what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020
Showing posts with label Commanding Hope. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Commanding Hope. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 5, 2022

Patterns of the Mind

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.