I’ve had a stab, in a guest post over at Overland, at looking at how the tendencies we’ve always had to succumbing to magical thinking make climate change a very difficult challenge for politics – particularly when we need to ground that politics culturally as well as rationally in a postmodern age where the narrative is all.
The post is partly informed by the insights of the French sociologist Bruno Latour on knowledge and, particularly, by his claim that ‘we have never been modern’. If he’s right, and I think he is, there is no public sphere of reason to which we can unproblematically appeal. Rather, we need to ground our arguments in a sensibility which bridges the culture/nature divide, and to recognise that the only possible response to climate crisis is political. That’s a challenge both for progressives, who seem in many instances to have forgotten cultural politics, and for those who believe that reason will triumph. That’s also a belief – and it’s one that will only come true if it’s fought for.
You can read the post here.
I blame (rummages around in hat) the field of economics.
No, seriously.
For too long we’ve put up with a bunch of backwards looking pseudo scientists playing with mathy-looking equations making pronouncements that never come true. They quite literally can’t predict *anything* with their edifice of stupidity. It’s gotten so bad they won’t even talk to each other without first ascertaining which “school of economics” these charlatans subscribe to.
Yet, both sides of politics have eaten whole this bubbling vat of superstition, complete with various prophets (Austrians! Keynes!) without batting an eyelid over the fact that none of the bullshit theories these demagogues fever-dreamed were worth any kind of damn. Every now and again one of the disciples awakes ala Greenspan, but tribalism rules over rationality in economics. It’s only lesson is that where there is not absolute certainty, there is room for crippling doubt.
That’s not how science works – that’s how politics and religion are presented and most people are far more familiar with the tropes of those endeavours. We aren’t familiar enough with the tropes of science to be able to distinguish scientific doubt from religious doubt, despite them being two completely different things. Scientific doubt might be statistical – religion or political doubt can’t be.
Humans are basically awful at internalising probability.
Now we’re in the situation where an entire branch of human endeavour, the hard sciences, that brought us vaccinations, electronics, more calories than we can possibly consume and movies of naked ladies sharing poop in a cup are now brought into disrepute because the dismal sciences have proved, well, pretty bloody dismal.
The war on science has probably been eternal, but you can blame it on spillage from superstition. That conflation of old-style black/white doubt with the more subtle probability or statistical doubt gives a certain portion of the population to broadly dismiss anything that doesn’t fit their world view. That the study of economics *allows* you to make a choice is the death knell of human progress. That’s why we’ll never be modern until statistics and probability is taught from birth.
Interesting, Ute Man.
So, in a way, the argument is that the scientism of the social sciences is also its own undoing. The claims to certainty (at least implicitly made) about the social seek to imitate the natural sciences, oblivious to the fact that good natural scientists understand science to be a process not a discourse of revealed truth.
It circles back to ideology and science, doesn’t it? I’m liking that old Marxist distinction (much as it needs complicating) more and more lately when it comes to thinking about economics as knowledge.
Great piece at OL , Mark – and Ute man, I think you’re on to something there. The reign of the dismal science has accustomed people to the view that models are almost invariable bullshit, and “rationalism” a social/ political tool. They have a lot to answer for.
And you make a good point: hey skeptics, remember those scientists you’re attacking are the primary reason you live longer than 50. Ungrateful schmucks.
Cheers, Lefty E!
It’s a challenging piece, Mark.
A few days ago, before the cricket took over, local radio in the afternoons had non-stop talkback on climate change, inspired by the ructions in the Liberal Party. The “magical thinking” of callers was incredible, as was the promulgation of misinformation on our ABC. To speak of ‘public opinion’ in terms of neat categories masks the sheer variety and inventiveness as everyone creates their own story of the world.
But that is only one aspect – there is much to think about in the piece. I’m always interested in how people come to think about issues in a different way because of an event in their lives. It’s usually the emotional dimension of the event that changes their perspective.
I think we have come to assume that we can mould nature to our purposes. So much of our habitual way of living our lives is based on this and the presumed efficacy of a techno-fix. Nature is perhaps shaping to whack us in the face.
But if we are going to tune into nature and see ourselves as a process of nature, we’ll need to adapt to nature’s rhythms, some of which work on time scales far beyond what we are used to in ‘normal’ life.
Gotta sleep on it.
Thanks, Brian. That was my intention.
Indeed and thanks for the argument. Regarding Latour – he questions both our modernity and our understanding of same. The two moments are reflexively bonded and the one is inseparable from the other. The touchstone of the book, in my view, is that we only appear to have severed our connection with nature and that we must always metabolise nature for our means of subsistence. Our belief in our independence from nature is a delusion which is one of the foundations stones of modernity. We have a moment or two of confronting our own collective delusionality before we are plunged back into a means of living with distinctively pre-modern characteristics rather like a person trapped in a vertical whirlpool gets a few brief moments of sucking in air before being cycled down the bottom again.
Mark, interesting piece.
I suppose the question is, then, why polls continually suggest that the majority of Australians want something done about climate change.
Perhaps it’s something that I think it was Lefty E pointed out on another thread – the predictions of climate science are tallying rather well with the lived experience of many Australians – the weather has been doing funny things in Oz over the last few years.
This lived experience might well be pushing Australians to accepting the scientific account.
The follow-up question is then why the young and urban are more likely to accept climate change than older people living outside the capital cities. Is it just that a larger fraction of younger people have a greater familiarity with science and are thus more likely to trust its practitioners?
I’ve read over your intro here several times trying to get a handle on your thinking. And I haven’t yet. But while thinking about it it occurred to me that public perception is not unlike a weather system, only it is more chaotic. In any one small space there can be every different opinion mixed together with no visible indication of the reality. Politicians attempt to create gusts or flows of like opinion. A good politician can even create a wind. The whole global climate debate is attempting to creat a choriolis of opinion between globally polarised view points. Interestingly, it is all about moving minds.
Ah. It would have helped to have read the whole piece, not just the flyer.
The whole thing is about visualisation.
It is no coincidence that God made man in his image. Actually man made God in his image so that the whole idea was easier to grasp (there is another debate).
There was an interesting piece on TV of which I caught the tail end. It was about dreams and nightmares. The argument was that dreams are our brain process our hopes and fears in order to be pre prepared for the waking reality.
Quantitative evaluation has a visualising credibility gap. For those immersed in the process of the study everything is absolutely clear, but for every one else there is a visualising gap requiring a leap of faith.
This was the genius of Hans Rosling and his “Mind the Gap” initiative.
Mark wrote:
Exactly. Or more simply as some much smarter ute man once told me, you’re entitled to your opinions but you aren’t entitled to facts. Economists are quite good historians though.
One important cultural generalisation that holds true for the democratic west is that many folks don’t like being preached to. AGW proponents remind folks of generations of sermonisers who have declaimed from their pulpits on the need for repentance of wicked ways to avoid being consumed by the fires of perdition.
AGW proponents are saying that the world is hurtling at 100kph at a climatic brick wall.
Many folks believe this but have also concluded that the solutions proposed by AGW proponents will simply mean that the world hits the wall at 60kph rather than 100kph. The smash will be delayed but not avoided. The smash may be less spectacular but it will be no less fatal for all concerned.
Therefore, this argument goes, why bother to do anything about it?
Perhaps, politically, AGW proponents would be advised to take a fatalist approach to presenting their message. Either they will be believed, or they will not. Then folks won’t by bored by sermonising. And as evidence for a gathering environmental catastrophe begins to accumulate, the public will demand effective action.
This approach may delay any action but it may bring forward effective, a opposed to tokenist, action.
Robert M @ 8, I remember in the late 1940s and 1950s farmers blaming the unusual weather (around where I grew up the weather has always been experienced as unusual) on the explosion of nuclear bombs and was told that in earlier times it was blamed on all the cannons let off in WW1. So in a sense the weather has always been unusual and the reasons assigned not scientific or rational.
Now we are told of ancient memories of droughts in the 1940s and early in the 19th century. I find that there is a tendency to latch onto contrarian thinkers whose story matches this folk memory (not hard, because we are pattern-seeking and can fit the past into many shapes) as well as how they would like to see things unfold.
So rationality is at work, but it’s different from starting with the science.
I might lose a lot of friends in what I’ve just said and be accused of being patronising, but I see the same sort of thing listening to radio talkback of city people.
Katz @ 12, my mission is to make the science understandable. And the science itself is more than a little alarming if you consider the issues of probability and risk. I can’t control what people make of it or what they do with whatever understanding they might glean.. Nor would I want to.
anthony @ 7, there is a concept of ‘embeddedness’ in nature that might be helpful. Successful traditional societies tend to be embedded in the natural rhythms of the places where they live, which are not always benign, but there are largely traditional ways of coping with even the adverse events.
Some peoples with this traditional knowledge are complaining now that nature is not behaving the way it is supposed to any more.
Agriculture and civilisation which depends on it are in a sense unnatural and involve us manipulating nature on a grander scale. We’ve stuffed up plenty of times, but until now there has always been somewhere else to go.
The problem now is that the large systems that make up the climate are themselves changing and becoming unstable in ways we don’t understand and can’t predict in terms of the localised regions in which we live and the short timescales we need to make our day to day decisions in (Trenberth’s complaint).
The problem is probably beyond us, which is what Lovelock is saying. Take our population back to about 2 billion or less, take the CO2 back to 280ppm, get our staple foods by manufacturing them from the chemical components instead of large monocultures, let nature sort itself out and concentrate on understanding what we do that is disruptive and what is supportive of nature sorting itself out to a new stability, like the Holocene, which has been particularly benign for our species.
We have to understand that choices of this scale are on the agenda and not choosing is a choice.
But there is no chance of this vision being politically acceptable, so I’ll just bugger off for a bit and let this depressing mess stew. (Actually, I’ve got to get on with my day!)
“For too long we’ve put up with a bunch of backwards looking pseudo scientists playing with mathy-looking equations making pronouncements that never come true.”
Actually Im pretty sure Keynesian macroeconomics is based on a bunch of “mathy looking equations” that are generally true, the same goes for human capital theory, mathy looking equations, In general they are true.
“They quite literally can’t predict *anything* with their edifice of stupidity.”
But see, I can quite clearly predict that unemployment would be higher without the stimulus package that was proposed and designed by, wait for it, economists!
“It’s gotten so bad they won’t even talk to each other without first ascertaining which “school of economics” these charlatans subscribe to.”
Actually they can it just happens they usually disagree, this comes back to ones assumptions about reality and human behaviour, hence why differences are so intractable.
“It’s only lesson is that where there is not absolute certainty, there is room for crippling doubt.”
I doubt you find a serious economists that makes any pronouncements with absolute certainty, most realise that there are bounds to understanding a complex system. I’d argue that making a decision with incomplete information regarding the nature of economic interrelationships is better than making a decision with no information at all. This is where economists come in.
“Scientific doubt might be statistical – religion or political doubt can’t be.”
Theres a whole economic literature that deals with doubt, looking at both ambiguity as to probabilities and fundamental uncertainty. Perhaps look it up, start with david dequech.
Economists make a very easy punching bag but remember they’re the ones trying to make sense of the complex interactions in society and use it to help improve policy decisions.
Sorry, here I am again:
There is a tendency to think of culture in terms of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as something that sits on top of the basics of how we find sustenance and shelter.
I remember Ziggy Bauman saying that culture is absolutely part of how we interact with the material world in gaining these ‘basics’. As are the way we interact with each other, and hence the political.
So culture which involves value orientations, plus ways of seeing the world and each other, whether we see ourselves as being or becoming, how we see time, the kinds of enjoyment we aspire to, relationships etc is about as basic as it gets.
Brian:
Your first statement is undoubtedly true.
Your second statement is your preference. That preference runs counter to the stated aim of those folks presently assembled in Copenhagen.
Perhaps those folks have a political lesson to learn from you.
No, Katz, the people at Copenhagen have to make decisions. I don’t. It’s not my role.
But you are right about choice. I have limited time and can’t honestly keep up with implementation issues, eg. the complexities of nukes and emissions trading systems in the kind of detail actual policy makers need to master.
So I don’t spend any time writing to pollies, joining movements, marching in the streets etc. But I can’t ignore these things because I do vote.
So I don’t know who is going to “found and refound a politics” but I’m fairly sure that it’s not going to be me. But if I have a word to say and a soapbox handy, I’ll no doubt take the opportunity to chuck another stone into the pool.
An interesting piece here from Grist, noting that the culture wars have become the climate wars.
stuart wrote:
I don’t doubt their intentions are good, it’s their methods that I question. Mark referred to “scientism”, I said “mathy looking” but the best analogy is probably something I’ve brought up here before – cargo cults. Bamboo hangers and flight control towers waiting for the mythical sky gods to drop supplies. Economics hasn’t had it’s enlightenment yet – it’s still stuck in the dark ages where chemistry and physics was when it was called alchemy. It’ll stay in the dark ages too, unless it’s re-oriented correctly as a tool rather than a philosophy.
It’s entirely possible to pick and choose an economic philosophy and still come across as credible. Ancient schools of economics stumble along, zombie like, never able to be disproved or tested. Lefty E nailed it when he said economics brings words like “model” into disrepute. At one level, it’s a minor issue of semantics, but the great religious debates hinge on quibbling over the meaning of words and that style of debate is anathema to useful knowledge.
It may a problem of populist science, that odd mixture of secondary school curriculum, personal experience and so-called common-sense. There is also the confusion of weather with climate. How can we trust meteorological models when the seven day forecast is unreliable.
I suspect that if we could somehow incorporate astrology and numerology (and perhaps iridology for the seers) into climate science we’d be well on the way to a global consensus.
Bjorn Lomborg was in my radio, lying at me, this morning.
It seems his position has shifted slightly, again. His current justification for doing nothing goes something like this:
It’s not worth doing anything directly about climate change, as it’ll cost too much. (Nothing new so far, but wait.) We’d get much better value for money by investing heavily in R & D in renewable, green energy sources.
Those of you who’ve been paying attention will recall that this is pretty much what the hippies suggested 40 years ago, but it didn’t happen then, and it won’t now without either government compulsion or some kind of price on carbon (both of which, I’m sure, are anathema to Lomborg and those who pay his way). Of course, it’s probably about 30 years too late for this to be useful anyway.
Somebody tell the Barnyard idiot that the price of Xmas hams and puddings is already up – not because of action on climate change, but because of inaction on climate change. http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/national/price-taking-ham-out-of-christmas-lunch/story-e6frf7l6-1225808441899
DI(NR)
I heard Lomborg too and yes, his basic point seemed to be that it would be cheaper to adapt as required and spend “$100 billion” on R&D on renewables. It is telling that the deniers claim this “game theorist” as one of their own. Fran Kelly bracketed him with the Abbott/Hunt position on climate change responses.
That said, 100 billion in actual renewables rollout probably wouldn’t be enough to displace fossil fuels here in Australia, leave aside the rest of the planet. He covered himself with talk of making it “research” which in this case is cover for spending without interfering with industry — which seemed to be most of all what he was worried about.
Speaking of media …
Watching our own Rasputin on Lateline last night was amusing too. He embraced James Hansen’s anti-ETS position, quoting him on the certificates being akin to the mediaeval “papal indulgences” but when challeneged by TJ that hansen in fact really did want a great big worldwide carbon tax Abbott got off message and claimed … but that’s not what Kevin Rudd’s proposing. Had TJ been a little quicker, he’d have offered to play Abbott back the tape of the first part of the interview. He had also apparently compared Copenhagen to Munich 1938 when speaking to Allan Jones on 2GB. Early Godwin! The delegates are treacherous and facile in the face of Climate Fascism!! He really is the Mad Monk.
An earlier position, Fran, was that we shouldn’t spend anything on climate change mitigation beacause that would be money we could (but certainly wouldn’t) spend on fixing poverty and stuff.
Lomborg’s central thesis is always that we shouldn’t do anything about climate change, it’s only the surrounding verbiage that changes. He’s very clever, and deeply corrupt.
From the The Age online…
“The UN climate talks in Copenhagen descended into acrimony overnight after the leaking of a draft “Copenhagen Agreement” that would require developing countries to take on targets as the world cut emissions in half by 2050.
Control of climate change finance would be passed to the World Bank.”
Meanwhile their are still people who think climate change can be tackled while capitalism is still around…tsk…
Could we please keep comments on this thread germane to the specific issues raised in the post?
There is an open Copenhagen thread for more general observations as well as particular ones about what’s happening at the conference:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/12/07/copenhagen-open-thread/
Following on from Brian citing Mark:
“The second is to find a genuine point of connection between culture and nature, which can be leveraged to found and refound a politics.”
This is a long shot however following on from McKibben’s argument that nature is ‘dead’ are the arguments that what we construe as nature (specifically that nature seen to be separate from human nature) is in fact not natural. Significant elements of nature, according to historical ecology, are artefacts of human activity. This is upheld by good scholarship and (briefly) can be seen in the ecological histories of Scotland where the rolling hillsdies that we accept as classical wild nature were in fact covered with heavy forest up until the sixteenth and sevwenteenth centuries. The same applies to Ireland. Both landscapes were denuded by the need for timber for iron smelting prior to the development of coaking coal. Similarly, Greenland was denuded by the Vikings in about the ninth century and the entire Mediterranean basin was cleared of forests by the Roman Empire.
The point is that if nature is not real, if it is an artefact of human agency, and whatever nature we have now certainly is (McKibben), then this changes the issue from ‘how do we protect nature?’ to ‘what sort of nature do we want?’ I think this might be linked to democracy. Future nature, subject to global management, can be democratised to support as much social- and bio-diversity as possible. The alternative is coporate nature and government run nature farms designed to produce the means of subsistence.
My favourite greenie poster features a heavy 4WD hurtling through an absolutely barren landscape while trailing a cloud of thick dust. The text reads ‘Nature, it’ll grow back’. The point is that it won’t in the forms that it has existed in the past unless we decide to have that sort of nature.
Maybe.
Robert Merkel @ 8 raises the question of “why the young and urban are more likely to accept climate change than older people living outside the capital cities”.
I’ve wondered that myself and take myself back to the early 1980’s when I spent several years running a school in the wheatbelt where drought meant a flood (sorry!) of farm kids back into the local school when funds for private school fees were scarce. Surely men and women on the land are the first to feel the impact of climate change? They live and die by the weather! Of course they should all be climate change activists, not deniers! As well so many of them were regular and intelligent listeners to the ABC and Country Hour where so much information about research and informed opinion is broadcast daily.
But then I remember too their stoic acceptance of the vagaries of climate and how government subsidies, tho’ often complained about as too little, were always there to help them through the driest of years. So from generation to generation, from decade to decade, they survived in their sunburnt country and stoically bore the alternating droughts and flooding rains. They got by. No, judging by their shiny tractors and late model utes and 4WDrives, they seemed to prosper even if from time to time the kids had to go to the local school.
In the recent years of truly devastating and unrelenting drought I read the MSM and see TV news stories of rural heartbreak as many are finally forced off their land. I sense reluctance in many of those interviewed, almost dragging their heels as they look back at those staying, thinking that his year maybe, “She’ll be right”. Accepting the ups and downs of climate is an attitude now ingrained in their DNA, as we’d say. No need to panic for the long term. Is there?
One might as well ask why racism was rife and entrenched in rural areas. After all, white and black have lived side by side there for generations. Shouldn’t that have resulted in mutual understanding and toleration?
Patricia WA wrote:
One word: overdraft.
PatWA: your argument works much better for the opposite conclusion.
Farmers have always been subject to the weather (not the climate per se), and whenever things got bad they could expect a bailout at least big enough to stay on the land and complain about how small it was.
They have plenty of personal or family stories of droughts, floods, February hail, &c &c, predating “current warming”, to give them ammo for a couple more generations of climate scepticism, minimum.
Their main question would be “okay, if ‘global warming’ is real, why doesn’t the government bail us out again and again and again, just like before when it was ‘natural variability’?. Don’t they still need wheat/beef/cotton/rice/sugar &c &c?”
It’s actually a fairly strong argument, because Oz govts have been propping up unsustainable agriculture for more than a century. Why stop now?
That is just altogether too cynical, um/fdb. At a very recent mini old HS get together I met a Farmer from West Wyalong and learnt a lot in short afternoon. You’ve got to remember that the history of farming is one of permanence, generation after generation. The real heartbreak for these tough people is the disinterest of the next generation to stay on the farm. Farming is hard and getting tougher year by year. But farming is not a write off. Far from it. It just requires new ideas, new methods, new energy. Change is inevitable. In what direction though?
Bilb wrote:
It's a self serving myth. Most Australian farming families barely stretch to two generations on any given bit of ground. Large scale commercial farming is slowly eating into the market share of family owned farms, whose succession strategies never work (warring brothers are not pleasant when the family farm is at stake).
The subsidies and drought payments aren't really for the farmers either. They end up in communities (some of it) and the rest ends up with our banks and the big export companies. Farming is big business – not that the National party ever acknowledges their real paymasters.
The big lie of western civilisation does get revealed every now and again: democratic socialism is never about the "little guy", or the battler, or the working family, or Howards Battlers or Abbots Barmy Army. It's about making sure those crumbling edifices that are banking institutions remain solvent no matter how stupid their lending practices or crazy their trading strategies. No government wants to be the one overlooking mass foreclosures and no bank wants to do it.
Farmers, of the ones I've spoken to, are far more broadly spread in their opinions of carbon trading than Barnaby Joyce (or that filthy "Land" rag) would have you believe. Sequestration is quite an attractive industry if your soil and rainfall no longer support seasonal cropping due to climate change. Lots of this generation of farmers have been to university (unlike their fathers) and without making generalisations, are a little better at seeing through bullshit and demagoguery. Plus, statistics is a huge part of animal science so they implicitly understand the the tropes of climate science. Don't write them off as a force of change or romanticise their involvement with the land. Mcleods daughters is not a documentary.
anthony @ 28:
That strikes a chord with me. Last year on our boat cruise down the Rhine the tour leader told us that in Europe nature had been pushed back into the mountains. He didn’t mention the sturgeon that once used to populate the river.
I work on some properties in Upper Brookfield, a Brisbane suburb, with typical holdings of 5 or 10 acres. One is a new house on a block carved out of a dairy farm, which is still operating. The other day I was thinking that the cow paddocks were in the best shape, followed by a horse paddock and the property I was working on was a poor third. A gully choked with weeds, a hillside covered with long grass beyond the reach of the mower, plus recently disturbed soil with grass cut too low with a ride-on, hence subject to erosion.
I heard once about some work done on landscape archetypes in Australia. It seems that a popular one is open woodland, with no understory and the grass cut short with a ride-on. This is typical of Upper Brookfield. Bad for erosion, no good for wildlife.
There is a local group promoting the planting of species native to the area, but my observation is that the exotics and weed species are winning. I’ve been involved in a couple of minor restoration projects, but just knocking over the weed species is extremely labour intensive, never completely successful and if you give up for even a year all the crap returns.
In Queensland there is a broader political struggle between green groups and farmers over woody vegetation management, with the green groups in the ascendancy through penetration of government. For the farmers the struggle is existential, as they see it. I’ve been planning a post on the issue. So far it’s been too hard, but hopefully next year.
Brian: exactly what I mean. The Australian landscape appears to have always been subject to extensive human management. Carter’s ‘Road to Botany Bay’ points out that in early Sydney the walk from Sydney Cove to Botany was initially a shortish journey on foot. It lengthened as Aborigines retreated or were killed off with the effect that, without their managment, the scrub grew back to impenetrable proportions thus turning what had been an easy walk into a tough battle.
I’m encouraging my kids into science/engineering/land management. Earth repair is propbaly the future of employment.
Cows, eh?
What Ute Man said @ 33.