Writing Climate Change (33)
The Fight for the Climate – Quirks of the Modern Mind
This is part of a series on writing climate change for fiction
So far we’ve been looking at some general aspects of human psychology in relation to climate change. In theory those factors would apply cross culturally and throughout history. They would simply manifest in unique forms depending on time and place.
Now we need to look at our particular moment in history. Here and now. Globalized modern society from about the 1980s (and to a lesser extent the 1950s) through to the 2020s. This is the era of climate change. How have all those psychological factors manifested for us? And why?
Climate change has coincided with some other major forces that have profoundly influenced how everyone is behaving. The world is a big complicated place, so the following is a bit of a grab bag of stuff to consider. This is stuff to get you thinking, rather than a comprehensive overview of the entirety of the modern world.
We’ll cover:
Values
Identity
Knowledge & Belief
Formative Influences
Structure
VALUES
What you value determines what you pursue. What you pursue determines what happens in your life. Multiply this across billions of people, and values determine the very shape and fate of our world.
What do we all want, and why?
The Liberal World
Broadly speaking we live in a liberal world (for now). Yes, we have everyone from ISIS to North Korea, but in broad terms the modern world has been shaped by the values of liberalism.
We’ve looked at how liberalism intersects with climate change previously. For our purposes here, keep in mind that liberal assumptions are so deeply buried in most people, that even the enemies of “The Libs” are also themselves products of liberalism.
Therefore when it comes to climate change, people will default to thinking about the issue in terms liberal terms (broadly speaking). Money, markets, technology, trade, rationality, rights, laws, democracy, the greatest good for the greatest number, etc.
The American Moment
The liberal country par excellence is the United States of America. Even its extremists are extreme about aspects of liberalism (often combined with other things below).
The rise of climate change has coincided with rise of America’s global dominance. American culture has therefore dominated the ways people think about climate change. This is especially true in the English speaking world, but thanks to globalisation this goes global.
What defines the American outlook?
Philosophy educator Wes Cecil has an interesting lecture series on this question. I’m going to borrow his analysis. If you want more, he starts with a literary prelude, looking at Cormac McCarthy as the literary embodiment of this American outlook. I’ve have seen the more apocalyptic style of climate activist directly cite The Road as inspiring their outlook on climate.
In this analysis, three major underlying forces drive American culture.
Individualism: you are on your own, in a vacuum without any past or social structure.
Nihilistic Materialism: the meaning of your life is found in the things you own.
Calvinism: morality is about creating zero-tolerance purity in a world of absolute good and evil.
What does this mean for climate change? It would appear to worsen certain factors we’ve already looked at.
The narrow individualism gets us stuck in blaming individual causes. The individualism is isolating, making barriers to action harder to overcome (as they usually require collective action), and making emotional management and trauma more likely (because people lack social support). It complicates certain identity issues, because people lack a sense of identity meaning they get neurotically involved in certain toxic sources of identity.
Climate change is ultimately a material problem – fossil fuel consumption. The nihilistic materialism, obviously, drives consumerism. Consumption becomes one of those toxic substitutes for lacking identity and community. It also enshrines material status competition as good. It reinforces the power justification in society, elevating the views of rich people. It reinforces notions that economic growth and consumerism can and should continue forever. It also reinforces the materially focused technocratic solutions as the only answer to climate change.
Calvinism gives us the apocalyptic narrative, which creates despair, which again leads us to emotional management and mental illness. Calvinism gives environmentalism its judgemental undertones, where you are a bad person for your eco-sins. This in turn worsens emotional management and identity threat, because telling people they are evil doesn’t go great. Calvinism also lends a certain amount of misanthropy to some environmentalist rhetoric, where humanity is evil and deserves to be destroyed by the righteous judgment of Gaia. All this feeds into culture wars, were crackpots can (correctly) denounce environmentalism as religious nonsense, while engaging in their own equally religious purity wars. Calvinism also supercharges the tendency towards conspiracy theories, given that Calvinists basically invented witch-hunting.
Rather than being “to blame”, American dominance has shaped the particular ways in which we are struggling. It’s likely no cultural tradition is particularly well suited to addressing climate change. If Chinese Communist Confucianism was the global hegemonic culture, we would likely still be struggling, just in a different way. For the time being, we all live in America-World.
Combine the Individualism, Materialism, and Calvinism together, and you get what is the most common approach average people take to climate change. Climate change is an individual moral issue, where I try to prevent the apocalypse with my wallet.
The Neoliberal Moment
Following from American dominance, we’ve had its political and economic expression – neoliberalism. This has reinforced those American cultural tendencies by institutionalizing them across the globe.
Again, we’ve looked at this economics a fair bit already. For our purposes here, one of the main effects is that neoliberalism has worsened inequality. Therefore it has worsened all the problems associated with power imbalances.
The (small) Crisis of Meaning
The neoliberal American led world is having an awkward moment right now. Neoliberalism, for all its gains, visibly crashed in 2008 and continues to do so, revealing the system’s deep hypocrisies and contradictions. The idea of modelling your culture on America is also getting much less appealing. Meanwhile forces like climate change, the Ukraine war, and [Insert Latest Catastrophe Here] are giving many the impression the whole world is going down in flames.
We’ve also had huge cultural shifts in a very short time span. Gay marriage went from inconceivable to normal in a blink. Globalisation and the internet has shoved every opinion from every corner of the globe into everyone’s faces everywhere. Forces like Nazism, that most assumed to be dead, have suddenly reappeared with vigor.
Meanwhile the Soviet Union was a failure. The political left collapsed. Political parties range from amorphous grey slop, to unhinged lunacy. All the visions for the world are failing, or impossible, or insane. No one seems to have a clear viable alternative.
What do you get when you sum all this together?
A gigantic crisis of meaning. People don’t know what to believe anymore. What is real? Who do I trust? Where do I belong? What matters? What does anything mean?
This happens to society from time to time. Notably this happened when the 19th Century order collapsed during the two world wars. We are seeing similar confusion today, being expressed in similar ways. A surge of surrealism and absurdism in art and discourse. A surge of new political movements with new manifestos. Political fights by groups who not only disagree, but inhabit alternate realities. Large numbers of depressed, disillusioned, and confused people. Predictions of the imminent collapse of civilisation. All of this is a symptom of the collapse of old identities, beliefs, and norms.
The (big) Crisis of Meaning
The modern world has never been particularly stable. If anything, one of the defining features of the industrial era has been instability. Repeated revolutions. Multiple world shattering global wars. An endless roll out of new technology. The constant upending of all cultures and systems of value.
We are undergoing a multi-century crisis of meaning. This has been going for a while. It’s a defining feature of the modern world.
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
The world used to be a lot more stable, a lot more isolated, and a lot more ignorant. In this context all the world’s cultures developed over several thousand years.
And then we transformed the world. And then we smashed the world all together. And then we built rockets to send robots to the heavenly bodies. God was not home.
All the world’s cultures, religions, and philosophical traditions are in a state of shock. Nothing has happened like this on such a scale before. By historical standards, the world is very confused.
IDENTITY
Who you think you are will shape the values you hold. How do you define yourself? A few big identity categories are having a huge influence on the way millions of people relate to climate change. Those identities are themselves undergoing huge shifts and conflicts. These are particularly important for how they feed into culture wars, which in turn get mixed up with climate politics.
Here’s a few of the biggest identity categories. Each of these is such a big messy subject that I may give it a more in depth treatment another time.
Gender
Gender is one of the deepest rooted forms of identity out there. Gender norms and expectations profoundly shapes how people behave. Climate change is therefore deeply tied up with gender issues.
The rough summary is this:
Nature and environmentalism is typically coded female. Therefore climate actions become the domain of women, and are expected to be done in stereotypically female ways. Caring, quiet, and domestic. Large amounts of environmental messaging plays into feminine stereotypes.
Politics and fossil fuel use is typically coded male. Masculinity is deeply tied up with projecting power, and enforcing dominance hierarchies. Because oil is power, oil is masculine. Nature (female) is to be dominated by fossil fuel use (male). A lot of Far Right and climate denial stuff is shot through with extreme versions of masculinity.
The result? Men and women approach environmental issues differently.
Women are more likely to be drawn towards climate issues. They will be more encouraged to express that concern domestically.
Men are more likely to feel repelled from climate issues. They might drift towards the Far Right, or doomsday prepping. Alternatively they might be drawn to more masculine expressions of climate action, like protests or technology.
Religion
Most of humanity is a member of a religion, or an ex-member of a religion, or culturally shaped by a religion (like Calvinism above). Whatever else is going on in someone’s head, it’s going to get filtered through their religious views. Who am I? What should I do? What is the universe?
These religious views will shape how they interact with climate change. Previously we looked at eco-religion (like Pope Francis with “Integral Ecology”). Later I plan to look at less friendly versions of religion. For now, just note that while religion is certainly present in climate activism, religion is a driving force in climate denial.
We also live in an era of secularisation, and religious fragmentation and experimentation. Science holds considerable authority, yet people are also more adrift spiritually. God is dead, and all that.
Nationalism
For the past 100 to 300 years, a lot of effort has gone into making your nationality your primary identity. People are therefore encouraged to relate to the issue of climate change through the lens of nation states.
Is my country high emitting or low? Which country is most to blame? Is the USA or China worse on climate? I am from a small country. Big countries need to act.
Nationalism is our default version collective identity. When people do break free from that American style individualism, they are likely to jump up to nationalism.
Therefore nationalism profoundly shapes the way people think about climate responsibility and solutions. Nations are to blame. Governments are the solution.
The second confusion arises when our ideas about nations themselves breakdown. Just like everything else, nationalism itself is undergoing a crisis of meaning. If you are caught between either a failing individualism, or a failing nationalism, where do you go?
I suspect this is spinning people off in all directions looking for new sources of identity. Therefore we are seeing once again both utopian socialists (“citizens of the world”), and ethno-nationalists, just as we did the last time the globalized liberal order crashed.
Race
One of the main self-justifying ideologies of the colonial era was racism. Therefore, thanks to centuries of colonialism, many people’s main identity is racial (or at least ethnic). Much of the legacy of colonialism remains tied to race. Those who wish to re-establish or shore up that colonial legacy inevitably turn to racism.
Industrialism came out of colonialism, therefore climate change is also entwined with racism. Most emissions are from the former colonial powers. Most impacts fall soonest and hardest on the former colonial subjects. The former masters are reluctant to sacrifice to save their former subjects, and vice versa. Solidarity between them is broken, and justifications turn to racism.
Because of how these ideas all overlap, climate activists tend to be aligned with anti-racism activism. Meanwhile climate denial, billionaires, and the like tend to drift towards racism.
KNOWLEDGE & BELIEF
How do you know what is real? We tend to take our grasp on reality for granted. However, our ability to know things can break down. And that breakdown can happen at the scale of an entire society.
Knowledge comes at different levels. Each level informs the others, either conflicting or supporting.
1. Direct experience e.g. I saw it myself.
2. Second-hand experience from people we know. e.g. my sister saw it.
3. Second-hand experience from people we don’t know e.g. the government held a press conference about it.
4. Abstract theory e.g. scientific theory explains why it happened.
Let’s take a simple fact: I live in Auckland with my sister. I have 100% confidence this is true. I have met my sister. I have seen Auckland. My parents affirm that both my sister and Auckland are real. Official documents and maps affirm these are facts. Everything from the theory of evolution to plate tectonics supports my belief as a reasonable belief. All of these lines of evidence converge.
Compare this with climate change. The subject is too large and complicated to be seen clearly at the level of direct experience. Therefore climate change is almost entirely known via things like journalism, governments, and scientists. All the lines of evidence do still converge... with one difference.
When society is going through a crisis of meaning (or bad actors are creating misinformation), it’s those higher levels which break down. I can lose my trust in journalism, governments, and scientists. Maybe it’s all a conspiracy? I will encounter wildly differing opinions on the subject. Who do I believe?
This problem of knowledge is a central issue in climate debates. Indeed, no debate would be possible otherwise. The question, “How do you know?” would exist in any era. Modern society adds a number of complications on top.
The Rise of the Internet
The era of climate change has coincided with the emergence of the internet. Therefore climate as an issue has played out differently than past struggles like civil rights. Much of the organizing and propaganda is happening online.
This is a vast topic. Here’s a few things to consider:
The medium is the message, and that message is some variant of libertarianism and/or anarchism.
Isolated people and fringe ideas can gain the critical mass needed to form movements online.
The barriers to entry into any movement are much lower. More people can join, but they might be less committed.
Recruitment and radicalisation are much easier. Due to how the internet links things, the funnel for getting people to radical content is now enormous.
People can get caught in echo-chambers where their ideas are reinforced.
People are also constantly exposed to wildly divergent opinions.
Both truth and misinformation are much easier to publish.
Both truth and misinformation, once published have the ability to be virally self-propagating.
The ability to connect people with high quality information in highly engaging forms is much higher.
The ability to create entire fake realities is much higher.
The internet is new. All the cultural habits, norms, and laws needed to govern behaviour online are still developing.
The internet is invasive and inescapable. You are always public. The world is always in your bedroom.
Much of the internet has been designed from a “Skinner box” mindset to encourage addictive behaviour, where people spend ever more time online, in an ever more distracted state, engaged with the most emotionally provocative content.
The internet creates the illusion of a universal encyclopaedia of human knowledge. In reality the internet is incomplete and biased.
The volume of information online vastly overwhelms people’s ability to process it all.
While the news has always been full of scandal and horror, the sheer volume and inescapability of online doomscrolling leaves people overwhelmed.
Internet discourse and culture is dominated by those people who can afford the technology, have had it the longest, and use it most. If you speak English, any space you enter or create is likely to be dominated by Americans (see above).
While the internet does connect the world, the internet is partially siloed by language groups, and has noteworthy sections where entire populations are cut off thanks authoritarian governments (e.g. The Great Firewall).
The internet is extremely technical, whereas most users are non-experts. Into that expertise gap floods crime, cyber-warfare, and propaganda.
Similarly, the identity, motivations, and origins of anything online is often unclear. This uncertainty and fear feeds paranoia.
The internet feels intangible, but is physical. It requires energy, and therefore every fad from crypto-currencies to AI uses fossil fuels. The whole thing could, in theory, break, be sabotaged, be dismantled, chopped up, or destroyed.
What does all this mean for climate change?
The internet requires a high level of media literacy and critical thinking skills to navigate successfully. People who are less skilled are more likely to get sucked in by all the craziness and misinformation. Climate denial never needed the internet, but it sure does use the internet.
The entire media landscape transformed just at the moment climate became an issue. All the old communications advice suddenly became out of date. Success in any political effort now goes to those who can master the internet most effectively, be it with troll farms pumping out memes, or flash mobs evading police.
By being so disruptive, the new media environment has deepened the crisis of meaning. New ideas are being thrust together. Old authorities have collapsed. New voices have emerged.
Is social media “to blame” for climate change? No. Once again, any media environment was going to struggle. The internet has shaped the particular ways in which we are struggling.
The New Propaganda
A lot of people treat the current style of political propaganda like it’s a question of truth and lies. Your task as an activist is to mobilize the truth. Fact check. Educate.
But the world has changed. Not truth. Not lies. But bullshit.
[The bullshitter] does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.
Our new environment is starting to resemble that under totalitarianism. The main difference from the 1940s is that we have “democratized” totalitarian style propaganda. An abuser does not lie to deceive. An abuser gaslights to break your will.
“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 was possible and that nothing was true. ... 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 that 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 that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
Combating this kind of propaganda needs to occur at the level of people’s souls – dealing with the “ever-changing, incomprehensible world” and the cynicism. Truth is necessary, but insufficient. This is psychological warfare, not a debate.
“The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
“This is not about persuasion: This is about disorientation.”
The rational liberal world, dedicated to truth, simply cannot keep up with a tsunami of shit. The end goal of this bullshit is to make truth and falsehood unknowable.
You cannot have debates in the shit-flooded sewer, only fights. No persuasion. Only attacks. Truth is gone. Lies are gone. Only power remains. The sewer is a warzone.
Flooding the zone is deliberate attempt to psychologically break people. You’ll know it’s happened when people lose touch with reality, and lose touch with their true selves.
To call out, “listen to the science” in such a world is not to be confused with merely debunking lies. To value truth is to exit the sewer, to fight for a world were lies are possible.
FORMATIVE INFLUENCES
People are made. We are a biological species which must continually recreate itself. The forces that create people decide what kinds of people exist in our society. What they believe. How they think. What they value. What skills they have. These are the people who must live in our crazy world, and take action on climate change.
At a minimum we need to consider education and parenting.
Universal Education
Thanks to the nation state system, most people are educated under what is usually referred to as the Prussian model. This is an education system designed for 19th Century German nationalism and liberal political ideals.
The actual history is messier than this suggests, but it’s close enough for our purposes. We have state run schools systems, universal schooling, age cohorts, sending students onto separate career tracks, one professional teacher in front of dozens of kids teaching them how to read and do math. There’ll be a test at the end.
Does this equip people for well for our historical moment?
Good question.
We do get some great benefits. Democracy and industrial economies would not work without this education. Raising the alarm about climate change is a lot easier in a society where everyone can read and do basic math. Scientific literacy is low, by the standards of scientists, but extremely high by historical standards. People are well equipped to understand climate change. Factually. Intellectually.
Clearly, that’s not enough on it’s own.
This kind of schooling is often accused of being “industrial” or even “indoctrination”. In reality, the aim is not so much industrial, as liberal. The aim is to create the ideal liberal individual for the ideal liberal world. In theory all citizens are given the basic skills and knowledge to participate in a liberal political system and find their individual place in a liberal economy. The reality is a mess. But that’s the aim. That aim exists in tension with industrialism and nationalist “indoctrination”, becoming a kind of liberal nationalism factory.
For our purposes, the main effect is to broadly reinforce status quo assumptions as people’s default approach to climate change. We spent years teaching you facts and technical skills. Therefore the solution to climate change is evidence and technology. This mindset is what gives us the dominant eco-modernist outlook. Add on the nationalism factory aspect, and people view it through the nation-state lens. Add on the short-comings of the system, and many people get just enough education to successfully misunderstand the world.
The Nuclear Family
The era of climate change has coincided with the rise (and possible fall) of the nuclear family as the default living arrangement. A male breadwinner. A female homemaker. Their biological children. They all live in one house. Friends and extended family all live elsewhere, with minimal involvement.
Historically this is a strange set up. Biologically speaking humans are “cooperative breeders”. We live in groups. A nuclear family in total isolation will struggle to successfully raise children. Therefore the ideal of the nuclear family has always been more myth than reality.
What has actually happened is that “tribe” has been partially replaced by institutions. Day-care, kindergartens, schools. In modern industrial societies, people are typically raised by a combination of the school system and the nuclear family (and possibly churches, sports clubs, etc). A few remnants of “tribe” hang on at the edges: grandparents, aunt, uncles, friends. The reality is a mess, but school and the nuclear family is the assumed default. This is what we build for. This is what many people aim for.
How does this matter for climate change? A few ways:
The physical embodiment of the nuclear family is suburbia. That means car dependence and urban sprawl. Fighting for “family values” gets conflated with maintaining suburbia, and therefore avoiding climate action.
The nuclear family is deeply caught up in gender and religious identity issues (see above). All the culture war angst of “traditional” gender roles is also a fight over this (mythically) “traditional” family structure.
The nuclear family is fragile. While it can be healthy, it very easily goes wrong. If people and schools are struggling materially (see neoliberalism above), then many families will simply fail. Large numbers of people will enter adulthood having been failed. Our society will be producing large numbers of people mired in mental health problems, who either get stuck in helplessness or serve as a recruiting ground for extreme politics. Anything which increases the burdens of stress and mental illness will worsen all the psychological issues we’ve covered previously.
The nuclear family is an impossible standard for many people. Financially, emotionally, and practically non-viable. Therefore people end up with guilt and shame for their inevitable failings, while futilely trying to do the impossible.
Huge pressures are put on romantic relationships as the only meaningful kind of relationship. This is especially a problem for men, where it feeds social isolation and culture war madness like “Incels”, which feeds the Far Right and climate denial.
To the extent people live in nuclear families they risk ending up socially isolated. If one of both parents are pathological, incompetent, negligent, absent, dead, or just stressed then that child is at risk. The child’s needs may go unmet, skills may go unlearned, and ultimately the child may develop mental health issues. Do this to enough people and society ends up with a mental health epidemic.
STRUCTURE
We got the people. The people got given values and identities and skills. They try to understand the world. But where do they actually live?
The general conditions of life will shape how they are able to respond when an issue like climate change comes along.
Money-brain
Money is a form of political control – a way for a society’s power structure to mobilize and coordinate that society. Every time the central bank tweaks interest rates to influence the economy, this is what they are doing. Money is the mechanism of control.
The primary organizing force in neoliberal society is money. When you live in Money-world, you will think with Money-brain. Every decision. Every thought. Every emotion.
Money-brain is an atomized individual. I own my money.
Money-brain only thinks about markets. I can buy anything I need. Anything.
Money-brain is an abstract mathematical optimizer. I want maximum value for my money. Value is money. How much am I worth?
Money-brain lives in a world of scarcity. Everything is rationed. I need more money-rations or I will die.
Money-brain lives in a world of competition. Don’t take my money. I want your money.
Money-brain believes in infinity. I can put money in a bank. The money will grow exponentially forever.
Money-brain believes in sacrificing the real, for the hypothetical. If I work myself to death now, I get more money tomorrow.
Money-brain solves problems with money. A bought running shoes. I am healthy.
Money-brain is jealous, envious, afraid, anxious, ashamed, nihilistic, boastful, narcissistic, ascetic, miserly, and prone to hallucinations. Money-brain struggles to distinguish between human value, and mathematical value. This makes Money-brain very unwell.
Whenever people think about climate change, part of them will be doing so as Money-brain.
The Actual PAIN Problem
Previously we looked at the “PAIN” framing of climate psychology (Personal, Abrupt, Immoral, Now). The basic idea is that if climate change was more like being mauled by a tiger, we’d pay more attention. This idea is both true and misleading for climate change.
Now we need to consider the actual PAIN problem. If you really are being mauled by a tiger, you won’t be thinking much about climate change. For many people, daily life is 100% tiger attacks.
PAIN-ful experiences by their nature crowd out the space needed for deep thought. If you can’t pay the bills, are stressed out about work, and the landlord is threatening to evict you, then you are in crisis. If your phone is buzzing all day with social media notifications sharing stories engineered to trigger PAIN, then you will feel like you are in crisis.
Crisis doesn’t just crowd out climate change emotionally, crisis crowds it out physically. You might care. You just don’t have time. You must deal with the PAIN now.
Indeed, a common cult tactic is to leave people overworked, underfed, and sleep deprived. Exhausted people struggle to assert their own will or question what is happening. That’s how you get people to literally drink the Kool-aid.
Isolation
Humans are social creatures. The modern world looked at this, and said, “How about no?” Especially in America.
Nuclear families live alone. Then get divorced. And live alone. Liberated individuals live alone. Your social bonds are online. Somewhere else. To maximize money you followed the jobs. And lost social connections. Or you stayed, and everyone else left. You work too long. The economy is bad, you can’t afford to go out. Nothing is free in Money-world says Money-brain. You are alone. You’re feeling anxious. You don’t go out. You are alone. You are alone. You are alone.
What does isolation do to people?
It gives them mental and physical health problems.
It undermines their ability to organize politically (or even just for DnD nights).
It makes them far more vulnerable to the information-sewer.
It creates the atomized mass population which is vulnerable to manipulation, totalitarianism, and more.
CONCLUSION
We could go on forever. The world is a messy place, no doubt you can think of other forces at play too (forms of government, workplaces, etc).
The key point: the modern world has emerged out of the past 500 years of global change. Everything that people think, say, and do has been shaped by that history. That history gave rise to a particular set of contradictory values, identities, lifestyles, and more. As a result there is a deep psychological inertia to changing our world to meet the challenge of climate change
This history has also been marked by repeated crises of meaning. We are in one right now. The societies we’ve ended up with are historically bizarre, and often damaging to people’s mental health. For the time being this confusion makes it hard to rally society in pursuit of a single goal.
Eventually new meanings will arise – just as they did last time. Artists will have a role to play in creating such meanings. The environment will be one of the central questions. Which is where you come in.
And that’s it for theory!
Next in the series I will do a quick summary synthesis of what has been some fairly dry and abstract stuff.
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