Writing Climate Change (26)
The Fight for the Climate – Political Ideology & Planetary Questions
This is part of a series on writing climate change for fiction.
Last time we saw how climate change is big, complicated, and inherently difficult to move. Now we’ll step down a little into some more details. Eventually I hope to get down to the level of individual psychology - the kind of stuff that is more directly relevant to character based story telling. By that point hopefully we’ll have set out enough global structural context to understand why people are thinking, feeling, and behaving as they do about climate change.
Here we will look at the political beliefs which, in theory, are guiding what gets done.
The Big Three Political Ideologies
If you want to change the world, you’ll have to do it in a way that fits with the world’s major political ideologies. If you don’t you’ll get ignored. Do it wrong and you’ll get imprisoned. Do it very wrong and you’ll spark a civil war.
These are the people you have to work with. This is where people get their ideas from. We have three big players:
Liberalism
Conservatism
Socialism
The big three have dominated the world since the French Revolution. The big three arose in response to the shift from feudalism to capitalism. The big three define modern politics.
These ideologies arose to deal with the questions of their day: freedom, wealth, and progress.
Those were the questions that dominated the past 300 years. Monarchies giving way to republics. Rural life giving way to global trade. Theology giving way to technology. Liberalism represents the capitalist order. Business. Trade. Liberty. Conservatism defends that which existed previously. Religion. Family. Aristocracy. Socialism critiques both in search of something new. Social justice. Social welfare. Communist utopias.
In general, they have little to say about climate change, because no one was aware of the issue in 1789.
Liberalism has given us:
The United Nations, and attempts at global agreements.
The focus on market solutions like ethical consumerism, and carbon trading.
The faith in technologies like carbon capture.
Climate denial. The Liberal nightmare is totalitarianism. The radical actions required for climate change sound too much like Communism for some.
Conservatism has given us:
Limited reform only. Because moving fast is not allowed.
More climate denial. Again, no Communists please.
Entrenchment of the liberal status quo. Much modern conservatism is a hybrid of liberalism and conservatism. If change is not allowed, liberalism is what is kept in place.
The reactionary conservatism behind authoritarians and fascists. Climate change is not something that exists in their reality.
Socialism has given us:
The anti-capitalism that shows up in environmental spaces, where ending capitalism and solving climate change become the same thing. This often shows up as the focus on a Just Transition, social justice, class conflict, and climate change as a systemic issue.
The anarchist ideas and organizing principles that show up so often in the climate protest movement, calls for Citizen’s Assemblies (direct democracy), various pre-figurative community initiatives.
Protests, ranging from peaceful to active sabotage of the fossil fuel industry. The view that climate change can only be solved by people power or a revolution.
State intervention as the big solution, such as in a Green New Deal. This includes the Chinese Communist party, and everything they are and are not doing via their massive state intervention.
The traditional socialist parties, which have long since fully transmuted into liberals.
Planetary Questions
Starting around the 1800’s the earliest seeds of a new set of questions emerged. Questions of planetary awareness.
By this point the world’s coastlines had been mapped. Trade routes and empires had global span. The colonial empires were now fighting global wars. These were the first stirrings of the new era into which we are now accelerating.
The Anthropocene.
Today planetary questions are the question of our times. The three biggest ones so far have been:
Global Population
Nuclear Technology
Climate Change
All three issues share similar characteristics. They are hyperobjects, they require scientific planetary awareness, they stretch the limits of human knowledge, they raise fundamental questions about human existence, they confront humanity with both our powers and our limits, they summon up futures both utopian and apocalyptic, and they can become the driving force behind entire political projects.
Population was the first planetary question to become a serious political question. World War Two was, in part, a war fought over the question of global population. Ideas like lebensraum and eugenics were a response to this question. The Nazi invasion of Russia and the Holocaust were, in part, an attempt to answer a planetary question.
People treated population similarly to how they treat climate change, because they are both planetary questions with significant overlap.
Our experiences today are not entirely new.
The limits of human expansion are much nearer than popular opinion imagines; the difficulty of future food supplies will soon be of the gravest character; the exhaustion of sources of energy necessary for any notable increase of population or advance in the standards of living, or both combined, is perilously near. Within periods of time, insignificant compared with geologic ages, the multiplying force of living things, man included, must receive a tremendous check.
.... Anyone who has seriously reflected upon the facts of the last ten decades must realise that, within the next ten, tremendous problems will arise for solution and these will touch fundamentally the following matters, viz. : —
(i.) The multiplying power of the human race;
(ii.) The organic constitution of Nature and the means at human disposal for avoiding the incidence of its unfavourable aspects; i.e., eugenics in its wider sense;
(iii.) The enhancing of the productivity of Nature, and the limits of its exploitation,
(iv.) The mechanism of the social organism, and the scheme of its control;
(v.) Internationalism and the solidarity of humanity.
- George Knibbs, The Mathematical Theory of Population, 1917. Appendix to the 1911 Australian Census
We’ve been here before. Planetary questions seem to have a particular flavor, and to evoke particular responses.
We issue a bunch of scientific statistics. World experts gather, discuss, and get ignored. Global governance fuddles about avoiding the issue. Liberal minded people link the issue to world peace and global cooperation. Nationalists link the issue to military power and use it as a justification for racism and war. The apocalypse is just around the corner. Time is running out.
As for the outcome?
The Big Three ideologies were all born to answer a different set of questions - freedom, wealth, and progress. Their answers to population ranged from colonialism, to genocide, to eugenics, to One World Government, to condoms, to the fossil fuel powered Green Revolution.
It was a mixed bag.
Ultimately liberal ideas won out. Literally. Liberal democracies had to win a military victory against the Nazis with their lebensraum and death camps.
That’s why population is now mostly framed in terms of family planning, contraception, and the demographic transition (and not, say, eugenics and soil fertility). These answers map directly to the questions liberalism was born to answer: freedom, progress, and wealth.
That answer to 20th century population is a fairly good match for how we are now approaching climate change. Personal choice. Technology. Sustainable development. Again, that’s freedom, progress, and wealth.
The population crisis was either solved or delayed by such measures, depending on your view. World population is now beginning to level off. It remains an open question if we will give a living standard ten times better to ten times more people than back in 1917.
We might. Who knows?
We can say much the same for climate change.
The Neoliberal Era
Of the Big Three, liberalism rules the world. Conservatism and socialism have been in the mix, but we’ve mostly just been swapping between variants of liberalism.
Modern Liberalism of the post-New Deal era was okay with government intervention. Classical Liberalism of the 19th Century and the Neoliberalism of today are both firm believers in small government and self-organising markets. This often gets confused as a difference between socialism and conservatism. It’s all liberalism. We ended up with neoliberalism because it has always been liberalism, unless you were in the Soviet Union.
The era of climate change has overlapped with the era of neoliberalism. That has had some big implications.
Decades of austerity have run public institutions into the ground. They simply lack the capacity to take effective action on anything, much less on climate change. The “war-footing” roll out needed simply cannot be achieved under small-government deficit-obsessed austerity. The result is locked in governmental failure.
Likewise, neoliberal government is committed to never using its powers directly. Huge swathes of possible policy options have simply never been considered. The focus has been narrowly fixed on carbon pricing. Industries have been left to self-regulate. Consumers have been left to guide the market via individual choice. Climate action has largely been tokenistic as a result.
Meanwhile inequality has shot to the moon. Individual billionaires have acquired more wealth than whole nations. Political systems have been captured by money. Billionaire philanthropy has failed to do anything much. Gridlocked political systems cannot act on anything. Financially strained consumers can’t guide markets to anywhere. The general public has fallen into despair and anger. Extremist politics is growing on the fringes in ways reminiscent of the 1930s. Political extremists herald the violent breakdown of the entire global system.
Neoliberalism has lost much of its legitimacy. The return of big, interventionist government could by coming. The question is – in what form?
And, will it work?
The Environmental Movement
Environmentalism is a hybrid of liberalism, conservatism, and socialism, plus an array of ideas from humanity’s first attempts to deal with planetary questions, plus large splashings of spiritual ideas. That whole amalgam is a philosophically confused muddle, and a mess for some other day.
The important point is this: unlike the old set of questions, we do not yet have a clear politics for planetary questions.
Instead of solid answers, what we get is stuff that bubbles up from centuries of thinking on different questions. Answers to questions of freedom, wealth, and progress. Answers specific to global population, nuclear war, and the ozone hole. Instead of answers the environmental movement has baggage.
Some of that baggage is good baggage. However, it’s much the same baggage we had in the early 20th century while grappling with global population.
The old answers were answers to real questions. Some of those questions do still apply to climate change. They just aren’t the full story anymore.
Societal Cleavages
You might also know this one as class warfare, although it goes beyond just classes.
Society can be viewed as differing groups with competing interests. These cleavages then play out across society, deciding who gets power, what decisions are made, and what triggers people to throw petrol bombs at cops.
Historically these cleavages have been articulated via the big three ideologies, among others. Each view has represented different groups (e.g. socialists and workers, or conservatives and the Church).
Climate change has now become symbolic in many of these fights. Often one side is identified with climate action and the other with climate denial. Alternatively both sides might believe in action, but off-load responsibility to the other side, or choose actions that benefit themselves and harm the other.
None of this is truly about the climate. Instead climate action becomes collateral damage in struggles for power.
Here’s a few common cleavages.
Centre vs Periphery: We see this in fights of “fly-over states” vs the “coastal elites”, Scotland vs London, or the Global North vs the Global South. The Center has the power and often uses it self-interestedly. The Periphery blames the Center for everything going wrong.
Church vs State (or Religious vs Secular): For all Pope Francis’s efforts, Christian churches have frequently aligned themselves with climate denial, conspiracy theories, and neoliberalism in direct opposition to the state. Meanwhile LGBTQ and climate activists tend to end up on the opposing side just by virtue of not being religious fundamentalists.
Owner vs Worker: The good old Marxist class division. Those who have, and do nothing. Those who have not, and do everything. Most climate policy has been set to favour Owners. Many of the blockages to further action exist to avoid harming the interests of Owners.
Land vs Industry: Conflict between agricultural and industrial sectors, plus the rural/urban cultural divide that exists around them. Land sees Industry as the climate villain, while Industry sees Land as a source of climate offsets via forestry. Both work to screw the other up while avoiding their own responsibility.
Materialism vs Post-materialism: A cultural divide over what counts as quality of life – physical stuff or the intangibles. Suburbia vs hippies. The post-material values show up a lot in environmental circles. Significant members of Extinction Rebellion aim not just for climate action, but spiritual transformation, making them cringy and nauseating to their materialist opponents, who in turn see them as soulless drones.
Globalization’s Winners vs Losers: Thus we get fights over patriotism, trade wars, multiculturalism, immigration, etc. Being a global issue handled by the UN, climate change gets identified as globalist, while nationalists become climate deniers.
Authoritarian-Populism vs Liberal-Pluralism: This is showing up in things like the Ukraine War and the Trump presidency. On one side are conservative values of conformity, nationalism, and security. On the other side are liberal values of the diversity, internationalism, and cooperation. The authoritarians tend to be identified with climate denial, the fossil fuel industry, and destroying international climate deals.
Crisis and The Death of Meaning
Society has always had cleavages of one kind or another.
It’s worth noting that we are currently in an odd moment in history. Societies are more fragmented and confused. This is going beyond cleavage into sectarianism, a politics of identity where issues get detached from reality to become tribal symbols, weaponized against imagined enemies.
Once again society is experiencing a death of meaning. This happens occasionally. We saw it when looking at the World Wars and nukes.
Right now the old ideologies and cleavages are perceived to be dead or dying. Political parties have become centrist mush or terrifyingly unhinged, standing for everything and nothing. Supposedly we live in a post-ideological era of fluid social media tribes. Truth is relative. Political groupings can be assembled and discarded at whim by populist strongmen and targeted propaganda.
Everyone is confused.
Regardless of whether it’s actually true that everything old is dead, enough people believe this for it to change how they do politics. This includes various populist, far-right, and authoritarian movements. They use ideology and symbols like clothing, worn in pursuit of raw power. The information space they create is deliberately confusing. The annihilation of objective reality is the aim. However, there is a label for much of this stuff: fascism.
As to climate change?
Collective action requires a shared vision. The era of climate change has overlapped with a breakdown of society’s ability to function, to form shared understandings, and shared visions of the future.
We are adrift.
Without vision we get nostalgia for a past that never was. We get apathy, cynicism, and nihilism. We get a politics of chaos and muddle. We get climate inaction.
We will get over this.
It will take time. Writers and artists will likely play a role in lifting the world out of this confusion. The realm of imagination is where we create and share new visions, new understandings, new values, and new directions. If you choose to write about climate change, that is the task which you have taken upon yourself - whether you wanted to or not.
Conclusion
In the grand arc of history, humanity is still in the early stages of coming to terms with being a planetary species.
The last big shift in human consciousness was grappling with the questions which allowed us to become a planetary species. Freedom, progress, and wealth. Now we must grapple with the consequences of having gained the massive powers that pursuit of freedom, progress, and wealth has given us.
We are now facing an emerging set of questions that center around knowledge, risk, and humanity’s responsibility for planet Earth. So far we have been trying to answer such questions using the answers to the previous set of questions.
We have focused on markets and consumer choice, because that matches ideas about freedom. We have focused on technological fixes, because that matches ideas about progress. We’ve hit a stumbling block around wealth. We should be able to solve the problem by getting wealthier. And yet, doing so is making the problem worse.
We don’t know what to do.
Is the answer to climate change a socialist revolution? A return to a rural past? A revitalization of liberal democracy? Is it a surprise that we’ve failed to find an answer, when we no longer know what the question is?
Meanwhile society is dividing, fragmenting, reforming, evolving - old meanings dying amid the chaos and confusion.
The political will to address climate change is missing.
And the world is changing.
Next time we’ll continue looking at institutional, economic, and political failure as we continue exploring why the world really isn’t doing great on climate.
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