Commanding Hope

Canadian Thomas Homer-Dixon is not your typical doom-merchant – although his was one of the first books I read suggesting that the increasing complexity of the world was creating limits to man’s ingenuity viz The Ingenuity Gap – how can we solve the world’s future problems (2001). A few years later he wrote a sequel which offered a bit more hope - The Upside of Down – catastrophe, creativity and the renewal of civilisation (2006)

I’ve just been reading his latest contribution - Commanding Hope – the power we have to renew a world in peril” (2020) which is one of the very few books I’ve seen which takes the crisis as read - and chooses instead to use our own reluctance to change our habits as the key with which to explore the values and worldviews lying at the heart of the different sense of identity we all have. (I wasn’t aware that, some ten years ago, Clive Hamilton produced Requiem for a species – why we resist the truth about climate change (2010) although only one chapter of the book seems to deal directly with the question in the subtitle).

But I well remember reading (in 2014) “Why We Disagree about Climate Change – understanding controversy, inaction and opportunity” (2009) by geographer Mike Hulme - which used seven different lenses (namely science, economics, religion, psychology, media, development, and governance) to make us aware of the complexity behind climate change. His argument was basically that –

- We understand science and scientific knowledge in different ways

- We value things differently

- We believe different things about ourselves, the universe and our place in the universe

- We fear different things

- We receive multiple and conflicting messages about climate change – and interpret them differently

- We understand “development” differently

- We seek to govern in different ways (eg top-down “green governmentality”; marketing environmentalism; or “civic environmentalism”) 

Little wonder, with such varied and extensive divergences in beliefs, values, fears and messages that we can neither agree about global warming – nor ourselves take but pitifully token ecological steps But that doesn’t stop any of us from priding ourselves on our rationality – nor taking it amiss when told that we are all creatures of habit, intuition and downright prejudice……It was less than a decade ago that psychologists first started to challenge the myths about rationality strongly – with authors such as Jonathan Haidt leading the charge

So Homer-Dixon’s book has appeared none too soon - and tries to deal with the argument of the Extinction movement - that things have now gone too far and there is little we can do to save the planet. For the moment, I’ll just list the main points which caught my eye -

- the successful “women against the Hbomb campaign” of the 1950s (which led to a treaty ban in 1963) was started by the determination of a single woman

- Feedback mechanisms can be both negative and positive (the Hbomb campaign and South Africa’s peaceful transition are examples of the latter)

- 2 megatrends – greater connectivity; and higher uniformity. The trick is to make them work in our favour by challenging what has become in the past 4 years a heavily pessimistic social mood

- the importance of Worldviews – which I’ve covered here  

- the strength of our belief in growth, choice and security

– 2 tools to help challenge that eg Cognitive Affective Maps - Commanding Hope

– worldviews, institutions and technology (WIT) 

By far the hardest transition will involve getting from today’s (economic growth) WIT to another arrangement that drastically reduces the global economy’s consumption of resources and its output of waste.

This new arrangement must explicitly address the three “equivalencies” I highlighted— growth equals happiness, freedom, and peace— because people won’t relinquish conventional growth if they aren’t reasonably sure they’ll be at least as happy, free, and secure as they are under the existing arrangement.

The intellectual and scientific foundation of this new WIT will also need to incorporate a renovated discipline of economics—one that recognizes that human economies are complex systems intimately connected with nature; that markets won’t automatically find good substitutes for some of the most precious things nature gives us, like moderate temperatures and enough water for our crops; and that economics must be grounded in moral principles attuned to our world’s demanding new material and social realities.

 - Sufficiency v feasibility; solutions have to be sufficient – and enough p180

- Donella Meadows’ Leverage Points – one of the most important parts of the book

- from the “Abundance mindset” to the “Scarcity mindset” caused by widening insecurity, migration, climate change and the new pessimistic social mood

- Jonathan Haidt’s 6 “moral intuitions” – care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity (?) and liberty

- three “temperaments” – exuberant, prudent and empathic which match Amartya Sen’s approach

My feeling, on finishing the book, was that it was an important contribution but that he hadn’t succeeded in pulling the various themes and arguments together in a satisfactory way. I’m still left wondering how I can explain it clearly to others.

But that’s one of its strengths – that it makes me want to go back and reread particularly the final part so that I can provide such an explanation….  

PS The book offers neither an annotated reading list nor an index. I had wanted to check whether it mentioned Robert Quinn (a neglected writer on the theme of changing the world)  - but the absence of an index makes that impossible……  You wonder whether that’s deliberate…..