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. 

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…..