Some 18 months ago I noticed a strange omission in the blog – no discussion of climate change. Rather lamely, I tried to explain this blog silence by suggesting that
- the issue was too
complex;
- others were dealing with
it;
- technical change would
sort things out; or
- a few personal changes in life-style could at least salve the conscience….
What’s strange is that I do buy, download and read books on the subject. It’s just that I don’t choose to share the content with readers of the blog. Why not? I wonder…
Last year, I did
have two posts on the issue – the first on the Extinction Movement whoseprotests in
the UK have brought forward new laws there which are seen in liberal circles as
threatening the very essence of English identity.
The other consisted of my initial notes on a book which had just been published Commanding Hope - the power we have to renew a world in peril (2020) by Thomas Homer-Dixon and which I recognised as deserving of a reread. As always, I got distracted and it took a reminder from the author himself a couple of days ago to direct me back to the book
What had originally
intrigued me about Dixon’s book was its focus on our mental processes – on the mix of hope and despair we brought to a
subject which can and does arouse trauma. At the time I was aware only of geographer Mike Hulme’s Why We Disagree about
Climate Change – understanding controversy, inaction and opportunity” (2009) - although Clive
Hamilton had apparently produced Requiem for a species – why we resist the truth
about climate change in
2010.
My reread of Homer-Dixon’s latest alerted me to two other useful titles on this intriguing theme of why most of us seem unable to take the issue of global warming with the seriousness which it warrants – Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life; Kari Marie Norgaard (2011) and Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change ; George Marshall (2014)
Although it’s only a year since I
first read “Commanding Hope”, the reread didn’t ring any bells in my head; and
that’s despite my having made notes available in the last half of
the post - which
questioned the lack of an index and bibliography. Many of you may see this as a
bit pedantic of me – but, if I’m
spending a few hours reading an author’s work I need to have a sense of their
biases. I don’t need (or even want) a long reading list - indeed the
shorter the better since the author is then required to think very carefully
about the average reader. A reading list stretching over 40 pages is simply a
virility symbol – “see how clever I am”!!
I do find it disturbing, however, that I have so little recollection of reading the book – just 12 months ago. That’s not a good sign!
Rightly in my view the book identifies “world views” as a crucial factor in explaining the attitude we adopt to global warming. Coincidentally, I devoted a section of Voices in the Air – the 2021 posts (just uploaded to the blog) to that very subject (from p 105) in which I make the point that the term is only one of five you can find in the literature – others being “world values”, “political culture”, “cultural theory” and “cultural values”. Homer-Dixon makes my life more complicated by offering two more terms – “cognitive affective maps” and something he calls “ideological state space” which he explains in a table containing 15 fundamental “issues” which divide people such as
Are moral principles universal and
objective?
is the world a safe or a dangerous
place?
Is the world best understood
through reason or emotion?
Can people choose their fate?
Are there large and essential
differences between groups of people?
How much should we care about other
people?
Should one resist authority or
defer to it?
I’m not able to reproduce the table so can’t do justice to it here. Those interested can read this 40 page article which Homer-Dixon wrote in 2015 and which reproduces an earlier version of the table and all the diagrams. He has also outlined his "theory of hope" in this useful briefing note.
