Exploring the bounds So far so bad, so far so good. But apart from establishing our commitment to a set of values, the extended use of the Nazi war trials seems a long distance away from anything to do with climate change. What do concentration camps have to do with levels of CO2 in the atmosphere? What do SS soldiers have to do the climate change migrants? Yet, if we allow our gaze to shift away from the carnal depravity of those SS men and women, our understanding of evil can be developed in an important way that enables us to think more clearly about the ethics of climate change and our role in it. However, we are rightly reluctant to look further than these crimes to define immorality. What more could be said? How could things get any clearer? Indeed, by adding any additional commentary, does it not diminish raw horror of the Third Reich? The uncomfortable truth is that there is more to understand about evil, beyond this dark centre of gravity. After the war trials in Nuremburg, Dachau, Belsen, Aushwitz and many others, a later Nazi war crime tribunal disturbed the world’s clear understanding of evil. It was the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. Aside from the outpouring of grief that survivors and witnesses went through in harrowing detail, it was deeply troubling for another set of reasons. It overturned many common sense notions of morality. These reasons will significantly open up our understanding of the ethics of climate change.
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“Eichmann in Jerusalem, 1961” At the Nuremberg Trials, the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss identified Eichmann as a key part of the operation that had exterminated around 3 million lives134. However, under a false identity, Eichmann had fled to Argentina. In 1960, the Israeli Mossad agents eventually caught up with him in, bundled him into the boot of a car and smuggled him onto a plane to Jerusalem. As the trial opened on April 11th 1961, observers in the courtroom could see one of the major cogs of the Nazi machinery now finally sat in the dock. The trial was screened on US and Israeli television. In the courtroom, it was observed by a philosopher, Hannah Arendt. Eichmann had been responsible for the transportation of millions of Jews to their deaths, but there was ‘no satanic greatness’ on display behind the glass. He was an extremely mundane bloke, full of a cold (in the first days of the trail), and full of clichés. In a disturbing way, Eichmann appeared as trivial and shallow. His recollection of the events was very clumsy and his explanations were full of contradictions. He was often vulgar, and it became clear through questioning that he simply could not understand a point of view other than his own. The Israeli court psychiatrist who examined Eichmann found him a, “completely normal man, more normal, at any rate, than I am after examining him”135. During the trial, Arendt sketched some thoughts to her philosophical friend Karl Jaspers, “Eichmann is actually stupid…, but then somehow, he is not”, and noted that he showed a kind of “brainlessness”136. In her book, entitled “Eichmann in Jerusalem”, Arendt offers a unique perspective on evil. Following the trial, she recapitulates all the mind-numbing suffering of the holocaust, and at the same time, Arendt vividly captures Eichmann in all of his banality. This horrendous parallel between the mass murder of millions and the superficiality of a bureaucrat in the SS regime who was proud of his efficient work is one that is utterly
134 In his affidavit, he stated that 2.5 million had been gassed or burnt and a further 500,000 had died through starvation or disease. 135 Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. New York, N.Y., U.S.A: Penguin Books. Introduction, xv. 136 Ibid, xiv.
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jarring. How could any human being sign off on those train timetable sheets, knowing the human content and destination of that railway traffic? Where was Eichmann’s inner moral voice? Where was the desk-killer’s conversation with himself? Arendt later explained her work by using Richard III as a contrast. In Shakespeare’s play, the opening monologue finds the protagonist in a tormented inner conversation with himself. “Now is the winter of our discontent…” and then, as Richard notices the appearance of his rival brother, his speech abruptly turns, “Dive, thoughts, down to my soul: here Clarence comes”137. Whilst King Richard could not be held up as a good character, he is at least in a dialogue with himself about his identity, his plans and his motivations. Eichmann had no such second voice in his head. Arendt notes, “… the only specific characteristic one could detect in his past as well as in his behaviour during the trial and the preceding police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think.” This ‘thinking’ for Arendt was not the everyday, routine thinking that we all do. This ‘thinking’ was the very specific activity of taking a critical distance from one’s self. It is the exercise of judgement, the exercise autonomous reasoning. Arendt writes, “When confronted with situations for which such routine procedures did not exist he [Eichmann] was helpless, and his cliché-ridden language produced on the stand, as it had evidently done in his official life, a kind of macabre comedy. Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardised codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognised function of protecting us against reality”. Indeed, Eichmann’s main defence in this trial was that he was just carrying out orders. For example, he claimed that when he was informed by Rheinhard Heydrich that, “The Fuhrer has ordered the physical extermination of the Jews”, Eichmann claimed to have responded, “I didn’t say anything because there was nothing more to say… I now lost all joy in my work, all initiative, all interest.” Arendt’s book was subtitled, ‘A Report on the Banality of Evil’. Although the word
137 Richard III, Act One, Scene One.
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‘banal’ only appears in the last line of the work, it is the central idea behind the rest of the text. It is a quite brilliant exposure of evil as a privation. Arendt showed the cruel power of an absence of good. “Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet — and this is its horror! — it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay to waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think.”138 There, on display in a glass box, was a very different kind of evil. It was evil demonstrated as a profound lack of thought and care. It was shallow and rootless. The four month trial of Eichmann was, in Arendt’s concluding words, a “long course in human wickedness… - the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil”139
Seperating the doer and the deed Many readers had clumsily taken deep offence with the association of the holocaust with the word banal. But Arendt insisted repeatedly on the difference between the doer and the deed. The shallowness of Eichmann’s character sat in awful contrast to the depth of the suffering that he had caused. It is a distinction that is fundamentally important to her book. The doer was banal, but the deed was horrific. It is a distinction that opens up a very effective point of entry for thinking through the morality of climate change. In the case of climate change, there is a huge gulf between the doer and the deed. There is no morally depraved group that are piping gigatonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere because they are filled with bitter animosity to people groups who live in houses close to the sea. No raging despot has set up a massive exhaust tube for emissions to wipe out, once and for all, the poorest, most vulnerable people of the world. It simply is the result of billions of well-meaning people just going about their lives inside an economy that is maintained, 82% of the time, by the burning of fossil fuel. In fact, the contrast between the intentions of the doers of climate change and the results
138 “Eichmann in Jerusalem” (1963), opening. 139 “Eichmann in Jerusalem”, (1963) last line.
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of their actions is perversely wide. Not only are modern human beings not actively organising the extermination of a particular race of people, but quite the opposite is true. It is a total mismatch. How could a honeymoon flight to an exotic island, to celebrate the deep love between two people, have anything to do with the sinking of an entire island culture? How could the construction of a state of the art hospital, to save thousands of people from critical diseases and injuries, have anything to do with mass starvation? Could the beef burgers at a child’s birthday party really cause the ruinous flooding of another child’s home? We are insulated from thinking about the consequences of our economic activity because it is such a stretch of the imagination to think that noble acts can have such ignoble consequences. This gap between the doer and the deed, which distances climate change so far from our common sense, is a major reason why we do not take meaningful action. Yet really, is it appropriate to put Eichmann into a book on climate change? Is it not the forced evacuation and deaths of millions of innocent people an impossible distance from a few unusually hot summers? As always with climate change, all of these reflections can be seen as wildly out of place until the sheer scale of the environmental catastrophe facing us is acknowledged. Any ethical deliberations on climate change have to be rooted in a realistic vision of the science. If our understanding of climate change science is shallow, then our reflections on the ethics of climate change will not get out of first gear either. For anyone who is open-minded and open-hearted enough to engage with the human consequences of our current eco-system going over a tipping point will accept that such a juxtaposition is justified. It is not that we are like Eichmann, but we are all prone to mere common sense thinking about our situation that is not plugged in, at a meaningful level, with the seriousness of what is going on.
Should we ban recycling? Indeed, the French philosopher, Jean-Pierre Dupuy in his book, ‘Pour un catastrophisme éclairé’ (2004) examines the cognitive difficulties we have with ‘risk’ when we attempt to contemplate a disaster on the scale of climate change or nuclear war. He writes, “In order to prevent a catastrophe, one needs to believe in its possibility before it happens.” Dupuy cites World War One as an example of his reasoning; few believed it was possible before it happened. Dupuy’s reflection is confirmed by the popularity of the pre-war pamphlet: ‘The
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Great Illusion’. Written by Nobel Prize winner Malcolm Angell in 1910, it was a very comforting read for those British people who leafed through its pages. In consideration of all the bombastic nationalism flying around Europe at the time, Angell’s central point was that, “the economic cost of war was so great that no one could possibly hope to gain by starting a war the consequences of which would be so disastrous140.” It eventually sold over two million copies. Those who read his ideas before 1914 were comforted by the common sense reasons to remain calm141. Run-away climate change is equally inconceivable. Clumsily put, it will be so unimaginably costly that we cannot imagine it. As it is not in the interests of politicians, businesses or the media to put our noses up close to the scientific facts, most citizens of the developed world live at a comfortable distance from the reality of it. Eichmann was not the SS solider with his hand on a pistol or a gas-tap. He sat at a comfortable distance from the real action. Indeed, he proudly testified in one startling line of testimony, that, “In the department that I ran, I did not tolerate violence”. It was a distance that afforded him the option of simply not allowing the second voice in his head to ask him any uncomfortable questions. He lived within a world of clichés. He lived his life full of false necessities. Likewise, for climate change, there are some very dangerous clichés doing the rounds. As consumers we are happy to recycle, the fight against the plastic in our food chain is an important one and reusing our towels in a green certificated hotel is not an unhelpful gesture. Moreover, many of us do these things earnestly and with a genuine concern for the planet. However, these gestures only make the most utterly superficial difference to reducing emissions, and so they just seem to serve as an immunising shot against the truth. Being known inside my school as someone who is ecologically concerned, I am approached almost weekly by students and colleagues who sincerely want to make a difference, but virtually every plan of action, remark, or suggestion is related to recycling. There is no doubt that recycling is a good place to start in primary schools, where children can learn a sensitivity about the human impact on the planet. It is a
140 In fact, this is the historian James Joll’s succinct summary of Angell’s work. Joll, James (1992) The Origins of the First World War. London and New York: Longman. p.202 141 Those who read it after were hoping that his arguments, along with the devastation caused by the conflict, would confirm Woodrow Wilson’s hope that World War 1 was ‘the war to end all wars’.
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very tactile response to the problem. However, recycling has become such a cultural cliché that I have proposed explicitly banning the practice in our secondary school, just to make a more important point. For a moment of perspective, the entire amount of plastic that is produced by the world’s economy is only responsible for 1 in every 257 tonnes of global emissions142. There are many key environmental problems associated with plastic that are not connected to climate change and such issues deserve some space. However, as an educational institution we are responsible for providing a clear landscape of reality for young minds that do not yet have the maturity or experience to see their knowledge in perspective. And when the overwhelming focus of environmental initiatives in secondary education are focused on these problems, rather than the risk of the planet’s eco-system entering into an unstoppable collapse, it is hard to argue that we are providing an advanced level of education. We do not ask our Baccalaureate students to do simple spellings and addition, so why do we tolerate such a limited response to the most significant threat to their welfare? We do not encourage our students to wash their hands more regularly when they are dying of septicaemia. Our students have a right to know the truth and pacifying them with a lame understanding of what is really going on is not honest or helpful. Recycling simply acts as insulation from the hard questions of reality. Where does this general ecological delusion comes from? Is it a lack of knowledge? Is it a lack of thought? Is it a soft form of propaganda that comes from the machinery of those in power, or is it a self-delusion? This is not the place now to untangle this knot, it is just important to note that how we understand our social reality is not neutral. Our responses to ecology are embedded in a social context which filters information and shapes our reaction. Being a cultural heretic is not comfortable for either the heretic or those who have sincere and well-founded concerns. Conversations about these priorities are often messy, but they are critically important and we owe it to our students to have them. Eichmann was deeply embedded in Nazi ideology, and he clearly had no excuse. He had direct responsibility for the immediate transportation of Jews to their deaths. He
142 Geyer R. et all, Production, use, and fate of all plastics ever made (2017) Sci. Adv. 2017;3: e1700782
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knew what he was doing. The reason that Eichmann could be guilty of organising the deaths of millions of Jews was because he was guilty of a breath-taking level of self-deception. This juxtaposition (not equation) of Eichmann with the normal citizen of the world is a deeply uncomfortable one to make, both for the writer and the reader. Indeed, it was not without real controversy that Arendt used the word ‘banal’ in the context of the Holocaust. Here, in alignment with Arendt, there is no claim that there is ‘a little bit of Eichmann’ in all of us143. There are no adjectives strong enough to mark the categorical difference between a well-meaning consumer on the one hand, and Eichmann’s poisonous ideology on the other. However, the appallingly brutal fact is that millions of people will die as a consequence of gas, and it is happening under the watch of a cultured and scientifically advanced society again. And so, the question poses itself, ‘how could it possibly be true that the mass destruction of human civilisation could occur in a society of rational people?’ Eichmann’s banality forces us to realise that our understanding of how evil can arise cannot simply be limited to common sense. Our understanding of what it means to good cannot be to common sense either. In ‘The Human Condition’ (1958), Arendt writes: “It is quite conceivable that the modern age—which began with such an unprecedented and promising outburst of human activity—may end in the deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known”. How can humans be so capable of technological advance and so creative in social organisation, and yet at the same time, be so incapable of stopping such an obvious and catastrophic danger? It does not feel like it at all, but these are extra-ordinary times. The powerfully striking claim that Arendt makes in her observation of Eichmann is that ‘not thinking’ can actually be genocidal.
143 However, Arendt did tackle the very thorny issue of how involved some of the Jewish communes were in the identification of their own Jewish communities for export to the ghettos and eventually camps.
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“On the Origins of Totalitarianism” (1951) Eichmann was thoughtless. Is it not also true that our modern society is also thoughtless about climate change? It is categorically true that we are very thoughtful about a vast range of social issues, but somehow climate change is the most fundamentally important problem that we are not thinking about. Arendt sat in close observation of Eichmann in 1961 and her insights are rooted in the daily observations at the trial, but at the same time, Arendt is working to understand something beyond him. Eichmann was a sharp example of a Nazi desk-killer, but he was part of a system that had pulled quite ordinary people into an abysmal situation. It was critically important for Arendt to understand the psychological and social preconditions that made it possible for people to participate in such destructive regimes. In fact, Arendt had been working for years on establishing a fuller understanding of the human condition. She wrote ‘On the Origins of Totalitarianism’ in the immediate shadow of the soul-crushing developments of Nazism and Stalinism. It is a book in which she grapples with the new totalitarian politics that had so deeply marked the first half of the century. There is a lot of history in the 500 pages that she writes, but it is the first major theoretical attempt to understand the appalling seizure in human affairs that shook everything up. The book made her intellectual reputation and it is a highly engaging read. The awful multi-dimensional puzzle posed to Arendt by these regimes was this: how could they manage to develop and function with such an overpowering and invasive force? Her responses to this question could help us understand the modern crisis of climate change. Indeed, totalitarian regimes demanded the most urgent scrutiny because Arendt was convinced that both Nazism and Stalinism had not exhausted their potential. Her work on totalitarianism was written with Nazism and Stalinism at the front of her mind, but her later experience of the Cold War (especially McCarthyism) and the surge in consumerism in the 1970s, confirmed her understanding that even openly democratic societies are capable of hosting totalitarian regimes. Arendt had observed how democracies can also endorse ‘thoughtlessness’.
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Her words from 1951 strike with bristling relevance today: “Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives.” A reading of Arendt’s work now, especially in the light of climate change, shows how much of her writings transcends their context. Arendt’s insights show how totalitarian systems of control can lead to large-scale human suffering, and how democratic societies are not immune from such dangers.
What’s next? Arendt’s writing defies categorisation. There are so many overlapping themes in her work and she approaches political and ethical reality in a highly independent way. Using her three major works, “Eichmann in Jerusalem”, “The Origins of Totalitarianism” and “The Human Condition”, this chapter will group her ideas into 5 critical concerns that Arendt held concerning our political life: 1. Thoughtlessness - as with Eichmann, the main precondition of totalitarian rule is a shallowly rooted thinking. 2. Thought Control - once people are atomised and deprived of any significant conversations with their past, their community or themselves, they are then prone to manipulation. 3. Public – Private Space - Arendt looks back to Antiquity to pay respect to how both Greek and Roman society had a genuinely distinct public space in the centre of their political life. 4. Hopelessness – Nazi and Stalinist regimes created and preserved their control by demolishing people’s hopes. Hopelessness is also very real today. 5. Retreat into the Self – Philosophy is often caricatured as a retreat from the world, Arendt staunchly argued that it must not turn inwards. All of these concerns about totalitarian rule are rather prescient about the current political order and they make our passive attitude towards climate change more understandable. Guest appearances will be made by Edward Bernays and Neil
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Postman, along with Truman Burbank from the film, ‘The Truman Show’ (1998) in the coming sections.
The Central Concerns 1. Thoughtlessness “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
(The Origin of Totalitarianism, 1951) Nazism and Stalinism abolished the distinction between fact and fiction through the dark forces of revenge and terror. The space of genuine public discourse was flattened by the atomisation of people and the availability of only one kind of story about life. For Nazism, this story was the racial supremacy of the Aryan race in its historical fight for true Lebensraum against defective parasites in society. For Stalinism, the story was the historical march of the Soviets towards liberation from its class enemies. If the 19th century had been characterised by imperial expansion over land, then the start of the 20th century was marked by an invasive colonisation of the mind. Both Nazism and Stalinism only offered their populations one singular way to think. Strikingly, Arendt had noted that this imposition on the ‘inner life of the mind’ even had the capacity to dictate how people experienced their own experiences. She offers the example of a Stalin Show Trial in which a factory worker is accused of vandalism. The worker is so embedded in Stalinist ideology that he admits that even though has no recollection of any sabotage, ‘The Party must be right’, and so accepts the guilty verdict. His confession could just be read as a resigned plea, which would be coherent with the ability of totalitarian regimes to utterly squash people’s hope; however, that would underestimate the power of ideologies to colonise the minds of its subjects. His mind was just a satellite state of the centralised consciousness, a humble node in the great Stalinist matrix.
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Backed up with a terrifyingly policed state, both the Nazi and the Stalinist propaganda effort managed to gain a remarkably firm grip of people’s minds. They achieved an overwhelming colonisation of their nation’s psyche. Both Hitler and Stalin were dictating the only story on offer. Moreover, their storytelling was not just about the control of a singular plot line. The storyteller also gets to define the values that drive the plot, they get to explain the significance of the past, and the meaning of the future. Very significantly, they get to decide who and what does not make it into the story. This level of thought control has the power to hollow out a nation’s cultural memory and reduce people to rootless thinkers. It was this superficiality that deeply concerned Arendt. As exemplified in Eichmann, she labelled such a state of mind, ‘thoughtlessness’ with genuine anxiety. She understood that the goal of a totalitarian state was to replace sense reality with irreality. With Plato’s Protagoras in mind, she wrote: “The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality144.” Later adding: “The true goal of totalitarian propaganda is not persuasion, but organization of the polity... What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.” Arendt’s warning about the unexhausted scope of totalitarian power, and its ability to colonise democratic societies was a shocking idea when she published her work in 1951. It was the year in which the Korean War become as entrenched as the Western world’s negative view of the Soviet State. They thought Stalin was the great puppet master, pulling the strings in North Korea, and a man who took thought control so seriously he even put his poets into Gulags or shot them. The liberal West, by contrast, was free. All the problems with thought control appeared to be on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Indeed today, the notion of “Thought Control” sounds like something out of a science-fiction movie, or a chapter heading in a book written by a whacked-out sect that believes that aliens are attempting to take over our minds from their mothership. In the real world, it only happens to desperately radicalised Muslims.
144 The Origins of Totalitarianism, (1951). [p93]
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However, given the coexistence of a massive constitutional crisis with nature and the passivity of our response, there has to be some major forces at work that are preventing us from thinking about climate change clearly. It takes a spectacular kind of thoughtlessness to allow our society to throw itself into such a major conflict with nature. Anyone who has seen the upward swings of all of the graphs related to climate change, and who understands the risks involved in setting off an ecological avalanche, will consider our docile response as disturbingly absurd. Our lack of awareness and our lack of meaningful action cannot be explained if the Western world considers itself to be a genuinely open democratic and rational society. It is true that climate change is a non-sensory problem, it is true that climate change demands us to take some difficult decisions now for the sake of our long term future. However, we are capable of taking out insurance policies for our homes and cars using our ability to do some basic risk assessment, we are capable of planning for our retirement with pension plans after a balancing of short and long-term financial needs. We often walk out of the house with an umbrella when it is not raining because we are aware that the forecast is not that positive. Human beings have continually demonstrated that they are quite capable of acting rationally even if issues are abstract and located in the future. No books of philosophy are required to get governments to legislate against gas leaks in school buildings. It is so obvious. Any minister or local official who was responsible for allowing a major crater to be torn into a town centre and into the lives of the families of the school children, would face major criminal charges. And yet, there are still no adequate laws in place to stop the Earth’s most serious gas leak, the CO2 that will cause monumental global damage. Indeed, the world responded to the threat caused by CFCs to the Ozone layer with swift and effective action. The ‘Montreal Protocol’ was the first universally ratified treaty in the history of the United Nations. When all 197 parties signed the agreement on September 16th 1987, there had only been a gap of 14 years between the discovery of
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the problem by the Nobel Prize winning scientists, Crutzen, Molina and Rowland145,146 and the unified global response. Climate change, another atmospheric problem, has been understood for over one hundred years and it has been very well understood for decades, and yet it is taking hold of the natural world in our blind spot. The contrast between the world’s response to the hole in the Ozone layer and the level of our response to climate change requires an explanation.
Climate Change is playing in the wrong key The fact is that climate change does not have a place in the modern story. It just does not fit into the script, it is a problem that is jarringly discordant with the themes of our current society. Climate change is about natural limits in a world of artificially limitless appetites. It is about Enlightenment and Education in an age of Entitlement and Entertainment. It is about data and analysis in an age of the image and tweets. It is about global citizenship in an age of powerful nationalism and individualism. It is about long-term binding agreements in an age of short-term targets and intentions. At so many levels of our cultural currents, there is a strong pull against us getting a proper understanding of the demands of climate change. It is not surprising to find very few politicians who have the conviction and the guile to tack their political course against these strong cultural winds and tides in the fight for real climate justice. In the simplest possible terms, climate change has no place in a culture which is concerned with the ‘me’ and the ‘more’, the ‘new’ and the ‘now’.
145 Crutzen, Molina and Rowland were awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1995. Crutzen later commented that humanity had been extremely fortunate to only have a CFC problem and not a BFC problem. This is because if humans would have developed their industrial technology with BFCs instead, the problem would have been far worse. BFC emissions are 50-100 times more potent than CFCs and by the time the scientists would have identified the problem it would have been impossible to repair. Humanity lucked out, because the decision to go with CFCs was done in the dark. 146 On the science of the difference between CFC and BFC: “Stratospheric ozone destruction: The importance of bromine relative to chlorine”, J. S. Daniel, S. Solomon, and R. W. Portmann, “JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 104, NO. DI9, PAGES 23,871-23,880, OCTOBER 20, 1999”.
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We have been thoughtless about climate change because it is a problem that is at odds with so many of the preconditions of thought. All of this is not to claim some grand conspiracy theory. Just as every individual is reluctant to look at uncomfortable truths, it is no surprise to find society at large doing the same things. Indeed, these dominant cultural trends would have been in place with or without the inconvenient truths about the chemical properties of CO2, CH4, N2O and their other greenhouse gas friends hanging out in the atmosphere. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with consumption and entertainment, it is just that it has some very unlucky side-effects. Our cultural mind set was formed independently of climate shifts, and now we find ourselves with a serious conflict of interests. Doing what is Right just doesn’t feel right. The problem is simply that climate change is in the wrong key signature to the themes of modern culture. It doesn’t matter how correct and precisely Nigel Kennedy plays the beautiful violin stave of Vivaldi’s violin concerto in A major (Op.9, No.6) if he forgets to retune his G string to play one tone higher (technically a scordatura). No one would ever want to listen to such horrendously grating harmonies. It doesn’t matter how correct and precise the lines of scientific evidence are about the atmosphere if they don’t fit into the established modes of thinking in a culture. Few would want to listen to it. Better, then, to keep the two tunes apart. What we have then is a very particular kind of thoughtlessness with climate change. We have politicians talking about their commitments to economic growth without any references to planetary boundaries. We allow them to talk about their commitments to climate change, without a proper parliamentary challenge about exactly what progress has been made to tackle it. We have media campaigns about the evil of the plastic straws, but do not have them ask any meaningful questions about how the government is legislating to stablise levels of CO2 in the atmosphere at a level that is compatible with keeping average temperatures under a 2°C rise. Having big campaigns against plastic are worthwhile, because pollution and the purity of our food-chain are major issues, but they are utterly insignificant when compared with the problem of emissions and the threat of all of the major wheels of nature spinning off down the road. We have recently witnessed Australia announcing an investment of A$500m to protect the Great Barrier Reef in May 2018; the government points the finger at Crown-ofThorns star fish, and farmers pesticides. However, they do not mention the excessive carbon emissions from the highly developed nations, like Australia, who are in that
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club whose lifestyle is the overwhelming cause of the bleaching. In fact, Australia is a top ranking member of the UN High Developed club, it is in second place behind only Norway in first. Yet we keep the Very High Developed nations of the world safe under the illusion that they have a low level of responsibility for climate change by making efficiency and recycling the prominent words in climate change discussion. But when emissions are counted more equitably to include consumptive and historic emissions on a per capita basis, the sharply discordant truth is that the Very High Developed nations are accountable for 68% of global emissions even though they only represent 18% of the global population. More generally, when the two tunes of scientific reality and social reality are kept so far apart, an important question presents itself with urgency. It is a very legitimate question: “Which is more absurd, a university degree in Architecture that does not account for the laws of gravity, or a degree in Economics that does not consult the scientific laws that govern ecology?” For those who follow the news coverage of our political and economic plans, and who also follow the latest updates in scientific journals about climate change (and also rates of resource extraction), the dissonance between the two tunes is teeth-gnashingly awful. Arendt was a keen reader of Kafka and for those who have engaged in climate change at a more than a merely superficial level, the juxtaposition of science and our social reality provokes thoughts of Kafka’s work. Kafka wrote with such vividness, throwing his characters Gregor (Metamorphosis, 1913) and K (The Castle, 1926) into utterly absurd situations in which an important job needed to be done, but the world they inhabit was just limply unconcerned147. Just like every society in human history, we live with a heavily edited account of what is actually going on in reality. No society has ever been immune from ideology, and no society should take its eye off the interests of those who are in power. It would be naïve to think that humans had suddenly become immune to ideology and equally naïve to think that the controlling elites had become disinterested in how people think.
147 The fact that climate change depends heavily on the movement of bureaucracies to act also contributes to the Kafkaesque claustrophobia about the state we are in (and this overlaps with another of Arendt’s key concerns).
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The latter half of the 20th century saw an extraordinary set of powers come together to form a formidable block of interests, the multi-national corporations, the banks and the media. A shift in power that was especially entrenched after the financial market collapse in 2008 and the subsequent transfer of wealth to those in power148. These elites are not tasked with fighting climate change and, without adequate laws in place to guide their future investments and their planning, there is no short term reason why they would want to bring the issue onto the agenda voluntarily. They all have another agenda that demands attention. Although it does not feel like it in our everyday social awareness, when scientific research and cultural reality are placed side by side, it becomes shockingly obvious that a very heavily redacted version of the truth is in place with climate change. We are alarmingly thoughtless about it.
Two Cheers In the same year that Arendt published her major work on Totalitarianism, E.M. Forster published his, “Two Cheers for Democracy” (1951). Explaining the title of his book he writes, “… one [cheer] because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.” During both World War Two and his experiences in India, Forster had seen the “military jack-boot” of totalitarian power stamp on the “fragile flower” of “tolerance, good temper and sympathy”149; in response, he wrote in praise of individual flourishing. However, whilst Forster could celebrate in 1951, he remained acutely aware of how large the shadow of power loomed over any political system, including the democratic one. He therefore famously added this further line in explanation of his book title, “Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three.” There is little question that democracy is the best form of government that we have yet sustained. However, that is no reason to shut off any discussion about its weaknesses. Until now, Nature’s voice has only intermittently managed to break through the main theme tunes of our modern culture, only extreme weather events have punctuated the
148 It is claimed that this transfer of wealth was the biggest in human history (Film, “4 Horsemen”,Directed by Ross Ashcroft, 2012). 149 p62, “Two Cheers for Democracy”, E.M Forster, Mariner Books (1962)
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flow of news. Our democracies have not been forced to reconcile the conflicting lines of development that are quietly building up to an awfully dissonant climax. Climate change is the first radically sharp signal that human society is living in a completely unsustainable way on the planet. This is a serious weakness in our democratic societies that has to be acknowledged and addressed with urgency. We will hold back on our third cheer, for good reason.
Edward Bernays “... because you’re worth it!” (L’Oréal Shampoo) When Arendt was writing her book ‘On the Origins of Totalitarianism’ in 1951, those in power were still trying to make sense of the carnage of war. The first half of the 20th century had been a crushing blow to the Enlightenment understanding that human beings are actually rational. Despite our civilised exterior, it was evident that a turmoil of drives were at work in the human condition. Decision makers were rightly anxious about channelling humanity’s darker forces into a productive activity. Sigmund Freud, who developed his notion of the ‘death drive’ (in German, ‘todestrieb’) in observation of the trench warfare in World War One, had already attempted to map out this struggle between the impulsive and the civilised elements of the human condition150. He labelled the successful negotiation of repressed instincts as ‘sublimation’ (‘Sublimierung’). Freud explains that he had been impressed after reading about a young boy151 who was sadistically preoccupied with cutting the tails off stray dogs for the sheer fun of it. Yet the boy grew up to become a brilliant and noble surgeon who pioneered reconstructive surgery – thereby successfully sublimating his passions and doing something constructive for society.
150 The first extensive development of the ‘death drive’ is published in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920). 151 His name was Johann Freidrich Deffenbaugh, from Heinrich Heine’s, “Die Harzreise” (“The Harz journey”), published in 1826.
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Freud’s psychoanalytic theories were about to have an impact on the world on a scale that would go far beyond his therapeutic couch. This is because his nephew, Edward Bernays, had not only kept in close contact with his Uncle Sigmund and his psychoanalytic theories, he had also gained a position of tremendous influence in the USA. By the early 1950s, it would not be a grand overstatement to put forward the metaphor that Bernays had established himself as ‘The Wizard of Oz’ (1939) in the real Emerald City of Washington. The metaphor works nicely if “Oz” does indeed stand for either ‘ounce of gold’ or the O-Z folders inside the filing cabinets of the world’s most powerful bureaucracy - and also if the green glasses that are provided by the Wizard for the people to wear is a reference to the greenback paper money that gives everything an illusory worth. The ‘Big Idea’ that had a formative influence on the 1950s was that consumption could dull the primal dangers of the human condition. A consumer society would be too distracted and happy to go to war again. Under the wizardry of Bernays, thoughtlessness could be an asset; in the sense that a dummy (“pacifier”, USA) for a stressed and confused baby can sooth them and make the world a more peaceful place. The writer Olasky notes: “Bernays emphasized that in a large scale society there were only two choices: manipulation or social chaos. He saw history moving in a certain direction and public relations practitioners obliged to climb onto the locomotive.” The two World Wars had demonstrated how high the stakes were. Bernays himself explained the task of propaganda in his book “Engineering Consent” in 1947: “This phrase quite simply means the use of an engineering approach—that is, action based only on thorough knowledge of the situation and on the application of scientific principles and tried practices to the task of getting people to support ideas and programs”. The Nazis had used propaganda to scoop out the different voices of critical reflection in their citizens. For Arendt, superficiality and thoughtlessness were dangerous vices, as
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it made people vulnerable to exploitation and control. Bernays was going to transform propaganda into a virtue. In the Brave New World of the second half of the century, there would be thoughtlessness, but it would bring order and conformity, and it would be good for us.
“Public Relations” After World War Two, various phone-calls were eventually made to Bernays. This invitation to help shape the public consciousness in the USA provided him with a chance to fully establish the value of his work. One problem for Bernays had been the fact that after the fall of Berlin in 1945, and the suicides of the Goebbels family, investigators went through Josef ’s possessions. Among the Nazi trinkets and clothes, they found a copy of Bernay’s book, “Propaganda”. Written in 1928, it was the textbook on thought control. The Nazis had taken propaganda very seriously, and it was a book that had shaped Goebbel’s thinking and strategies. After Goebbel’s torrid use of the word, Bernays was forced to change the name of his craft to the colourless alternative, “Public Relations”. But colourless quite suited Bernays. It is ironic that the author of a book on propaganda that had such a pervasive impact on the modern world remains so unknown, especially because his Uncle Sigmund Freud spent so much of his energy trying to establish his own global reputation. In the first chapter of his original book, “Organising Chaos”, he writes: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. In almost every act of our lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons [...] who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.”
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Perhaps the thoughtlessness of consumerism has enabled us to avoid another global conflict; although the M.A.D. prospect of a Nuclear Armageddon is most often credited with helping us to avoid that fate. Perhaps trade and the promise of prosperity has significantly diverted some nations away from developing fewer democratic tendencies; however, China and Singapore stand out as two prominent examples to the contrary. Whatever the possible upside to Bernays’ sublimation of our carnal drives, whatever the benefits of Adam Smith’s invisible hand might have had in soothing our primal impulses, the problem is that consumerism has brought with it a weakening of our civic abilities. Writing in ‘The Human Condition’ in 1958, Arendt lamented “the heedless recklessness or hopeless confusion or complacent repetition of “truths”, which have become trivial and empty.” Arendt suspected that this phenomenon was widespread and as early as the 1950s, and she called it the “outstanding characteristic of our time”. This suspicion that Arendt had about that the increasingly trivial thinking of the Western world was an important early identification of a trend that gathered momentum in the decades that followed. These anxieties have strengthened in recent years with the surging influence of social media and mobile technology. There is no time for an extended examination of how smartphones have upgraded our thoughtlessness. These are still early days in the outsourcing of our minds. However, the most pronounced negative impacts of social media seem to be upon our civic skills. Briefly, Arendt would have particularly regretted the loss of different cultural voices in our head and the impoverishment of debate through the enlarging of our cultural silos. There are certainly some huge feedback loops in our media system, exemplified in one screeching moment of cultural feedback on ‘Fox News’ in April 2018. The evening show presenter invited President Trump, if he was watching, to flash his bedroom light on and off. He was watching, because live on air, he did. Fox News then proudly tweeted their scoop, which was inevitably retweeted by the President. Arendt would have noted the use of big data as an attempt to colonise our minds with influences for our consumption and votes. Perhaps most of all, Arendt would have been troubled by the reduction of democratic arguments into slogans that can fit into a tweet. As our culture has shifted decisively away from the word and moved towards the image, political battles are now fought in gifs and clips. They are fought with tribalism and emotive language, not through reason and exchange.
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Do we not live in a society that continually refreshes the present? Under the ideals of the ‘me’ and the ‘more’, the ‘new’ and the ‘now’, all other kinds of reality get pushed away. The lasting influence of Bernays could be observed in the advice offered by President Bush Jr. after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre on 9/11. Answering press questions, he commented: “We cannot let the terrorists achieve the objective of frightening our Nation to the point where we don’t conduct business, where people don’t shop. That is their intention. Their intention was not only to kill and maim and destroy. Their intention was to frighten to the point where our Nation would not act152.” This Freudian slip should not be taken too seriously, but it could be revealing of how acting authentically in our modern culture is reduced to mere consumption. The boundaries of our thinking are regulated by those in power, and the modern duty is to ‘Enjoy!’ or as SpriteTM once declared, “Obey your thirst!”. There are many riffs on this theme that appeals to the inner-self or the indulgent self, “because you’re worth it!” (L’Oréal). Whatever the details, there is a clear moral imperative to not deny yourself and to “consume!” and the other voices in our head are easily drowned out by these priorities.
Neil Postman delivers With childish simplicity, after really losing control of himself after a joke at the dinner table, my 7-year-old son Thibault said, “It’s funny isn’t it, when you really laugh, you can’t think”. When he is much older, I will be able to explain to him all the ways in which his remark would have been appreciated by Hannah Arendt (or Schopenhauer or the Frankfurt School). Indeed, when he is ready for it, I could also provide Thibault with a copy of Neil Postman’s prescient book “Amusing Ourselves to Death” (1985). It was written at a time when the technological advances of TV were having a major cultural impact; the subtitle is a telling one: “Public Discourse in a time of Show Business”.
152 Italics added.
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Postman writes with unusual insight about how the TV medium had made information subordinate to entertainment and he uses President Reagan, with his Hollywood background as an example. “Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death”. If only he could have lived to witness President Trump, it would have blown up the cathode ray tube in Postman’s mind. Although it has to be stated that Trump, in so many ways, is really just a madly distracting sideshow from the real action that is taking place systemically within our culture. Postman underlines the importance of the Word. This is because the detailed articulation that language enables in communication gives genuine depth to our understanding of each other and the world. It is what makes us human. In a striking passage from the first chapter of his book, he looks back to something he was taught as a child, The Decalogue, more specifically, Moses’ Second Commandment, ‘Do not make a graven image’ (Exodus 20:4-6). He writes: “It is a strange injunction to include as part of an ethical system, unless its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture”. The word is heavy, the image is light, but if our society loses its strength to communicate in words, in real dialogue, it makes us very vulnerable to various moral dangers. Postman writes: “Consider the primitive technology of smoke signals. While I do not know exactly what content was once carried in the smoke signals of American Indians, I can safely guess that it did not include philosophical argument. Puffs of smoke are insufficiently complex to express ideas on the nature of existence, and even if they were not, a Cherokee philosopher would run short of either wood or blankets long before he reached his second axiom. You cannot use smoke to do philosophy. Its form excludes the content”. Climate change is not a major news item because it is heavy in words, often scientific words. The spaghetti-like truths that appear when studying the causes and effects of a changing climate system could never be reduced to an emoji or to a casual tweet. My Ecology students have mobilised their school peers to make short, focused videos about climate change in order to draw attention to their own hardnosed journalism about the heavy facts. The difficult social reality is that articulate truths have to piggyback on entertainment to get any visibility. This problem is compounded by the
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fact that climate change is not really a topic to raise a laugh. Therefore, in order not to forsake the truth, many of the videos have resorted to irony in order to compress humour with the troubling facts of our situation.153
A Brave New World? In the opening lines of Postman’s book, he captures the same concerns about thoughtlessness and thought control that Arendt had with remarkable clarity and poignancy. He writes: “We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares. But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another—slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in ‘Brave New World Revisited’, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny, failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.
153 In November 2018, Pietro Gavinelli a Baccalaureate student won the ‘Best Short Film’ for the Duemila30 Festival in Milan. His film “S(no)w” can be seen on my Ecology students’ website: genzeco.org
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In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.” Such a powerful text deserves several slow readings, and I feel reluctant to hustle the reader onto the next section. All I can do is double tap the Enter key to create a bit of space.
2. Thought Control The return of Eichmann - The unexamined life of a Mass Murderer The comedian, author and social critic George Carlin put it like this: “It’s called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.” Thoughtlessness has been described (so far) as a mainly shallow and conformist phenomena; it is potentially deep in consequences, but rootless in reality. The moronic figure of Eichmann sat on trial in Jerusalem demonstrated just how far this banal form of evil could go. However, it must be admitted now that Arendt did not read everything about Eichmann correctly. Arendt did not get the full picture; it could even be argued that she was duped by him. This truth has been kept off the radar on purpose. Arendt had identified such an important moral truth in her view of Eichmann that it deserves to stand and it deserves to interrogate us. Yet In 2011, after years of research, Bettina Stangneth published an acclaimed work of history, “Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer”. This book overturned our understanding of what was going on in 1961. Stangneth pieced together and validated a set of interviews carried out by a Dutch Nazi journalist, Wilhelm Sassan, who had talked extensively with another Nazi living in Argentina during the 1950s named Ricardo Klement. These interviews would become famous as the ‘Sassan Interviews’, because the real identity of Ricardo Klement was
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Adolf Eichmann. What Eichmann said to his fellow Nazi émigré in Buenos Aires contrasted sharply with the image that he portrayed of himself in the trial in Jerusalem. Eichmann in Jerusalem presented himself as a small-time bureaucrat with no sharpened sense of ideology. Arendt writes, “Eichmann was not Iago, he was not Macbeth… Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all. And this diligence in itself was in no way criminal; he certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post. He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realised what he was doing… it was sheer thoughtlessness.” By contrast, Eichmann in Buenos Aires describes himself as a “fanatical warrior, fighting for the freedom of my blood” and he smugly signs photographs of himself as “Adolf Eichmann – SS -- Obersturmbannführer (retired)”. In the 796 pages of evidence forensically examined by Stangneth, he frequently boasts about his sadistic thuggery and the high profile and role that he played in the decision making of the Third Reich. When questioned in his exile about the deportation of 400,000 Jews from Hungary Eichmann responded, flushed with pride, “It was actually an achievement that was never matched before or since154.” Stangneth writes, “He dispatched, decreed, allowed, took steps, issued orders and gave audiences.” Stangneth’s Eichmann simply pretended that he was numb to the events going on around him during the trial. His strategic manipulation of his image during the trial was an agile trick in deception. Given the weight of evidence from the Sassan files, our understanding of Eichmann has been radically overturned. This level of deception not only shows his capacity for self-reflection and social awareness, it even shows that he had an excess of it. Stangneth’s new perspective on Eichmann does not invalidate the insights that Arendt had into the banality of evil, nor does it undermine her analysis of how totalitarian regimes can work. What her research does expose is how very clearminded commitments and ambitions can disguise themselves as bland, neutral thoughtlessness. It now looks like Eichmann dressed up his sick ideology with the camouflage of mindlessness. Worse, he even tried to pass off his actions as somehow
154 “Eichmann before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer”, B Stangneth (2015).
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noble. In one breath-taking passage of the trial, Eichmann tried to argue that he was fulfilling the Kantian Imperative because he was prepared to act ‘universally’. In his truly gross misuse of Kant, Eichmann claimed that he was doing something that anyone else would have done in his circumstances. It made Arendt choke. Stangneth’s update to Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann is very illuminating for climate change and the reality that lies beneath the surface of the political rhetoric. The indifference that the Highly developed nations show towards keeping emissions down to a sustainable level is not that mindless. It is in fact a purposeful indifference. The virtuous speeches, full of green sound bites, signal the right intentions, but the policy action lags an incredulous distance behind. Their noble words mask a very ignoble reality on purpose. At least Donald Trump is upfront and noisy about how much he “digs coal”. The previous chapter on ‘What is Real’ has shown how unreasonable the current situation is, the speed with which we are heading to an ecological catastrophe is such a stark reality that something more than just a carelessness must be at work. Thought control must be happening on a more purposeful level. A manufacturing of consent is taking place and the orders are coming from the top.
Manufacturing Consent When I am faced with the daily political challenge of getting my children into bed, I often ask them (in a motivational tone of voice) if they would like to brush their teeth first, or put on their pyjamas first. They are not yet old enough to realise that the superficial choice that they are offered is just a kindly manipulative gesture to get them to do what I want them to do. The strategy of closing down freedom, in the name of freedom, is a decent trick. The reason I am unashamed about manufacturing my children’s consent is that I am confident that my actions are motivated by a concern for their well-being. It might be true that the thought of a glass of red wine once the children have settled down to sleep might stray into the mind of a parent in those tricky twilight hours. However, the
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essential fact is that a parent is basically motivated by the well-being of their child who needs a lengthy night of rest. In the case of commercial companies, their adverts inviting people to enjoy their freedom, has all the moral depth of a TV game-show host. In 1976, under the Freedom of Speech155 (ironically), the United States released a number of controls on how much private companies could lobby members of congress156. A study by James A. Thurber in 2014157, estimated that $9bn was spent by major conglomerates and companies in attempts by an estimated 100,000 lobbyists to control legislation. Studies by the Washington Post158 and the Economist159 demonstrated that it was a ‘white hot’ investment160 when the rewards of that spending were mapped out. Labelling that $9bn as ‘lobbying’ and not ‘bribery’ makes many democratically minded American voters profoundly angry. The image of congress members spending hours a day flicking through their mobile phones trying to identify a rewarding source of funds is a truly dispiriting reflection. As we observed in the previous section on Bernays, the arranged marriage between politics and big business that he had presided over blossomed beautifully well. Our thoughtlessness about climate change in 2018 could be explained by the numbing of our political nerves. Now is the time for the fuller picture. The strength and motivation of massive economic power to block the shift to green, carbon free energy must not be underestimated. It is time for Bernays to show us “… how deep the rabbit hole goes” (The Matrix).
155 First Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. 156 Buckley v. Valeo, 75-436, 424 U.S. 1 (1976). 157 Lee Fang, March 10, 2014, The Nation, Where Have All the Lobbyists Gone? On paper, the influencepeddling business is drying up. But lobbying money is flooding into Washington, DC, like never before. What’s going on? 158 Brad Plumer (October 10, 2011). “The outsized returns from lobbying”. The Washington Post. January 13, 2012. ”Hiring a top-flight lobbyist looks like a spectacular investment”. 159 January 13, 2012. ”Hiring a top-flight lobbyist looks like a spectacular investment”. 160 Raquel Meyer Alexander, Stephen W. Mazza, & Susan Scholz. (8 April 2009). “Measuring Rates of Return for Lobbying Expenditures: An Empirical Case Study of Tax Breaks for Multinational Corporations” Retrieved 7 March 2013.
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Bernays is back Bernays had seen the power of propaganda to take a reluctantly isolationist America into World War One in 1917 first hand. He had worked for the Committee of Public Relations and engaged in what he described as, ‘psychological warfare’161. Following this affirmation of his understanding of mass psychology, he realised that “what could be done for a nation at war could be done for organizations and people in a nation at peace162”. Bernays then used his relationship with Freud and his astute understanding of public relations to work for various corporate interests, most notably American Tobacco. This company was a market leader, but their major problem was the existence of a strong social taboo about women who smoked. If Bernays’ strategies worked well, he could breakdown this taboo and thereby double their customer base. So, on Easter Sunday in New York, 1929, Bernays planted attractive163 women into the march who were smoking ‘Torches of Freedom’. He had also lined up the major media firms to capture their moment of social liberation. In 1923, women smoked just 5% of cigarette production, in the year of the march it jumped to 12%, eventually reaching 33% in 1965.164 In the 1920s, Bernays also helped to turn around the struggling sales in bacon by an appeal to people’s ‘well-being’. In an advertising campaign that used doctor’s endorsements, he not only transformed the profits of the Beach-Nut Packing Company, but he also managed to install into the American psyche the enduring idea that Bacon and Eggs defined the history of the ‘Great American Breakfast’. Although Bernays was dealing with trivial products like bacon, he was taken very seriously by those with corporate and governmental power.
161 Alan Axelrod, Selling the Great War: The Making of American Propaganda; New York: Palgrave Macmillan (St. Martin’s Press), 2009 162 Edward Bernays, Cutlip (1994), p. 168. 163 Models, but they were not too attractive, otherwise they would not be able to function as role models. 164 O’Keefe, Anne Marie, and Richard W. Pollay. “Deadly Targeting of Women in Promoting Cigarettes.” Journal of the American Medical Women’s Association 51.1-2 (1996). Web. 28 Apr 2010.
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Bernays goes Bananas The application of Bernays’ insights into mass psychology had demonstrated their commercial potential by attaching our primitive instincts for self-preservation, identity, sex and power to products. In the deep freeze of the Cold War, he was invited from New York to go to Washington as the government wanted to use his craft for a different kind of project. A problem was brewing in the United States’ sphere of influence in 1954, and they needed someone to lubricate public opinion. The problem was Guatemala. The nation had recently elected President Arbnez who was in favour of a moderate form of capitalism. His land reforms had increased agricultural productivity and inaugurated various levels of social care from education to health. Arbnez’s supporters had spent 10 years trying to build a democratic state from under the pressure of a corrupt dictatorship that took bribes from external landowners who had been exploiting the land and the people. Here was the problem. The external landowner was the “United Fruit Company”, a huge American firm that traded in bananas from Guatemala. The effects of Arbnez’s reforms were entirely negative on their profits. In 1954, Allen Dulles was a board member of the United Fruit Company, and he was also the head of the CIA. His brother John Foster Dulles was the Secretary of State, and he had previously served as a lawyer for United Fruit. For a company with annual profit margins of $65m165 to protect (a sum equivalent to $661m in 2017), Guatemala now posed a very real problem. For those with the power and resources to do something, the idea of invading a Banana Republic was just too tasty to resist. For a Guatemalan government with a gross state revenue that only equalled half the amount of United Fruits profits, the was only going to be one outcome. The CIA code-named the coup d’état, ‘Operation PBSUCCESS’166.
165 Immerman, Richard H. (1982). The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. 166 United Fruit is the only company known to have a CIA cryptonym, ‘UFCO’, ‘UNFC’ or sometimes, ‘UNIFRUIT’.
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It was a success. Only 9 days after the CIA-sponsored troops went over the borders, Arbnez resigned. It was as easy as peeling a banana. However, as the US administration was going to violate so many basic standards, they needed to identify a good cover story and find someone skilled enough to co-ordinate it. It was a job well-suited to Bernays, and so he orchestrated the extensive propaganda push to provide important cover to their military moves. Bernays got to work portraying Guatemala as an existential threat to the USA, he plugged the move into people’s fears about the USSR (especially after it acquired an H Bomb in 1953). For example, a few months after the victory, an event was organised by the United Fruits’ Public Relations department. Vice-President Nixon was joined on stage by the new dictator (Carlos Castillo Armas) and a huge collection of Marxist books - stacked up behind them. These books had allegedly been found in Arbnez’s central office. The truth was that after an exhaustive search, the only direct evidence of a link between Arbnez and the USSR was one singular receipt from a Moscow bookshop found by the CIA for $22.95 in the Guatemalan Communist Party office; a fringe party that only held 4 seats in the 58 seat parliament of Arbnez’s government167. (If anything, Arbnez had actually been inspired by Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ that pulled the US Economy out of the Great Recession.) Against this background, Nixon addressed the crowd and the TV cameras: “This is the first time in the history of world that a communist government has been overthrown by the people … and we are sure that under your leadership, supported by people, who I have met by the hundreds on my visit to Guatemala, that Guatemala is going to enter into a new era in which there will be prosperity for the people together with liberty for the people”. Nixon did not go on to fully explain what he meant exactly by the words, ‘prosperity’ and ‘freedom’. In another detail of this “Public Relations” exercise, Bernays graphically illustrated the Freudian roots of his thinking when he placed bananas into the hands of strategically selected celebrities who could endorse some of the rationale for the take-over. The
167 A full analysis of the episode can be found in the well-respected, Stephen C. Schlesinger, Stephen Kinzer (1982) “Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala”, Harvard University Press.
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hand-held banana. A perfectly phallic symbol of what was going on in the minds of US administration as they looked across the Caribbean Sea towards Guatemala in 1954.
Does some context help? My baccalaureate History students find this episode of the Cold War a little surreal. Their reading of the primary texts provokes numerous questions of qualification. They struggle to accommodate the strong democratic rhetoric of the United States during that period and their confessed respect for the rule of law with the violent overthrow of a government to install a dictator. The takeover of Guatemala has to be seen inside the paranoid context of the Cold War. By 1954, the FBI had carried out over 100 investigations through committees like HUAC into people suspected of links to the USSR (including a man called Charlie Chaplin), as McCarthyism had reached its high-tide mark in January of that year168. The US was fearful of a communist ‘domino effect’ starting in Latin America to mirror the one that Eisenhower had observed happening in Asia169. This context is not provided in order to excuse the naked economic interest that led United Fruits to lobby Congress for an invasion. However, it is revealing that the Cold War provided a generously soft environment for major companies to protect and expand their commercial interests. The Guatemalan coup d’état provides a bracingly clear example of how ideology, commerce and power can combine to attack democracy, even in a country which is so fervently outspoken about the importance of it.
168 Robert Griffith (1987). The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate. Univ of Massachusetts Press. p. 263. 169 China fell to Communist rule in 1949, then Korea in 1950 and it was threatening to happen in Vietnam in 1954, after the French losses in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu.
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There is nothing new under the sun Quite naturally, Adam Smith’s invisible hand has got some knuckles. Japan witnessed the strength of American trade interests when Commodore Matthew C. Perry parked his naval squadron into Tokyo Bay in 1853. He was equipped with high technology weaponry and he was there to complain in the strongest terms possible about Japan’s Sakoku period. The Japanese had enjoyed a period of extreme isolation from the rest of the world, with minimal trade and cultural exchange with the outside world for a full 222 years. There had been several requests to play ball, but Japan was not coming out to play - until Perry’s US warships forced them to. In 1856, the British Navy had returned to Hong Kong to start the Second Opium War with China. The UK was very frustrated that the Chinese only accepted silver in payment for their massive export of tea, porcelain and silk. So, in order to try to balance up the trade deficit, the UK wanted to force China to deal in opium. Opium was unsurprisingly an illegal drug in the UK, but getting over a quarter of all Chinese men addicted to the substance not only softened the trade deficit, it also softened the concentration of the Chinese army. Forcing the Chinese to take over 1,000 tonnes of hard drugs every year morally outraged Gladstone who would later remark as Prime Minister, “that a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated in its progress to cover this country with permanent disgrace, I do not know, and I have not read of ”. And finally, and for different trade reasons, the shortest war in human history happened in 1896. The 38 minutes of fighting on August 27th in the Anglo-Zanzibar war started at 09:02am. It cost the Zanzibar Sultanate around 500 lives and 2 boats, it cost the British navy squadron parked in the sea outside the capital a lot of shells and bullets. At the close of a very short day of play, the British had won the right to choose a new Sultan who was more favourable to their trading ambitions.
The White Man’s Burden Observing the very mixed map of Western history with a proper attentiveness to detail can help us to see some of the subplots in the present. Baccalaureate history students can find the past to be morally alarming, rather like discovering a dirty secret about an
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old family member. My former student Theresa Fuhrmann once remarked: “It is worse than finding out that Santa Claus is not real, it is like finding him downstairs fumbling around trying to steal some money out of your piggy bank”. “The White Man’s Burden (Apologies to Rudyard Kipling)”, Victor Gillam. Judge Magazine, 1st April 1899.
It is true that each of these 19th century incidents had their contexts, and these are just the simple headlines. Just as the aggression in Guatemala was justified by the setting of the Cold War, these three examples of gunboat diplomacy can be understood as the pain inflicted from ‘The White Man’s Burden’. However, this should not prompt us to look away with indignation at our past, as if it were something that had nothing to do with our human condition. The opposite is true. These moments in history are a useful reminder of how shockingly hypocritical every government and private interest can be in their global affairs. They illustrate how permanent the bond is between foreign policy and trade. Arendt would always insist that we listen to the different voices from the past in order to interrogate our current world order with some wisdom. A similar context frames the current geo-political struggles over climate change. The fossil fuel industry is set to lose billions of dollars and they are able to exert a tremendous weight of lobbying pressure on the governments of the world to slow down the transition to green energy supplies. The dominant themes of our dominantly consumerist culture continue to provide a soft environment for the very narrow interests of oil, gas and coal executives to keep their commercial interests in charge of public policy. The details of how the fossil fuel industry has strategically managed to sustain public support for its exclusive priorities will be exposed in some detail in Chapter 6 on Popper.
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The Paris Climate Accord committed virtually every nation in the world to keeping greenhouse gas emissions to a level that is compatible with a rise of ‘well under 2°C’, but foreign secretaries have been woefully slow in translating this ambition into anything remotely realistic. This is not because it would have a negative impact on trade, but because it would have a negative impact on the ‘wrong’ kind of trade. The first countries to suffer from this destructively myopic view of the economy will be the poorer nations, like Guatemala. Their democracy was overpowered in 1954 by military power, and after the US installed the authoritarian rule of Carlo Castillo Armas, the country eventually fell into a devastating civil war that lasted from 1960 until 1996. Such developing countries are the least well equipped to handle the offensives that Nature will now throw at their borders. History does not look back favourably on the 19th century trade deals. ‘The Black Man’s Burden’ was summed up well by celebrated investigative journalist Edward Morel in 1920. He had been instrumental in exposing “the horror, the horror”170 [sic] of Belgian King Leopold II’s genocidal trade in Congolese rubber: “In the process of imposing his political dominion over the African, the white man has carved broad and bloody avenues from one end of Africa to the other… what the partial occupation of his soil by the white man has failed to do; what the mapping out of European political “spheres of influence” has failed to do; what the maxim and the rifle, the slave gang, labour in the bowels of the earth and the lash, have failed to do; what imported measles, smallpox and syphilis have failed to do; what even the oversea slave trade failed to do, the power of modern capitalistic exploitation, assisted by modern engines of destruction, may yet succeed in accomplishing”171. Neither does History look back favourably on the Guatemalan coup172. Stripped of its Cold War narrative it is difficult to believe that economic interests could be so ruthlessly single-minded about bananas. What will history make of climate change once our
170 From Joseph Conrad’s “The Heart of Darkness” (1899) in which an ivory trader named Kurt whispers his final words, “the horror, the horror” as he remembers all the atrocities he has carried out and witnessed in the Congo. 171 “The Black Man’s Burden”, (1920) E.D. Morel. 172 Outside of the USA a clearly disapproving view was taken by both foreign governments and the foreign press. For example, the British Prime Minister Clement Atlee described it as, “a plain act of aggression”.
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own cultural blindness is removed? How will history students read the actions of our democratic governments who facilitated the continued profits of a handful of major companies at the expense of so many other lives? The irony of an outspokenly democratic country invading another to install a corrupt leader will be usurped by the irony of global governments seeking economic growth and pursuing energy policies that lead to a global economic collapse. As Arendt noted: “The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality.”
1. Thoughtlessness and 2. Thought Control… this time together Underneath the cheap slogans that came out of Eichmann’s mouth, there was a ruthlessly dark force at work. What lay behind Eichmann’s thoughtlessness was actually a grisly example of thought control. Looking at the trial in 1961 with these two, seemingly contradictory, aspects of his responses put face-to-face, it becomes an invitation for us to cross-examine our own society. It invites us to look at how our thoughtlessness might also leave us open to thought control. With respect to climate change, the shallowness of our civic attention has enabled various short-term interests to stall meaningful action. The current combination of thoughtlessness and thought control, is setting up our current world order for the most withering criticism from the people who will inherit the ecological disaster. This seemingly impossible combination of thoughtlessness and thought control is what makes modern culture very interesting to analyse. Philosophy enjoys paradox and apparent contradictions, and the state we are in with climate change is full of them. Perhaps with an apology for restating the central contradiction one more time – but it so remarkably easy to forget: How can our democratically elected governments allow a catastrophe, with the magnitude of unchecked climate change, to unleash itself on their citizens? How can elected leaders, with a mandate to protect the well-being of their people not inform their people of the most basic choices that they are making? The threat posed by climate change is just so appalling that once the conclusions of science are held in proper focus then another part of the brain simply cannot reconcile the lack of policy
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action with those truths. Maybe it is too absurd. Perhaps, we all just have a naturally child-like instinct to trust those in power? Perhaps we are just not prepared to accept a Kafkaesque world in which our symbolic order is so perverse and uncaring? So rather than doubt the government, we doubt the reality. As the carbon data demonstrated in Chapter One, we have not managed to stabilise greenhouse gas emission rates, let alone reduce them. We are only a fraction of the way towards a solution to climate change after 30 years of trying. The scientific consensus is so strong, all the hockey-stick arrows are pointing to a global disaster, and the projections are hardening into a grim outlook. The ‘little by little’ approach has failed but no-one is pointing out the failure. When this situation is genuinely considered, it just does not fit anywhere with our view of modern government. It is such a violation of common sense that it throws you back onto the evidence each time in order to reassess your thinking. Indeed, one of the darker aspects of teaching Philosophy and Ecology is that young teenage minds often see the artificial nature of political reality for the first time – and this awakening is often a hard one. Political philosophy can be shocking. It really does not matter if inaction with climate change is more a product of our thoughtlessness or more a consequence of thought control, the fact remains that this is a very odd time in human history.
3. Public Sphere - Private Sphere Social Blindness As explained in the first part of the introduction, one of the fundamental problems of climate change is that we are all naturally ‘Motion Blind’. We are just a bundle of experiences with no plan-view of what is going on, and so it is very demanding for us to see the pace of change and to make reliable connections between the dots of experience. In our ambition to see reality more fully, Science can help us overcome this blindness with the help of graphs and charts. Without it, our vision of reality would always be stubbornly rooted in the present, or in a confusing mash of data. It also seems that we are afflicted by a very similar problem that could be designated ‘Social Blindness’ because the same cognitive difficulties afflict our awareness of social
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reality. We are very forgetful of how things used to be and find it difficult to get a reliable sense of perspective. We are stubbornly rooted to our current social set-up, we get used to the wallpaper of our values and expectations. It is always a bit alarming to be faced with a different moral world that was once transposed onto the same physical area because our spontaneous moral responses to the world feel authentic and enduringly stable. For example, we have become so accustomed to a non-smoking policy on-board aeroplanes that it is a real jolt to see old TV footage of passengers sitting in familiar rows of seats, being served a gin and tonic by an air steward, but then sitting back and lighting up a cigarette. Whatever the social change, we tend to be very forgetful of the past. This forgetfulness gives the present a sense of permanence that it does not deserve. It also alienates the past from us so that we become rather deaf to its voice. Therefore, in order to help us overcome our ‘motion blindness’, Phillippe Rekacewicz (Geographer, Cartographer and Associate Researcher, Department of Anthropology - University of Helsinki) has produced some helpful maps. These maps are not of countries or continents, they are not maps of glacial decline or urban growth. On the following page you find examples of maps Rekacewicz made of the Gardermoen airport in Oslo. Rekacewicz has a similar set of maps for Christiansen Airport (near his home town of Arendal, Norway), Paris, Berlin and many others173. Clearly illustrated is a social truth about the growing incursion of the private sphere into the public sphere. Rekacewicz is a celebrated cartographer whose maps are rooted in scientific research. However, the following sequence of maps are not produced with the help of science, they just take a simple plan view of Oslo Airport. They were not compiled to help us navigate our way through physical space, they were made to help us understand our social space. But there is a parallel between his scientific maps and these type of maps, they are both attempting to make invisible trends, visible.
173 TEDx Talk,Arendal 2013 – P. Rekacewicz.
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This firsr airport map is from 2005: In green, on the left, is public area before the check-in control which leads to another large public area in blue. This seating area has a restaurant and bar, which looks out through open windows to the tarmac. At the back, is a small red area for Duty Free shopping.
In 2006 the airport was developed: Now the passengers enter through the security control and immediately enter a greatly enlarged shopping corridor. Any passenger, who wanted to avoid the opportunities of Duty Free Shopping, would have to squeeze themselves past the shopping trollies that stretch out to the left.
In 2007, the transformation of the airport was complete: The blue public space has shrunk to its minimum. For those passengers who want to get to their gate without any purchases, most of them will have to pass through the check-out tills empty handed with an apologetic shrug to admit their reluctance to buy something.
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Geographers are interested in identifying significant data and change, then producing clear representations of it. Rekacewicz spent over a decade as head of the cartographic department at GRID, an organisation that provides expert graphs and data for the United Nations Environmental Program. Their work was often used for the climate scientists in the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change). The climate charts and the airport plans are not unrelated. How we think about anything is embedded in a material, social context. We are all so used to walking through airport shopping areas on the way to our flight that it is hard to imagine a time in the recent past when the commercial space was less extensive. Of course, airport maps are not to be taken too seriously, but they do illustrate a general cultural shift that many people sense, sometimes images can make plain that which is so difficult to capture with prose. They are just three still shots of time, but they help us to make sense of the flux of everyday experiences that we have by taking a bird’s eye view of reality. As a long-suffering Manchester City fan, the time when football was organised without the global financial interests is something that I can only remember with any clarity if I browse through old match day programmes. The incursion of huge private interests into football might have made my home club into a world power, but the change has had many negative impacts on the sport in general. Spot the Ads! The markets are quite brilliant at achieving many diverse human ambitions. But accepting the benefits of a capitalist economy is categorically not the same as endorsing a capitalist society. There are some areas of public life in which the power and dynamism of the free market has given a properly defined space in which to work its magic. Lionel Messi can play mesmerising football on a standard pitch, and he would still be the best player in the world if he was given a football pitch that was a few meters narrower. Capitalism will always be highly creative, however big the space it is given to work in.
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We all accept that there should be legal limits for private industries that make food, because toxic food is so dangerous. By extension, we would all consent to legally binding limits for carbon emissions because a CO2 level well over 400ppm in the atmosphere is so dangerous. Climate change regulation is just as basic as this. It has nothing to do with any sort of Marxist conspiracy, it is simply about setting reasonable boundaries for the free-market. The twist that the airport maps illustrate is that the free market has a natural tendency to encroach on the space in our mind for thinking about these issues clearly.
The Human Condition (1958) These maps also offer a good introduction to the third book by Arendt that could help us to understand Climate Change, ‘The Human Condition’. It is a book in which Arendt explores the differences between public space and private space. She looks back to Antiquity when there were clearly defined boundaries between that which was the ‘Public Sphere’, and that which was ‘Private Sphere’. It is a very demanding and complicated work of philosophy and it requires too many qualifications for the details of her book to be of use here. Arendt spends many pages contrasting the Ancient Greek and Roman understanding of the public and private realm with the modern world that functions in what she calls the ‘Social Sphere’. What Arendt admires about these ancient societies is that they clearly demarcated a strong line between any private interests and any public interests. Private affairs, concerned with the economy of the household including the land, the property, slaves and everything else, got left behind when the man entered into the public buildings of the city to debate the affairs of the polis. This is not to say that this is an endorsement of some of the violence and abuse that was carried out under the ‘alpha-male’ command of the private realm; instead, for Arendt a meaningful public space could only operate once all material concerns had been transcended. Arendt took particular aim at the notion of ‘public opinion’ as it gave importance to some kind of loose aggregate thought. The public interest was something utterly distinct. It was something that could only properly be worked out through direct and - 188 -
vigorous debate in a public space when people consider matters that lie far beyond private worries. For Arendt, the public interest had nothing to do with a vague common denominator, or sum, of private interests. For any reader familiar with Kant’s ethics, his use of the word “autonomous” is a helpful starting point for understanding Arendt’s view of the difference between ‘public’ and ‘private’ actions and realms. For Kant, “autonomous” acts carry a moral nobility because they have an intrinsic worth and pay no regard to private interests. By contrast, “heteronomous” acts that are simply products of desires, or traditions and customs. When we think and legislate in a genuinely public sphere then we are creating something uniquely valuable, and something beautifully human. Arendt gave our ability to transcend ourselves to work towards justice, equity and freedom a central importance. Any examples of human solidarity characterised by such values and ambitions she labelled as “Acts”. The key point that Arendt wants to establish is that the modern world has strangled the human ability to ‘Act’. The mixing of the public and the private spheres, with its increasing bureaucratic and technological machinery, has led to an atomised and rootless society that struggles to Act. As with ‘thinking’, Arendt has a very particular understanding of what it means to ‘Act’. She means the ability to debate and reflect with genuine liberty and depth. ‘Acting’ for Arendt was the type of activity that makes us truly human174.
The difference between Acting and Acting. After reading Arendt, the word ‘acting’ has two opposite meanings. Acting as defined by Arendt is a genuinely free action that is borne out of values and reflection. It is our capacity to rise above ourselves and social forces that makes us unique as humans. This stands in total contrast to the usual meaning of the word in which someone is just following the lines of a script. Just how free we are to ‘Act’ in a world that seems so heavily scripted by commercial interests was explored in the seemingly superficial, but surprisingly provocative film, “The Truman Show”.
174 To be contrasted with ‘Work’ and ‘Labour’ (again each with its own very specific meaning).
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Are you on The Truman Show? In 1998, millions of people watched “The Truman Show” from the comfort of a cinema seat, waiting to find out if Truman (Jim Carrey) would eventually see that he was living in a virtual world. Truman, an insurance salesman, lives the ‘American Dream’ in a place called Seahaven Island. He has no idea that the horizon of the sea actually meets a painted studio wall, onto which clouds are projected. He has never seen any of the thousands of hidden cameras, and he has no idea that all of the people in his life are acting. Truman is the unwitting star of a reality TV show that is screened 24/7 to an audience around the globe that can buy any of the products that they see on the set. All of the actors in his life must keep Truman from asking too many questions about the world beyond Seahaven Island. When in school he declares his boyhood ambition to become “an explorer, like the great Magellan”, his teacher shows him a map of the world and regretfully says, “well, there really isn’t much left to explore”. When Truman sees a large studio light accidently fall from the roof of the studio onto the pavement in front of him, the incident is explained away on the radio news in his car as he drives to work as “a plane shedding parts”. The day when they faked the death of his father at sea, it wove a very useful aquaphobia into Truman’s mind so that he would be fearful of sailing too closely to the edge of the studio. The clipped lawns and bright white picket fences, the sunny smiles of the actors, all keep Truman happy enough for a while. However, human curiosity eventually emboldens him to to get into a boat that sails through a manufactured storm and finally the spikes through studio wall. After walking along the outer rim of the studio (that used to function as the horizon), he finds the short steps that take him up to the ‘Exit Door’ of his commercial space. After his final words to the ‘Big Other’ in the sky, he takes a bow, and walks through the door into the real world.
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In 2006, Joel Gold (MD) a psychiatrist at the New York University School of Medicine reported in an academic lecture that he had observed 5 cases175 of schizophrenia in which the patient believed that they were stars of a similarly styled reality TV show. One man (Case 2, Mr ‘B’) had become so deluded that he travelled to New York to climb the Statue of Liberty in the belief that after a dramatic reunion with his high school girlfriend, he would be released from the show. The British Journal of Psychiatry176 confirmed its own cases of a condition that is now commonly known as ‘Truman Syndrome’. As with the case of patient ‘LM’ from Munich who suffered from ‘Motion Blindness’, those afflicted by the ‘Truman Syndrome’ in some perverted way, might have a more telling view of reality. Their predicament enables them to see beyond common sense. We live out our lives inside a world that is set up to keep us focused on certain interests, through key methods of temptation and distraction. Truman enjoys his world, he grows up in a secure and loving environment. Seahaven Island is prosperous and the relationships he builds are not without some authenticity. There is no obvious need for Truman to wrestle with the truth behind the appearance. If Truman, his friends and family are happy, if all the people employed by the show and the viewers are happy, then what is the problem? There are many arguments that could be advanced in support of the sanitised and communal life that Truman lives in. However, the problem is that Truman’s curiosity about the world is always siphoned away by those managing the show. The greater his curiosity, the more heavily manipulative the control has to be. Truman is not as free as he thinks, the major truths about his life are withheld from him. The Director of The Truman Show, who controls the show from his ‘The Lunar Room’ above Seahaven Island, has to keep Truman happy because the whole reality show can only continue to draw in huge revenues if he stays inside the illusion of his fabricated world.
175 The full paper was eventually published with his philosopher brother Ian Gold: Gold, J. & Gold, I. (2012). The “Truman Show” delusion: Psychosis in the global village. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 17(6), 455472. 176 Fusar-Poli, P., Howes, O., Valmaggia, L., & McGuire, P. (2008). ’’Truman’’ signs and vulnerability to psychosis. British Journal of Psychiatry, 193, 168.
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When Truman walks through the exit door, into the ‘real world’, it is a moment of liberation. Ironically, all the people on “The Truman Show”, watching ‘The Truman Show’ cheer and fist-pump at his moment of freedom, whilst watching TV themselves; a moment of pathos that becomes even more ironic when we think about ourselves as observers watching them… It is not easy to see how much our social reality is a fabrication. In an odd way, caricatures often open up the truth about reality by distorting it.
Back to the Airport In an airport, there can be the mild irritation of not being able to get your preferred food or drink, your regular newspaper; an untimely flight will mean that a major sport event passes you by. But these are just temporary problems, you will soon be out of the secured zone back into the wider world. But what if the wider world is not wide enough? What if the news coverage of reality is still limited? What if all the major news organisations are run according to private interests and public ones? What if the major truths about our economy are withheld? In China, thousands of people who can afford to go abroad on holiday buy a VPN service whilst they are away to be able to access a fuller range of news and information once they are back home. Westerners who visit China have good reason to question why the Chinese have very limited press freedoms and closely controlled civil liberties. Westerners enjoy a free press and a huge range of civil liberties, but in the case of climate change, although we have a formal freedom of the press – in reality, very few meaningful questions are ever asked about the critical details outlined in the first section about ‘What is Real?’. In his book, “Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies” (1989) Noam Chomsky writes bitingly about the narrow bandwidth of the modern media: “Debate cannot be stilled, and indeed, in a properly functioning system of propaganda, it should not be, because it has a system-reinforcing character if constrained within proper bounds. What is essential is to set the bounds firmly. Controversy may rage as long as it adheres to the presuppositions that define the consensus of elites, and it should furthermore be encouraged within these bounds, thus helping to establish these doctrines as the very condition of thinkable thought while reinforcing the belief
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that freedom reigns”177. Chomsky backs up his claims about the boundaries of the free press through a detailed empirical map of the frequency of various news items and an analysis of what information is withheld. He reminds his readers that any news group today gets most of its revenue from advertising, and not from sales or subscriptions, this gives the companies behind the adverts highly influential control over the editor. Indeed, major media groups cannot afford to lose access to major inside sources, and so there are many implicit rules of engagement between the two parties about press releases. For anyone who might remain a little dubious about the freedom of the press in their coverage of climate change, then the challenge is to identify any realistic coverage of the emissions gap, or any open questioning of where the responsibility for emissions lies. The more you look, the more you realise that it is not there. Doing a search like this puts you in some good company: “One day when Pooh Bear had nothing else to do, he thought he would do something, so he went round to Piglet’s house to see what Piglet was doing. It was still snowing as he stumped over the white forest track, and he expected to find Piglet warming his toes in front of his fire, but to his surprise he saw that the door was open, and the more he looked inside the more Piglet wasn’t there”178 (A. A. Milne, 1928)
Control experienced as freedom ‘The Truman Show’, graphically illustrates how our public space can be dominated by private interests. Freedom is suppressed in the name of freedom. The first half of the twentieth century was characterised by our escape from centralised control, but in the name of toppling authority we have excavated too much. This freedom has gone too far in the name of Liberalism. What started out as an ambition to be open and nuanced about the truth has mutated, and a very odd form of totalitarianism has returned. It is the totalitarianism of ‘freedom’, the imperative to only hold loose opinions, a totalitarianism of tolerance – if that makes any sense. In our new social space, we
177 Chapter III: The Bounds of the Expressible (p. 48), Necessary Illusions. 178 ‘House at Pooh Corner’, A.A. Milne (1928) Chapter One, “In Which A House Is Built at Pooh Corner for Eeyore”.
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are encouraged to live without critical thinking and to float freely in the world of the senses and the self. In an age when dogmas were not easily challenged, Immanuel Kant defined the original goal of the Enlightenment as an ‘escape, a self-incurred tutelage’ through the fostering of autonomous reasoning. Now that we have cut ourselves free, the ambition has morphed into an individualism that is caged by sentiments and customary thinking. Thinking clearly about climate change means that we need to win back some genuinely public space. Like Truman, we need to be determined to find the exit. Or as Chomsky wrote, “citizens of democratic societies should undertake a course of intellectual self-defense to protect themselves from manipulation and control, to lay the basis for more meaningful democracy”179.
4. Hopelessness Relativism – the Polish Corridor of Truth Arendt noted how the Totalitarian regimes of Stalin and Hitler functioned by atomising their populations and knee-capping their hopes. However, the hopelessness that many people feel today is not the intense powerlessness that overpowers the mind of someone looking down the gun turret of an armoured tank, confronting a high prison wall, or stealthily avoiding the prowling threat of a secret police force. Today’s Western hopelessness is more banal, it is rooted in a type of cynicism. Such a claim requires proper sociological study. However, there has been a cultural move significant enough for the Oxford English dictionary to name “post-truth” as the word of the year in 2016. This was followed by Collins announcement of “Fake-news” as the word of the year in 2017. Indeed, Collins picked their word out of their body of a 4.5 billion-word register because it had spiked 365% since 2016. ‘Alternative facts’ seem to be ubiquitous. Propaganda is as old as human society, but the particular power of the current ideology is due to the fact that it does not present itself as a ‘paternal voice’. The modern ideology
179 Chapter I: Democracy and the Media (p. 8) Necessary Illusions.
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does not function like a megaphone, it does not try to persuade or coax. It does not even set itself up for any kind of dispute or challenge. ‘Post-Truth’ politics dismantles the entire system of meaningful debate and accountability. Instead of a boxing ring where real punches are thrown under established rules, today’s politics seems to be played out in the style of wrestling in a bouncy castle, where you cannot really stand up anywhere that has a firm base and without any rules the whole thing is rather farcical. Climate change requires complex economic and social choices, policy decisions need to be negotiated in acknowledgement of the rules of science. The reason why this introduction started by explicitly rejecting moral relativism might now become a little clearer. The moral relativism that pervades our modern culture seems just like common sense, it seems harmless and even positively tolerant. However, the deep end of it is genuinely dangerous. Putting our own sentiments and intuitions as the final judge of truth claims serves to equalise everything, not allowing any truths to stand up more prominently than others, it just flattens our view of reality. This flattening creates a ‘Polish corridor’ for powerful forces to move through. Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin understood the impact of their forces were strengthened by taking advantage of the flat landscape in Poland, which is why they pushed their advances through that vulnerable country. The winners in flat political landscapes will be those empowered with rhetoric, emotional impact, tribal appeal or just simply those with the most spending power to occupy the social space. The losers are those who are concerned with dealing with complex truths, accountability, and transparency. Simply, those who are concerned about the fundamental conditions of a democracy. Arendt noted ‘The Origins’ in 1951 as: “A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible, world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything is possible and that nothing was true. The mixture in itself
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was remarkable enough, because it spelled the end of the illusion that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and cynicism the vice of superior and refined minds. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness”. After Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremony in January 2017 sales of Arendt’s book, ‘On the Origins of Totalitarianism’ spiked so much that Amazon briefly ran out of stock. It is worth remembering the fact that Donald Trump is the first US President to also be included in the World Wrestling Entertainment’s (WWE) Hall of Fame. In the pay-per-view ‘Wrestlemania 23’ (in 2007) Trump was suited up and throwing money into the crowd, whilst his appointed wrestler Bobby Lashley performed Slam Dunks, Chop Drops and Stinger Splashes. In many respects, Trump had taken his experience of Wrestling into the political ring. He embodies the glitz and the poverty of our current politics. With total assets in excess of approximately $600m, WWE is a major business that works hard to keep the storylines rolling and the seats full. Many viewers of WWE know that it is all fake, they enjoy the simulation and showbiz of it all. And just like with fake news, there are some ardent fans who cannot distinguish the line between fiction and reality. This ambiguity is essential to the proper functioning of both WWF and fake news. In an interview with the French writer Roger Errera in 1974, Arendt commented: “The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer… And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived, not only of its capacity to act, but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please”. - 196 -
Hopelessness and Hope Arendt does not leave her philosophy as simply an observation of hopelessness, her PhD, ‘Love and St Augustine’ (1929) is a work that she returns to throughout her life. In it, Arendt affirmed that humans are capable of transcending such cul-de-sacs through their capacities for reflection and transcendence. This fuller view of the human condition can easily be forgotten during times of stifling cultural forces – but her work on Augustine is a reminder that it is precisely in situations when these forces are at their strongest that humans create new beginnings out of the wreckage. Arendt, so difficult to categorise, could be understood as the philosopher of ‘natality’. As with Nietzsche in the previous chapter, when a thinker who has explored the darker depths of the human condition is able to sustain a philosophy of hope and transcendence it really means something significant. Engaging with a philosophy that takes us beyond clichés and common sense inevitably drags up some deep issues about humanity, but this extra bandwidth in the heart and mind also enables us to be reborn, both as individuals and as a society.
5. The danger of “Pure Thought” For Arendt, Eichmann acted without thinking, but Arendt was also very concerned about the reverse danger. Namely, thinking without acting. From her earliest studies, Arendt had been devoted to understanding Ancient Greek philosophy. The urgency with which Arendt wrote about Eichmann is informed by a close attentiveness to the ancient Greek thinkers. She greatly admired Socrates, and regretted the advances that Plato had made to his tutor’s teaching. Socrates represented the greatness of mankind as social and rational creature. By contrast, Plato represented the retreat of rational people into the self. Arendt saw Socrates as the last great philosopher and citizen. Socrates embodied, as he walked around the ancient Agora in his bare feet and grubby clothes, the fundamental virtues of a healthy society. He was someone who directly engaged people in robust debate in a public space, and helped people to negotiate between plural perspectives. As Socrates willingly took the cup of hemlock from the hand of his executioner, he planted himself right into the centre of public life. Critics would say that this was the ultimate act of exhibitionism, but Socrates remains standing as an icon of absolute
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engagement with the polis. Arendt argued that his life was remarkable for how boldly he underlined the importance of dissent and consent. In stark contrast, after witnessing the traumatic death of his mentor and friend in 399BC, Plato then took flight into an inner world. Perhaps it was a predictable move, not only had democracy crassly voted to extinguish the life of the luminary Socrates, it had also allowed its passions to pull the state into a catastrophic war with the Spartans; a war that provided the backdrop to Plato’s early life. The polis had continually shown itself to be both foolish and dangerous. However, his inward move is one that Arendt vehemently opposes. Arendt argued that Plato’s attempt to reach beyond the real world, to the high abstractions of the Forms, had degraded the active life. She deeply lamented the loss of the public market place of ideas, in which people argue, wrangle and exchange their opinions away from their private interests. For Arendt, the Platonic turn away from plurality and action to solitude and inaction had reduced people from a ‘We’ to an ‘I’.
It was a failing that Arendt, a secular Jew, held against her lover and Nazi-sympathiser, Martin Heidegger. Their steamy affair over several years was made even more untenable when Heidegger accepted the Rectorship the University of Freiburg in 1933 and joined the Nazi Party shortly after. Philosophy should not lock itself away from reality in pure thought. The retreat into the self is something that is encouraged by the technology of the mobile phone. As a final example, coffee bars used to be the place in which the grand new ideas of the day were discussed. The customers conversations were often stimulated by fresh ideas that came in from distant lands on the back of trade. However, our modern coffee bars have been made much quieter as people sit in close proximity to each other, but each of us look into our globalised mobile phones.
Bleaching Arendt’s continual concern in her writings is about maintaining a plurality of voices in our heads. The atomisation of society that was so brutally imposed by the Nazis and by the Soviet regimes led to a polity in which there was no debate, no real exchange between people.
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Dividing this book into separate chapters on different philosophers provides a framework for tackling different aspects of climate change. This structure also allows the student of philosophy to pursue a particular interest or thinker. However, the most important reason for structuring the book like this is to open up a wide conversation with ourselves. Philosophy provides a rich family tree of history and culture to look back on and learn from. It affords the possibility of having a sustained conversation with our past. A society that is engaged in a genuine dialogue with itself is much more robust and resilient. Each philosopher wrote in a context, and the dialogue that the thinker held with their world is part of a rolling conversation that we need to uphold. Arendt’s philosophy, so difficult to categorise, could be loosely summarised with the insight that we enter into the world through thought, articulate thought. How we think is not a secondary action in a human life, for Arendt it was a primary one. Eichmann’s mind had been bleached by Nazi ideology, he had no other voices of history in his head. With Nature’s forces mobilising to act against us, we cannot afford to be banal in our response.
Conclusion Being tactless Philosophy should not be comfortable. It puts you on the outside of common sense. Arendt explicitly, and often tactlessly180, contrasted her work with the focus of the general media and the chief prosecutor, Gideon Hausner. This made her seriously unpopular. This was because they were occupied with the individual tragic testimonies that Eichmann had ordained at his desk, and it just seemed very inappropriate to approach his trial with a highly abstract agenda. It was 1961, and the Holocaust still had a powerful sensory impact. The scars of grief were wide open, especially in the edgy consciousness of the newly formed State of Israel. Her detractors had a point,
180 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1963/02/16/eichmann-in-jerusalem-i For example, Arendt had always preferred a ‘homeland‘ for the Jews in Palestine rather than a state. And she cynically wrote, “Clearly, this courtroom is well suited to the show trial that David Ben-Gurion, Prime Minister of Israel, had in mind when he decided to have Eichmann kidnapped…” in the first lines of her report for the New Yorker.
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but Arendt was never attempting to undermine the gravity or the sheer horror of the Holocaust; she was just trying to gain a foothold of understanding into arguably the greatest tragedy to hit the human race. The opposite psychological problem with climate change is now the case – because the whole reality of it is so far from our senses, and the worst consequences are in the future, we cannot bring ourselves to make a well-reasoned response to it. The fact that 400,000 Hungarian Jews were sent to their deaths in the final death throes of the war is a cold, brutal statistic that carries much more psychological impact than the estimated 250,000 deaths per year that scientists have calculated occur as a direct result of climate change now. Indeed, the scientific projection181 that 5 billion people will live under the continual threat of severe drought by 2050 due to climate change is a reality that remains beyond our most immediate concerns. Even if this situation will lead to several million avoidable deaths, the emotional immediacy of it all remains missing. Climate change demands an immediate, radical, legal and political response. The laws of physics, chemistry and biology are tactlessly correct in their unchanging reality. It is humans that have to do all of the adjusting, and we need people to tactlessly say this in their texts and tweets, in their coffee bars and in the streets. It needs to be said in parliaments. Most importantly, this book will argue, the truth about climate change needs to be taken to the courts. Arendt interrogated common sense and she helps us to ask the hard questions of our own time. Thomas Paine will do the same in the following chapter.
181  http://www.unwater.org/publications/world-water-development-report-2018/
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Space for your own reflections:
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Chapter Four - Common Sense On the Edge with Thomas Paine
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The New World, 1774 A New World, 2016 On the brink, 1774 A Tipping Point, 1775 On the brink, 2017 A Tipping Point, 2050?
207 211 212 213 216
The Central Problems 1. A conceptual problem 2. The problem of Treason 3. The problem of Justice 4. The problem of the Media 5. The problem of Unity
219 220 222 229 234 240
Thomas Paine - No summer Solider The truth at what price? A close shave in France
244 245
Conclusion Finding a decent vantage point Paine – the forgotten prophet of the New World Paine – the Radical Realist
247 249 251
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Chapter 4 On the Edge with Thomas Paine
The New World November 30th, 1774. Thomas Paine, a straight-talking English philosopher, walked off a boat and stepped into a land that was on the edge of revolutionary change. Paine would soon write a work of philosophy so forceful and so direct that it would turn the tide of public opinion towards a revolution, towards the American War of Independence. His pamphlet, “Common Sense” remains the best-selling work in American history182. Paine invited his readers to see the plain truth that the British rule of the colonies was as absurd as it was unjust. “Why is it that we hesitate? From Britain, we can expect nothing but ruin. If she is admitted to the government of America again, this continent will not be worth living in”. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, has not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand, and a race of men, perhaps as numerous as all Europe contains, are to receive their portion of freedom from the events of a few months”. In the build up to the War of Independence, there were clearly visible signs of stress between the 13 mainland colonies and London. In the year before Paine arrived, on December 16th 1773, chests of East India Tea had been thrown overboard into the Boston harbour. “No taxation without representation” they protested. Yet, despite
182 In terms of today’s American population base, it would have sold around 150 million copies.
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their various and serious grievances, the colonists were not talking about a revolution. Pamphlets and books published prior to ‘Common Sense’ merely discussed ‘difficult constitutional questions’. The talk was about rebalancing the system, finding a new equilibrium and modifying the power relations between parliament, the king and the colonies. Different factions wanted to tinker with the system in different ways. Colonial rule was disputed amidst a muddle of facts, figures and sentiments. Talk about independence was muted. Even once hostilities had started in the skirmish at Lexington, those caught up in the swirl of events did not have a clear vision of the end game. Thomas Paine was not for tinkering. Paine was a non-conformist, the son of a Quaker man183, who looked at the world from a different, radically egalitarian angle. He could only see one inevitable conclusion to the events that were happening around him. He thought that the United States of America (a phrase he coined) could and should stand on their own two feet. His work, written in simple and convincing English, provided the colonists with a plain view of the mess they were in and galvanised them to do something about it. “THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.” (The Crisis, 1776). The hundreds of dead bodies that lay dead on the battlefields of Camden and Brandywine are a clear testimony to the resolve that the colonies needed in order to gain independent control of their own land. The tyranny of the British was not easily conquered. Those who observed the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4th 1776 would have to wait 7 long years for those ideals to be inscribed into the real world as the Treaty of Paris was agreed upon in September 1783.
183 ‘The only boy who could ever teach me…’
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The physical fight for control of the new world was mirrored by a psychological battle, especially in the early years of the conflict. Thomas Paine was on the front-line of this battle. In order to move the colonists past just tinkering with British rule, Paine had to challenge the arguments about British power at a much more significant level than just the vocabulary of dispute; he had to change the fundamental grammar of the debate. Paine was a genuinely great thinker because he was able to identify points of real leverage amidst all the disputes about the details. He attacked two common sense notions that colonists held. A primary line of attack focused on the hazy confidence the colonists had in their future, a vague assurance that the problems they faced would sort themselves out. Paine mocked their confidence given that it was simply based on the principle that they had prospered in the past. It is understandable that most of the colonists were reluctant to engage in the violent overthrow of the regime that had brought them so much prosperity. Why should they be so bold as to take on one of the most successful and powerful political empires in the world? Why step way out, so far from a well-trodden path that had brought so much prosperity? A basic human instinct is to stick to what you know you have, rather than to risk it on possible future gains. Modern psychology calls it ‘Status Quo Bias’, which is not a preference for 3 chord music and a perm, but a known feature of human decision-making which tends to perceive any change as a loss. It must have seemed like a major gamble for the colonists to bite the hand that had fed them so well in the past. But Paine wanted to overthrow the belief that their future happiness was necessarily tied up with the mother nation. He wrote: “Nothing can be more fallacious than this kind of argument. We may as well assert that because a child has thrived upon milk, that it is never to have meat, or that the first twenty years of our lives is to become a precedent for the next twenty.”
Another major idea he took on concerned the notion of ‘Kingship’ that badly dulled the colonists’ minds from seeing the injustice of their situation. The colonists were proudly British and the notion of Kingship fitted comfortably with their strong Biblical convictions. As earnest readers of the Old Testament, they would have noted how God - 205 -
establishes earthly Kings as the hub of his interface with his chosen people. There was also a pleasing symmetry between the divine rule over creation and a kingly rule over a nation. Moreover, after ditching the Pope, it was one way that many Protestants could make the Earthly City look like the ‘City of God’ again.
George III
However, for the iconoclastic Paine, the simple truth was that having a hereditary monarch was as stupid as having a hereditary mathematician or a hereditary poet, a remark so pointedly correct that it requires no further comment.
It is possible to identify the two main threats that were converging on the Feudal order at the end of the 18th century in this double line of attack. Firstly, in the American colonies, a wealthy middle class was prospering in an age of burgeoning commerce and trade, and they now had the strength to push the monarchy aside. Secondly, in France, an Enlightened middle class did not see the point in having a monarchy in an ‘Age of Reason’ and they just needed the tenacity and single mindedness to get rid of it. Thomas Paine would play a pivotal role in the American Revolution and he would also participate in the French Revolution a dozen years later. The Revolutionary period of the late 18th century was one of biggest hinges in human history. As Wordsworth famously put it, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!”.184 Being a monarch at this time could be much less fun. It is no polemical exaggeration to say that we too stand on the edge of a new world today. The difference is that our maps will not be redrawn by military victories, but by the colossal forces of nature.
184 ‘The French Revolution as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement’, W Wordsworth.
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A New World September 15th, 2016. Aidan Colton, a climate scientist, walked into his workplace at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. A research facility that measures the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere to an accuracy of 1 part per million. The readings that day confirmed the fact that the level had remained above 400 ppm, a concentration unprecedented in 3-5 million years. The clicking of the mouse in that research lab, which brought up the screen of data had none of the drama that followed the clicking of the trigger as the first shot was fired in the battle of Lexington. However, the consequences are much greater. The reading of 400ppm, alongside the measurements and graphs from a huge range of scientific enquiries, all confirmed one uncomfortable conclusion: The birth of a new world was now at hand. We stand on the edge of a new world that is not compatible with human society as we know it.
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The most recent 11,700 years of Earth’s history are known to geologists as the Holocene. Within it, human beings have been able to construct their civilisation under a highly stable and benign climate. However, since the start of the Industrial Revolution, we have been ratcheting up the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. The average surface temperature of the planet has tracked this exponential rise. The significance and the depth our human print on the natural world has led to the strange sight of geologists getting out their pens to prepare a new label for planetary history - in the present. This new world will be known as the Anthropocene. Ironically, the moment that we finally get to put our name on the front door of our home is the same moment at which it becomes uninhabitable. The Anthropocene will be a dangerous place for humans. Climate change has become a familiar phrase, but this familiarity betrays the existential threat it poses to human society. Climate change is not about Polar Bears or flash floods, it cannot be fixed by recycling or turning off light bulbs. It is a far more fundamental threat than plastic waste in the sea and air pollution in cities. Climate change is about the birth of a whole new world in which the current eco-systems will stop functioning. If these systems crash, human society will crash with them. Climate change is about a complete reconfiguration of the planet. The United Nations lists it as the 13th Sustainable Development target in a list of 17 targets, after the ambition to end world poverty, hunger, and inequality. Yet a failure to control the climate will make all the other 16 targets close to impossible.
Indeed Climate Change is in fact a subset of an even more fundamental issue – sustainability. We are currently extracting a monumental amount of natural resources out of our closed mass system. Resources that, due to entropy, simply cannot be replaced – no matter how much we might try to recycle. All of our aluminium, gold, cobalt… everything, was made in the supercharged energy of a supernova. We cannot make it ourselves. When it’s gone, it’s gone. In the latest 200 years of homo sapiens’ 130,000 plus years on the planet, the average lifetime resource extraction for one person has increased from 0.2 to 27.3 trillion tonnes. Coupled with a booming population that is living longer, this means that we require 4.3 Earths to provide the resources to sustain our lifestyles. All the images we have from space show that we only have 1 Earth.
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Climate change is driven by this unimaginably deep and extensive extraction, processing and consumption of the Earths’ natural resources. At the moment, the 1.2 billion poorest people consume only 1% of Earth’s closed mass natural resources, whereas the 1 billion richest people consume 72%. [United Nations Environment Programme, International Resource Panel. Assessing Global resource Use (2017), (figure 2.2 Global material extraction in four main material categories, 1970–2017, million tonnes, adapted).]
There are signs of stress already within the current world order. The 400ppm185 CO2 reading was just one of many scientific indicators that shows that the major cogs of the present ecological epoch are moving into a different set of gears. This climate change stress can be seen most vividly now in the collapsing condition of the Great Barrier Reef - a remarkably cosmopolitan underwater world of living organisms that cannot adapt to the rising temperature and acidification of the oceans. The massive bleaching seen in 1997, then again in 2016 and 2017, are shocks to the equilibrium of this sprawling marine conurbation from which it will not recover. Because, even if the Reef did fight back, the root cause of the problem is only going to get worse. The 1°C
185 Two years after this 400ppm threshold was crossed the laboratory has recorded levels of 408.18 ppm on July 9th, 2018 (NOAA-ESRL) (https://www.co2.earth/daily-co2), after peaking at 412.45 ppm on May 14, 2018 (NOAA-ESRL) due to the winter ‘exhale’ of the planet.
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average global temperature continues to rise: the level of CO2 concentrations now in the atmosphere commits the climate to a 1.5°C rise in about a decade186 - and we are on course to lock in a 2°C rise by 2036 at the rate of emissions.
An Ecological Fuse The collapse of the Great Barrier Reef is a vivid example of an ecological fuse blowing out and it should not be seen as an isolated event. The spectacular aquatic civilisation of the Reef is plugged into the same network that human beings are part of. Planet Earth is a huge, interconnected system, a failure in one loop of the circuit is indicative of the stress at work in the rest of the system. Turning up the temperature of the whole planet is like turning up the voltage of an entire electrical circuit. Climate change is not about the need for more suntan cream during a summer holiday, it is about shorting out the natural world that supplies everything we need to survive. When geologists use the word ‘Anthropocene’, it is not a reference to just the numbers of human beings on the surface of the earth; instead, it is a reference to how human beings are disturbing the basic operating system of the planet. Having an entire geological epoch named after you is quite an achievement. A rise of 2°C average global temperature might not sound like a big deal, but anyone who has had a fever for a week at 39°C will know how lethargic and grumpy it makes human beings feel. Moreover, doctors inform us that if an elevated temperature is not treated for several weeks then vital organs start to breakdown and it can become a fatal condition. A 4°C rise for humans is called hyperpyrexia and it is a medical emergency. All organic life has a similar intolerance to movements in temperature. A global temperature rise of 2°C and over for the natural world is consistent with a breakdown in the main systems of the planet. Food chains, water cycles, ocean flows, weather patterns, seasonal rhythms - these are the vital organs of life on Earth. There could not be a greater emergency to attend to. Scientists are in full agreement that we are already in unchartered and dangerous territory.
186 See Chapter 1 for the qualifications to this basic truth.
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On the brink, 1774. No-one knew what direction things were going to take in the year that Thomas Paine arrived in Philadelphia. However, it was clear to everyone that there was a considerable amount of stress developing between the colonies and London.
In this Royal American Magazine cartoon from May 1774, a Native American woman is being pinned down by Lord Mansfield and forced to drink tea by Lord North. The British Prime Minister (North) also has an invoice for the East India Company stuffed in his pocket for all the tea that was dumped in the Boston Harbour by the colonial rebels. The tea that is being tipped into the woman’s throat represents the ‘Intolerable Acts’ which were a set of 5 British government impositions that attempted to turn the screws on its wayward colony. Lord Sandwich, an infamous womaniser, holds down the helpless victim’s feet and looks up her skirt. Although the soldier representing military rule on the right watches the assault, Britannia (stood behind) cannot. She looks away in sorrow and disgust. It was not the first time that London had trodden on the toes of the colonists. Back in 1765, after winning the 7-year war, the British government was bankrupt and vulnerable on its Northern Appalachian border. To bolster its bank balance, and in so doing its military presence, a ‘Stamp Act’ was passed which drew in more taxes to fund more Red Coats. The act had been seen by the colonists as an illegitimate raid on their pockets, and it had made them nervous and suspicious about the real nature of the relationship that they had with London. The ‘Intolerable Acts’ of 1774 confirmed their worst fears. Otherwise known as the ‘Coercive Acts’, they were perceived as a raid on a value that the colonists held above all else, their freedom. It was a violation of the most basic law of the settler’s psyche. - 211 -
Crudely simplified, the colonists who sought the freedom that money might afford had taken a boat to the Caribbean islands, and the colonists who sought religious freedom got on board a boat for Boston. But whether it was the riches of the right commodities or the riches of the right conscience that was at the forefront for the colonial mind, their basic drive was for freedom. Having risked so much to attain it, they would forcefully resist any attempt by the British motherland to take it back. The cartoon illustrates that colonial minds had started to become focussed and it shows that sentiments had turned very sour. With freedom at stake, people were being inspired into radical action.
A tipping point, 1775 In the turbulence of the events and the debates in the early years of the conflict, it is informative to note the moment at which the colonists’ complaints, concerns and difficulties suddenly fused together. That moment came when the 2nd Continental Congress put forward their grievances in the ‘Olive Branch Petition’ and it was rejected by George III. Until this moment, the colonists had understood that their disputes were stuck with the troublesome and corrupted Parliament, but many had thought that once the King learnt of their plight that he would then wade in to bring about a just solution. It was not to be. In fact, to say that George III rejected their petition is an understatement - he wouldn’t even look at it. It was a tipping point. The human psyche is a remarkable thing; it can uphold and defend an idea with such tenacity against the accumulating evidence, but once the idea has fallen, it very quickly turns to dung. Something just broke with the Olive Branch Petition. Even though George III sent thousands of troops across the Atlantic to defend the royal rule of his empire, there was nothing those Red Coated soldiers could do to put the symbolic order back together again. Thomas Paine was on hand to harness the momentum of the times and direct it towards a revolution. In many respects, he was the midwife of the United States, on hand to assist in the delivery of the rebirth of the New World. As someone wrote at the
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time, Paine spoke a language that the colonists had felt, but had not thought187. Just one month after the publication of Common Sense, the Pennsylvania Evening Post wrote: “Sometime past, the idea [of independence] would have struck me with horror. I now see no alternative; … Can any virtuous and brave American hesitate one moment in the choice?” (13 February 1776) Speaking a little biblically, The New-London [Connecticut] Gazette agreed: “We were blind, but on reading these enlightening works the scales have fallen from our eyes…. The doctrine of Independence hath been in times past greatly disgustful; we abhorred the principle. It is now become our delightful theme and commands our purest affections. We revere the author and highly prize and admire his works.” (22 March 1776) The Enlightened reasoning of the Founding Fathers also agreed. Benjamin Rush noted: “Its effects were sudden and extensive upon the American mind. It was read by public men. It was repeated in Clubs, spouted in schools, and in one instance delivered from the pulpit instead of a sermon, by a clergyman in Connecticut.188” A browse through the Founding Father’s writing from February to March and April of 1776 shows how frequently they all cite Paine’s work - in what can almost be seen as a realtime unfolding of a revolutionary consensus. As the historian Gimbel rather enthusiastically puts it: “Common Sense swept the country [sic] like a prairie fire,” and “as a direct result of this overwhelming distribution, the Declaration of Independence was unanimously ratified on July 4, 1776189.”
On the brink, 2017 No-one knows what direction the world will take in response to the science of climate change, but there are clearly observable signals of stress between humans and nature.
187 http://openmedia.yale.edu/projects/iphone/departments/hist/hist116/transcript10.html 188 Travels Through Life or Sundry Incidents in the Life of Dr Benjamin Rush 189 Gimbel, Richard. Thomas Paine: a Bibliographical Check List of Common Sense with an Account of its Publication. New Haven: Yale U.P., 1956. (p57)
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Since the New World is the leading contributor (on most counts) to the reality of the new ecological world, and since it is the main location of this chapter, the examples of this tension will be taken from the USA. Firstly, the NOAA Virginia Key Tide Gauge registered a 9mm sea level rise in the last decade for Miami. This is a significant uptick that confirms a trend, and it is in line with scientific projections that estimate that up to $36 billion of Miami real-estate will be underwater by 2050, rising to $208 billion by 2100190. A study by the University of Miami191 found that flood frequencies have spiked since 2006, 400% from high tide floods and 33% from rainfall floods, “frequently bringing octopuses into garages and barracudas into swimming pools”192. Florida is particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels for a few reasons: it suffers from the quirks of winds and currents that curve the oceans up towards Florida, it has a shallow water table, and it has a highly porous limestone bedrock that allows water to subversively breach flood defences. Florida is taken as the first example because it highlights a particular point about the current mismatch between science, politics and common sense. Donald Trump has a private, multimillion dollar Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, he was helped into the Presidency by winning a majority in the key state of Florida, and yet he is the president who pulled the USA out of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change in May 2016. Our second example comes from the ‘Scientific American’ journal which reports on how climate change is a ‘cereal killer’. The increasing number of days with a temperature over 30°C is starting to hit crop yields, and looking forward, “... the estimated
190 http://riskybusiness.org/report/come-heat-and-high-water-climate-risk-in-the-southeastern-u-sand-texas/ 191 Wdowinski, “Increasing flooding hazard in coastal communities due to rising sea level: Case study of Miami Beach, Florida,” June 2016 issue, Vol. 126 of the journal Ocean and Coastal Management. 192 The Economist, p37, June 3rd 2017.
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future harvests of wheat, soybeans and corn could drop by 22 to 49 percent, depending on the variety of the crop”193. Although watering the crops could offset some of these losses, the problem is that climate change will also be seriously depleting water supplies at the same time. An alternative solution would be to shift production further north, where it is cooler, in a game of musical chairs for crops. “It may very well be that in the next 50 to 100 years, the new Corn Belt is centered around North Dakota, Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Parts of Iowa could be growing cotton and the Deep South — where cotton is currently grown — will probably be too hot to grow anything.” Indeed, just like musical chairs, when the music stops the losers are left without a chair to sit on. The analysis by David Lobell from Stanford University, using data going back to 1980 from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation194, notes that the yields are particularly flattened when the spike in the thermometer happens at critical moments in the growth cycle of the grain – something that is increasingly likely as weather patterns become more erratic. He concludes that climate change has already added 18.9% to various crop prices over the period of the study and the direction of the graphs is not good news for the ‘breadbasket of the world’, and by consequence, bad news for all those who eat from it. Further examples can be harvested from the opening to Naomi Klein’s celebrated book, ‘This Changes Everything’. She gives an ironic snapshot of a passenger plane stranded on the tarmac in Washington DC on a blisteringly hot summer day in 2012, ‘the wheels of the US Airways jet had sunk into the black pavement as if it were wet cement’. This meant that the burning of more aeronautical fossil fuels had to be delayed for 3 hours and the passengers had to disembark to lighten the plane’s load. Eventually a large fossil-fuelled truck was found, and it dragged the plane out of its 10cm deep footprint.
193 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/u-s-crop-harvests-could-suffer-with-climate-change/ 194 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-impacts-staple-crop-yields/
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Klein also notes the irony of oil and coal barges being stranded in the low waters of the Mississippi River after a severe drought. 2012 also forced several coal-fired power stations in other parts of the USA to “temporarily shut down because the waterways that they draw on to cool their machinery were either too hot or too dry (or, in some cases, both)...” Of course, the USA is not alone in pushing the planet towards the brink of a disaster. Klein remarks: “I am in no position to judge these passengers. All of us who live high consumer lifestyles, wherever we happen to reside, are, metaphorically, passengers on Flight 3935. Faced with a crisis that threatens our survival as species, our entire culture is continuing to do the very thing that caused the crisis”. These short examples from the USA are typical of the challenges faced by every country in the world and they are fuelled by a lifestyle that is typical of capitalist economies. The distress signals can be seen in every country and at every level of the global economy. “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind. Many circumstances hath, and will arise, which are not local, but universal, and through which the principles of all Lovers of Mankind are affected, and in the Event of which, their Affections are interested. The laying of a Country desolate with Fire and Sword, declaring War against the natural rights of all Mankind, and extirpating the Defenders thereof from the Face of the Earth, is the Concern of every Man to whom Nature hath given the Power of feeling”.
(Opening of Common Sense)
A Tipping Point, 2050? Having a widespread and deeply entrenched problem is not easy to fix, but, the most disturbing problem of all is that we are heading towards a tipping point. The continual elevation of CO2 in the atmosphere well past 400-ppm risks pushing the climate over a cliff. After this point, any attempts to control the environment will be irreversibly puny. If
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a tipping point is crossed, the whole system starts to collapse like a house of cards. This doomsday scenario has been played out several times for real in the earth’s deep history and a few times for entertainment in Hollywood’s dystopic movies. If Nature is pushed over the edge and gathers an unstoppable momentum, then it will be like being locked inside a cage with an angry rhino. It would be lunacy to get anywhere near this point. Scientists are not attention seekers who enjoy shouting “fire” in a crowded theatre for the fun of it. They are especially concerned about the risks of negative ecological contagion with good reasons. A fire in one room immediately endangers another room and, thereby, the whole house. Given the deeply interconnected nature of the Earth’s systems, the feedback effect from a few collapsing ecosystems could very quickly amplify itself into a catastrophe. The term ‘Climate Change’ could turn out to be a monumental understatement. (We don’t say someone has ‘really changed’ when we attend their funeral). In order to avoid pushing our ecological systems over the edge, scientists have consistently warned against crossing various thresholds. Because of the complexity of the climate system, these lines are difficult to demarcate, but politicians needed some simple targets. Originally, the goal was to limit global warming to below 2°C (COP 15 - Copenhagen, 2009). This was considered to be the safe line behind which the climate and the eco-systems could remain within their relatively stable equilibriums. The new green line set in COP21 Paris, is for ‘well below’ 2°C with 1.5°C set as the ultimate target - a conclusion sharpened by the recent 1.5°C report by the IPCC. Many scientific models show that a 2°C rise will turn out to be an irreversible tipping point if that temperature is sustained for long enough. The consensus is that a rapid rise of between 3°C and 4°C will be enough to push everything beyond human control and make human life intolerably difficult. It is a temperature rise that will cause Greenland to become Blackland195 and it will cause the collapse of the Amazon Basin and pull what we now call ‘normal’ down the plughole. Temperatures rises of 5°C and beyond
195 The growth of algae, stimulated by the average warmer temperatures, has quickly darkened the surface of the ice. White snow reflects over 80% of heat radiation, whereas black repels only 15%. This sudden development was not included in most models of climate change forecasts. Ironically, it will speed up the day when Greenland will indeed be green. https://www.nature.com/news/algae-are-melting-away-the-greenland-ice-sheet-1.20265
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would make the Earth unrecognisable, the scientific expectations for this outcome are not something anyone would want to read before going to bed. Yet, astonishingly, whilst we are on the edge of this revolution, the only public discourse is about modifications and adjustments, rebalancing and recycling. Tinkering. Schools and communities are earnestly committed to recycling, supermarket shoppers are proud to renounce the evil of the plastic bag, and eco-friendly hotel rooms invite you to reuse your towels for the sake of the planet. Tinkering. After much applause at COP21 in Paris, the governments of the world are still only loosely bound to voluntary emission reductions that would take us towards 4°C. Tinkering is not enough. We do stand on the edge of a new world, and it is difficult to state the science clearly without appearing to be alarmist – simply because it is so alarming. Yet the plain truth is that the future of the Earth will be determined by the laws of chemistry and physics, not by human feelings. Science is driven by data not by sentiments. It will happen regardless of how many people are expecting it, and they just don’t make Arks big enough these days. Given the size of the revolution which is at hand, aggressively poking the 2 tonne rhino that we are locked in the cage with is not an action that is compatible with common sense. We find ourselves in an absurdly dangerous situation and yet we do not feel it. Putting life on pause for a moment to attentively look at this disconnect between our knowledge and our senses can make the brain feel as gelatinous as it really is. But a pause is needed because something truly weird and dangerous is going on that requires an urgent investigation. We need much more common sense, and, paradoxically, we also need to transcend it.
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The Central Problems Climate Change and Common Sense Like the colonists, there are some psychological and cultural barriers that prevent us from seeing the plain truth of our situation. Thomas Paine’s arguments in favour of American Independence from the rule of the British have a strong resonance with the current world order and the problem of climate change. The key similarity between Paine’s world and ours is that there is a powerful minority that rule according to their narrow interests and this injustice is camouflaged by culture. In his world, the feudal monarchy was blind to the interests of its colonial subjects. In our world, the interdependent rule of capitalism and democracy is mostly blind to the limits of the planet and blind to the interests of those earthlings who will have to live on it in the future. In his world, the colonists were proudly British and most of them understood that the monarchy that they had prospered under was essentially benevolent (the worst excesses of kingship had seemingly been pruned along with the head of Charles I in 1650). In our world, western culture is proudly democratic and capitalism has overseen the most astonishing boom in prosperity (the worst excesses of capitalism appear to have been pruned by the welfare state and foreign aid). However, the scientific data insists that we look beyond common sense. It is an inconvenient truth, but climate change changes everything. We need to be ready to ask some heretical questions about (extensively) deregulated capitalism and be ready to ask what legitimate adjustments could be made to democratic systems. We need to be prepared to reconsider what we mean by ‘growth’. We need to be prepared to take off the cultural wallpaper and look at the wall. Despite some of the failings of capitalism and the weaknesses of democracy, this book is not heading towards the horizon of a Marxist-Leninist ending. The pages will not turn red for a capitalist sunset or communist sunrise. There is no call to abolish private property and there is no call to establish the dictatorship of the Proletariat. However, anyone who is not prepared to look honestly and boldly at the current mismatch between the facts of science and the current social, political reality should put down this book. Indeed, Groucho Marx once said that he had been so disturbed after reading an
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article about the effects of smoking that he gave up reading. Paine was willing to think heretically about the apparently noble truths of his world. His Philosophy summons us to do the same.
Five Problems Now that the landscape for both Thomas Paine and Climate Change has been established, it is time to focus the lens more sharply. There are five key problems: 1. A conceptual problem 2. The problem of Treason 3. The problem of Justice 4. The problem of the Media 5. The problem of Unity This following section will make the dialogue between Paine and climate change more direct and explicit. It will follow the overall structure of the book, by first attending to the question of ‘What is Real?’ in problem one, and then attend to some of the key ethical questions which arise from these facts in problems two, three, four and five.
1. – A conceptual problem (The future doesn’t have to match the past) Human beings have just lived through a period of geological time called the Holocene which was extremely favourable to human development. Reading Paine’s ‘Common Sense’ is a reminder that a prosperous past does not guarantee a prosperous future. Up until 1763, the American colonists had enjoyed an unusual level of liberty, as London had allowed them a great deal of self-governance. In comparison, for example, the Spanish held the reigns of their colonies much tighter. However, as the 7-Year War with the French came to an end in 1763, the British felt they needed a shift of gear with their American colonies. This was because of the fact that, although the British had beaten the French, it had left both sides of the conflict bankrupt. The British King and Government felt that the wealthy colonies should pay more for the upkeep of the empire (including funds for the 10,000 troops that were posted on American soil to keep the peace). With higher taxes came more control and the loose hand of
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government started to stiffen up. Paine could see the unsustainable direction that everything was heading in. For those who did not want to really ask themselves the big questions, it was easy to find comfort in their past prosperity and just assume it would all sort itself out. But Paine was fully aware of how corrupt and malignant governments could be and he argued for independence - the most radical, definitive solution. If humans look over their shoulders into the Earth’s history, beyond the favourable conditions of the Holocene, it becomes clear that our present fortune with the climatic conditions is not something that is guaranteed to last. How things are now is anything but permanent. The surface of the Earth has been configured in hundreds of radically diverse ways that have each supported different modes of life. The Antarctic has been a tropical jungle and the Equator has been covered in slush and ice. Throughout the 4.6 billion years of planetary history, the fundamental determinant of life has been the temperature of the oceans196 and the air. During this time, the Earth’s thermostat has been sensitive to the slow movements of tectonic plates, and the steady rhythm of the Earth’s shifting orbits and tilts, known as the Milankovich cycles197. These slow pulses have sometimes been fast-tracked into dramatic changes by feedback loops when various atmospheric and earthly factors have coalesced. At other times, the impulse has come from a very particular source. For example, 2.4 billion years ago the Earth was transformed into a giant snowball by tiny cyanobacteria. 252 million years ago the vast volcanic activity in the Siberian Traps resulted in a warming that wiped out around 90% of all known life. Around 66 million years ago in the soil of what some brainy mammals now call Mexico, the massive Chicxulub asteroid strike marked a huge full stop to the dinosaur age with a crater over 100 miles wide. These loud drum beats have been accompanied by other major and minor shifts in the configuration of the planet. The current abruptness of the spike in CO2 points scientists towards comparisons with the major swings in the climate’s past. The burning of fossil fuels by human beings, at such an accelerated pace, has jolted the system onto a new path. We should expect a sudden and violent reaction from the entire system as a result of our twisting this basic CO2 dial with such speed.
196 At the start of Earth’ history there was only one ocean, ‘Panthalassa’, which wrapped around the singular landmass Pangaea. 197 Although the distinctive climate patterns created Milankovich Cycles are only clear when a number of other variables of the Earth System are in place.
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To complacently imagine that nature will essentially remain favourable to human life is deeply negligent of the geological past and negligent of the prosperity of human civilisation’s future. Nature, like political empires, might appear permanent and sometimes benevolent, but Thomas Paine wished to lift his readers eyes to a wider view of what was possible. Even during the opening hostilities of the American War of Independence, many colonists found it very difficult to accept that the mother country had turned up on their shores as the aggressor. Climate change has already started to fire its weaponry at our civilised world, and there are still many who find it very difficult to accept that mother nature is, in fact, pitiless to the human condition.
2. – The problem of treason What Paine wrote was treasonous. His associates in Philadelphia were radical thinkers, like Dr Benjamin Rush, who was part of an underground movement that established the roots of the revolution (the ‘Sons of Liberty’). In fact, it was Rush who came up with the title, ‘Common Sense’. However, as a physician he perhaps had a lot to lose and was happy to encourage the young, much less cautious, Thomas Paine to write the manifesto. Indeed, Paine reportedly ignored Rush’s advice to avoid explicitly provocative words like ‘Independence’ and ‘Republic’ - he planted them at the centre of his work. At the time, because of the ‘Bill of Rights’ that was agreed in Westminster in 1689, British subjects had the right to petition the King, but Paine’s writing takes the principle of free speech much further and transgresses into heresy. He used his reason to challenge the entire monarchical system. Paine starts his argument by admitting that having a government was essential. It was a regrettable necessity, required due to human moral weaknesses. Without any government there would be no freedom, security or property. His thinking is memorably set out in the opening lines of the book: “…Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform, and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest.”
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And going further, Paine did not accept that Kings had any legitimate role to play in this basic contract between the people and their rulers. He continues: “Here then is the origin and rise of government; namely, a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world; here too is the design and end of government, viz. freedom and security. And however our eyes may be dazzled with show, or our ears deceived by sound; however prejudice may warp our wills, or interest darken our understanding, the simple voice of nature and of reason will say, it is right.”
Common Sense, Chapter 1 (11) So although government might be a necessary evil for our fallible humanity, its basic function is to provide freedom and security to its citizens. Paine is very clear minded about this throughout his work. He saw the pomp and noise of monarchies as a distraction from this most basic point and he wanted to bring the colonists to their senses. Not only do monarchies dress up their unjustified royal prerogative with pageantry and mystique, Paine goes on to claim that the unnatural rule of Kings was prone to corruption, war and incompetency. He risked his life to point out the absurdity and injustice of the monarchies.
Common Sense was high treason. At a surface level, the book functions as an attack on royal rule, but Paine’s writing manages to get to grips with power at a more meaningful level. The enduring power of Paine’s work is that he was attacking any type of rule that serves the interests of the few over the many. Paine was a commoner to his bones, and he remained totally committed to egalitarian values throughout his life. The plain language of his writing was not simply deployed in order to reach as many people as possible, the style and tone of his phrases was a critique of all pompous and self-serving elites. The unintimidated directness of ‘Common Sense’ not only served to mobilise the lower classes into action, it was at the same time, an attempt to gate crash the practice of language. By bypassing technical and obtuse vocabulary, his daringly original work served the interests of those without power by pulling down the whole operating system of those who had it. In this sense, Paine was a truly Promethean author. Up until then the word ‘democratic’ had been a pejorative term, which invoked the notion of the mob taking over. After Paine, it soon became an idea with positive
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associations and eventually a core universal value. Likewise, he reframes the rebellious notion of ‘Republic’ that was a dirty word for those who believed in the Divine Right of Kings, and talks about it as a virtue: “Every government that does not act on the principle of a republic, or in other words, that does not make the res-publica its whole and sole object, is not a good government. Republican government is no other than government established and conducted for the interest of the public, as well individually as collectively. It is not necessarily connected with any particular form [of government]”.
(The Rights of Man, Chapter 3) In that last line, a critical move takes place. Paine re-emphasises the disconnect between the form of government and its function. Appearances did not matter for him, the only issue of concern for him was if those in power had their citizens’ interests at the centre of their policies. For all of the jibes and jabs at monarchies, Paine was getting at something more important. Indeed, the short abstract above the ‘The Rights of Man’ (written in 1791) shows how uneasy Paine was with the American Constitution that had been put forward four years previously in 1787. His insistence on the ‘res-publica’ points to a deception that he thought had taken place. The Founding Fathers, such as John Adams and James Madison, had agreed with Paine’s critique of monarchy, but they were very nervous about ‘the mob’ taking full control with their votes and so Paine was kept at arm’s length by those at the Convention who wrote the constitution. They kicked-back against his radically positive view of the common man after the War of Independence had been won. The American Constitution softened the democratic zeal that he had inspired. The original US Senate was filled with non-elected members taken from high society that, as Madison himself put it, “had sympathy for property owners and their interests”. Some of the reasoning behind his thinking can be seen in the notes from the secret debates of those setting up the constitution: “Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes,
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they ought to have permanency and stability.”198 Or, as the Conservative philosopher in the UK, Edmund Burke more bluntly put it: “The occupation of a hairdresser…cannot be a matter of honour, the state suffers oppression if such as they…are permitted to rule.” These ideas about the poor and poorly educated were not unusual at the time, but that fact only serves to illustrate the boldness of Paine’s belief in the basic ability of every person to be capable of thinking and acting reasonably. With a long view, it would be unfair to anachronistically question the integrity of the Founding Fathers. Madison’s famous essay, ‘Federalist Number 10’ (1787) is fully aware of the danger that a rich majority might become a faction that would dominate and destabilise a state – yet, being a good Enlightenment thinker, he imagined how those who held property would also be considerate of those who did not. His essay is an attempt to find a genuine equilibrium for the newly born nation after the unity that war had forced on the colonies had disappeared. The problem was that as the Founding Father’s Enlightenment ideals faded with time, and as the economy and stature of the USA grew, the constitution permitted a deep division of wealth and interests that gathered real momentum; these are divisions that in American society that were grotesquely caricatured in the election that put President Donald Trump into the White House. Paine’s original suspicions about the design of the new American state demonstrates how consistent he was in his writing, he saw beyond political appearances, remained critical when others were too quickly satisfied or defensive, and he kept his mind stubbornly focused on genuine democracy and social justice. Seeing through the form of rule to its function is just common sense to Paine, but it is surprising how such a simple point can be easily overlooked. It is surprising how easy it is to be accepting about a story being presented to us and not to be attentive enough to any dangers in the sub-plots.
198 Statement (26th June 1787) as quoted in Notes of the Secret Debates of the Federal Convention of 1787 by Robert Yates.
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The Really Inconvenient Truth Take the example of ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. The documentary did a great deal to put climate change into the public debate and onto TV screens at home and in schools. It vividly illustrated the costs of violent weather events and sea level rises and it brought to the surface many critical issues. However, the absurdly lame finish, after all the powerful narratives, images and graphs, is that climate crisis can be solved through energy efficiencies and recycling. Some films have truly weird endings that cause a lot of head scratching. ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ is one of them199. However, in this case, the experience of the audience would not be one of confusion or shock; as the effect of telling people to be more energy efficient and to recycle is a very comforting one, it is a happy ending. In fact, in a peculiar way it is a real ‘feel good’ movie, as the efficiency and recycling are very compatible with high consumption – they almost promote it. Recycling infers that there is no real ecological loss and improving efficiency is a good alibi for an upgrade to a new model, whilst saving money in the long term, probably for more consumption. Something known to economists and ecologists as “The Rebound Effect”, or the “Snackwell Effect”200 (as people who buy low calorie cookies often end up eating more). Of course, these two things are part of the overall solution to climate change. However, these actions are a tiny fraction of what is required. They are a happy ending to a scary movie because no-one would ever disagree with doing them, as they are so in-step with our lifestyles. If the solution to climate change were that simple, then we would have solved the problem as quickly as we fixed the hole in the ozone layer. The Really Inconvenient Truth about climate change is really quite brutal. It is utterly heretical. It challenges us at a very personal level and poses very tough questions for our industrial economy. The Really Inconvenient Truth is that mass overconsumption is the root cause of climate change. Al Gore was not willing to bring this unpleasant truth to the screen. Sometimes what is not said is more informative that what is said, it is just harder to spot.
199 ‘Al Gore’s ‘Truth to Power’ (2017) is not much better. 200 http://science.time.com/2010/09/30/energy-will-efficiency-lead-to-more-consumption/
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The Really Inconvenient Truth II The second uncomfortable truth is that it is the advanced Western economies of the world that are responsible for climate change, most notably here, the USA. When a nation’s emissions are calculated with their imports included and when this total is divided per capita, then there is a very clear burden of responsibility on the advanced nations. This responsibility includes both the past (we were the first to mobilise industry) and the present (we still consume most of the world’s resources). It is just not right to calculate the emissions of a country if the carbon footprint of every imported product is thrown overboard before crossing the border. The statistics that follow are simply extrapolated from emissions data that counts emissions per capita and includes the consumption of imports for each nation. These statistics are rarely chosen by those reporting on climate change in the developed Western nations, and they are certainly not used by the politically savvy Al Gore. If the carbon emission limits were translated accurately into road speeds201 (the details are provided in Chapters 5 and 6) then a safe global average for the planet (to stay under a 2°C rise) would be 100kmh. Countries like Ethiopia (8kmh)202, Kenya (30kmh), Gabon (80kmh) are currently driving well below that speed limit. China, the state that most consider to be the bad guy of planetary emissions, is indeed driving much too fast at 450kmh on the highway to hell. But China’s excess speed is also close to the global average per capita (350kmh). Overall, the planet is moving 4 times too fast towards 2°C. This reckless average speed would be much worse if the majority of the world’s population achieved a
201 These speed limits are calculated on the basis of the 3 key documents from 2015: 1.
The IPCC AR5 for the basic carbon budget.
2.
The UN World Population Prospects - 2015 medium estimate
3.
Global Carbon projections for consumption emissions, Edgar vs 2012 for GHG.
202 They are calculated for a 2°C rise – at a 66% probability of those emissions leading to that temperature increase. They are based on consumption emissions of goods and services, per capita. Once the Emissions Gap Report is released for 2018 all the numbers will be updated and put into a full list of different speeds for numerous nations – they will appear in Chapter 5 on Descartes.
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level of consumption that was close to that of the developed world. A minority of rich nations (18% of the global population) are dragging the majority of the world’s population (82%) towards an awful wreckage. If it wasn’t for an invisible subsidy of their atmospheric cubic meters, the major collision between man and nature would have happened years ago. The deeply inconvenient truth for Al Gore is that the USA is currently scorching down Route 66 at an eye-watering, hair blasting, music pumping, 1,350kmh. (Most of Europe is burning some very serious gas too, at an average of 730kmh). This is not because Donald Trump has opened up a few more coal mines. It has nothing to do with Donald Trump, it is due to an American society that has a lifestyle with a clown sized carbon footprint. Admittedly, Al Gore may have been constrained by a Hollywood typescript. How much bad news can you take in 2 hours without spending the rest of the day banging your head against the fridge door? Is it ever worth making a film that might only be watched by sadomasochists and odd ball philosophers? Who wants to spend their Friday evening going to the movies to have their deeply personal and national interests disturbed? The scientific truth of the matter is that nature will become our enemy and that will be at greatest cost to our self-interests and national interests. We are just sleepwalking into a crisis because our culture, from the elected to the voters, from the producers to the consumers, is not yet ready to ask some questions that are heretical enough. It is perfectly normal to prefer a nice sleep than to sit awake chewing over some difficult questions, but the problem with sleep walking is that you can get into dicey situations very easily. The American colonists had Thomas Paine to wake them up: “… when the country, into which I had just set my foot, was set on fire about my ears, it was time to stir. It was time for every man to stir.” (The Crisis V) But who would listen to the voice of a cantankerous philosopher now? Thomas Paine’s audience was immersed in a biblical culture that placed great virtue in self-sacrifice and a consideration of ‘The Other’. In this most basic sense, they were ready to listen. Whereas any book published today that threatens our noblest virtues, “freedom” and “choice”, will have to travel at a very low voltage through the wires of the brain in order to avoid tripping out the fuses and shutting the system down. - 228 -
3. – The problem of justice Consider the relative sizes of Britain and America. Paine thought it was absurd that such a small island should rule and take advantage of such vast continent. How can such an asymmetry of power and size not lead to serious instability? How could such a small centre of interest manage to maintain its own priorities over such a large body of land and people? Paine’s reflections on this irregularity mirror his observations about kingship. Paine was intrigued by the psychological magic that would have to be in place to preserve such a seemingly unstable status quo. How could the mere dazzle of a crown be so effective in preserving the gross inequalities of the feudal system? In short, Paine was pre-occupied by social justice. If all people are born equal, and if everyone has the basic capacity to reflect on their situation, how can small minorities justify and sustain their advantage over the huge majority of people? The differences between the rights and privileges of the rich and the poor was as striking to Paine as the difference in size between the small island of Britain and the massive land mass of America. The title of his book, ‘Common Sense’ sums up the overriding ambition of Paine’s philosophical output – he wanted to make the natural equality of man so plainly clear, in order to illuminate how unnatural social injustice was. Or in other words, more common sense (reason) should engender more common sense (equity). “Titles,” he wrote, referring to royal nomenclature, “are like circles drawn by the magician’s wand, to contract the sphere of man’s felicity”203. Paine in a later chapter of ‘The Rights of Man’ (1791), launches a withering attack on the Duke of Richmond: “… to all these are to be added the numerous dependants, the long list of younger branches and distant relations, who are to be provided for at the public expense: in short, were an estimation to be made of the charge of aristocracy to a nation, it will be found nearly equal to that of supporting the poor. The Duke of Richmond alone (and there are cases similar to his) takes away as much for himself as would maintain two thousand poor and aged persons. Is it, then, any wonder, that under such a system of government, taxes and rates have multiplied to their present extent?” In 2017, we are still paying taxes to support the elites. It is easy to think that such feudal inequalities are a distant problem of an unenlightened past, but the same mad
203 The Rights of Man, Part 1, ‘On the Foppery of Titles”.
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lop-sidedness can still be seen today. It is just that courtly robes have been swapped for a well-pressed suit and a tie, and the castles for yachts. Firstly, the division of wealth remains absurdly uneven, one statistical slice exposes the fact that the richest 8 people in the world are worth as much as the poorest 50% of the whole population (Oxfam204). (The fossil fuelled Koch Brothers come in at joint 8th on this list and hold an estimated $48.3bn of assets each205). Secondly, some of this wealth is supported by taxes. This is not only true because of the austerity measures that were placed on the average worker after the financial sector meltdown in 2008, but it can also be identified in the long-standing subsidies paid by governments to the fossil fuel industry. In 2015, this global subsidy was calculated by the IMF to be worth $5.3tn per year, which works out at $10m every minute of every day206. These figures make the $120bn that governments gave to support green energy look pathetic. The IMF have calculated that: “The fiscal, environmental, and welfare impacts of energy subsidy reform are potentially enormous. Eliminating posttax subsidies in 2015 could raise government revenue by $2.9 trillion (3.6 percent of global GDP), cut global CO2 emissions by more than 20 percent, and cut premature air pollution deaths by more than half. After allowing for the higher energy costs faced by consumers, this action would raise global economic welfare by $1.8 trillion (2.2 percent of global GDP)”. Despite the colossal size of the annual damage inflicted on the world by these subsidies, the common perception is that cheap fossil energy is a baseline necessary evil for the economy to work properly. The move from dirty energy to clean energy is deeply complex, but these figures explode the myth that (somehow) we would all be poorer in an environmentally safe world. Not only must we move away from fossil fuels because of the laws of nature that govern the climate, but it an awful injustice to the world that potential investments in infrastructure, health and education are being redirected to a dirty industry within which most of the profits float to the very top. David Coady, the IMF’s lead author in the research paper said: “When the [$5.3tn]
204 https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2017-01-16/just-8-men-own-same-wealthhalf-world 205 https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/list/#version:static 206 http://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2016/12/31/How-Large-Are-Global-EnergySubsidies-42940
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number came out at first, we thought we had better double check this!” But he affirmed that the broad picture of huge global subsidies was “extremely robust. It is the true cost associated with fossil fuel subsidies”207. Vitor Gaspar the head of the IMF’s fiscal affairs commented: “These [fossil fuel subsidy] estimates are shocking… Energy prices remain woefully below levels that reflect their true costs”208. In truth, the really big money is being made apart from those subsidies; in the bustle of the global economy, however, looking at those subsidy figures is a clear way of seeing how the whole economic and political system is slanted heavily towards a minority of winners and against a huge majority of losers. Every day, the sun provides enough energy to power the world for a year. Indeed, Green solutions have been available for decades, even centuries. These solutions would not only create jobs but cultivate a less polluted environment (as well as saving the planet from a landslide against human development). And yet, democratic governments who are supposed to represent all of their citizens, not just an elite faction thereof,, remain reluctant to take meaningful action. How is it that such a small minority can have their interests met so consistently at the expense of so many others? The loyalty shown to the fossil fuel industry during all the decades that we have known about the dangers of Climate Change makes no sense. There is simply no way to justify placing the lives and the welfare of billions of people under such risk, merely to keep the board members of one industry happy for a few more decades. It would be analogous to having the continent of America ruled and exploited by the people of Easter Island. What sort of rational society would endorse this? Who would consent to such an imbalance of interests? It is an injustice that makes no sense until the interdependency of big business and politics is recognised. It is an injustice that this camouflaged by the conjugal relationship between money and power.
207 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/18/fossil-fuel-companies-getting-10m-aminute-in-subsidies-says-imf 208 Ibid.
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Power and Politics - Tale of Two Brothers Mark Hanna, a wealthy industrialist and Senator from Ohio wryly commented back in 1895: “There are two things that are really important in politics, the first is money, and I can’t remember what the second one is”. In fact, the interconnectedness of modern democracy with the world of commerce is so significant in America, that it has endangered the fundamental values that it started out with. It is true that after victory in the War of Independence, both the economy and democracy in the USA grew up strongly alongside one another. It would become a commercial juggernaut, and the most advanced economy in the world – and from a limited start, democracy would also become fully embedded. Indeed, Thomas Paine’s democratic hopes had remained frustrated in the first Presidential election of 1787 (only 1.3% of the American population voted, as most people were not eligible to vote and some chose not to). But by 1913, the Congress had passed the 17th Amendment which meant that the Senate was to be decided by popular election by the people of the states; a vote that included women by 1920 and non-whites by 1965. However, having a booming economy and a full set of democratic rights did not ensure social justice. The concerns of the ruling elite can still be attended to at the expense of the majority inside a democracy. Two brothers can grow up and be well fed in the same house, develop their own interests and concerns - but one can still dominate the other. The fact that one brother can overshadow the other is especially concerning if it goes on unnoticed. If Paine were alive today he would be haranguing the government about issues of social justice. The hard-line that Paine held over democracy and his deep concern for justice is important to recall when examining the current state of affairs with climate change. Globally, the narrow interests of a few major fossil fuel businesses, who have a disproportionate influence on politicians due to their massive reserves of wealth, are having their priorities attended to at the expense of everyone’s human rights. A failure to deal with climate change will undercut our basic human rights because the climate is so basic to the natural world. A breakdown in the ecosystems of the planet will pull the rug out from under all the other development ambitions that the UN might have. This wholesale damage is happening to millions of people’s access to food, water and shelter already. This is what makes climate change not just one issue among many - it is the defining problem of the 21st century.
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Imagine a school. In this school the students achieve high exam results, there is equal opportunities in the classroom, the school dinners are healthy and tasty and the sports team have won a host of trophies. In nearly every respect this school is making tremendous progress and has an exciting set of ambitions for the years ahead. The leaders of this school would rightly be praised for their efforts. However, if it was also true that the school leaders had not taken care of a gas leak that would cause the deaths of hundreds of children and adults, through a negligent attitude to health and safety guidelines, then all of their other achievements would become irrelevant. They would be held criminally responsible. This school and its leaders would not be remembered for the details of its rising exam results in 2036, nor for its spectacular production of ‘Grease’. It would be remembered for the gas explosion that led to a massive crater in the ground and in the lives of its families. Such a scenario is unthinkable. However, our current economic situation is not only roughly equivalent to this, it is even more absurd. This is because not only do the management of the school know what is going to happen in the build up to the gas explosion, but the media do too. And so while the press eagerly covers the details of a charity day, a cake sale and the last minute goal by the First XI football team, the duller truth about a failed health and safety check is pushed off the publishing desk. We are leaking CO2 gas at a seemingly unprecedented speed209 in the Earth’s history, it will hit billions of young and poor people with an unforgiving power, and yet this gross injustice is not at the top of the political agenda and it hardly makes it into the news in a meaningful way. Back in 1776, with typical directness, Paine wrote: “Britain is the parent country, say some. Then the more shame upon her conduct. Even brutes do not devour their young; nor savages make war upon their families.”
209 There have been numerous outpourings of CO2 that have pushed the planet into a new geological epoch, but these shifts take place of thousands or, more often, hundreds of thousands of years. The vertiginous change of the last few decades seems to even out-pace the extra-ordinary drama of the PETM Extinction Event around 56 million years ago – an era that remains perplexing to scientists, but which offers some of the best proxy parallels for our current situation.
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4. The problem of the Media Common sense tells us that any democracy is only valid if there is freedom of the press and freedom of speech. ‘The First Amendment’ to the American constitution emphatically confirms this in black and white. In the absence of these two freedoms how could any real debate take place, and how could any accountability of those in power be upheld? These two rights are just basic to democracy, their importance has continually been underlined in modern history by men and women who have sacrificed so much to instate or protect them. Thomas Paine was one of these men. He was put on trial ‘in absentia’ in 1792 for ‘seditious libel’ by the government of William Pitt. At the time, the UK was extremely nervous about any radical ideas (like those in his book ‘The Rights of Man’) making their way across the channel from Revolutionary France. Paine was found guilty and he never returned to England. Paine’s commitment to these fundamental pillars of democracy was evident when he gave up the copyright to ‘Common Sense’. His overriding concern was to get the pamphlet into as many hands as possible in order for the colonists to think through their situation with reason and clarity. In fact, Paine donated his share of the income from ‘Common Sense’ to the cause of American independence. (It is heartwarming to note that he used his funds from the pamphlet sales to buy mittens for the Continental Army in Quebec.) Paine once remarked to a reluctant printer of his work:“If the freedom of the press is to be determined by the judgment of the printer of a Newspaper in preference to that of the people, who when they read will judge for themselves, then freedom is on a very sandy foundation”210. History teaches that an open society needs continual protection from many different powers that might encroach on those rights. This danger does not always pose itself with a moustache, an army and a secret police force, like Hitler or Stalin. Freedom of speech and freedom of the press can be dangerously diminished in much less viscous ways – and one of those is through the soft control of the media by big business. As the American journalist AJ Liebling wryly observed: “In America, freedom of the press is largely reserved for those who own one.”
210 http://www.thomaspaine.org/letters/other/to-mr-claypoole-pennsylvania-packet-january-1786. html
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This control can be both direct and indirect. There is forensic evidence that the fossil fuel industry has directly and purposefully kept the bad news about climate change quiet. This is not a ranting tree hugger with a webcam’s conspiracy theory. The fingerprints of the fossil fuel industry on the output of the media has been identified directly by a team of Harvard researchers. Their recent and extensive study published in ‘Environmental Research Papers’211 found that Exxon Mobil’s was highly duplicitous when talking about climate change. When the company’s communications between 1977 and 2014 were methodically mapped out, a stark contrast becomes clear depending on whether the communication is written for someone inside the company or if it was intended for a reader on the outside. This empirical study of Exxon’s private and public statements shows that as early as 1979 they internally observed to themselves that, “‘The most widely held theory is that:—The increase [in atmospheric CO2] is due to fossil fuel combustion;— Increasing CO2 concentration will cause a warming of the earth’s surface;—The present trend of fossil fuel consumption will cause dramatic environmental effects before the year 2050.’212 But for the public, for example, they placed an editorial in the New York Times decades later in 1997 entitled, ‘Reset the Alarm’, which announced: “Scientists cannot predict with certainty if temperatures will increase, by how much and where changes will occur. We still don’t know what role man-made greenhouse gases might play in warming the planet...Let’s not rush to a decision at Kyoto. Climate change is complex; the science is not conclusive; the economics could be devastating.’213 Natasha Lamb, from investment management firm Arjuna Capital, noted in conclusion: “The Harvard research shows systemic bias in sowing public doubt, while acknowledging the risks privately.”214 The tobacco industry was guilty of exactly the same deceitful game in earlier decades. Not being honest with your shareholders, and consciously paying large sums of money to the media in order to mislead the public (shareholders of the planet) for the sake of your profits are criminal acts. The massive compensation tobacco firms are now paying is a clear signal to the fossil fuel industry
211 http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa815f 212 Ibid, p6 213 Ibid, p6 214 https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/companies/2017-08-23-study-shows-exxonmobil-purposelymisled-the-public-about-climate-change/
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that the law might catch up with them in the end. In finding tobacco company Philip Morris guilty under the US RICO Statute, Judge Kessler stated: “In short, Defendants have marketed and sold their lethal product with zeal, with deception, with a single-minded focus on their financial success, and without regard for the human tragedy or social costs that success exacted.”
The Pleasure Principle In the case of Exxon Mobile there is no question that the left hand knew what the right hand was doing. Human society is full of rational beings who know that what they are doing is wrong, but they do it anyway. The awkward truth is that the deception observed in Exxon-Mobil’s communications is at work at every level of the world – and our dishonesty can be even more sophisticated and pervasive than this. When there is a very strong conflict between what we want and what we should do, our brains can just turn off the communication between the two hands. Any politician will talk about the importance of creating jobs and growth, and many politicians will also talk about the need for action on the climate. However, how many politicians are prepared to talk about both of these things together? These two ambitions are deeply complimentary, but a much more open political conversation has to be had in order to not see them as being in conflict with each other. Without this deeper debate, when the brain is presented with a deep clash of interests over the facts of reality, the conflict quickly gets pushed underground. In these cases, the brain can just shunt the problem out of sight into the subconscious. This self-deception has different degrees of selfawareness. It is a self-deception that happens at an institutional and an individual level in equal measure. Although the direct interventions of the fossil fuel industry into the media and politics should not be underestimated (see Chapter 6 on Popper), the most pervasive and effective control of the media concerning climate change happens much more naturally and indirectly. It happens as an absence. If a silence could have any content, this is an example of it – it is a deeply political silence. Climate change gets very limited or skewed coverage because it simply doesn’t fit with the main interests of the press or politicians.
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This is because the primary concern of the massive multi-national corporations that own the media is to maintain a healthy audience that can underpin their advertising revenue. The negative vibes of climate change do not chime in tune with these priorities and so there is little incentive for the issue to be brought to the surface properly. It is a parallel situation for politicians - climate change can never be afforded a high priority in electoral campaigns because it just doesn’t win votes. The media and politicians share the same basic requirement to stay alive - they need attention and popularity. The persistent absence or maligned coverage of climate change in the media should be shocking given the gravity of the situation. But it does not strike us like that because it is hard to believe that something dramatic is going on when no-one is really talking about it. Any child will naturally run with enthusiasm towards a big ball on a beach to kick it if no-one is shouting a warning at him that it is an unexploded bomb. So, at the heart of our democracy, the central cogs get very little traction with climate change. There is a mutual interest from them to turn according to the Pleasure Principle and a mutual interest for them not to move according to the Reality Principle. And so, as Sigmund Freud noted about the human condition, when a conflict between the Pleasure Principle and the Reality Principle is moved into the subconscious, it takes a lot more craft to deal with it.
The Pleasure Principle in the Web With this quasi-taboo in place, a further issue arises if the development of the internet is considered, because the web has had a very significant impact on the media. From an age of pen and ink, Thomas Paine was one of philosophy’s loudest advocates of democracy. He would unquestionably support the remarkably extensive reach that the internet has achieved, and he would applaud the free access to ideas and debate that the internet provides. However, he would also have some serious concerns about how the internet has democratised the modern media. The search for information on the internet is not a neutral exercise; the system closely mirrors the way in which politics and the media function. For example, Paine’s consistent concern for social justice would make him attentive to the fact that the algorithms for search engines and social media sites operate with a coding that also prioritises popularity and financial power.
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The Pleasure Principle is also at work throughout the web. In the swarming movement of the virtual world, Truth and Reality very often get lost in the crowd. The traffic flows of information and activity that move around the internet cables are carefully studied by businesses and the media to keep their interests prominent and well fed. In the World Wide Web, truth is not a very valuable commodity. The truth has got no survival advantage in the fight to stay alive on the internet; it often has to piggy-back with popularity to keep afloat, and this often means that the truth has to pay a price for the ride. For Paine, the point of the press was to pester governments to advance human rights, to spread democracy and to reduce inequality and injustice. The internet has the potential to do all of these things, but because it functions as an extension of our minds and the human condition, it tends to be prone to the same failings as the real world.
A very sticky web AJ Liebling also commented: “As an outside observer, I take a grave view of the plight of the press, it is the weak slat in the bed of democracy”. However, pointing the finger at the media, politicians and industry is an easy gesture to make and forgets the fact that we are all signed up to social media sites, we are voters and we are all consumers. We are just as content to follow the Pleasure Principle as the institutions that we participate in. Indeed, the full extent of this systemic problem could be fruitfully explored through the work of Karl Marx. Although he is known as a philosopher of the economy, his work is informed by a probing awareness of the connections between psychology and economics. He understood that the predominant interests of those in power will not just be economically satisfied, but that these interests will also affect the basic coding of how we even think. It is in this very rudimentary sense that the freedom of the press and freedom of speech are endangered by the partnership between money and the media. In Marxist language, the economic “Base” will determine the culture, education, religion and media of a society (a consciousness that he calls the “Superstructure”). As Marx said in his book, ‘German Ideology’, “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas”. This economically wired web of social relations was famously given a modern illustration as ‘The Matrix’ (1999) in the film of the same name. In this dystopian
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movie, aliens have captured humans and they feed their minds an artificial reality in order pacify them whilst their bodies are used as an energy source. In order to uncover some of the injustices in our society, it requires more than just a nominally free press. The media must have the capacity to probe issues deeply. For citizens to use their right to free speech it needs to be a rooted in genuinely free thoughts. Karl Marx offers us his Red Pill to get to this deeper level of awareness: As Morpheus tells Neo, “The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work... when you go to church... when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth. Neo: What truth? Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind.” When Paine attacked the British Monarchy in ‘Common Sense’ he was trying to expose how the pomp and the ceremony of the ruling elites had disguised their illegitimate hold on power. This camouflage was not simply due to the robes and jewels that the monarchy wore; the deep costs that they imposed on their societies were concealed inside what were felt by the people to be noble values - the most natural and effective form of disguise. Paine understood that the Monarchy could drain society without much complaint because they had found a comfortable niche inside people’s value system. Today, our fundamental values are not in line with the Feudal themes of nobility, sacrifice and duty. Our spontaneous responses to moral and political issues are coded with the grammar of freedom of choice and of self-fulfilment. In a very particular way, our modern values make it very difficult for us to think and to talk about climate change in an appropriate way. The problem of climate change is camouflaged by value system, and those in power have found it easy to leave it undisturbed. Categorically, the point here is not to identify which cultural value system is more or less healthy. The point of Thomas Paine’s work (which Marx would fully agree with) is that we should be able to think about ourselves and our situation in a way that is much - 239 -
deeper than just a spontaneous common sense reaction to news. Philosophy is a subject that should equip people to reason and to think for themselves. Paine’s ‘Common Sense’ is a call to become genuinely autonomous, it embodies the fundamental rights of free speech and freedom of the press. His critique of the Monarchy, like Marx’s critique of Capitalism was, in this specific respect, the ultimate treason. This ‘virtuous’ cycle that excludes climate change from being the central concern for human society has prevented us from getting anywhere close to a real solution. Our lack of sustained attention is one of the reasons why we have not been able to put together a unified response in the face of climate change.
5. – The problem of unity. As mentioned previously, it was Thomas Paine who seems to have coined the phrase: “The United States of America”. Looking at the USA today, it is not that easy to imagine how tentative the connections were between the different colonies at the very beginning. In the early days of the war, the Continental Congress had no power to demand money or soldiers from the individual colonies, it was all done on a voluntary basis. When Jefferson talked about ‘my country’ he was referring to Virginia; for John Adams, ‘my country’ meant Massachusetts. There was no USA. To many colonists, it seemed a bit odd to spend so much human life and resources throwing off one distant central government in London only to then replace it with another one (eventually in Washington). However, it was also clear that the Disunited States of America would not be able to win a war against the United Kingdom. And so, it fell to the political skill and resolve of George Washington to keep the colonies united in the common cause of Independence. Part of this common sense of purpose was fought with propaganda. For example, the colonies used a very popular poster that been designed by Benjamin Franklin back in
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1754 when the ‘Ohio Conflict’ between the British and the French215 was escalating towards the 7-year war. The original purpose of the image had been to unite the colonies behind the British cause.
But 20 years later in 1774, the chopped up rattlesnake was re-appropriated and rereleased by the revolutionaries to bite against the British216. Each segment of the snake represented a different colony, marked with the relevant initial217. The colonies needed to combine their individual colonial agendas and identities in order to survive against King George’s attack. In some states, such as New York and Pennsylvania, the slogan underneath was changed to “UNITE, OR DIE”. The brute fact of war simply demanded unity. Paine’s work was part of the war propaganda. He wrote in simple, short English that could be read aloud in clubs and bars. Rather like Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, he tried to mobilise accessible phrases that could stick in the minds of listeners. It is said that Washington had the ‘The Crisis’ No. 1, read out to his beleaguered troops before they crossed the Delaware River to face the British at the Battle of Trenton. One advantage of changing the title of his book from ‘Plain Sense’ to ‘Common Sense’ was that Paine could not only marshal his arguments against the unreasonableness of kingship, but it meant that he could also put forward the imperative case for unified military action. George Washington had to deal with many reluctant colonies, and with the help of Paine’s rhetoric, he managed to pull together and sustain an army that overcame the British forces. In view of the need for a steadfast response to the British, Paine reminded his readers that patriotism requires people to value something more than themselves. In Chapter 4 of Common Sense, ‘On the Present Ability of America’, he argues: “In military numbers, the ancients far exceeded the moderns: and the reason is evident. For trade being the consequence of population, men become too much absorbed thereby to attend to
215 The French were also allied with various Native American Indian tribes 216 It was also used as early as 1765 in the dispute about Stamp Duties and continues to be rehabilitated for different purposes today. 217 Georgia was originally left out, and other states were combined to make the 8 segments that represent the 13 mainland colonies.
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anything else. Commerce diminishes the spirit, both of patriotism and military defence�. Paine rightly recognised that one positive side effect of trade was that nations found fewer reasons to fight between themselves. However, this extract points out something else to which Paine was attentive. He often noted that this anaesthetic effect was not just a local one. Commerce also had a general dulling effect on the human character - a pacification of human temperament that is certainly not a good thing when collective defiance is needed. Alongside a nuclear holocaust, climate change poses the biggest existential risk to humanity. What is required is a rapid, unified, global response. Modern global leaders, like the Founding Fathers, have to lead by re-appropriating national pride with some Enlightenment values. National interests have to be combined and harmonised, not indulged for the inward looking, xenophobic appetites. It is true that it is more difficult to focus minds on a threat that is much less sensory than flying bullets, but this does not diminish the reality or the urgency of the cause. The good news about the enemy not wearing a military uniform and shooting at us is that the positive actions that we need to take in order to combat the problem do not involve the loss of life. In fact, green investments increase welfare and jobs. Even if there are some short-term economic costs that cannot be offset by the investments in low-carbon economy, even if sectors of the economy will suffer, the cost of not doing enough will simply be monstrous. The first thing to be rationed in the UK after the outbreak of WW2 was petrol. Everyone could see the sense in the limits on its consumption that were imposed on September 16th 1939 – people’s lives ultimately depended on it. Further restrictions followed, with the rationing of Bacon, Butter and Sugar on January 8th 1940. When the enemy is so obvious, and the threat is so imminent, we can understand the logic of imposing civilian limits. The costs of defeat against the Nazi regime would have been unthinkable for the UK. Of course, the problem with climate change is that it does not present itself to our senses with the same simplicity, and so our collective resolve is limp.
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In consideration of the oncoming fight with the British motherland, Paine spent some time putting together some detailed calculations to show that the colonies could construct a navy to rival the British one for 3.5 million pounds in Chapter 4 of Common Sense. He argued both for the long-term affordability of the ships and for their long-term advantages. Modern science has also completed detailed calculations, rooted in a huge database of empirical work, about the investments and costs involved in remaining under a 2°C rise. The wide-ranging Stern Review back in 2006 calculated that meeting the challenge of climate change will only cost 1% of the headline global GDP figure218(updated to 2% in 2016)219. The global fossil fuel subsidy that was worth 6.5% of a wider global GDP in 2015 would be a good place to start looking for how to off-set this cost. Although Stern quite rightly pushes back on the vocabulary of ‘costs’ and emphasises that channelling funds into the green economy should be framed as an investment for multiple reasons. For the moment, according to the latest projections by the IPCC, we are on track for a planetary hyperpyrexia of over 4°C from the pre-industrial average. Paris pointed us in the right direction, but we are not even half way towards the reforms needed220. General George Washington could not have won the war against King George III with less than half his army. Paine concludes Common Sense with these words: “These proceedings may at first appear strange and difficult; but, like all other steps which we have already passed over, will in a little time become familiar and agreeable; and, until an independence is declared, the Continent will feel itself like a man who continues putting off some unpleasant business from day to day, yet knows it must be done, hates to set about it, wishes it over, and is continually haunted with the thoughts of its necessity”. Chapter 4 (140)
218 http://mudancasclimaticas.cptec.inpe.br/~rmclima/pdfs/destaques/sternreview_report_complete. pdf 219 In the 2016 update of the Stern Review, although the costing went up to 2% of GDP to reflect the 10 years of relative inactivity – the plummeting costs of renewable energy kept the figure very low. Lord Stern also emphasised the very heavy downsides to GDP of not doing anything. 220 See Chapter One.
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The truth at what price? Poor Tom Paine! There he lies: Nobody laughs and nobody cries Where he has gone or how he fares Nobody knows and nobody cares The mocking voice of this popular nursery rhyme does not seem appropriate for a man who championed the interests of the common man and prophetically called the American Revolution into life. But the fact that so many people were singing: ‘Nobody knows and nobody cares’ nicely captures the irony that characterised Paine’s life. The motif of his life would be an odd double act of astonishing success and popularity alongside fierce rejection and exclusion. His stubborn, sometimes grouchy character, made him both immensely popular and unpopular at the same time. And so, perhaps it is not surprising that after the startling success of ‘Common Sense’, and after the roaming storm of the War of Independence had blown itself out, Thomas Paine found himself on the margins. Indeed, Paine’s habit of heresy led him to jump around inside the wildly turbulent events that marked the turn of the century. The main movements of his biography are rather like a ‘geo-political hopscotch’, as he consistently squared up to those in power and got himself into trouble.
What remains consistent in all of his life and work is a commitment to truth and justice, whatever the prevailing view was and whatever the cost was. Paine was always willing to take risks and to sacrifice his popularity to defend the values he held. In our (post) modern times there are many justifiable reasons to be cynical about society – but Thomas Paine is a powerful reminder that the human condition is also marked by a remarkable capacity for altruism and selflessness. - 244 -
A close shave in France Such is the scale of Paine’s achievements, it has not yet been appropriate to mention his ground-breaking work against the slave trade. This was at a time when most American colonists, from the lowly ranch worker up to General George Washington, did not consider it to be a problem. He was fearlessly outspoken about it, and founded the first abolitionist society in 1774 with the Founding Father Benjamin Rush. But perhaps the clearest example of Paine’s integrity can be seen by taking a look at him on July 24th, 1794. He is sat in a prison in the heart of Paris during the reign of Terror. The celebrity of the American Revolution finds himself in feverishly poor health and incarcerated with 3 other inmates on the ground floor of a converted Palace. An evening guard is going through the building, marking various prisoners’ doors with white chalk to signal to the guard on night duty which inmates need to be taken away to have their heads chopped off. Most of Paine’s friends have already gone off for a ‘French Shave’, and Paine himself did not think of his life “as worth more than 24 hours”. This is really not the sort of ending we would expect for a celebrity whose ‘Common Sense’ was so in-step with the three primary colours of the French Revolution, ‘freedom, equality and brotherhood’. In fact, his most recent book, ‘The Rights of Man’ (Part II), had sold millions of copies in France, and he was even given honorary citizenship of the new Republic. Paine had enthusiastically gone to France shortly after the storming of the Bastille, lured by the early revolutionary energy. However, as a deputy in the Revolutionary ‘National Assembly’, Paine had spoken out and raised his finger to vote against the execution of Louis XVI. He was a moderate, thoughtful voice at a time during the French Revolution when the euphoria had started to turn toxic and common sense was running out. So, as the Jacobin’s attempt to cleanse France of anyone who was not fully committed to the cause became more and more feverish, by December 28th 1793, Robespierre raised his finger and pointed it at Paine in accusation. He was arrested and locked up. - 245 -
But Thomas Paine always kept his head whilst all those around him were losing theirs. Returning to observe him on July 24th, 1794, Paine had been so sick in prison that they allowed his cell door to be pushed fully open to afford him some fresher air. This meant that the guard slashed the death mark onto the inside of his door. And so, as it was closed for the night, Paine was shut into his cell with the chalk mark hidden from view. In the darkness of the night of 5th Thermidor, the angel of death passed down his corridor, and it went past Paine’s door without stopping. Robespierre himself would get the chop only 4 days later, and Paine eventually got back safely to America. He could have easily got out of the bloodbath in Paris much earlier, but he thought that his contribution to the revolution was important. Paine was prepared to pay a heavy price to defend his principles.
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Conclusion Finding a decent vantage point History provides a sense of perspective that would have been so difficult to get from inside the tumult of those revolutionary years. Knowing how the story of the war ends, sinks certain events, concerns and people out of sight and raises others to prominence. It gives us an elevated position that enables us to see the key moments of the American War of Independence in one view. From this vantage point, we can see the sudden influx of 4,000 Red Coat infantry docking into Boston Harbour on October 1st 1768 and just a little further on, the confusion and resentment after 9 of them opened fire on a crowd in the Boston Massacre. These Red Coats can then be seen at the Lexington skirmish on April 19th 1775, as their bullets thud into the chests of the Massachusetts militiamen there. This view enables us to see the snaking lines of troops that then poured out across the battlefield maps, and the eventual retreat of the British Red Coats back to their boats. As the papers of Independence were signed in Paris, the British boats started to drift reluctantly out of New York Harbour. On the morning of November 25th 1783, a naval Red Coat soldier cut the rope of the last boat - as if it were an umbilical cord. This final scene concludes an extraordinary swirl of events. The Revolutionary Wars in America and France provided moviemakers with a grand and dramatic list of characters and plot lines with which to work. These wars reshaped the political and economic global map in a profound and lasting way. The characters involved in the story could not see the full significance of what was happening around them, they were much too close to the action. But now that the fog of war has lifted, from our privileged view, we can see the whole dot-to-dot connections that led to American Independence. By zooming out and taking an even more distant vantage point, the drama of these years can be framed by a more significant story. Historians agree that the Revolution with the most power and traction in human affairs was the Industrial Revolution. It is a story with little to attract the attention of a screenplay writer. Its slow turning cogs
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had started to pick up some momentum at the time of Thomas Paine, but although the industrial age was much less theatrical, it became far more decisive in reconfiguring human societies. The full extent of this change might only just be making itself apparent now. Because, in the background to the Industrial Revolution there was an accelerating release of a colourless, odourless gas. Throughout this time, a seemingly harmless chemical compound, CO2, has been accumulating above our heads. This gas has the capacity to effect colossal change that will dwarf all of the other revolutions. Taking a scientific viewpoint of the past offers an even wider view of reality. The conclusions of science are drawn from results that are not cluttered by the mess of human concerns. Climate science is able to look into the past, by sampling ice core air bubbles, deep earth sediments and a whole range of data. The lines of history that it can draw are made up of thousands of statistical dots. The vantage point that science offers has multiple dimensions, but all of the different angles confirm the central story that the climate has just taken a very sharp turn. This view also enables them to see quite clearly the direction that we are heading in.
The truly historic present In 1774, a very large storm was brewing in a very large British tea-cup. Today, an even bigger storm is brewing in the biggest cup of all. It does not feel like it at all, it is way beyond our common sense, but a new world is being born. It cannot be known through our common senses, it can only be properly identified with high precision equipment and in the results of scientific research. Although our lives feel very ordinary most of the time, if we could take a wider perspective on everything, we are living through a truly historical present. The vantage point offered by Philosophy is a 360° view of reality. Not only can Philosophy pull together the historical with the scientific viewpoint, it is a subject attempts to form reliable cognitive map of all fields of knowledge and experience. Climate change is a systemic problem that requires systemic thinking. With all the different economic and ethical complexities, with all the social and scientific aspects of the issue - Philosophy provides a important holistic view of the situation. Indeed, not only does this cognitive map have many features and details, but Philosophy also attempts to offer an informed sense of the contours of a problem - it shapes priorities, - 248 -
and seeks to understand which issues should be most prominent in our thinking. It is a subject that tries to form a reliable cognitive map of all of the claims to knowledge that are out there. In the bluster of events that were happening around Thomas Paine in 1774, his reading of the events became the actively definitive version. Philosophy at its best does not just understand the world, it also redeems it. Thomas Paine, like Philosophy, was not a subject aloof from human affairs; he was fully engaged in the events of his time and through the strength of his writing he lifted the lid on what was really going on. We are currently in the middle of a constitutional crisis with Nature, things cannot go on the way they are now. We need to start writing a new story about ourselves. Thomas Paine’s ‘Common Sense’ provides an ideal starting point. It is open-eyed about reality and boldly courageous about how human beings have the capacity to think and to co-operate.
Paine, the forgotten Prophet of the New World Paine was a modern prophet, who was inspired by reason rather than by an inner voice. His insight into human affairs was motivated by both an intense realism and idealism. He was uncompromising and unintimidated in his arguments about social justice because he had such a clear and positive vision of how things could be. Normally considered as opposites, Paine fuses ideals and reality together in his bristling but earthy prose. It is a remarkable synthesis of opposites to sustain. It is interesting to note that he was vilified by the ideologues in revolutionary France for being too humane and hounded out of pragmatic Britain for being too idealistic. Like many unlikely prophets, Thomas Paine was full of contradictions. He was a flawed man, somewhat of a social misfit, but he was unfailingly a man of the people. He was the godfather of the American Revolution, yet having devoted so much of his life to democratic reform, he died without the right to vote in the USA. His funeral on June 10th 1809, vividly demonstrates how often he was marginalised in his fight for those on the margins. It seems there were just 6 people in attendance: his partner, Madame De Bonneville, with two of her children, an Irish political refugee and two Afro-American men (one of whom might have been the gravedigger). There was no crowd, no political leader, and no recorded eulogy - although Madame De Bonneville claims to have cried these words as the soil was spaded onto the coffin: “Mr. - 249 -
Paine! My son stands here as testimony of the gratitude of America, and I, for France!’ Although Paine was radically Christ-like in his concern for those who had no access to power, the church had denied him a graveyard due to his searing rationalist attacks on the Bible and his debunking of various dogmas. Just like Christ in fact, his body disappeared after his death. Paine’s post-death narrative takes much longer than three days, but in short, his bones were dug up in the dead of night after 10 years at rest by a democratic zealot William Cobbett who transported them back to his native England to ‘sanctify’ a monument of Paine. But the project lacked funds and failed, so his bones were put into his attic and later (probably) flogged in bits to the Rag’n’Bone man. It is claimed that Paine now has a rib in France and is quite possible that his skull is in Australia221. In the 1930s, a woman in Brighton claimed to own one of Paine’s bones. Tellingly, it was a jaw bone. As the historian Moncure Daniel Conway noted a hundred years ago: “As to his bones, no man knows the place of their rest to this day. His principles rest not”. The lack of traction that our culture and politics has with climate change would be enough to make Paine turn in his grave, if he only had one222. But despite all of the setbacks that Paine suffered in his own life to promote justice, he retained an undimmed belief in people’s capacity to think for themselves: “Perhaps you thought America too was taking a nap, and therefore chose, like Satan to Eve, to whisper the delusion softly, lest you should awaken her. This continent, Sir, is too extensive to sleep all at once, and too watchful, even in its slumbers, not to startle at the unhallowed foot of an invader.” (The Crisis I) In 1775, the massive force of the empire had turned against the colonists and it was not good enough to just be good British subjects anymore. It was a brutal truth to accept. The first shot fired at Lexington demonstrated that it was real, and the tempest of war was set to ruin thousands of homes and lives. Today, another type of war is looming. Nature is turning its face against us in the 21st century and it is not good enough for us to just be good consumers anymore. The cannon balls fired at the
221 When enough funds are found a DNA test will be carried out to determine if Paine’s lock of hair from the private Thetford collection matches that of the skull. 222 www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2009/apr/23/norfolk-thomas-paine-bbc-map
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USA by Mother Nature with Hurricanes Harvey and Irma in 2017 were loud warning shots across the bows of a society that has not been paying enough attention to her. The hurricanes themselves are just spots on a graph, but that is not how they were experienced by those who lived under their paths, and those spots are an expression of an underlying condition that the climate is developing. If we continue to ignore those signals and if the rising fever is not treated, She could raise an army that would easily overpower us. It took some time for the American colonists to awaken from their dogmatic slumbers about what it meant to be a royal subject. Even after war broke out, as late as March 1776, Elbridge Gerry observed: “Some timid minds are terrified at the word independence…” This book is essentially an argument that a new declaration of independence is needed again. As the unsettled climate begins to rattle our cage with increasing force, the plain truth of climate change must consistently be put before the people. We need to be startled again at the unhallowed foot of an invader into our civilisation. “Everything that is right or reasonable pleads for separation. The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, ‘TIS TIME TO PART.”
(Common Sense) “Why is it that we hesitate? From Britain, we can expect nothing but ruin. If she is admitted to the government of America again, this continent will not be worth living in”.
(Appendix to Common Sense)
Paine the Radical Realist Paine was unquestionably a radical thinker; a proper reading of his work should not leave us sitting comfortably. He has clear and demanding principles, but at the same time his prose is well grounded in reality. He did write ‘The Crisis 1’ on a drum skin around the campfire whilst accompanying George Washington during an army retreat, but what he writes is just a lot of plain old common sense. This radical realism in Paine’s work can easily lead to two mistakes when holding his books. The first mistake is to simply read him as a high-minded radical, as this - 251 -
affords us the chance to keep him at a cautious arm’s length. This mistake is easy to make because we live in times in which zeal or passion are suspicious features of any argument. Indeed, Paine continues to receive some criticism for the strong polemical tone of his work, but his detractors should be mindful that the urgency and conviction of his prose were grounded in very reasonable arguments. The second mistake is to just read Paine as a temperate defender of our modern democracy, as this affords us the chance to cosy up to him, and that prevents us from doggedly scrutinising our own social order. Are we prepared to think through the consequences of modern capitalist society as resolutely as Paine thought through a deconstruction of the monarchy? Are we prepared to leave our comfy sofa within an economic empire and see things from a position outside the systems of power? Can we look directly at the alarming problem and not just tinker with it? Are we prepared to accept that the solution might involve real change, both at the personal level and the national level? Are we prepared to do more than recycling our thoughts and our rubbish? Either mistake deflects Paine’s power as a thinker. He was a radical realist with a noble view of humanity. It is true that Paine’s dissent is unsettling, but he is at the same time, an uplifting thinker. Faced with a new world crisis, the green solutions are there, but the political will is not yet resolute enough. Thomas Paine demonstrates that powerful philosophy is capable of looking unflinchingly at the truth and moving forward; it is both boldly realistic and idealistic. This is the exceptional virtue of Paine’s work that gives his writing such a resilient value. He asks us hard questions of ourselves and our society, whilst trusting our common sense to move us forward.
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“I had formed my plan of life, and conceiving myself happy, wished everybody else so. But when the country, into which I had just set my foot, was set on fire about my ears, it was time to stir. It was time for every man to stir.” - Thomas Paine, “The Crisis - No 7” (Philadelphia, Nov 21st, 1776)
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Acknowledgements Opening credits I thought I was quite well-educated before I met a hippie. He was from another world, America, and from another time-zone, mainly the 1960s. His name is Michael Wadleigh. His talk about ‘Closed Mass Systems’, given to the Club of Rome in Brussels in 2009 toasted my brain. He demonstrated the deep ecological stress marks that remain hidden from our common sense of things. In a decade when we have suddenly allowed fringe mad-men to take over the mainstream, it is a deep shame that we were not yet ready to allow anybody of genuine intelligence and values to have any key influence. He is a man who would be deeply embarrassed by any compliments, so I won’t offer any. His 50-year-old Oscar statue for directing the award winning documentary ‘Woodstock’ (1970), and his not-much-younger white mini-van, says enough about him. His partner, Dr Birgit Van Munster, who is certainly not to be counted as second, has offered her remarkably clear data and analysis as an immensely helpful entry point into the scientific conclusions about climate change. Over two decades working to help countless Tanzanian people to have a sustainable future, and her recent monster number crunching of the latest climate data, makes her genuine understanding of nature and its limits so precious. This was something keenly appreciated by all of the students that she has welcomed to their ecological farm in Wales. Birgit, an expert reviewer of IPCC publications, also gave up hours of her time to crosscheck all the scientific references in the book. All of the statistics and claims made in this book are supported by the data produced by universities and institutions, and by the latest peer reviewed publications. Again, dragging such a modest character into a public text like this will not be comfortable reading for her. So, do not be surprised to find these lines deleted.
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My apologies for neglecting Michael’s scientific background and Birgit’s sensitive awareness of people and society; however, for the sake of a metaphor, you make the perfect couple. Michael, so gifted in the arts, and Birgit, so able in science, are cofounders of the ‘Homo Sapiens223 Foundation’ that is dedicated to making humans live up to their name. And so, this book is a modest attempt to help make that bridge that you are so committed to building, between the scientific truth and our social reality. Thank you.
Closing credits Two students have made significant contributions to this book. Firstly, Carl (Jonsson) who so thoughtfully crafted the illustrations that help keep the reader on track with a text that I struggled to control. Your understanding of Ecology was always a bright and slow-burning light. Secondly, Seb (Kaye), for engaging so fully in philosophy. You are a remarkable citizen for taking the UK Government to court over their emissions. Such an undertaking requires both a big brain and big heart, and you have both. Thomas Paine would have been proud of you for holding the government to account on behalf of the people. It was a beautiful co-incidence that the full hearing for the court case happened on the 4th July (2018). To all of my Ecology groups, even if it seems like a sublime kind of madness, “change is gonna come”. This book is also ‘Für Elise’ Sijthoff. Physiotherapist, Publisher, Philanthropist and POW! The multi-coloured Human Firework. You have moved so many children. Just as a child needs core motor skills to be physically mobile, every child needs the core democratic skills to take up their proper place in society. In your ground-breaking project for Dutch, Scottish and Welsh Primary School classrooms, and now with Child
223 Sapiens – from the Latin for wise.
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Press International, you are enabling children to move into the civic space around them. Your genuine concern for their Rights is remarkably and wonderfully infectious. To Els, Frederik, Pierre-Phillipe, Jennifer and François, constructing a Philosophy syllabus from ground zero for our European students made the value of Philosophy and the richness of our European languages and culture so clear. Even though we wrestled over concepts and priorities from our different traditions, it was always a curious experience to see that there was a strong understanding that we were all plugged into the same powerful thing. Many of the ground-rules for this book were established in those meeting rooms. To Stijn, the warmth and creativity of the books’ graphic design is such a great reflection of your character. To Sean, for the scrutiny you gave to the small details of the prose and to the joints of the arguments. To my Mum and Dad, my sincere gratitude for your nature and nurture. To my children, Jules, Madeline, Thibault and Antoine - you are simply adorable. Finally, to my wife, Samantha - you made contingent love necessary.
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Space for your own reflections:
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Space for your own reflections:
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Journalism is like Philosophy Quality Journalism and Philosophy require the writer and the reader to be attentive and reflective about that which lies beyond their common sense. They both: • Invite us into dialogue with people and the world around us. • Insist that we are attentive to evidence. • Sharpen our thinking to spot contradictions and false arguments. • Encourage us to develop an autonomous viewpoint. • Dare us to overcome egocentric thinking. If there are to be no Philosopher Kings and Queens, robust journalism is a democratic skill that we must both deeply respect and invest in. As Orben said, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance”. It is time to start the dialogue. Time to hand over the pen. Matthew Pye, Author
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Proudly presenting:
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At ChildPress, like real research journalists, youngsters create and publish content for schools and the public. While producing trustworthy media, they experience what influence the media has on both the quality of dialogue as well as on the quality of any decision making process, first hand. - Elise Sijthoff, Publisher Fysio Educatief, Founder ChildPress
The unknown truth below the surface of consumerism By Vappu Väänänen
A Cry for help: Ginny Tyson meets Greta Thunberg By Ginny Tyson
Boskanter - Disconnecting and Reconnecting By Jules Pye
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3 Essays for ChildPress We are Vappu, Ginny and Jules - Students of Mr. Pye and members of ChildPress. Reporting and publishing opens up our experience to be heard. Reading our publications will give adults insights in our lives and in the issues we care about. In this book, for the first time we present 3 essays. We are preparing many more publications, for both schools and the public.
Photos by the students.
Together we will share our words and learn from each other. We invite you to read our following 3 essays and challenge you to join us in the climate change dialogue.
The unknown truth below the surface of consumerism by Vappu Väänänen
In the late 20th and the 21st century we, the homo sapiens, have adapted a mindless consumerist lifestyle in the very highly and highly developed countries. We purchase items, such as clothes and gadgets, for “wants” and not “needs”. As obvious as it might sound, everything that we consume has to be created, extracted or produced. Most often this requires the burning of fossil fuels, the core drivers of climate change. But for us high consumers, a 5€ t-shirt in Primark appears as if it grew from the ground because we have not witnessed the environmental damage for ourselves. Instead of paying attention, we keep on humming Madonna’s “Material Girl” while shopping in the realm of fast fashion and never question the contribution of a tangible product to such an abstract complexity like climate change. Let us delve deeper into clothes: Research, conducted by the Continental Clothing Co. Ltd and certified by The Carbon Trust, studied various pieces of clothing and their total lifespan from the creation of the fabric to its disposal. A single t-shirt produced by standard grid electricity emits 6.34 kg of CO2, including embedded emissions and consumer-use -phase emissions. Approximately two-thirds of its emissions originate from the “raw materials and manufacturing” phase. In contrast to a t-shirt that is produced in the EarthPositive supply chain (using renewable energy), the percentage of CO2 emitted plummets to 15%. In all honesty, 6.34 kg of CO2 alone is not much considering the 43 billion tonnes of global CO2 emissions emitted in 2018 . But to provide perspective, this abstract amount can be translated into house mice. If the comparison is made to the average adult mouse weighing 19 grams, purchasing five standard t-shirts a year would mean that you share your home with 1668 of them. The production and the embedded emissions of such a simple thing as a cotton t-shirt is a perfect illustration of our economic system. If we persist in making individual alterations in order to mitigate our personal carbon footprint, by either being plant-based, cycling to work or school, keeping the lights off or investing in EarthPositive t-shirts, the global system
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will not change significantly. “You can make a big difference!” is a partial truth at best. The global economy has been constructed by human beings in such a way that investing in a low carbon lifestyle is financially difficult for many and could potentially drive businesses and microeconomies into bankruptcy. But the beauty of our carbon crisis is the fact that all of it is human-made. This way, unlike the laws of nature that exist beyond the human mind, our system is artificial and thus, it can be changed.
The relationship between information and change In order to achieve change we need to start by being mindful of our consumption on every level possible and demanding new, affirming legislation. We consumers are constantly being fed by advertisements claiming that a company’s brand new product is a must-have. This propaganda brainwashes us into harnessing, buying and owning material things. After all, everyone subconsciously yearns for an ostentatious lifestyle because only then you are considered “successful” and “admirable”. Due to this reality, our present consumption pattern is firmly ingrained in us but we, as a population, can challenge that. However, the question of how we can individually contact governments and politicians and persuade those in power to change our legislation is more difficult. I recently hosted a discussion about the very fundamental facts about climate change for a Finnish association called “Martat”. As I was progressing with my PowerPoint presentation, one audience member asked a question, breaking the utter silence, which then ultimately escalated into an enthusiastic conversation amongst the whole audience. When the topic changed into high consumerism, a woman suddenly turned towards me and asked: “Is this all made to blame us?” At first, I did not quite absorb what she meant by that remark, but only afterwards it really sunk in with me. I was not angry at the woman, but rather empathetic about her point of view: she had never in her life known the truth about how much the Western and Northern people consume. But if she did not know, how many others like her are still out there? With information comes sagacity and with that a possibility to utilise it. The woman has now gained knowledge as she is one fact richer than she was before she posed the question. She is a great example of how vital information is for mindfulness: if no one knew about the critical state that the human civilisation is submerging in, change would not occur. For something new to be born, the old state of humanity cannot remain the same. This concept has to be the catalyst for the necessary legal alterations that we need to confront.
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Responsibility over blame Returning to the initial question that the woman asked, the answer is no. The fact that very highly developed countries have about 30 times higher consumption emissions than lowdeveloped countries, and that they consume an average 23.5 tonnes of material things per year (which is 10 times the amount of the consumption of low-developed countries), is not done to blame anyone. Blaming only invests our precious time into negativity instead of contributing to genuine actions targeting the problem itself. The numbers are there to show us the truth, that being the lack of responsibility that us highly developed nations with soaring consumerism levels are not willing to face. From my own point of view, I used to love shopping, whether it was fast fashion or useless Ikea furniture. I had a habit of leaving the lights on in the whole house and continuing to charge my phone despite it being fully charged. In all honesty, I did not know better back then and after learning the truth I blamed myself. The feelings of abhorrence and repulsion I had towards myself and my family that kept on overconsuming, started festering in my mind. I became outraged. But that anger did not lead me to a better place. It was only after accepting my responsibility that I was able to begin mindful meditation and developing a minimalist, low-consumerist mindset.
Our right to know I still do not meet the criteria of an ideal low-consumerist profile. My life is so deeply embedded into the economic and financial reality of this era that I still consider myself as an excessive consumer. However, the turning point in this short life of mine has been education. There is so much that is unknown to the public that needs to be addressed. For instance, a pivotal graph produced by the World Meteorological Organization (below) clearly indicates that our emissions keep on increasing, and thus the warming effect proliferating in numbers as we hankering homo sapiens keep on guzzling more individual power, more material things and more energy. This graph is one of the fundamental but substantial pieces of the bigger, forgotten truth – and yet, it is not shown to the public eye. The complexity of the science behind climate change is an utterly invalid excuse not to inform the global population about the unimaginable disaster that lies ahead of us. Our right to know the truth has been seized by our world-leading politicians due to fear, greed and the lingering uncertainty of people’s reactions and opinions. But climate change is not an opinion. It is an environmental catastrophe and a violation of our rights and our moral principles. Denying the truth will not change it and leaving the problem untouched will only bring even more devastation. We human beings have a right to know our reality and a right to challenge our very own legal, political and economic system. We have a right to act and react, and the right and responsibility to ignite change.
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Space for your own reflections:
3.0
CAUSE OF CLIMATE CHANGE Long-lived greenhouse gases in the atmosphere WMO Greenhouse Gas Bulletin 2017 projected to 2018
Watts per square meter (W/m2)
Radiative forcing (warming effect)
2.5
2.0
CO2 1.5
1.0 CH4 0.5
N2O CFC-12 CFC-11
0.0 1988
15 minor
1998
Vappu Väänänen,
Finnish, Aged 1 7. - 267 -
2008
2018
A Cry for Help - Ginny Tyson meets Greta Thunberg by Ginny Tyson
At numerous rallies across Europe, Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg speaks out for the younger generation against “catastrophic climate change”, in favour of pleas that drastic measures must be taken immediately to avoid irreparable damage to the world as we know it. On October 6th 2018, activist Greta Thunberg (15) addresses the crowd gathered around her, just outside the European Parliament. “If we don’t act now,” she says, “it will be too late”. This not the first time the young Swedish student has spoken up for the climate. Beginning three weeks before Sweden’s parliamentary elections on September 9th, she has been ‘schoolstriking’ outside the Swedish parliament in Stockholm. Her aim? To gain media attention, and in this way to raise awareness about the little-known scientific facts behind the climate crisis. A fifteen year-old girl may not be the most expected voice for an issue with such a worldwide impact. Yet her focus on the climate has remained unwavering since she began research on the subject over six years ago, after seeing a poster which piqued her curiosity. While the first thing she sought to change was herself, then her family, now she is making a stand to change the world. Unobscured by ‘adult concerns’, her perception of the issue is clear and precise. She worries about her future, not about money or a career, but about its very existence. “In terms of global warming, no one plans for after the year 2050. By that time, I will at best, have lived less than half my life. […] What happens next?” Thunberg is consistent and repetitive in discussing her subject. Whether in Stockholm, the Hague, Helsinki or Brussels, she repeats the same few quotes to any interviewers; the same facts. “We need to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 15 percent a year”, she insists; “We already have the infrastructures necessary for this”, she adds, and begs for people to understand that:
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“We only have until 2020 until the situation becomes irreversible”. The truth is, she doesn’t have time to humour each crowd with different speeches. She has done extensive research and knows the science; her goal now is to spread the truth before time runs out. Thunberg repeatedly mentions that: “We cannot save the planet by playing by the rules”. It is legal for companies to pollute and destroy, with limits so high that they may as well not be there at all. She reminds her audience that every day, we use one hundred million barrels of oil, without infringing any laws. This needs to stop before global warming’s damage becomes uncontrollable, and it is up to the older generation to understand this and to act accordingly. “We don’t have time to wait for the children to make this change”, she warns the crowd. Simply put, this is why she protests. “The rules need to change” she says. Lawful action has produced little to no results so far and even international environmental efforts are wretchedly ineffective. Indeed, the most recent agreement reached at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) did not include even a third of the measures necessary against greenhouse gas emissions. If no one takes notice of scientific fact, sometimes someone has to make a stand – and sometimes, this someone is a fifteen year old girl making sure the truth is spread. Due to lack of media coverage of the climate crisis, myths and doubt surround climate change. Doubt that it affects us, doubt that it is immediate and belief that it is inescapable and that we do not have the science to back it up. ‘If the mainstream media do not report the fact that without major, urgent change, we are heading for societal collapse, there is a part of our brain that cannot believe that the science is right.’ Mainstream media urgently has to get in line with mainstream science. The thing is, as Thunberg points out to her increasingly numerous supporters, the research has been done and the facts are available. She recalls being told to become a ‘climate scientist’ instead of protesting, so that she can solve the problem. “The truth is, it’s simple, not complex” says Thunberg when discussing the answer to the climate crisis. “What is the point of learning facts at school, she asks, when the same facts […] clearly mean nothing to our politicians and our society?” As she has said countless times, she is looking for a change – a change in the perception of climate change and of the nature of its current and future impacts.
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Faced with parliaments and leaders in denial of the severe consequences of climate change, is it up to the younger generations to fight for their right to a future? Destructive floods, droughts, and natural disasters, not to mention their resulting mass migrations, are the results of climate change which are already visible today. Monsoon rain in Bangladesh killed over 1,200 people and impacted over 40 million in the worst flood the region had seen in years. In Sierra Leone, over 300 were killed and 2,000 left homeless by terrible landslides. The repercussions of global warming can be felt all over the world, from hurricanes in the United States to the sinking Netherlands, and they will be increasingly damaging. All of these are indicators of the systemic stress that the whole ecological system is under. And the whole of our economy is built on this, everything. Yet, still climate change is not being treated as a crisis, still there is minimal effort on the part of governments and older generations to fight it. “This is a cry for help”, pleads Greta. “Give us a future. Our lives are in your hands.”
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Space for your own reflections:
Ginny Tyson,
English, Aged 1 7. - 271 -
Boskanter - Disconnecting and Reconnecting by Jules Pye
A cold and windy morning, the first one of the year, and at the remote bus stop and the end of a long journey through the Belgian countryside awaits a cheerful Ciaran Foulds carrying his 20-month old toddler in his baby carrier backpack. We are greeted with a handshake and some excited babbling. A short walk later we discover their home, Boskanter: A very small, humble and modest house; a bit rudimentary looking to the outsider, who has just left his modern apartment in downtown Brussels. Inside we meet some of the other inhabitants and are immediately sucked into their feeling of community - wrapped by an authentic feeling of homeliness, belonging and safety. If we did have any naive prejudices of the home’s outside appearance, they were gone. The healthy, light and locally sourced lunch serves as a good indication for the upcoming extensive tour of the farm - vegetable discovering, tasting and picking, wood splitting and finally something just short of a miracle they called dinner. Boskanter’s goal: To be as independent and carbon-neutral as possible. Their permaculture garden and greenhouses, the many woodpowered rocket-stoves and ovens, solar panels, rainwater collection systems and the forest that covers all of their land, all demonstrate the steps taken towards their target. Alongside these sadly unconventional technologies is their insatiable determination and natural drive. The freshness of this lifestyle provides the energy that motors their dream. Intruders like us can taste all this through an immediate feeling of inclusivity and belonging. When meeting the two children (Rumi and Naoise, nearly 2 and 4 respectively) who live in this close knit community one cannot help but admire their unique start in life. The closest most children get to nature is the occasional walk in the forest with the family, or class trip to the zoo or park every now and then. On this farm, however, the children have the most intimate bonds with their surrounding natural environment possible from day one onwards. Along with their family and friends from the farm, they live inside nature and thereby nature also gets inside them in the form of nurturing respect and admiration for it, and through acquiring knowledge and skills.
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With “normal” youngsters growing up outside of such rich and fascinating opportunities, nature is always something they have to go to, something separate from their own mind and body that they do not necessarily have to engage with. This distancing of nature from one’s self (in which nature all too often seemingly ends up underneath) is probably what has led to such extensive violations of natural environments throughout Earth and a present lack of environmental action from humans. Because the truth remains that without nature there is no mankind; this knowledge is being embedded into these fortunate children, who are being fed with perfectly sustainably sourced food and natural awareness and conscience. They won’t even have to learn to live in harmony with nature as we would in, say, a highly specialised university course, because it will already have formed part of their everyday life; it (quite literally) comes naturally to them. And that is why these two siblings are way ahead of all of us lot, who are not being self-sufficient in terms of food (nearly) and energy (completely) and (very close to) carbon neutral. What is now forming part of their upbringing, we will all have to learn as a survival skill. Spending just eight hours with them allowed us to discover and learn such a huge array of “things”: ranging from their smartly built rocket-stoves which increase the energy harvested from burning firewood, to spicy lettuce, shockingly zesty and citrusy spinach and bright pink beans that looked like a cross between an “M&M” and a dinosaur egg. From how to dig small trenches in a field to increase crop yield, to the fact that “we harvest most of our plants in a prepubescent age” (as Ciaran Foulds so nicely put, which is why the term “ripe” now seems so misleading), before finally discovering that there is a season for chicken eggs. If in eight hours we had been so enlightened, it is hard to wrap your mind around how much these children would learn growing up and spending a whole childhood in such an intellectually rich environment. And, of course, it isn’t just these children who profit from it. This farm, which includes its energy plans, food production, harmonious living with, or rather in, nature and authentic feeling of belonging to a community with a common cause, is way ahead of us all. They show us how we ought to live in order to ensure the survival of our species. They are so successful in what they do because they embrace the fact that we are just another species so openly - thereby illuminating how counterproductive and contradictory our unsustainable living is. Boskanter sets such a pure example of what it is to be dedicated in life and be a real homo sapiens. This includes being
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a “cooperative” part of Earth, without Mother Gaia having to kick us out. Until we all learn to live as truly and nobly as they do, we can only pretend we are the wise humans we claim to be. On the train back home we agreed that our visit to Boskanter was an eye-, mind- and spirit-opener. During the course of that day, and whilst digesting the whole experience at home afterwards, we realised how much we, as humanity, have managed to distance ourselves from nature. The distance is proven by our everyday lives, in which the only trees we see are those artificially evenly spread along the side of the road, the only animals we see are our pets at home and the only birds we hear are the pigeons gorging themselves on leftover chips under benches and the staged chirruping from our alarms in the morning. The inhabitants of Boskanter prove that that gap is unnecessary and can be sealed up by living harmoniously inside, alongside, attentive to and in accordance with nature by joining into its rhythms. This whole article had to be written using a language, English. This meant that it has been difficult to communicate properly, the intention is to show how we need to live ‘inside’ nature, but that makes it sound like we are not part of nature ourselves. We might be clever, we might have invented things like supermarkets and huge supply chains to stock them – but what I am struggling to say is that we need to be humble, and see that everything is nature, every blob of it, including us and everything we make. Our future is bound up in it. The danger with the separation that language and technology causes is that it has forced society to turn a blind eye when it comes to our actual, real relationship with nature. We don’t realise that we are just a rebellious, uncooperative and dangerously greedy part of the system and that we are just as vulnerable to our ecological recklessness as the 60% of all vertebrates that we have eradicated in under the last 50 years. Climate mitigation, the preserving of natural habitats, and consuming, wasting and producing as little as possible (which needs to go far beyond plastic bags, straws and cups and recycling) is not only about saving some hungry, fluffy polar bear. It’s about saving a species from its own jaws of egoism, greed and irrationality. We should care much more about our species, the homo sapiens – and live up to our name.
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Space for your own reflections:
Jules Pye,
German, Aged 1 7. - 275 -
From Left to Right: Paolo van Dommelen, Matthew Pye, Kia Katainen,Vappu Väänänen, Annele Baltmane, Patricija Marijauskaité, Carolina Teixeira, Zoë Sleath, Elise Sijthoff, Franziska Herrmann, Jules Pye,Theodor Selimovic
Space for your own reflections:
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Space for your own reflections:
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