Changing One's Mind

 I have been totally blown over by Dougald Hine’s At Work in the Ruins (2023) which I read as the most profound exploration of our world views - and of how the combination of his experience of

• climate activism

• changing his domicile to Sweden a few years before Covid struck

caused him to question those world views. And to pose more profound challenges than simply those of global warming. The book digs deep into the ways we try to make sense of the world - a subject which I dealt with not so long ago. Here's how Hine describes it -

“Two paths lead from here: one big, one small. The big path is a brightly-lit highway on which many lanes converge. It unites elements of left and right, from Silicon Valley visionaries and Wall Street investors, through a broad swathe of liberal opinion, to the wilder fringes of Fully Automated Luxury Communism, and in some form it will constitute the political orthodoxy of the 2020s. It sets out to limit the damage of climate change through large-scale efforts of management, control, surveillance and innovation, oriented to sustaining a version of existing trajectories of technological progress, economic growth and development.

The small path is a trail that branches off into many paths. It is made by those who seek to build resilience closer to the ground, nurturing capacities and relationships, oriented to a future in which existing trajectories of technological progress, economic growth and development will not be sustained, but where the possibility of a ‘world worth living for’ nonetheless remains. Humble as it looks, as your eyes adjust, you may recognise just how many feet have walked this way and how many continue to do so, even now.

Which of these paths I would have us take is clear enough. The big path is a fast track to nowhere. We will not arrive at the world of fossil-free jumbo jets promised by the airport adverts. The entitlements of late modernity are not compatible with the realities of life on a finite planet and they do not even make us happy. But we may well follow that path for a while longer, as it leads us deeper into dystopia and leaves us more dependent on fragile technological systems that few of us understand or can imagine living without.

And what I think I can see now is that the very language of climate change will be owned, from here on out, by the engineers and marketeers of the big path. Any conversation about the trouble we are in, so long as it starts within the newly politicised frame of science, will lead inexorably to their solutions.

However far it may be from our political roots, we find that we have more in common with assorted conservatives, dissidents and sceptics – including some whose scepticism extends to climate science – than with the mainstream progressive currents that have so far had a claim to be on the right side of history when it comes to climate change. Under the authority of ‘the science’, talk of climate change will belong to the advocates of the big path, and those of us who do not wish to contribute to that future will need to find another place to start from when we want to talk about the depth of the trouble the world is undoubtedly in.” (pp34/35)

Along the way the author meets other travellers who also challenge the conventional wisdom – people like my compatriot Alastair McIntosh and others such as VM de Oliveira (“Hospicing Modernity”), James Bridle (“New Dark Age”) and Justin Smith. The book continues thus -

The path we are on now looks like a dead end and we are left to look for other paths worth taking. The way we answer such a question can be informed by science, but science alone cannot answer it for us because we’re not dealing with the kind of question that can be answered definitively through processes of observation, measurement and calculation. Rather, what we have is a question that calls for the exercise of judgement. And it cannot not be answered, since any response to climate change will contain an implicit answer. If the question is not made explicit – if the existence of upstream questions, these questions that take us beyond the boundaries of what science can tell us about climate change, is not recognised – then the default answer will be to treat it as bad luck and pursue some combination of techno-fixes and lifestyle adjustments.

The trouble is, compared to the promise of science, the exercise of human judgement looks terribly fragile and fallible. Indeed, from early in the development of modern science, before it even got that name, there have been those who hoped that scientific ways of seeing and knowing the world could free us from dependence on the exercise of judgement and the disputes to which it often leads. You can trace this hope within the history of environmentalism and the climate movements arising from it. Yet to expect scientific knowledge to take the place of the exercise of judgement is to ask too much of science, and those who have done so tend to end up disappointed, as we shall see.

In 1987, the Brundtland Report had established ‘sustainable development’ as the frame within which the international community would talk about the planetary situation: a framing which yoked the pursuit of ecological sustainability to the trajectory of economic and technological development, without any proof that this pairing could pull in the same direction. In hindsight, the five years between its publication and the Rio Earth Summit of 1992 appear as a high tide of international concern and intergovernmental action around the environment that remains unsurpassed to this day. This was also the moment at which the environmental movement drew back from the terrain of culture and established a new relationship with science. No longer was the scientific evidence a starting point for a larger questioning of society or making political arguments; now the evidence itself was to make the case for change, to carry the weight and do the work of politics.

This turn is not hard to understand: in countries where Green politicians had entered parliament, the demands of working within existing institutions drove a certain kind of ‘realism’. Meanwhile, the journey of David Icke from BBC sports presenter to Green Party principal speaker to promoter of lizard-related conspiracy theories offered a cautionary example of how the attempt to call your whole culture into question could unravel. pp59-60