Two Public Lectures – no.’s 11 and 12 in the series “Global Warming: Science and Politics in Troubled Times”
Delivered, Trades Hall, Carlton, June 8 and 15, 2009
***Lecture No.11***
In which are set out more and more far-reaching considerations about modern society’s faith in science. The grim actualities of the relationship between science and politics summarised.
***Lecture No.12***
In which further grim climate change realities are painted in vivid chiaroscuro.
(To be followed shortly by:
***Lecture No.13***
In which the manifold possibilities for change in Australian society’s response to climate change and in the relationship between science and politics are canvassed.)
There were, you’ll remember, to be two parts to the penultimate section of the course dealing with climate change contrarians, the first revolving around the issue of knowledge and authority, the second revolving around the whole issue of faith in science – whether it’s right to say there is an element of quasi-religious faith involved in doing science, whether, as many of the contrarians say, climate science is particularly faith-based and whether the attitude to the deliverances of climate science in society at large is worryingly (pathologically) faith-based. It’s that last aspect of the problem I want to turn to begin with today – whether the attitude to the deliverances of climate science in society at large is worryingly (pathologically) faith-based. It brings us back to the very start of the course, to the man who, I said right at the beginning, sets out the problems of science and politics as they relate to global warming in a wide-ranging and incisive way, John Lanchester. Here he is again, you’ve already heard this and probably you’ve read the article it comes from in the meantime:
“When we come to sum up how we got to this point, there is one other factor to add to the politicisation of science and the reporting of science. It is a deeper, murkier consideration, and it bears on the way our society is in thrall to science and at the same time only partly understands it. Our material culture is based on science in a way so profound that our attitude to it approaches a kind of faith. Arthur C. Clarke said that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ This is a remark beloved of sc-fi fans, and endlessly quoted in discussions of what might happen if there were ever to be contact between humans and aliens (or time travel etc.) Its real sting is that it is a description of the world we already inhabit. Electric light and power, and tv, and computers, and fridges, not to mention cars and planes and lasers and CD players and dialysis machines and wireless networking and synthetic materials, are things we take on trust: we don’t know how they work, but we’re happy to benefit from using them. We may have a rough understanding of scientific method, and even a rough Bill Brysonish sense of some of the science involved, but that is about it; our attitude contains significant components of faith and trust and incomprehension, while at the same time we are grateful for the wonders modern science has brought us.
Our faith-based contentment with science has been challenged before, most particularly by the invention of nuclear weapons. But with global warming, science is bringing us catastrophic news, and is doing so, moreover, on the basis of predictions. . . about the future which demand urgent and radical action in the present. It’s not like being told about some scientific breakthrough, waiting a few years, and then having the breakthrough manifest itself in the form of a technology that gradually becomes more useful over time. The issue of global warming is the opposite of that: we are required to act on the basis of the faith in science which is one of the fundamental underpinnings of our society, but the faith has never been made quite so explicit before, and the need to act radically, urgently and expensively on the basis of scientific models is testing that faith to the full and beyond." J. Lanchester, “Warmer, Warmer” London Review of Books, March 22, 2007
There are several very simple points in there which are useful in seeing how contrarians get the wrong end of the stick when talking about global warming as the source of a new religious dogmatism, as well as a point about how the specialised, theory-bound, rarefied world of science relates to the wider social world. The first point is that the attitude you might take towards the content of climate science (or any science) – the amount of faith involved in your attitude to it – will differ markedly depending on whether you’re a climate scientist or not, and probably it will differ depending on whether you’re a scientifically educated or a non-scientifically educated member of the general public. The further you get from the field itself, the greater the element of faith involved. Nor is the faith of the non-scientifically educated members of the general public unwarranted: it’s a consequence of the fact that we live in a scientifically and technologically advanced society which has a certain division of labour, between scientific experts and non-experts. Unless we want to junk the idea of scientifically and technologically advanced society and unless we want to take the trouble to educate everyone to the point where they have a robust scientifically-independent mind of their own, then faith in the deliverances of science is going to be a cultural given. That’s a point that Lanchester is making in this passage and in the article at large. But there’s an equally great point relating particularly to climate science – the point that the faith we as a society are implicitly being asked to show in its deliverances is not something separate from the belief (amounting sometimes to no more than passive acceptance, sometimes to active appreciation) that we manifest in our everyday dealings with the ensembles of equipment. The faith we as a society of non-experts are being implicitly asked to show in the deliverances of climate science is, Lanchester is saying, the darker side of a quite ordinary everyday faith.
Can we get a bit further with this issue of faith in science? Let me at least say something briefly about the issue of faith in science among scientists – the issue of whether scientists themselves, or “the scientific enterprise” as you might loosely call it, requires any noteworthy manifestation of faith. Rather than saying something myself, I let Oreskes, who in a way has been another of the heroes of this course, say something, and I’ll see what I can get out of it:
“No scientific conclusion can ever be proven, and new evidence may lead scientists to change their views, but it is no more a ‘belief’ to say that earth is heating up than to say that continents move, that germs cause disease, that DNA carries hereditary information, and that HIV causes AIDS. You can always find someone, somewhere, to disagree, but these conclusions represent our best current understandings and therefore our best basis for reasoned action.” - Oreskes, “How do we know we’re not wrong?"
The first thing she says there may seem rather surprising: “No scientific conclusion can ever be proven.” Isn’t the hallmark of scientific conclusions that they’re proven – you might ask. Or that they’re backed up with rigorous experimental evidence? Perhaps Oreskes would be better off saying “no scientific conclusion can ever be definitively proven.” Let’s take it that that’s what she means. Why can’t scientific conclusions be definitively proven? Because of what she says next – because new evidence could be discovered or new theories developed which put the old theories in the shade or put old evidence in a new broader context. All of you who are versed in the history of science will know that that’s how paradigm shifts in the sciences often occur – by re-contextualising old theories and old evidence. Classically that’s what happened in the twentieth century in the switchover from classical to post-classical physics, from Newtonian mechanics to quantum mechanics. The old Newtonian laws weren’t abandoned, abrogated or declared invalid. Instead they were recognised as limit cases of more general laws, applicable to some – a very large number but not all – the phenomena of physical reality.
Why is it important for us that scientific conclusions can’t ever be definitively proven? Because it means that there is an element of something that might, with qualification, be described as faith in science that’s native to the enterprise itself. And it means that the contrarian argument that “climate science is based on quasi-religious faith” contains a grain of truth, unfortunately just not the truth the contrarians think it contains. All science, I’m saying, contains an element of faith, so naturally climate science does too – though it would be putting it far too strongly to say all science is based on faith. The question then becomes what this element of faith is? And answering that question clearly is important or else the contrarians can get away with the argument that the element of faith in operation in climate science because it’s a science like any other is actually a sign that’s it’s a corrupt science or a pseudo-science that’s been hijacked by political agitators who believe religiously that Western Civilisation is evil. (Even more generally, answering the question what the element of faith is is important because without a clear answer Christian naifs the world over are going to be able to argue that, if what they believe on faith is essentially the same as what people believe on a scientific basis, then there’s no difference between taking the Bible literally and taking the facts of Nature literally. (In fact the Christian naifs I’m thinking of usually go further than that. Having purportedly established that the scientific evaluative standpoint is just as faith-based as their own evaluative standpoint, they assert the superiority of what they believe on faith, because their faith-based belief system gives the world a coherent and striking metaphysical and ethical meaning, which other purportedly faith-based belief systems like the sciences can’t generate and which they in general don’t see it as their job to generate.)
I ask the question again: What is this element of faith that becomes manifest in the fact that scientific conclusions can never be definitively proven? A large part of it is the faith that science is usable, precisely faith in science’s application to practical situations in spite of its non-definitive nature – the faith namely that our assessment of the scientific facts is not going to be completely overthrown any time soon and that our assessment says enough about the way the world is in reality to enable us to act in the world.
Let me break things up into two questions. First question: why does science involve this element of faith? The simple but I think quite profound answer is – because we can’t know the future. In every case we act to change the future we act on the faith that we know enough to suit our purposes – a point that applies to all modes of acting in the world and that applies to science systematically to the extent that science has a pragmatic orientation. That’s the simple version of an answer to the first question (the question why does science involve this element of faith). A further question - what does this faith-element not amount to? This is Robyn Williams’ point about faith in science which I made on his behalf in lecture no. 9. Faith in science is not like faith in religion, or at least not like those theologically articulated forms of the Christian religion, which require that believers believe in spite of all evidence, in other words even when – or rather precisely when – all evidence seems to contradict the belief. That last point is very important for several reasons. Firstly it means that contrarians are playing fast and loose with words when they put climate science and religious faith in the same basket. Secondly it means that garden-variety Christian theology doesn’t have much of a case for arguing that its version of religious faith and so-called scientific faith are directly comparable. Believing something on basis of a balance of empirical evidence is markedly different from believing in spite of all evidence – which has been one of the hallmarks of Christian faith since St Paul.
Let me briefly make a philosophical point which would be a fitting starting point for a series of lectures on the philosophy of science: all action involving something more than knowledge of how things stand in the world and why they stand in that way – all knowledge that steps beyond knowledge in any way whatsoever always demands something a bit like faith (though of course not necessarily the humble, unquestioning, warmly emotional faith of the Christians). That’s a point I think is not too far removed from what Oreskes is saying in the last sentence of hers I’ve got up on the board –You can always find someone, somewhere, to disagree, but these conclusions, the conclusion that the earth is warming due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, represent our best current understandings and therefore our best basis for reasoned action. Someone else you’ll find making a related point in the course reader, I’ve put him right up the front – on the page of juicy introductory quotes about science – is this character Rosenstuck-Hussy, who says:
“The scientific method cannot lead mankind because it is based upon experiment, and every experiment postpones the present moment until one knows the result. We always come to each other and even to ourselves too late so soon as we wish to know in advance what to do.” Rosenstuck-Hussy
That’s a superb aphorism – I think because of the beautiful unforced way he generalises in the second sentence what he’s saying in the first sentence about science, the way he points in the first half of the aphorism to a certain disjunct between knowledge and action in science which in the second half of the aphorism turns out to be – not just a factor operative in science but a constitutive feature of our experience of the world – the very gulf between knowledge and action that we face every day of our lives which can sometimes be bridged simply but can sometimes lead to the anguish of a Hamlet. A fuller way of saying what Rosenstuck-Hussy is saying about science here is this – the scientific method cannot lead mankind (cannot in other words give you an incontrovertible, final or definitive basis for action) because it’s based on knowledge built up through doing experiments and, when you’re approaching the threshold of action, you can always – hold back and do more experiments. You can always build up a firmer knowledge base than the one you already have before you go ahead and act. It is not however necessarily rational to do so – not necessarily rational to wait while you build up a firmer knowledge base. Why not? Because to the best of your current knowledge the dangers of not acting could be grave; because in other words you might clearly and rationally – on the basis of evidence – apprehend that not to act would be to court disaster. That of course is quite like the position we’re in with climate change, where we have the contrarians arguing that we don’t know enough about the climate system to be confident that we ought to take radical action right now to combat climate change. The right answer to the contrarians on that point is precisely the one Oreskes also gives - that the conclusions of climate science represent our best current understandings and therefore our best basis for reasoned action. It is false and misleading to argue that they don’t represent a reasoned basis because there are some elements of something a bit like faith involved – the faith that pertains to all action that occurs in spite of imperfect knowledge of the future. And it is equally misleading to argue that they don’t represent a reasoned basis for action because there are some elements of uncertainty involved. Aspiring for complete certainty is not a hallmark of rationality and it’s certainly not a hallmark of rational action claiming to base itself on a well-formed body of scientific knowledge. The problem we are faced with is the problem of making rational decisions under conditions of uncertainty; the argument of the contrarians however seems to be, or seems to shade off into saying, that we can’t make a rational decision because there are elements of uncertainty involved – which is to mistake the nature of rationality, decision-making and certainty and to ignore the fact that there are more and less rational responses to conditions of uncertainty.
To give you an even broader perspective on this idea of faith in science, let me quote someone whom I’ve referred to constantly over the past 12 weeks, but never actually quoted. Here’s Max Weber in his very famous public lecture from 1918 entitled “Science as a Vocation”:
“Scientific progress is a fraction, the most important fraction, of the process of intellectualisation which we have been undergoing for thousands of years and which nowadays is usually judged in such an extremely negative way. Let us first clarify what this intellectualist rationalisation, created by science and by scientifically oriented technology, means practically.
Does it mean that we, today, for instance, everyone sitting in this hall, have a greater knowledge of the conditions of life under which we exist than has an American Indian or a Hottentot? Hardly. Unless he is a physicist, one who rides on the streetcar has no idea how the car happened to get into motion. And he does not need to know. He is satisfied that he may “count” on the behaviour of the streetcar, and he orients his conduct according to this expectation; but he knows nothing about what it takes to produce such a car so that it can move. The savage knows incomparably more about his tools. When we spend money today I bet that even if there are colleagues of political economy here in the hall, almost every one of them will hold a different answer in readiness to the question: How does it happen that one can buy something for money – sometimes more and sometimes less? The savage knows what he does in order to get his daily food and which institutions serve him in this pursuit. The increasing intellectualisation and rationalisation do not, therefore, indicate an increased and general knowledge of the conditions under which one lives.” Weber “Science as a Vocation” in
Weber by the way means absolutely nothing pejorative by the word “savage”. By “savage” he means someone leading a life untouched or largely untouched by this millennia-long process of intellectualisation.
But to re-phrase his main point: Science and technology have come to play a dominant role in our lives, but the result is something strangely unscientific. Science and technology have come to play a dominant role in our lives, but that doesn’t mean that we all become scientists, nor does it mean that most people come to possess scientific knowledge of the social or natural environments in which they live, work and move. What he’s pointing to is a sort of paradox or tension within mass societies that base themselves on scientific knowledge and advanced technology – base themselves, that is, on a sort of scientific enlightenment – even though most people in those societies remain, scientifically speaking, almost completely in the dark about most things. I’ll come back to that in a minute. First, more Weber. What does this far-reaching, macro-historical process of intellectual rationalisation through science amount to in human and social terms? What do intellectualisation and rationalisation mean, if they emphatically don’t mean that people have an increased knowledge of the conditions under which they live? Here’s Max Weber:
“It means something else, namely, the knowledge or belief that if one but wished one could learn it at any time. Hence, it means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather than one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service. This above all is what intellectualisation means.” – Weber “Science as a Vocation”
His point again. Intellectualisation is connected with this idea that ideally you could master the circumstances of life in the full scientific sense. Intellectualisation does not mean that your average member of a scientifically enlightened society does in point of fact master the circumstances of life scientifically. Intellectualisation, in the modern societies we have today at least, means that you take it as given that somebody else has learnt and hence knows how things work scientifically and technically. And this is very much what I mean by faith in science – the fact that we take it on faith that somebody else knows how things work; the fact that we take if for granted that we could learn and that moreover somebody else has learnt. And it’s that which generates the paradox – in some ways for Weber the paradox of modern civilisation: in the form of science and technology, intellectually very highly developed means exist to take care of the material needs of mass society. And yet the closest most people get to experiencing those means is just some sort of passive un-thought-through acceptance. Intellectualisation, we might think, is all about stepping beyond faith; and yet our society, based on intellectualisation as it is, seems also to be steeped in faith of a strange kind – a sort of practical social faith in intellectualisation (the beyond of faith) itself.
We live in a society based on a high level of intellectualisation, the main locus of which is science. Yet that society is one in which the vast majority of people do no more than evince a passive faith in intellectual knowledge; in other words, what they manifest is a completely pre-intellectual or sub-intellectual attitude. There’s the paradox.
To make the point again, this time in terms of another of the great Weberian themes, the idea that the world of modernity is disenchanted. (The idea in a nutshell is that we don’t believe in magic and so, in quite a strong sense, don’t believe in the mystery of life anymore, viz. in the sense that no mysterious comprehensively incalculable forces are taken to exist.) The way the paradox of modern intellectualisation plays itself out in terms of that idea: even though we live in a world in which it’s taken as given that no mysterious forces exist, science and its products are in practice pretty much a total mystery to us. Even though there’s no magic, as far as we’re concerned science and its products might as well work by a sort of magic.
***
What is this dark underside to our modern faith in science which, I’m saying, is dimly perceived by everyone who isn’t lucky enough to be filled with naïve wonder in all things scientific and which, I’m also saying, might be the cause of some of the trouble we’re having facing up to climate change? The shadow side of our faith in science that I’m talking about comes in the form of proliferation of ever-newer forms of technology, the ever-deeper inroads new forms of technology make into every corner of day-to-day social life, and it’s related to the high-degree of specialisation that goes with life in a high-tech world. Here’s the idea expressed by Redner, who himself develops it in response to the German sociologist of science, Boehme:
“Gernot Boehme has stated that ‘the scientification of our lifeworld does not mean that we adopt a scientific attitude toward our lives, or that commonsense is transformed into scientific thinking, but that, on the one hand, scientific products play an important role in our lives and that, on the other hand, certain actions are delegated to experts.’ Both these developments entail adverse and even harmful consequences. . .The first, that of the dominance of scientific methods and instruments in work and life, produces a preponderance of technical procedures that has resulted in the ill-effects that have been studied by many authors, such as iatrogenic diseases, land erosion in agriculture and massive learning failures in education. The second, that of relying on experts for everything, leads to an acquired incompetence of ordinary people in managing their lives – confronted with the experts they become ignoramuses or are treated as such.” Redner, “Science and politics: Critique of scientistic conceptions of knowledge and society” in Social Science Information Vol. 40, 2001
The key-phrase there – a clumsy one, even if it’s a good one – is Boehme’s “scientification of our lifeworld” – a phenomenon closely linked with what I’m calling the faith in science characteristic of modern mass society. It’s the “scientification of our lifeworld”, coupled with the fact that we don’t usually have any sort of intellectual mastery of the way science works in the world around us, that requires us to adopt an attitude of pre-reflexive acceptance of science, “faith” if you like, if we’re to live as functioning members of a technologically advanced society. Now the point that Redner goes on to make is that, socially considered, the “scientification of our lifeworld” – this simultaneous cause and effect of our contemporary faith in science – is far from being unambiguous. What it leads to firstly is “the dominance of scientific methods and instruments in work and life” and to an unthinking preference being given to technological solutions to problems, which then have a way of producing further problems that are sometimes larger than the problems they are meant to solve. What “scientification of our lifeworld” amounts to secondly is a wide-ranging dependence on experts: and that entails people not being up to meeting the exigencies of their lives by themselves, to people leading lives full of things and processes that are quite radically opaque to them. (A third thing which the “scientification of our lifeworld” entails – something we haven’t spoken about for a long time – is what I’ve called de-ethicisation. Recall what I said was one of the things at the heart of the de-ethicisation problem (lecture no.2) – the uncritical use throughout society of impersonal technologies and procedures in place of personal forms of interaction. My argument back in lecture 2, you might recall, was that personal forms of interaction played a major role in giving ethical shape to human personality, functioning for the longest time as a basic precondition of ethical life; they were in effect the school of ethics, if not the textbook; and a society like our own that technologically mediates so many forms of human relations in fulfilment of un-thought-through economic or technological imperatives is one which is in danger of regressing to the pre-school stage of ethical development.)
So there, if you like, are the three bad forms of the faith in science. If you like they’re the ghosts that haunt our societies because those societies are inhabited by people whose belief in science has more than a whiff of superstition to it and necessarily must. The ghosts take the form of subservience to experts and expert bodies in possession of justified true scientific belief which we, as non-experts, can possess in true, but not in justified, form. The second of the ghosts is the belief that science is applicable to all the problems of society. It’s this ghost that’s created new apparently more insoluble problems, often where it turned its most concerted problem-solving attentions. And indeed there’s barely a corner of the social landscape where such problematic problems don’t present themselves to the eye: look hard enough and you’ll find them in pretty much all major social domains, in the domain of agriculture as much as the domain of culture, in medicine and education, in physiology and psychology, in the way science is used for purposes of war to create smarter more effective weapons and in the way it is used for purposes of peace to create the energy and infrastructure, food, bad television and rubbish that are the material givens of our lives.
Thinking back to the lecture on technology before Easter, one of the places where we’re haunted most by the maleficent form of the belief in science is where our society creates for itself that horrible phenomenon of darkness known as technocracy. It would’ve been good to say more about it than I said in the session on the triumph of technics before Easter. Today all we need to note is that technocracy is often generated by the application of scientific methods and scientific technologies to social problems in false expectation of the sorts of exact, replicable solutions that one expects from problem-solving in the natural sciences. Have a read of the paper by Redner that I’ve handed out today if you want some theoretically polished thoughts about the technocratic side of the haunting activities of the ghost. Because social science is too readily identified with natural science, Redner thinks, the practical results of social science, such as decision-making and policy-analysis, are taken to work in the same way as the practical fruits of natural science, which come in the form of technology and give us a degree of mastery over the material world. In short, Redner thinks, the haunting activities of the ghost arise because social science is taken to enable technical control of the social environment in the way that natural science makes possible technical control of the natural environment.
***
So much then for the anxieties and ambiguities which come with faith in science and which might in some sense be at the bottom of the cultural problem of dealing with climate change.
The rest of this lecture and the next two are going to be devoted to the actualities and possibilities of the relationship between politics and science as they apply to global warming, with the emphasis today and next week on the actualities and the week after on the possibilities. Today, as I say, is going to be about the actualities of the climate change problem, which, as you know if you’ve come along to even half of the lectures over the past three months, are frankly pretty grim. Not to beat about the bush, the line this course has run over the past three months is that in actuality, for lots of theoretical, historical, psychological and material reasons operating in the long and short term, there’s a huge disjunction between the domains of politics and science, a yawning chasm between the two worlds, which is painfully perceptible in attempts to deal with climate change, though it is also manifest in other areas of social life too. So before I lead you into this hell-hole for the last time, let me give you some reasons not to be depressed about the situation. I think back to a moment, I’m not sure which lecture it was after, when I opened the floor for questions and nobody said very much and then someone asked, I think as a joke – what do you do to deal with depression? During the week I was thinking how I could answer that question – not as joke, but in seriousness (not total seriousness, maybe actually with an element of black humour). I’m assuming everyone in this room has asked themselves a version of the same question. In fact I’m sure that everyone who has acquainted themselves with what science is telling us about the present state and the future prospects of our climate system has sooner or later come up against the question – what am I going to do with the depression that has now come over my life?
The first reason not to be depressed is that diagnosis is half-way towards cure. That’s profoundly true in many areas of life and I think it’s true for climate change as well. At the end of this course, if you’ve come to the lectures and have done some of the reading, I think you have a half-decent diagnosis of our little quandary. In fact I hope you’ll go away thinking that you have a much better diagnosis than most of the ones generally available. What I hope to have shown is that global warming is not something you can get your head around very well if you limit yourself to looking at imbalances in the climate system or at misconceptions about the physical basis of economic life. Global warming is a social problem as much as anything. The diagnosis I’ve given you is something I hope you might actually consider more than half-way to a cure because it diagnoses the problem fairly fully in its social dimension, not just its biogeophysical dimension.
A second reason not to be depressed – this reason doesn’t belong on a serious list because what it amounts to saying is that even if you’re depressed you don’t have to be depressed about being depressed – the second reason is that some forms of depression are actually pretty damn uplifting. What I’m thinking of is the fact that there’s a certain exhilarating side to despair, especially if that despair derives from knowing how deep a mess you’re in.
Some of you I’m sure have heard of the philosopher Cioran, whose book-titles have an uncanny way of expressing what I’m trying to get at here. There’s one that’s called “On the heights of despair” which sums it up perfectly. Others, his bibliography tells me, are called “A short history of decay” and “The trouble with being born”. Clearly I’m not recommending any of these as bed-time reading for your kids and I can tell you he’s the last writer you’d want go to for ideas about Nature or science or the environment or climate change. But he is someone you could describe as a cheerful pessimist. In short – take this with a grain of salt – if you’re depressed about climate change – don’t leave your depression in the lurch! Don’t forget – to put it in a slightly pretentious way – that there are beauties and truths to be found in those little melancholy corners of the over-hyped world of compulsory happiness we all live in nowadays. Now that I’ve said that I can’t resist giving you a quote in support of pessimistic good humour. It’s from Schopenhauer, the greatest philosophical pessimist of them all, who says that humour is something “to do honour to which in this mercilessly ambiguous existence of ours hardly a single page could be too serious.” Life is so damn difficult to read that humour is something that deserves to be taken very seriously. So much for my second reason.
A more serious – straight – reason not to be depressed is that feeling depressed is part of a false perspective. What does that mean? Roughly this: A lot of people who have started taking the science of climate change seriously find themselves thinking or feeling or, let’s say, half-thinking/half-feeling as if, because of climate change, we’re confronted as a society with the prospect of losing everything, or losing an awful lot, environmentally and therefore socially. Up to a point that’s understandable – this course certainly hasn’t soft-pedalled on the seriousness of the mess we’re in as far as climate change goes. But beyond a certain point it’s worth keeping in mind that the environment is hardly in a happy state as it is, so that, if we were to pass the tipping points we’re told we’re quite near to, we’d go from being in a state of universal environmental bliss to living in a miserable totally uninhabitable world. What this amounts to saying is that climate change has to be placed alongside all the other representative indications of what poor shape the natural environment is in – destruction of habitats, rapid extinction of species, pollution of waterways, depletion of fish-stocks, ground-water reserves and so on. And none of these is separable from forces that have been operating in society and culture at large for hundreds of years – we looked at two of them at the start of the course: the expansion of an industrially driven capitalism across the globe and the use of high technology on a very large scale to create mass societies – both of which, I said, lead to the natural world being treated as a mere input into the production process or an outlet for what results from either the production or the consumption process.
If you like this exercise in context-setting could extend much further back in time. In some ways the processes that have led to the environment being in bad shape have been operating for thousands or tens of thousands of years. To see what I’m talking about here you need only cast an eye across graphs showing the collapse of mammalian diversity in the centuries or millennia following the rise of homo sapiens on each of the world’s six habitable continents. No continent is exempt from the trend – diversity of mammalian life-forms declines by 70 – 90 % in the wake of human habitation. That’s leaving aside completely the effects wrought by man the giant since the industrial revolution fitted him out special powers of destruction.
Alternatively you could extend the context-setting in a different dimension and consider the way the processes that have been operating to degrade the natural environment over the past 200 years have by no means just devastated the natural world. Increasingly, our globalised system of economy, in combination with the industrial application of science to create mass societies, have devastated the cultural world. The unprecedented loss of biodiversity that was consequent upon the rise of industrial society is matched, or, you might say, more than matched, by a monumental loss of cultural diversity: viz. by a parallel disappearance of ethical forms, aesthetic forms, intellectual forms, popular forms and traditional ways of life. The past 200 years, in other words, has seen the radical simplification and attrition of the manifold modes of representation and ethos displayed by very ancient historical cultures but also by quite recent ones. This then is my other deeper reason for saying we don’t stand on the verge of losing everything, as it might sometimes feel – put simply, because we’ve already lost so much. The situation is roughly this. Before anyone knew very much about climate change the great cultural losses I’m talking about had been inflicted or were being inflicted. Maybe it’s an odd reason not to be depressed at the prospect of climate change, because there are other things to be depressed about that have already come to pass and that are part of the same picture, but – there you have it – that’s my third reason.
Lastly, a less ambiguous reason not to be depressed which is related to the first. It is that you’re now in a position to place a radical bet: if you can communicate what you know to enough other people – if you can communicate what you already knew and what you now know – then enough people will come to see the problem for what it is soon enough for something to be done about it. I’ll come back to this again in the last lecture in the course when I get round to talking about possibilities for change. However let me say right away that I don’t think there’s much more individuals can do than put themselves in a position to make the radical bet – at least if you’re not in a privileged position to speak to and sway large masses of people.
The second option, a more complicated option, involves leading a sort of double life – though not the sort of double life implicit in the actions and habits of those millions of Australians who know and simultaneously don’t know – simultaneously know and don’t let themselves know – about climate change. Unlike the first option, this option entails the possibility of radical disappointment. It is the life that conjoins pessimism of the intellect with optimism of the will – the sort of life that involves maintaining a knowing dis-illusioned gaze at the seriousness of the climate change problem, but combines it with unrestrained idealism about the individual and communal potential to address the problem. This might sound like a sort of ethic of heroism, and it does indeed have some resemblance to heroic ethics, except that it also in a sense involves living ironically – irony, I take it, being a prime requisite for anyone who lets the deliverances of their intellect get radically out of kilter with the direction of their will. (Pessimism of the intellect sits comfortably and without irony only with pessimism of the will, just as optimism of the intellect sits comfortably and without irony only with optimistic belief in the unity, continuity and grand calling of individual wilful beings.)
***
Back to the actualities of the relationship between politics and science, set out in the grand chart of the vicious circle of contemporary politics I’ve got up on the board [click above to enlarge. CS]. You’ll remember that I gave you this diagram without details or complications early on in the course. Since then I’ve embellished it in various ways. Now, as a way of summing everything up, my idea is to do a review of all the embellishments I added in the central six or so weeks of the course, bearing in mind that the overall point of the diagram is to show something of the construction of the social mechanism which shuts out serious science-based acknowledgement of the realities of climate change. You might remember that in my initial version of the diagram I had the outer points of the vicious circle spiralling round THE ECONOMY (that savage insatiable beast). Recall the occupants of our viciously circular system – (1) professional politicians with one eye on where they’re up to in the electoral cycle and the other eye on whether they’re projecting the right sort of image of themselves, (2) our spectacle-hungry media, (3) we, the more or less disaffected hard-working members of the polity and (4) the various commercial forces with their vested interests which are more or less keyed into the operations of the political system. The idea of putting the economy at the centre of the picture involving those four groups of social actors was to indicate that the entire social system is driven by a very powerful set of actual and perceived economic necessities.
Instead of having the economy as the centrepoint of the system today, I’ve put the economy and the environment at the centre. But I’ve got the economy over the environment – the economy as it were divided through by the environment. What that’s meant to indicate is that a non-dysfunctional environment is an (often unspoken) pre-condition of having a functional economic system ( – not unlike the way having a functional economic system is the presupposition of the social swirl that makes up the outer ring of the diagram, by the way). To put it in the darkly theoretical language of continental philosophy, the Environment is the Other of the Economy – which is just an idiosyncratic way of saying that the conditions for a functioning economy are provided by a set of necessary and dynamic repressions and exclusions of nature. (Or, to put it in the abstract, functional language of the economics profession – the condition of a functioning economy – up until now and conceivably up until economic life as we know it comes to grief on its own environmental contradictions - is treating environmental goods and natural resources as externalities.)
I start with the domain of politics in the narrow sense of the word – politics as it is practised in the public domain inhabited by politicians and governments. Politics in the broad and interesting sense of course includes everything in the picture. But in the narrow sense we have our elected representatives, forming the executive and legislative branches of government: the prime minister and his cabinet in whom executive power is vested and a larger body of parliamentarians, forming the legislature. Below them I’ve listed the broad features of politics which have made it pretty much useless as an instrument for dealing with climate change:
The first of those broad features – this is a bit of a catch-all – is fixation on election cycles, the notorious short-termism of the sorts of liberal representative democratic governments we entrust with power every three or so years. It’s clear, I hope, why I’ve put short-termism down as the first impediment to serious climate change policy. In simple terms, with an issue as big, radical and potentially divisive as climate change, it’s much easier to defer taking action till after a future election, and it’s all the easier given that the time-frame on which it makes sense to think about the climate change-problem is decadal and thus totally out of alignment both with the electoral cycle and the power-political imperatives of fighting elections. A much more elegant way of saying all that which I quoted a few weeks back came from de Tocqueville – you’ll remember he thought that “persevering in a fixed design or working out the execution of a fixed design in spite of serious obstacles or awaiting the consequences of its measures with patience” were qualities much more native to individuals and aristocracies than to democracies. Why? In part, presumably, because of democratic short-termism – the systemically instantiated imperative to be responsive to the short-term needs, aspirations and fears of voters and the corresponding temptation not to respond to or only symbolically respond to complex long-term problems like climate change that are too amorphous for voters to focus their minds on.
Second on the list – the question of projection of imagery. Earlier in the course I used Redner to give the whole issue a theoretical gloss: the problem contemporary societies face, Redner says, is the decline of the complexly symbolic representative functions of culture, including that of substantial democratic political representation: and what is at the bottom of the phenomenon, according to him, is the substitution of complex modes of representation like democracy with more ephemeral less symbolically rich forms of representation, such as the sort of images that are technically produced, reproduced and disseminated by the media. The spectre I said a highly mediated image-driven form of politics raised was the spectre of a political system in which the democratic consent of the electorate to the political rule of those they elect is merely manufactured. Active consent becomes mere passive assent to a quasi-commercial political product we have been sold.
The results of the shift from relatively rich forms of representation to relatively truncated forms are all around us. My argument however was that in the climate change arena, the typical traits that have marked the loss of democracy's representational function are especially pronounced. The great weakness of our democracy nowadays is that the content of political speech is radically simplified (sound-bites are the verbal equivalent of pure imagery); public events are rendered into photo-opportunities; policy statements (budget papers and the like too) become advertisements for themselves, while their contents become ever obscurer, even to those who write them; and the spruiking of political credentials becomes indistinguishable from communicating political agendas and explaining how they are to be realised. Because climate change is as about as hotly contested a political topic as any, those kind of things tend to make a specially farcical nonsense of so much political speech and action about climate change.
Third on my list of the constitutive features of contemporary politics that make it unequal to climate change – maybe you could say it’s the “political principle” that’s at the root of our political representatives’ short-termism and their obsession with how they’re coming across in the media. You’ll remember, when I set out what I called the dissociated spheres of modern social life right at the start of the course, I put politics in a sphere of its own and said the underlying logic of politics as it’s practised in modern societies is captured by this German word Realpolitik. Recall what Realpolitik involved – politicians operating a sort of calculus of political self-interest that allows them to maintain an advantage over political adversaries, speaking to the self-interest of voters on the domestic political front and robustly defending what is deemed to be in the national interest in foreign policy. It of course goes without saying that few elements of climate change policy in Australia, either under Howard or Rudd, have failed to bear the imprint of Realpolitik – that "naked realism of power in policy- and decision-making". We can see it quite clearly in Howard’s strident insistence on Australian exceptionalism at Kyoto, where it became a point of pride for government to be seen to be repudiating the wider world’s demands on us in defence of our national self-interest. We can see it of course in Howard’s unwillingness to give anything but a bare minimum of acknowledgement to the issue throughout almost ten years of government, until the radical political potency of climate change became palpable in 2006 – 07 and he got very busy on it very quickly (That, it might be said, was a case of Howard failing to competently operate the calculus of political self-interest, and certainly a case where Rudd’s lack of historical commitment to outright denialism allowed him to operate the calculus to open up for himself a decisive political advantage).
However, Rudd as a climate change politician has turned out to be uncannily like his predecessor – while he hasn’t flirted with outright denialism, he has essentially pursued a politics of practical denialism and he’s done so for the sake of maintaining minor or major political advantages over his political adversaries. Broadly speaking, one of the things Rudd’s CPRS is is an attempt to occupy the shaky middle ground between the outright denialism audible in Coalition ranks and the scientifically well-founded but somehow still utopian-sounding position of the Greens. With its proposals to compensate households to the tune of 120% for the extra costs likely to follow from the introduction of its CPRS and to rebate the petrol-price increases that having a carbon price can and must entail, Labor’s climate change policy manifests an extreme willingness to placate what Rudd clearly takes to be the infinitely fragile political sensibilities of voters. Finally, the provisions the CPRS makes for Australia to meet emission reduction targets overseas – thus allowing us to continue to run the most carbon-intensive economy in the world – show us the principle of Realpolitik in international action. All these measures can and should be viewed as a continuation of the Howard government’s robust defence of national self-interest, with the qualification that it’s a rather narrow definition of self-interest that allows us to continue to run the most carbon-intensive economy in the world when the climate change that will likely result from doing so will effect us more than any other developed country in the world.
Then the last political factor I’ve got up on the board – the fact that the ethos of government (“the state”) is determined by bureaucracy – what we a little euphemistically call the public service, or what you could less euphemistically call a managerial mindset or functional administrative division of labour. I’ve also put up on the board two of the main features of bureaucracy that my Weber-inspired lecture on bureaucracy brought out – compartmentalisation and specialisation. The lesson any serious analysis of bureaucracy has to teach about amorphous big-picture issues like climate change is that the standard approach of conventional political systems is to put the issue in a little box where it looks like a technical problem to be solved by quasi-technical means – to compartmentalise it so that it can be treated functionally by specialists. However it’s certainly not government alone that on my political model is subjected to a logic of bureaucratisation. Nor is it just government that succumbs to the dual rationalities and irrationalities of bureaucratic ways of solving problems, planning action and executing it. Bureaucratic forms of organisation and the bureaucratic exercise of power also dominate the internal organisations of our political parties, leading to the creation of party-machines, which have a way of mechanically entrenching the power of social groups with an interest in circumventing the conclusions of the climate science fraternity, as they have in the case of both the Liberal and Labor parties. Bureaucratically-organised parties don’t of course operate just to muster funds for the systematic pursuit of political power, they muster opinions in an equally machine-like spirit. In the climate change arena, party-political machines with their party-political lines have turned out to be the exponents of a type of political thinking that flies in the face of the biggest macroscopic fact that confronts humanity today.
There you have them – the four basic headings under which I say we can understand the imperviousness of the political sphere to the scientifically attested reality and gravity of climate change. That’s a (relatively) matter of fact reading of the political side of the problem. Here though, for the sake of argument, is a less matter-of-fact perspective.
The question we're working our way towards is the question how feasible a politics is which takes climate change unflinchingly on board. And you certainly wouldn’t be mistaken if you took away from these lectures the impression that a politics taking climate change unflinchingly on board is not particularly feasible under the sort of political regime I’ve got sketched on the board. In the final week of the course I’ll present some qualifications to that damning assessment and try to show one or two of the pressure points of this part of the system:
If I’m going to avoid winding the course up with an unqualified counsel of despair, I’m going to have to come up with some possible ways the vicious circle could be broken or at least say how some elements of the circle could be spun off in a different direction so the circle doesn’t operate to the same vicious effect. But for the time being – the harsh realities in simple polemical form: The harsh reality is that climate change is massively difficult to address within the bounds of our current bureaucratically underpinned political system once you accept its full reality. The full reality, which I probably don’t need to repeat, is that climate change is happening now, that it’s happening much faster than we thought, and that we only have a short space of time to deal with it – on our best current scientific assessment we have less than ten years to basically have the problem licked. Why does that make it massively difficult to deal with in conventional political terms? Essentially because, once you accept the reality that climate change is happening much faster than we thought, the policy implications are horrendous. Thinking about this from the point of view of mainstream politics – once you take the climate change problem seriously, you’re faced with a political crisis of the first order – something which calls into question the fundamentals of every element of the wider political system, and which poses the challenge of making fast and radical changes to our entire society.
Now for most of the people in this room, the prospect of facing up to that sort of crisis might seem like a matter of plain pragmatic necessity, or it might seem like something that could actually be damn interesting. For our political classes the situation is very very different for two reasons – because the obvious thing a political crisis of these proportions means for politicians in a (half-way) liberal representative democracy is that lots of them lose their seats – and because dealing with the crisis means upsetting some people, including some very powerful people, as well as running the risk of upsetting lots of people – and let’s face it there are some pretty tetchy people around. Given that situation, the way mainstream politics often deals with crises – the way mainstream politics is certainly dealing with the crisis of climate change – is to simply say – there is no crisis. In a nutshell what you try to do is construct climate change as an absolutely manageable issue like any other, you commission reports and reports into reports, you set the wheels of bureaucracy in motion, you create extra wheels of bureaucracy and you create neat little policy boxes into which you can slough off the issue. The situation could so easily be comic, as John observed when he pointed out to me a little while back that so many of the swifties pulled by Howard and Rudd on climate change might have come straight out of of Yes, Minister. Of course they would be comic if they didn’t have the potential to be tragic on a vast scale. An example you’ve heard before:
“The [UK] government is building the runways to make sure that [two-fold increase in air-traffic between 2005 and 2030] happens; and all this on top of the 500 per cent growth in UK air travel over the last 30 years. The government knows perfectly well that flying is the most potent way of emitting greenhouse gas – it magnifies the effect of those gases 270 per cent. So why isn’t it doing anything to stop the growth in flying? Won’t this frenzied expansion trash any prospects of meeting targets to curb our emissions? Not a bit of it – because airline emissions aren’t counted in the national figures. So from the government’s point of view they don’t matter.
It would be a mistake to see this orgy of runway-building as a contradiction of government policy in respect of global warming. In practical terms, there is no policy. [George] Monbiot makes a horribly strong point in Heat (and graciously attributes it to his researcher Matthew Forrest): ‘government policy is not contained within the reports it commissions; government policy is the reports and reviews. By commissioning endless inquiries into the problem and the means by which it might be tackled, the government creates the impression that something is being done, while simultaneously preventing anything from happening until the next review (required to respond to the findings of the last review) has been published.’ The government is dedicating 3.6 billion pounds to widening the M1, seven times what it is spending ‘on spending policies that tackle climate change’ – and if that last piece of ministerial wording fails to set off your bullshit detector, it’s time to get the battery checked.” Lanchester, “Warmer, Warmer”
That’s John Lanchester wringing a droplet of grim amusement from the situation – something I read out to you in week 1 of this course. Of course with a few names and details swapped round it would work quite well as a description of the climate change policy situation in Australia. It’s more than two years now since Ross Garnaut started his long and detailed review. It’s a year and half since Rudd was elected p.m. – a year and a half since he created a separate department for climate change and set the wheels of policy formation in motion to give us a Green Paper, a White Paper and then a CPRS with almost negligible emission reductions targets which has itself now been the subject of an indeterminate number of reviews and has already had its start-date deferred by 12 months. 15 years into the 25 years we’re going to get to deal with this brewing civilisation-wide disaster, two more years have been spent creating a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme the main effect of which – if it passes the upper house of parliament or not – will be to create an enormous paper trail that will almost certainly fail to reduce Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions at all – not just because it richly compensates polluting industries or because it mixes its price signal by handing straight back to us what it will cost us in increased power bills, but (I emphasise) because it’s combined with a suite of other policies – trade, industry, infrastructure and transport policies – that are designed to operate on as carbon-intensive a basis as ever.
Can you see what I’m driving at? The fatal weakness of the scheme lies quite as much outside it as inside it: to judge by the huge outlays the government is willing to make expanding coal-production, on desalination plants, freeways and so on, the CPRS just hasn’t been integrated into a coherent overall strategy that takes on board the reality of climate change. And the real indictment I’m making of our system of government and its policy-making methods is that the same phenomenon – the same compartmentalisation, the same bureaucratically rational responses that obscure the extent of the problem and generate higher order irrationalities – those same phenomena are reproduced at all levels of government.
To take another example that might be mildly controversial given that there are three DSE staffers in the room. All praise to the (Victorian) Department of Sustainability and Environment in its work, however sustainability is not an issue you can treat anything less than holistically, it’s an issue that takes in energy policy, infrastructure policy, industry policy and so much else. Sustainability in other words – and I think the DSE people in the room would probably agree– is not one policy-area like others, so you can’t do very much about it if you turn it into something manageable and separate, a technically measurable function to be taken care of functionally in one corner of state government.
Now with climate change we see the same situation writ large. Climate change has been constructed by mainstream Australian politics as manageable by the usual quasi-technical procedural mechanisms of policy formation, when it is clearly nothing less than the overarching issue of the times in which we live. It’s an issue that makes a mockery of the word “issue” – an issue which has the capacity to turn the world on its head quite soon and which as a result has the potential to confute the assessments of reality and direction given by all mainstream political compasses. There’s the answer, by the way, if you’re ever confronted with someone who tells you it’s utopian of environmentalists to want to bring about society-wide transformations fast enough to bring emissions down to zero within a decade: By the time everyone who’s about 30 in this room is 50 – life is going to be very different because of climate change. The proposition that the lives of the 30 year-olds in this room are going to be economically or socially the same by the time they’re 50 – is looking more and more like the utopian position. Nor do you have to fix on worst-case scenarios to be able to say that. The rough figures are in: even if the world agrees this year at Copenhagen to limit the build up of CO2 in the atmosphere to 550ppm – and that’s looking unlikely at the moment – there’d still be a 50/50 chance that we’ll push beyond major tipping points in the climate system. And if we do limit the build up to 550ppm, that, on the best of current understandings, would still mean significant and irreparable damage to the environment and in Australia would mean putting a significant dent in our ability to supply ourselves comfortably with the necessities of life.
Enough for today. Like it or not we’re right back in the swamp of climate change politics. And I hate to say it, but next week we’re going to have to wade in further before we try our hand at getting out in a couple of weeks time.
*** Lecture No.12***
“The public, however, is not presented a realistic picture of how science works on such matters […]. Instead public discussion of global warming is befogged by contrarians, whose opinions are given a megaphone by special interests that benefit by keeping the public confused. Some of the contrarians were once scientists, but now they behave, at least on the topic of global warming, as lawyers defending a client. Their aim is to present a case as effectively as possible, citing only evidence that supports their client, and making the story appear as favorable as possible to their client. The best, the most articulate, are sought out by special interests, and even by much of the media, because the media likes to have “balance” in its coverage of most topics – and especially this topic because special interests have influence on the media.
The barrage of e-mails that I have received from the public highlights another aspect of the global warming story: it is now very political. The people sending these messages are not generally scientists, even though in many cases they parrot ‘scientific’ statements of contrarians. In their opinion these matters should be discussed in you-tube ‘debates’ between scientists and contrarians. My guess is that scientists may not fare very well in such a format. It is th is situation that has created what I call a huge gap between what is understood about global warming, by the relevant scientific community, and what is known about global warming, by those who need to know, the public and policy-makers. Nobody ever asks me what I mean by ‘the relevant scientific community’. If they did, I would say: people who know what they are talking about (which may cause a bit of consternation, but this is no time to mince words). Is there any way out of this situation? Continuing real world climate change and the scientific method will eventually make things clear. Unfortunately, because of inertia of the climate system and climate tipping points, it is extremely dangerous to wait for real world events to be so large that they overwhelm special interests and their contrarian lawyers.” J. Hansen, “The Trip Report”
– just something from James Hansen, the NASA climatologist, that it will be useful keep in mind throughout what I’m saying today.
Next we move round to another part of the great vicious circle, the part of it made up by journalism, or by what I called, a touch polemically, our “spectacle-hungry media”:
On the board I’ve put what I said many weeks ago are the four prime characteristics of mainstream media coverage of climate change. To briefly review what each of them mean – we have trivialisation (reducing the climate change debate to dot-point differences between parties, reducing debates about the socio-economic effects of climate change policy to dollars-and-cents costs and benefits to the so-called “average householder”), sensationalism (homing in on worst case scenarios, blithely ignoring the complexities and the nuances of the science, glossing over the distinctions that discussing complexities requires), balance as bias (giving both sides of scientific debates equal weight as if they were contending political points of view, rather than weighting coverage according to how well-supported scientific views are in the relevant scientific community). Lastly, summing them all up, we have controversialism, which I said was a matter not just of playing up differences of opinion, but playing them off against each other. (As you’ve just seen James Hansen pointing out – controversialism often functions so as to serve vested interests. Two types of vested interest might be mentioned: firstly the vested interests of those who seek to maintain the status quo of fossil fuel-based economic production; secondly the vested interests of media proprietors and all those seeking to maximise the diminishing returns to be made from mainstream media products. In the first case creating the appearance of scientific controversy over climate change where there is hardly any is the surest way of maintaining the status quo because it will lead reasonable but inexpert policy-makers to defer making policy until the experts are in agreement. In the second case, creating the appearance of quasi-political scientific controversy even where there is none pretty obviously sells newspapers better than dense scientific description. The other major point to make about controversialism is that, contrary to appearances, the controversialist approach is not one that pits representatives of environmental science against well-informed contrarians, but an approach that pits misrepresentations and simplifications of the green-hued variety against another set of misrepresentations and simplifications of the stridently anti-green variety. As I think I said in Lecture no. 8, it is not as if a sophisticated version of the science is well represented on either side of the mainstream debate.)
There are two other main ways of talking about climate change that I gave a bit of a shilacking earlier on in the course. Here are those two ways of talking again. Actually I’d say these two ways of talking are in general circulation beyond the unholy halls of the media, so associating them exclusively with the top section of my diagram would perhaps be a mistake.
The first climate change language-game I called attention to just after Easter was what I called the just-add-water approach. If I didn’t make it clear at the time, this is a way of talking-and-thinking that is characteristic of people who are favourably inclined towards environmentalist politics and who might well support ambitious CO2-mitigation. The just-add-water approach is the approach which tells us that what prevents mainstream politics coming to grips with climate change is a mysterious quality called “political will”. If Rudd, so the thinking goes, had more willpower, he’d give us a better climate change policy; and if Rudd had more will-power he could infuse his cabinet with it and the government could start behaving as if it had more willpower on this issue. Taken together, these sorts of foggy ideas about the way party policy follows from the emotional dispositions of leaders constitute another of the many sets of half-truths that dog public debate about climate change. And the reason it’s only a half-truth to think that a robust climate change policy awaits the awakening of Kevin Rudd’s willpower is because there’s simply isn't one obvious thing in Rudd called willpower which is lacking, in the same way that there is fairly much one obvious thing lacking in me called willpower if, say, I’m still in bed at 11 o’clock in the morning with a pillow over my head.
The idea that Rudd just needs to evince more willpower is, of course, true in the sense that he could manifest some comprehensive emotional motivation to act as if climate change were a problem of great pith and moment. The idea is false, though, insofar as Rudd is the product of a certain sort of political machine, funded by unions who back the fossil fuel lobby. It’s false insofar as Rudd’s whole thinking about politics was shaped by the economic liberalisation agenda of the 80’s and 90’s, which, we saw, intentionally dovetailed with an emissions-intensive trade and industry policy. And it’s false above all insofar as Rudd is the prime practitioner in this country of image-based politics over genuinely representative politics: when it comes to an issue as tough as climate change, it’s his whole political modus operandi that leads to him just confecting an image of action (staying on message, sternly repeating the words “our CPRS addresses emissions on the home front”) – instead of genuinely representing the overwhelming long-term interests Australians have in seeing climate change addressed properly. Put simply, imagining what our political representatives need to do to address the climate change problem on the model of a change in their personal disposition – imagining that what they need to do is just add water in the form of willpower – misses the point about the system Rudd is caught up in and is, quite deeply, the product of. To the extent that we or media commentators use the analogy of willpower to describe what’s lacking in our politics, our very language remains unequal to the complexity of the situation it’s trying to comment on.
The other way of talking about climate change politics that I took issue with in the first half of the course is much more recognisable in media coverage of the issue. This is the approach which looks at climate change policy as another means of scoring points in a sort of game of political basketball and more or less openly applauds those who score the most three-pointers. It’s deeply related to what in the political sphere is Realpolitik. In fact you might say this sort of commentary holds up a sort of real-political mirror to the Realpolitik of conventional politics.
The basic idea runs as follows – there’s little more to government policy than “manipulating a calculus of political self-interest”; policy formation is little more than extended electioneering; politics has no substance to it – as a form of activity it’s little more than a complicated means to the end of gaining political power or maintaining yourself in political power if you already hold it. The language this sort of semi-analysis speaks is that of deft management of expectations and of pollies sizing up or failing to size up the electorate correctly so they know which of the electorate’s concerns to placate, which of the punters’ buttons to press, how political opponents might be successfully wedged and how their internal divisions might be exploited. Over the long-haul (on this picture), politics comes to be about creating a credible political narrative, while day-to-day and week-to-week it’s about getting your timing right so that you maximise the effectiveness of one type of policy announcement and minimise the exposure of another type of policy announcement, as the present government did when it took the cynical step of unveiling its CPRS a week before Christmas last year.
Two observations. It’s clear that this sort of deranged strategic approach to politics and the version of it that does the rounds as commentary and analysis form a vicious circle of their own: surround enough politicians with enough media packs following the point-scoring approach and the pollie, however he might have started out thinking at the beginning of his or her political career, will start to think in these terms. Surround him or her with media managers and minders who also think in these terms and who edit his speeches, create his talking points and half-digest departmental briefings for him – and you’ve got a robust mechanism – another robust mechanism – for emptying liberal representative democracy of its content and meaning.
Second observation – note that the point-scoring approach to political analysis is underwritten by what you could call two master metaphors. On the one hand, this is politics considered as a matter of creating a convincing quasi-theatrical spectacle – that’s the deeper meaning of the fact that the talk in this language-game is so often about getting your timing right, creating a political narrative etc. On the other hand, this is a politics of quasi-military concentration, politics practised as a sort of military logistics – strategy is everything, your opposition has to be kept in your sights at all times, the effects of everything you do have to be calculated for their effect on your political adversaries.
Putting the two master metaphors together and reducing them to a yet simpler term: this is politics considered purely as means rather than as means to an end or set of ends. In short, the successful use of political means (of good theatrical effects, of cunning successful tactics) is a ne plus ultra; ends don’t come into view or make up the content of political speech. Instead, political activity is assumed to have one unambiguous end that is beyond discussion, viz. the end of maintaining yourself in political power if you already hold it or attaining political power if you don’t.
An example from Australian climate change politics. We have in this country two master-practitioners of this style of political commentary, one of them working for each of the country’s main newspaper stables, Michelle Grattan for Fairfax and Paul Kelly for Murdoch. There’s an article by Kelly in the reader called “The Heat’s off Rudd”. What it contains is Kelly’s reaction to the tabling of the Garnaut Review in October last year and it’s a classic of the point-scoring genre, setting out to show how the modest emission reduction targets recommended by Garnaut are going to play out on the stage of the contemporary Australian political theatre – essentially how Garnaut’s recommendations are going to allow Rudd to steer a politically very astute course between opposition obstructionism and green utopianism. Here however is a shorter though equally choice bit of Kelly, introduced at some length by Guy Pearse, this time a response to the Rudd’s December White Paper on climate change, which Kelly applauds as a masterful exercise in political strategy in a tone of brainless hawkish amoralism:
“Most of the Canberra press gallery, meanwhile, were mesmerised by the political wizardry of the government. The long-term national interest, the economic and environmental implications and the palpable sense of betrayal felt by millions of Australians who expected better from Labour – these things were much less important than Labor’s impressive political acrobatics. . . The whirlwind of cheques leaving everyone feeling no worse off, the deft management of expectations and the strategic positioning of Labor in the sought-after middle ground – these things were paramount. Fiscal churn on this scale was a thing of beauty. With a handful of exceptions (Tim Colebatch, Olga Galacho, Mike Steketee, Bernard Keane and a few others) most of the press gallery wore their election goggles too tightly: how cunningly Labor had fooled green voters with symbolic commitments in the 2007 election to hide the detail of a Howardesque policy; how cleverly Labour was using the issue now to split the Coalition and position itself for the 2010 election. Paul Kelly’s take on Rudd’s policy summed up the dominant attitude: ‘Rudd will define Labour forever as the party that acted on climate change. . . Rudd is a green Howard. He has turned climate change into a magic pudding. It is a work of political genius that would make Howard proud.’” Pearse, Quarterly Essay 33
While we’re on the topic of media coverage of climate change, there’s a third phenomenon the media have, if not generated, then considerably amplified. Let me add it to my summary of journalistic failings – it’s what I’d call following Guy Pearse “greenhouse narcissism”. Greenhouse narcissism is essentially what results when the ethical impulse to act in the world to address climate change turns away from the world and back towards the personal sphere, where it becomes a source of self-love, a fashionable sense of personal distinction, but not – a source of meaningful emissions reductions. It’s a phenomenon the media have to bear a large part of the blame for – often I’d say people’s ethical impulse to act for the environmental good is turned aside, precisely by media coverage of environmental issues, which degenerates with surprising regularity into feel-good stories about the little things people can do individually to address themselves to climate change.
What feel-good coverage of the little things you can do is saying to you is essentially – the individual greenhouse gas emissions that you’re personally responsible for are something you can control – reducing them can give you personal satisfaction. All well and good. Not, I would say, an ignoble impulse, but all the same an impulse which needs to be complemented – and given current media styles of presentation of climate change cannot be complemented – by acknowledgement of the systemic (non-individual) dimensions of the climate change problem. In other words an impulse that means little in environmental terms and remains merely gratifying to the person who has it – unless it’s based on an understanding of how greenhouse gases are emitted and how they contribute to global warming – and unless it’s followed up with some sort of re-conceptualisation of the climate change problem as a deep political problem. The question is where this not-ignoble impulse leads if it isn’t complemented by genuine understanding of the causal complexities involved in climate change as they affect both what individuals are doing and how that relates to how we run (e.g. provide power for) our society. And the answer to that question is that it leads to people satisfying themselves with symbolic gestures which don’t reduce CO2-emissions; it leads to people going on living slightly different carbon-intensive lives having bought off their individual consciences.
The lynchpin here is the lack of context the mainstream media provides when it presents a scatter of ideas for low-emissions living and dresses them up in a life-style format. Greenhouse narcissism becomes egregious when the media omits to tell its audience how carbon-intensive some of what that audience loves to do actually is. I’ve stuck my neck out a long way on the issue of air travel in the past, so I might as well stick it out again. The fact is – I can be a virtuous little mouse all year round, take public transport, cover my roof in solar panels, turn off my kettle at the switch and so on. But if I go overseas for a holiday or a conference or to a friend’s wedding in Perth or London then I might as well have spared myself the trouble – I can make no claim to being a good environmental citizen, I’ve done something small but significant which hastens the collapse of the environmental conditions which support (a degree of) civilised life on the planet. And any media presentation of climate change that systematically avoids confronting me with those sorts of facts is, frankly, flattering my environmental vanity.
This whole problem is tied in with a very difficult set of problems that I talked about in the first course in this global warming series, the course on images of nature in the history of ethics. In that course I tried to handle the topic of greenhouse narcissism under the heading of what I called the “dilemmas of voluntarism” – the main dilemma of voluntarism being the trap of seeing climate change as a problem that is principally for individuals to solve – seeing it as a problem that involves individuals exercising good environmental will or else evincing some sort of spiritual benevolence in the face of the problem – and doing so moreover in a way which obscures the need for sweeping political action and prevents the climate change problem being seen as a scientific and political whole. Individuals can cut back their power-usage as much as they like, but the number of individuals who are likely to do so is not going to make a serious dent in CO2 emissions until governments take steps to phase out coal-fired power generation – as you know I think that’s the very first question of environmental politics at the moment and it’s a question no amount of individual will is going to solve. As I say, the media needs to be taken sorely to task for purveying cosy illusions on these scores. That is essentially what the media’s contribution to “green narcissism” amounts to – purveying cosy illusions about these things.
In Australia in the wake of Rudd’s election greenhouse narcissism became the predominant tone of mainstream media coverage of environmental issues. As Guy Pearse puts it – infotainment about carbon-saving home-improvements became inseparable from the reporting of environmental news, environmental science and environmental politics. What’s more such infotainment became inseparable from serious reportage in precisely those media outlets you’d expect to be capable of communicating in more sophisticated scientific and political terms. The rash of green editions of fashion mags was – up to a point – to be expected. (For anyone who wants to learn more about the funny and cute ways Sophie Lee is doing her bit for the planet, I’ve brought along a copy of a magazine I became grimly fascinated by at my local Chinese takeaway and couldn’t resist knocking off, The Green Issue of Madison. Riveting stuff.) Even more problematically, the ABC gave us the soft and pleasing Carbon Cops. And The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald spent months boosting a venture they were prime sponsors of, Earth Hour – essentially a feel-good campaign presented two years running as if it were a genuine item of environmental news.
Having mentioned the dilemmas of voluntarism I ought to mention that I think there’s an equal and opposite set of dilemmas, which in the “Images of Nature” course last year I called the dilemmas of statism. Very briefly, the dilemmas of statism arise when individual will is cast aside – when the action of the state is seen as the only means to bring about CO2 mitigation. That, I argued last year, is an approach that lets individuals off the hook, or, in more sophisticated terms, it’s an approach which denies and devalues the individual ethical dimension of the problem. The reason there is such an individual ethical dimension of the problem in the first place – apart from the fact that the Personal or Individual is an inalienable moment of ethical life – is that the state and its laws cannot of themselves address ethical issues or raise the ethical standards of a society. This follows from what I said early in this course about de-ethicisation: when centralised political authorities try to address problems on their own, even when they do so with the best intentions, it often brings about paradoxical anti-ethical results. To say how and why would mean going right back into the middle of the circle of thoughts about ethics and de-ethicisation that formed the core of the earlier course. However, I will say a little more about it at the very end of the last session next week, when I come round to the section of the vicious circle that has been given least attention in this course – the “overworked cynical politically disengaged general public” which is the only place individuals qua individuals fit into my picture, as part of the “overworked cynical politically disengaged general public”.
I hope this course hasn’t disappointed too much given that it hasn’t talked about this part of the picture up until now (and still I’m only giving you promises). Because it’s been a course about the place of the institution of science within the political system, it hasn’t had much to say about what anyone individually can or should do to address themselves to climate change. There was much more about this sort of thing in the earlier course. I hope no one feels too diddled.
One last reflection about media coverage of climate change as it is in actuality in all its weakness. Or, before that, let me point out that it’s no accident that the picture this course has painted of the action of the media has been unrelentingly negative. It had to be so because the role of the media in creating a society in which nothing can change (in which climate change can’t be addressed and in a way is something we just don’t have the words for) – the part of the media in creating that situation is, I say, sorely under-rated. In general people are more than willing to slate home the failings of our social system to politicians, partly I think because they think they understand how politics works. (Most people do have a commonsensical grasp on Realpolitik and to that extent they do actually understand politics.) But because people don’t have much of a notion how the media works, they’re much less inclined to see how the failings they slate home to politicians are often a function of the way politicians cannot but present themselves in the media. What’s more, people are much less alive to the fact that the raw material of their disaffection with politics, as well as the very form in which they slate home the failings of society to politicians, is supplied by the media – and supplied moreover for patently self-interested reasons.
One of the abiding conceits of mainstream media presentation of issues is that the political and social phenomena the media commentariat comments on happen entirely independently of them. As against that the first thing everyone needs to understand about the media is that it is primarily engaged in creating many of the phenomena it purports to be observing and commenting on. That holds true for all sorts of issues. Above all I think it holds true when the media go about relentlessly hyping up a crisis. The very style of the coverage creates a diffuse sense of crisis that thenceforward exists as a media-created reality of its own, largely irrespective of whether there was any crisis in the first place. In lecture 8, I observed this sort of thing in action in the climate change arena in the case of commentators like Bolt denouncing in hysterical tones the hysteria surrounding media discussion of climate change. Of course, Bolt is not an isolated case. You see it in the way a variety of contrarian commentators take their own ill-informed huff and puff about climate change as self-validating evidence that a scientific controversy over climate change exists. The logic almost seems to be – because I and my fellow contrarian commentators are full of sceptical afflatus, the consensus we’re all told the scientific community has come to falls to pieces.
You’ll remember that when I talked a couple of weeks ago about climate change in Australian journalism I pointed out how I thought sensationalism perversely re-enforced a sort of trivialisation of the issue and vice versa, to create a minor vicious circle of its own:
The idea – not a difficult one – was that the relentless presentation of crises, wars and emergencies desensitises mainstream media audiences and makes them incapable of responding to social issues with a sense of proportion. By presenting too many things as extraordinary and worrisome and stoking a sense of crisis, the mainstream media makes a hard glaze of ordinariness and indifference set across all public affairs.
Why this rhetorical conjuring of crises is pernicious is clear – not just because it’s socially irresponsible (which it is), but because it’s cynical. Invoking a sense of crisis is what makes for gripping headlines and sells newspapers. And current affairs writers and editors boldly sensationalise in full knowledge of that. We’re talking, I think, about an ethical depredation of the first order, not a problem of tone or a problem of an occasional lapse of judgement (an “ethical depredation wrapped in a problem of tone” maybe?).
Now climate change is an issue that has paradigmatically (I think) fallen victim to the underlying logic of media crisis-mongering (the dual logic of sensationalism and trivialisation). The climate change problem is the crisis/emergency/war we can’t recognise as such because – for eight of the years when we should have been addressing it – for eight of the 25 years we’re going to get to deal with it – we had a war on terror, which, though it seems to have rhetorically let up, has been replaced in Australia by a war on unemployment, which had as a sort of back-up number the never-ending war on drugs, not to mention what the Herald Sun calls the “war on motorists” – which is a sort of biennial affair.
A comment about the use of this sort of language in discussions of climate change. My own opinion is that it’s not inappropriate, though it’s a little risky, for the left-leaning media or for environmentalists to be using the metaphorics of war. You’ll have noticed that many of the more astute climate change commentators use this sort of language. Pearse does, as you’ll see in a minute. Phillip Sutton and David Spratt, who wrote Climate Code Red and were behind the rally some of you went to on Saturday, have in fact made it central to their whole way of interpreting climate change. (As some of you’ll know because you did the second course in the series which was taught by Phillip, Sutton and Spratt’s environmental advocacy aims literally for declaration of a state of climate emergency. But while I admire their political gumption, my feeling is that even Sutton and Spratt are letting the metaphorics of war have a bit of a lend of them. Guy Pearse summed it up perfectly in his Quarterly Essay:
"No matter what happens in 2009, Australians will still be conscripts on the wrong side of a ‘coal war’ with climate change, a costly and disastrous proxy war on behalf of our coal industry. The industry may prevail, but we will lose, as well the planet – it is merely the extent of the loss that is uncertain. Some call for a ‘War Cabinet’ to fight climate change, perhaps not noticing the several we already have. Successive state and federal Cabinets have fought on coal’s behalf in the war on climate change, believing coal burning has a bright future. They dare not consider the possibility that they have backed the wrong side. Rather than glance at that Medusa-like prospect for fear they might turn to political stone, they have turned to anthracite and lignite, oblivious of the consequences. Tim Winton might just as well have been describing the nation’s fight to protect coal when he recently wrote of his home state of WA that the ‘economy and mindset are bound up in an endless war against nature.’ Ultimately, however, the Australian people can only prevail if their country changes sides. The sooner we prepare for that, the better for the global environment, and the better for Australia." Pearse, QE33
What that brings out well – though Pearse doesn’t explicitly say so – is that war metaphorics in the climate change-debate are a double-edged sword. (There you go, I just used a war metaphor and a bit of a tired metaphor at that.) Why are the war-metaphors a double-edged sword, or, let’s say, why are they “rich in ambiguities”? Because in using them too loosely and liberally journalists and environmentalists risk contributing to the diffuse sense of crisis that permeates and perversely trivialises media coverage of all facets of social life. The problem is this: Doesn’t the use of war-metaphorics by environmental advocates follow unnervingly similar lines to George W. Bush’s war on terror or Kevin Rudd’s war on unemployment or Gordon Ramsey’s war on Tracey Grimshaw? In proposing a “war on climate change”, is environmental politics not buying into the same brand of sloppy hysterical thinking that is part of the very circle of causation that continues to drive the social problem of climate change in the first place?
The reason I’ve quoted Guy Pearse is because his use of the metaphorics of war as a rhetorical tool is considerably more self-critical. “If you want to talk about a war in relation to climate change,” Pearse is saying, “then don’t talk about the notional war we ought to have against climate change, talk about the war that we’re already fighting in the name of fossil-fuel against the natural world in such a way as to aggravate climate change.” I especially like that because it turns against itself the standard form of the metaphor of a climate change war inside-out – it infuses the metaphor of a climate change war with a salutary though necessarily disturbing element of political and environmental reality. The country is already fighting a war on climate change, Pearse effectively says, and it’s fighting whole-heartedly on the wrong side.
There are several reasons for thinking this is an exemplary use of language of the kind we need more of from commentators – firstly because on the one hand it has the potential to act as a genuine ethical and political tonic because it’s metaphorically in touch with reality and secondly because it raises as many questions as it solves; it brings out the genuinely problematic nature of Australian climate change politics and thus meets the challenges which so much of the rhetoric of our environmental commentariat fails to meet. No matter how acutely and no matter with what intensity of passion commentators perceive the environmental issues at hand, their very language often leads them to foreclose on the scientific, political and ethical complexity of climate change. When they use the metaphor of a war on climate change or a climate emergency they confect an image of all-out effort that can never be much more than that – an image. Let me explain. Australian national self-esteem demands that we pride ourselves on having fought on the right side in war, for example in WW2. And that’s why Pearse’s use of the metaphor is so outstanding – because effectively he uses it to tell us that in the case of climate change we have a sort of war on our hands that is as serious as WW2 and we’re fighting on the wrong side. That ought to be a matter of profound national soul-searching, and that it’s not is a national disgrace. That’s the first point. Next though note the implication of saying we are conscripts in the war against the climate system that’s already going on. What that means is that we have become the unquestioning instruments of a highly questionable use of political authority being used to support a fossil fuel-driven economic regime and that we remain as such at our peril. How might the situation be different? One time-honoured response of those enlisted against their will to fight in unjust wars is to exercise their political consciences and refuse to bear arms – to take radically dissenting action against the political system that conscripts them to fight. You see what I mean when I say there’s a potent tonic element to the metaphor, at least as Pearse uses it. That, I say, is talking in a way that’s appropriate to the seriousness of climate change and to the ethical gravity of Australia’s current status as a combatant nation in the war against the climate system.
***
My last pass at the topic of actualities – where does science fit into the political map [click to enlarge] as it stands at the end of the course? I’ve put science in square blue boxes on the margins of the vicious circle where I think it belongs.
The idea is that the question marks hanging over the links between science and the players who make up the circumference of the vicious circle indicate that the relationship between the science and mot of the other major social domain is fraught with problems. By way of review, here are some of the points I made throughout the course in support of the argument that the relationship between science and society (science and politics) is highly problematic.
In Lecture 5 we saw that during the Howard years the sort of impartial analysis of climate change being done by government scientific agencies was simply excluded from the policy making process. The science of climate change was literally out of the loop. Down here:
Did the relationship between the domains of science and government change with the rise of Rudd? Pearse makes a strong polemical case for answering that question in the negative. (Not being au fait with the detailed inner workings of government and bureaucracy it’s difficult for me to make a definitive judgement on that one. My non-definitive judgement is that with the transition from the Howard to the Rudd administration, the government’s climate change policy agenda moved from one of semi-systematic denialism to semi-systematic symbolism. Rudd gave a conservative social scientist, a man with a hugely acute mind, Garnaut, a complex brief – to provide an assessment of Australia’s past emissions and future susceptibility to climate change and then to come up with a blueprint for a comprehensive policy. However, as you know from Pearse, the closer Garnaut came to delivering to the government what looked like it could be a comprehensive tough-minded policy, the more Rudd came to distance himself from his prime climate change adviser. The Garnaut Review became one source of policy advice, rather than the policy blueprint it was originally supposed to be. This, I would say, is one of the most decisive failing of Rudd as a Prime Minister and as a climate change politician: the fact that a question-mark went over the relationship between government and its prime source of independent scientific advice which was as large as the question-mark that had always hung over the relationship between government and its scientific agencies in the Howard years.
Up here at the top of the diagram we have the highly questionable relationship between science and journalism that I touched on in lecture 9 – the question-mark raised by the mainstream media’s utter lack of interest in communicating the complexity of climate change as a scientific issue.
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There is, I’ve argued, something quite systematic about the way the complexity of climate change has not been portrayed in the media. In short, it is not just that the scientific issues associated with climate change have been too complex for the media to lay before the public given it’s sensation-hungry basic nature. Lack of interest in communicating or inability to communicate scientific complexity is, if you like, the intellectual side of the malaise of climate change journalism. But there is a thoroughgoing ethical side of the malaise that is directly fed by the intellectual malaise. In very simple terms, journalists can be forgiven for not understanding how science works, or how the non-linear science of the climate works. But they cannot and should not be forgiven for not knowing how little they know – for pronouncing ex cathedra on matters they have no grounds for pronouncing about. In some areas of social life, lack of intellectual scruples takes the form of a lack of ethical scruples – especially where the function of a social actor is enlightening his/her fellow human beings or providing the basis for critical reflection – most notably in journalism, academia and the education system at large. (Part of the malaise of current-day higher education is that the narrowness of economic goals and the techniques of managerial hypercontrol that have been employed in pursuit of narrow goals has meant that the system has effectively ceased to exercise its critical function – another ethical depredation of the first order.) As far as journalism goes, one of the most basic of the media’s ethical responsibilities is to speak truth to power, and it is this function it has largely forfeited in taking on a dual role as producer and reproducer of the spectacle of contemporary politics.
In a way it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the media-sphere and the scientific sphere of social life fail to engage each other, if the social theory put forward by Redner and me in this course is on the mark. The analysis I’ve set out with the help of Redner suggests that the very logic of modernity has made the media into the technical engine-room for the production, reproduction and dissemination of The Image. The media has increasingly become that to and through which the ad that is the contemporary politician’s career plays continuously – as Chomsky says, the media has made itself into the essential means through which democratic consent for politicians is manufactured, or, as we’ve said, the media is the means through which meaningful symbolic representation becomes subordinate to the projection of a certain sort of trite glossy political imagery. Why, given that that’s the case, is it no wonder that science and the mainstream media have spun away from each other so radically in opposite directions? Science, as Redner tells us, is at or close to the centre of modern ways of representating the world. It’s not itself the centre, because the world of modernity on Redner’s picture is de-centred. And yet the idea of objectively representing reality without respect for consequences, the mainstay of science as a social activity, is one of the ideas without which modern culture and society are unthinkable.
However scientific modes of representation, as Redner also tells us, have become ever more complex in the era of World Science. Especially in the course of the past 100 years, our scientific modes of representation have departed further and further from everyday language and everyday thought. So the sciences – and climate science is quite representative here – have increasingly become sciences of complexity, sciences of non-linear phenomena, systems sciences. Moreover they’ve done so at the very same time that mainstream mass culture – of which the media is the principal vehicle – has been moving decisively in the opposite direction – away from complex representation, towards a style of image-making that is truncated in its representational function, even though its technical mode of production is a complex one. The situation, to say it again, is this: at precisely the time the task of objectively representing the world through complex scientific theories has grown more onerous, the media have systematically given up on the ideal of (a) objectively representing the world and (b) communicating a sample of the well-considered representations of the world that are out there. The full gamut of confusions and impostures the media are capable of perpetrating has become clear as the boundary between information and entertainment has become ever more blurred, as advertising has merged with editorial opinion and so on.
That’s a very broad diagnosis of the actual weakness of science in the face of modern mass culture, politics and media. To finish today I want to come down off the pinnacles of generality and say a bit more about three specific (slightly more specific) weaknesses of the modern scientific polity that play themselves out in the climate change arena.
The first questionable phenomenon the modern scientific polity confronts us with is scientists with major ideological investments in science that have made them resistant to what climate science, this newcomer to the scientific polis, has been telling us about the climate system. Maybe it’s problematic to formulate this thought as a thought about “ideology” given what I said earlier in the course about how debates about parties to climate change debates accusing their opponents of refusing to accept basic facts because of unshakable ideological prejudices. Nonetheless here goes. Is there one major set of ideological confusions that gives shape to science as a social endeavour and leaches into the way it’s debated, particularly in the climate change arena? Clive Hamilton thinks he has identified something along these lines and he calls it the ideology of “unlimited human mastery of nature through science”, the uncritical faith in “unlimited progress through technological advance”. In Lecture 9 I pointed out that the scientific spokesmen for this old brand of thinking about science’s social meaning have re-created themselves as the new culture warriors. We’ve met them in the form of Ian Plimer, Robert Carter and William Kinninmonth, the climate warriors for whom environmentalism is politically reactionary and intellectually nefarious in a strong sense. As we saw a couple of weeks ago, both hold (a) that the environmental movement aims to subvert the scientific, technological and economic values that make up the modern Western achievement and (b) that the environmental sciences are not much more than a spurious pseudo-scientific offshoot of environmental politics. Here’s Hamilton’s assessment of the ideological co-ordinates of Plimer and Carter’s colleagues in the U.S.:
“These three scientists who were prominent in the conservative backlash against climate science in the 1990’s rose to positions of privilege and respect in the post-war decades, an era of American supremacy built on [. . .] ‘a pre-reflexive modernist ethos’ in which science and technology were believed to hold the answer to any problem. As the masters of scientific progress humans had the right, even the obligation, to assert control over the natural world through the application of their intelligence to practical problems [. . .] In this world the scientists, and especially the physicists, stood at the centre of the modernist project and their special knowledge gave them a unique entitlement to shape opinion. - Hamilton, “Nature will deal with sceptics”
The three scientists question are the physicists Fredrick Seitz, Robert Jastrow and William Nierenberg. And, as I say, Hamilton’s reason for mentioning them is that he thinks that their motivations and their overall evaluative standpoint are shared by all three of the prominent Australian climate change contrarians with established scientific credentials.
Some reflections. My guess is that for every Frederick Seitz in the US and every Ian Plimer here in Australia, there are a 100 scientists who make the same sorts of intellectual/emotional investments in science – 100’s of scientists who hold similar beliefs about science/technology’s benevolent role in meeting human needs. Just as importantly – and this a completely evidence-free guess I’m making – for every 100 scientists who are working with this rough evaluative standpoint there are just as many policy-makers and a much larger number of members of the general public who are working with it as well. I made a point very like this in last week’s lecture, but I now want to repeat and sharpen the point. In some ways faith in “unlimited progress through technological advance” is actually the fundamental modern faith, or at least one of the fundamental modern faiths (plural). And as I say that doesn’t just inform the scientific self-conception of individual scientists, but is widely diffused throughout society – I argued last week that, even though it has a shadow side, it’s present in tacit form in the very way we accept the products of technological advance, not to mention in the way governments and policy makers see technological innovation as the dynamo of economic growth and an unquestionable good. (Nor, by the way, should we forget that a version of this fundamental faith in progress through technological advance is also there in the whole push to combat climate change by putting to use different more environmentally benign technologies. The greater part of the environmental movement is clearly motivated by a desire to alter the course of technological advance in the interests of a worthier vision of progress, not stop the project of technological civilisation in its tracks.)
The problem as it raises itself within science is that many scientists, not just the contrarian climate warriors, still hold to the most virulent form of faith in unlimited progress and thus find themselves defending what is an historically outmoded conception of science’s relation to society. (In a way that’s understandable – a proper sociologically, historically and culturally informed account of science’s relation to society is something you need sociology and history and culture to put together - - not a topic that the natural sciences are going to be able to correctly pronounce upon in their own natural scientific terms.) What the environmental and social ills of our time make plain is that science can no longer be thought of as securing unlimited progress through technological advance. The ideal image that fixed itself in the minds of most scientists in the era of Classical Science and that maintains itself down into the current era of World Science is clearly in need of a complete overhaul: the attempted application of the rational approach of science to all areas of thought, society and life will not bring about the dawn of a universal rationality, as little as it will bring about the progressive satisfaction of an ever-expanding circle of human needs for a reason we are now becoming painfully aware of - that Nature's capacities are not just finite, but that they are already stretched beyond their limits.
Hamilton, who as some of you know is a declared philosophical pessimist, is actually upbeat in his assessment of the chances that these sorts of ideological investments in science are going to disappear in time for the scientific community to face up to the climate change problem in a fuller sense. Hamilton’s thought is that it’s a generational problem – the older-style physicists who hold to these “culturally and historically charged understandings of scientific and environmental reality” as he calls them, will, he thinks, die off and the sub-scientific controversy over climate change they’ve created will die down. One question you might want to ask though is – will it happen soon enough? Another might be – isn’t it a bit sour and nasty to be looking forward to their deaths so openly? A more serious question might be – is the classical scientific image of science’s role the only obstacle to a reformed scientific polity capable of fully facing the social side of the climate change problem? Hamilton may not actually think it is the only obstacle. However I still have a small criticism of the way he presents the issue in his article (“Nature will deal with the sceptics”). The critical point is this – the obstacle posed by those whose views on climate change are warped by ideological faith in the unlimited human mastery of nature through science isn’t an obstacle posed by a half-dozen superannuated reactionaries. Nor is it simply an obstacle posed by the much younger brigade of conservative boosters who have flocked to the flag of the old ideological faith. Rather it’s an obstacle – a sort of cultural blockage – that occurs much deeper and is much more widespread in the social drainpipes. (And for the time being I don’t know what the sociological Draino is that’s going to unblock the piping.)
A second major point of difficulty for science that’s already been up for discussion. I hope some of you had a look at the essay by Jared Diamond I referred you to a few weeks ago, whimsically entitled “Kinship with the stars”. It’s relevant here because Diamond would say – the fact that journalists don’t have the intellectual sophistication to cover scientific issues like climate change isn’t the only problem with the relationship between the scientific community and the general public or between the scientific community and the media. Communicating well with a wider audience has been and is something most serious scientists frown on according to Diamond. In general, he tells us, scientific populists tend to be looked on with suspicion by the community of scientific experts they work within, the popularisers who have succeeded in popularising while maintaining the high regard of their colleagues have tended to be older figures less actively involved in advanced research. Communicating ideas to the wider public is seen as the very opposite of one’s duty as a scientist, at best as a distraction, at worst as an unworthy sub-scientific form of attention-seeking. (One thing Diamond might’ve mentioned to qualify the negative assessment of his colleagues entailed by that reading of the situation is that some of the anxieties scientists have about popular (populist) science are quite justifiable and that they seem all the more justifiable if you look at what happens all too often when scientists dive into public debate. It’s painfully obvious in the climate change arena that scientific issues themselves should never be settled in the court of public opinion and perhaps part of what makes scientists justifiably apprehensive about popularisation is the worry that popular science could be used to lend strength to this or that scientific hand. Then there’s the unedifying spectacle of scientists using their expert knowledge as a basis for taking public stands on controversial issues involving science and having their personal and intellectual integrity impugned by opinionated media attack-dogs, like Andrew Bolt. (For Robyn Williams' experiences with Bolt click here.)
So there are some possible explanations of the suspicions scientists have about communicating with society at large. The problem as Diamond diagnoses it still stands. And it still stands in part because it’s related to a further problem that he’s also got a good handle on – that scientists on the whole don’t even see it as their duty to communicate well with other scientists working outside their own immediate fields. Here we’re confronted with a great ambiguity of the whole scientific enterprise in the ultra-specialist era of World Science;individual scientific disciplines are often very small and the walls between the small disciplinary enclaves are very high, not because they have to be, but because scientists don’t take the time to communicate well, even with those just on the other side of their own disciplinary back-fences. Scientific communication with the general public is a problem partly because intra-scientific communication is problematic. As a result, says Diamond, the task of explaining science to the public has been left to science journalists, who on any fair-minded assessment of the matter are decreasing in number and talent, and who in any case are rarely practicing scientists themselves.
I’m not so sure that these problems beset climate science to the same degree they clearly beset science in general. There are of course some great climate science populists. Australia’s own Tim Flannery, whatever you think of his political judgments, writes superbly for a general audience about climate science. And James Hansen, I think it's right to say, is one of the truly brilliant most forward-looking of scientists alive today, not just the foremost of climate scientists, but also a forthright, genial individual human being, capable of making sense of climate change as a practical social and psychological problem as much as a climatological problem. Not being privy to the doings and whisperings of climate scientists, I’m not in a position to judge how people like Flannery and Hansen are looked on by their colleagues. They probably aren’t badly regarded and even if they aren't it doesn’t invalidate Diamond’s argument that popularisers are treated with less than full respect within science. (Diamond also points out that there are some scientific fields that regard popularisers with less disdain than others and climate science is possibly one of those fields.) Diamond’s problem remains a problem for the scientific community at large. . . The reason why it’s important for scientists to communicate well with governments, the media and the public ultimately comes back to the whole issue of the changed relationship between science and society in the era of World Science. Good communication is surely of the essence in our scientific era because science depends on government both for funding and for a sense of what problems it could usefully turn its attention to and because the wider world depends vitally on the deliverances of science – nowhere more vitally than in the field of climate science. Yet, to go by the Diamond piece, in spite of the ever closer nexus between science and wider society, the issue of good communication is something many scientists are just waking up to, while a certain amount of deep-seated resistance to the practice of communicating with wider audiences remains.
The third crack, really a series of cracks, in the great mirror that science holds up to Nature, comes in the form of problems of mistaken theories about science and its social role. Some of these problems I’ve dealt with already. Just a minute ago I mentioned the old guard of physicists who want to continue to make science the focal point of utopian modernist aspirations. Not so long ago in lecture 9 I dealt with two misconceptions about the nature of the scientific enterprise and said they were in some way inverse images of each other, a (so-called) post-modernist misconception and a positivist misconception. The post-modernist misconception I’ll take it I’ve said enough about. The positivist misconception, which got less of a billing in lecture 9, is that view of science that suggests that power, politics and authority have and ought to have no part in determining what goes on within science. There wasn’t time to bring this out at length in the earlier lecture, but one thing I wanted to say at the time was that this positivist evaluative standpoint on science provides another of the many false bases of climate change contrarianism. That’s because it leads some contrarians to argue that the normal exercise of scientific authority that has gone with the establishment and maintainance of the climate change consensus is illegitimate and anti-scientific in itself. (Strangely, the post-modern misconception, though it turns the positivist standpoint on its head in some ways, also turned up as a contributor to the whole contrarian roadshow – nowhere more noticeably than in the scatter-gun reductions of climate science to a blind tool of ideological contestation.)
One last foray into positivist territory. You’ll remember back in the lecture about climate change policy under Howard (lecture no. 5) I mentioned the CSIRO’s political controllers and the way they invoked a tendentious distinction between policy-relevant and policy-prescriptive pronouncements. (What they said they wanted from the CSIRO’s Climate Science division was policy-relevant advice, what they said they were against was policy-prescriptive advice. What the toads were trying to put paid to was anything that could be interpreted as criticism of the government's denialist hard-line, including any sort of public comments from the bureau’s climate scientists about specific methods, targets and timetables for emissions reductions.) The point I want to make now is that a version of the distinction between policy-relevant science and policy-prescriptive science is something that is actually embedded in much of modern science’s conception of itself and that that in turn might help to explain the way science and scientists have in general stayed out of the public arena, in spite of the fact that on the climate change front we desperately need them in the public arena. The version of the policy-relevant/policy-prescriptive distinction that is quite deeply embedded in scientists’ ideas/ideals about science is the whole distinction between facts and values – facts being what science purports to establish and explain, values being what science leaves to others to get into undignified spats about.
In one form or another we’ve actually seen this positivist value distinction between facts and values, as well as the positivist insistence that facts and values be kept prophylactically apart, at numerous points in the course; another version of the distinction you’re already familiar with holds that knowledge is what science (purportedly) creates, while authority/power are what are absolutely foreign to the creation of bodies of scientific knowledge. Or again – science is (purportedly) the pursuit of objective truth irrespective of consequences and the vagaries of subjective and intersubjective experience are nothing but a hindrance to the pursuit of objective truth. I hope what I’ve said about knowledge and authority in science over the past four weeks has begun to give you a feel for why – philosophically and sociologically – it’s not quite right to strictly divide facts from values, scientific knowledge from scientific authority, or objective scientific truth from subjective trivia: essentially because knowledge and authority are intertwined (the recognition of facts demands that facts be valued). Before we wind up today I’ll leave you with a thought. I can’t help thinking that the science of the present and the science of the future needs to aspire to a higher more humane and more accurate conception of itself, precisely by breaking down these distinctions between facts and values, for the bar between the opposed terms of the value-distinctions is the very same bar as that between science and society or between science and politics. The fact that science hasn’t had this higher conception of itself as involving values and facts has, in the long run, somewhat limited its ability to deal with climate change as a social issue. In the grand struggles of our culture – which take place over decades and centuries – it is to be hoped that such a higher conception of itself is something that climate change might provoke scientists to develop. In a way that would be fitting given that climate change is both the great issue of the twenty first century and the issue that calls most decisively for the bar between scientific knowledge and social action to be intellectually and practically crossed in both directions.
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