Fascinating insight into our complex relationship with complex ideas!
There’s a powerful saying in the world of writing: If you can’t feel it you can’t write it!
But our feelings are so, so much a part of what it is to be human. That’s why I spent some time exploring how our resistance to change is so wrapped up in the emotions that change brings about in an article back on the 2nd August: Changing the person: Me.
So a post on the grist online magazine not so long ago really caught my eye. It was called Why climate change doesn’t spark moral outrage, and how it could, and was written by David Roberts. I would dearly love to have sought David’s permission to republish it in full; it’s so relevant to understanding how we humans have to approach turning back from our present course of making the Earth’s biosphere uninhabitable for we humans.
But in a couple of days time, I have a Post coming out that is republished with David’s written permission called Cutting CO2 emissions – who leads the world! It felt greedy to ask David for another full republication. So I’m going to dip into this one, hopefully to the point where you will go across to grist and read it for yourself.
David opens up as follows:
Perhaps the single biggest barrier to action on climate change is the fact that it doesn’t hit us in the gut. We can identify it as a great moral wrong, through a chain of evidence and reasoning, but we do not instinctively feel it as one. It does not trigger our primal moral intuitions or generate spontaneous outrage, anger, and passion. It’s got no emotional heat. (Ironic!)
David’s article then goes on to refer to a recent paper published on the Nature.com website called Climate change and moral judgement by Ezra M. Markowitz & Azim F. Shariff. The abstract sets out that:
Converging evidence from the behavioural and brain sciences suggests that the human moral judgement system is not well equipped to identify climate change — a complex, large-scale and unintentionally caused phenomenon — as an important moral imperative. As climate change fails to generate strong moral intuitions, it does not motivate an urgent need for action in the way that other moral imperatives do. We review six reasons why climate change poses significant challenges to our moral judgement system and describe six strategies that communicators might use to confront these challenges. Enhancing moral intuitions about climate change may motivate greater support for ameliorative actions and policies.
M’mmm – not sure how that leaves me. (Which is my way of saying that I don’t really understand that!) Luckily David goes on to say that the authors “go on to identify six reasons why, “unlike financial fraud or terrorist attacks, climate change does not register, emotionally, as a wrong that demands to be righted.” and refers to an interesting table in the research paper.
Now go to the article on grist to better understand how those challenges are explained.
Then later on in the research paper, there is a second table, as below:
Again, these strategies are expanded upon in David’s article. What I will do is to copy his final few paragraphs:
6. Highlight positive social norms: This is, to me, the Big Kahuna. As I was reading about all the psychological barriers to climate action, I kept thinking, “one thing can overcome all these: peer pressure!” If people see others that they view as peers or leaders doing something, they will tend to do it too, and retrofit reasons for it after the fact. This is the essence of humans as social creatures.
The recommendation is twofold, though: not just to “highlight pro-environmental, prosocial injunctive norms such as prohibitions against being wasteful,” but also to “be careful not to inadvertently highlight negative, but existent, descriptive norms, which can actually encourage individuals to follow suit in the wrong direction.”
In other words, you want to emphasize that climate hawkery is good, socially desirable, admirable, and that all the cool kids are doing it. You don’t want to give people the impression that “everyone’s doing it” if it is bad. Even if you state clearly that it’s bad, the fact that others are doing it is, in and of itself, a powerful incentive to do it too. It’s the herd instinct. This is good reason not to whine on and on about how everyone drives too much or everyone wastes electricity. The subtext is, “it’s the social norm.”
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Aaaanyway, this is a lot of food for thought. But it’s the kind of stuff — not about science but about people — that far too many climate hawks ignore or disregard. Climate change is not only the economic and ecological crisis of our time, it’s also a moral crisis. What we are doing to our descendants is a moral crime. Finding ways to help people get that, feel it in their guts the way they would if someone threatened their own families, is a precondition for serious, sustained action.
Let me repeat David’s closing words, “Climate change is not only the economic and ecological crisis of our time, it’s also a moral crisis. What we are doing to our descendants is a moral crime.”
OK, so how strongly do you feel that? Great, so you do feel it – even feel it deep inside you.
Now that you do, let’s all get stuck into making a difference. It is all about doing. As someone of huge stature, and a wonderful person of action no less, said;
I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough, we must do. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
We must do! Start your own ‘doing’, don’t wait upon others, actively look for ideas (there are a few here) and together we can make a positive difference.
Well done, David – great article.
Learning from Dogs 
Anglo-Saxons colonists have to explain what it is in their culture which makes the USA, Australia and Canada the world greatest polluters per capita (but for some Arab petrocracies). By a long shot. Three times the EU average, nearly four times France, more than twice Japan…
To make silly hyper complexified pseudo rationalizations that apply only to Homo Anglo-Saxonis Simplex is just a way to change the conversation. Fact is citizens of the USA are just fossil fuel voracious. They gorge themselves on fossil fuels. The keep on making excuses. The latest is that no one can comprehend their minds.
If Anglo-Saxon colonists want morality, they just need to increase fuel taxes. If they want morality, they have to stop believing the grotesque fossil fuel plutocrats (Koch brothers, etc.)
And Anglo-Saxon colonists have to realize that it is the same mental structures that allowed to massacre the natives, centuries ago, that allowed to deny all responsibility in the rise of, and tolerance, extended to, Hitler, (especially in the case of the USA), and now make them live on their knees, listening carefully to all the crazy stories their plutocratic masters tell them, in mesmerized awe, as the little children they have never ceased to be.
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Dear Patrice, I so often value your comments and they offer, almost without exception, an insight into a theme that I had missed. Today there’s a ‘but’. 😉
But in your comment above, I sense an over-riding anger at North Americans swamping a more reflective comment, which is your usual style.
To me, the work undertaken by Markowitz and Shariff goes a very long way to clarifying why the vast bulk of intelligent, socially aware citizens have not embraced in any significant manner the change in behaviours that are critically essential to mankind’s future existance.
In fact the next article from David Grist that I am publishing on the 16th sets out that the USA is leading the world in cutting down on CO2 emissions.
As always, your comments are, of course, welcome. Paul
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I would dare say, dear Paul, that it is the perception of my alleged anger which is overwhelming the comment. As I knew it would. But I decided to stomp a bit. At some point anger is more productive that politeness. Remember Munich? Well, this is potentially, much worse.
USA citizens ought to have the decency to recognize that they have been splurging. And good luck with the reduction thing. It’s a bit like saying a serial killer leads in reduction of serial killing because instead of killing 18 persons a day, he is killing 17 (this is an allusion to the tons of CO2 per person, per year.)
So I am not angry at all. I am actually amused. USA citizens have no excuse for not having indexed their gasoline tax on inflation. So now they tell us Anglo-Saxonis Simplex is too complex to fathom.
Just look at finance now: USA banks are treated like sacred cows, whereas the USA treats Swiss banks as severely as possible. Is it because Patrice is angry? Or is it because Uncle Sam is greedy? Think about it.
;-)!
It is also an insult to most Europeans that the bulk of intelligent, socially aware [European] citizens have not embraced in any significant manner the change in behaviours that are critically essential to mankind’s future existence. The Europeans have tried, and are trying very hard. Even Spain.
The bulk of intelligent, socially aware USA citizens have not embraced in any significant manner the change in behaviours that are critically essential to mankind’s future existence, because they believe most of what their plutocratic masters tell them.
Well when the sea laps the lawn at the White House, I can certify to you I will not be angry.
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Dear Paul,
I can see that, for Dave Roberts, I am going to have to make an exception and subscribe to Grist – he is simply too good to miss. This is a fascinating – but very difficult – subject; namely our own mortality. Nevertheless, at my dissertation supervisor’s insistence, I covered it. He sent me a PDF of an article have now found online: Janis Dickinson (2009) ‘The People Paradox: Self-Esteem Striving, Immortality Ideologies, and Human Response to Climate Change’, In the end, I managed to combine referring to this with references to David Aaronovitch (Voodoo Histories) and Clive Hamilton (Requiem for a Species), as follows:
In considering potential reasons for collective human failure to act to prevent anthropogenic global warming (AGW), a number of authors appear to have been influenced (either implicitly or explicitly) by Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death (1973). For example, Aaronovitch proposed that we try to avoid the “catstrophe of indifference” that a world devoid of meaning or purpose represents (2010: 340), and Hamilton suggested that climate disruption “has the smell of death about it” (2010: 215).
Janis Dickinson elaborates a little more, exploring what she describes as “…one of the key psychological links between the reality of global climate change and the difficulty of mobilizing individuals and groups to confront the problem in a rational and timely manner” and – referring to what psychologists call terror management theory (TMT) – she also categorises denial of climate change; denial of human responsibility; and/or immediacy of the problem as proximal responses (Dickinson 2009).
Furthermore, as referenced here, both Dickinson and Hamilton suggest that other distal TMT responses (focussing on maintaining self-esteem or enhancing self-gratification) can be counter-intuitive and counter-productive. Dickinson summarises the recent work of Tim Dyson by saying “[b]ehavioral response to the threat of global climate change simply does not match its unique potential for cumulative, adverse, and potentially chaotic outcomes” (ibid).
And on that happy note, I will sign off… 😉
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Martin, Thank you so much for that. Perhaps I could coax you into writing a post around your reply? Either for your own Blog or for LfD. Either way I would love to publish that because the more we throw light on the nature of the change process, the more we can effect that change. Very grateful for your input, Paul
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I re-read my comment above. I would be curious to know what is angry about it. Is the truth angry? ;-)?
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Your reply to mine stirs some interesting thoughts within me that I’m going to allow to fester for a few hours before replying. It’s much less of a reaction to your own thoughts and much more me pondering on my own emotional make-up over this!
It’s so much caught up in knowing the truth of the matter and then going into one’s own psyche to better understand one’s own mental stirrings. I noted your latest powerful essay on your own Blog causing similar reactions inside this aged body!
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Some great info. I’d just like to add one more psychological challenge: the fact that we now have to abandon the very thing that made our society great (fossil fuels). Fossil fuels have brought us many things which we hold in very high esteem: long lives, high standard of living, rapid progress etc. and we have some real problems accepting that the moral cons have now started outweighing the moral pros.
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Thanks Schalk, Paul
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The USA Military-Plutocratic Machine offers gasoline at a small fraction of the prices practiced in Europe. This insures that the USA cannot adapt short, or medium term without war and, or depression. In other words, the MPM has insurance. (OK, somewhat cryptic remark.)
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May or may not be cryptic but, sure as hell, it’s chilling. Especially taken in context with the video published in today’s LfD Post, that I would more than welcome your response to (and Martin’s)!
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