Archive for May, 2021

Psychology and Climate Suppression 3

May 20, 2021

Why is this important?

Useful suppression

First let us recognise that sometimes emotional suppression is needed. If you are locking yourself to a gate or facing a heavily armed row of riot police, you may need to suppress some of your fear about what will happen to you. This strategic suppression is different from long term or habitual suppression, as it can recognise (rather than deny) the existence of the fear, but just not act upon it.

The harms of suppression

Emotions are part of you, if you suppress them you are suppressing your full self and its capacities.

Emotions are a great motivator. If you suppress awareness of them, you can lose motivation to act, and you can loose the ability to sublimate them. Love of the earth and distress at the harm it suffers, for example, can motivate a person to attempt to protect the earth, or at least to reduce the harm they do.

Suppressing emotions almost necessarily leads to suppression of parts of your awareness of a situation. It can limit what you know. You may steer away from other people and areas that resonate to produce pain and upset. Lack of awareness creates an unconscious dynamic, that may tend to produce bite-back, and disruption of your daily life. Your emotions may be telling you something useful that should not be ignored.

Suppressing emotions takes time and energy away from action and interaction. You use up energy, focus and time keeping your muscles tight, distracting yourself, condemning others morally, insisting on your righteousness, being manically active and distracted etc…

Suppressing emotions can leave you caught between collapse and rigidity. Again, the attempt to relieve pain by suppression can remove capacity to act fully and responsively.

Suppression looses you an awareness of processes you share with others, and which can be used to build closeness, trust and action. By not facing or discussing emotions you render them individual rather than social. You retreat from others rather than bond together. Your miserable experiences seems to become your individual problem, not a collective problem. Perhaps you even fear upsetting people if you talk about how you feel about climate, and are therefore helping to promote a social repression of awareness, or you just act as if those who talk about climate emotions are somehow inferior, or not really engaging with the reality of the topic, and that helps shut the whole discussion down.

Being aware of modes of suppression, also helps us to realise how anti-climate propaganda media invokes these common modes of suppression around climate for political effect. It mocks those who are concerned, it claims they are impractical idiots, who want to send us back to the caves. This aggression makes it hard for people in both ingroup and outgroup to express their concern or distress as they know what will happen to them. It tries to displace its audiences fears and anger about the disruption of their lives by climate change, onto those who would do something about this disruption. It implies that you would be left alone and untroubled, if you left things to the market, or acted to further suppress awareness of the problems. If you look at popular right wing discussions, they are full of emotion and evocation of emotion (primarily anger and superiority), and they work politically in the short term, although the repression will become more disruptive the longer it is ignored. They encourage people to find the truth that already agrees with their emotions. The audience and ingroup are active and resistant to change. These audience members may fear loss, but the loss is not associated with the changing climate. Suppression of energy seeks an outlet, and proto-fascism, and social myth (massive numbers of Satanic pedophiles in high places), is one such outlet which in the long run will not help those who support it.

Suggestions

Awareness of emotions is a first step. Sharing your distress, confusion, ignorance, or whatever you discover, with those you trust outside your own family. This will be slow and awkward because it is not something most of us are familiar with, especially if you are male, but it probably has to happen. This produces what some people call ‘climate conversations’, in which the focus is shifted, temporarily, away from finding solutions and acting, into something more contemplative, more building of connection. Hopefully it will build awareness of more general connections to the world. We live in interactive networks with the world, perhaps the conversations can extend to attention to the non-human world and how we fit in with that.

Gain more neutral appreciation of the techniques of preventing, or ameliorating, climate change. Perfection is not possible, but that does not mean we should go along with the impossible, highly unlikely or desperate. We don’t have to know everything to act, we learn through doing.

Empathy with the earth. Just allowing yourself to relate to the world. You don’t need much nature, just a bit – a weed bursting through the pavement. What is it you want to save? Probably not modern life as such. Would you rather have lions, elephants, sharks and kangaroos or TV dinners (I’m told that term is now archaic)?

On this blog I’ve repeatedly suggested the importance of quiet listening to other people and to the world, as a way of relating to complex systems and coming to have a feel for them. Active listening involves accepting the other as they are, not trying to change them. This relieves the need to be a performer in possession of the perfect dogma. You don’t have to know what is coming next, or have all the answers, or avoid change, to move forward, or to be at peace in life. To listen to others with care, you may also have to listen yourself with care and attention and recover your repressed; learn to let feelings be.

There is a recurrent insistence in Depth Psychology, that sometimes to often unpleasant symptoms or feelings are trying to get our attention, or distract our attention. In other words, they are pointing at, or away from, something we should take account of. Deep listening may be one way of getting access to this hidden awareness, as may looking at dreams. It may help to tell each other dreams, and see what happens – but please do not interpret someone else’s dreams, your interpretation may well be correct if you had had that dream, but not for them, and premature interpretation can shut down exploration. With enough sharing, personal dreams can become a group dreams.

Compassion for others, even with those you disagree with. They may be wrong, but most of them are not evil, and will be trying to find their way through their own social and reality maze. But if you are angry with them, just accept it, you don’t have to act on it, or display it.

There are two, known and related, processes the ‘Pygmalion effect‘ and the ‘Golem effect‘. Basically if you treat people as if they are intelligent, capable and kind and foster their abilities, most of them will become more intelligent, capable and kind, if you treat them as stupid thugs, that is what many of them will become (at least in relation to you). We become who we are through interaction with others. So treat people well, even in opposition.

Having pleasure in your actions. Your actions have to reinforce your desire to participate, and attract others.

Once you have regained some of your emotional being then you can begin the process of sublimation, of using that energy being aware of what you are doing. There are no instructions…. For Jung, for example, sublimation is not really a matter of will power but a somewhat mysterious and unpredictable result of learning to ‘assimilate’ and work with the creativity of unconscious processes which, in turn, leads to personal transformation. For the purposes of these posts, the term ‘unconscious processes’ can include the workings of the non-human world, which are likewise creative and part of our lives, and which ‘rebel,’ or disrupt us, if we attempt to suppress them or direct them in inappropriate ways.

Remember people will not be helped by an overwhelmingly negative view of the future, yet they don’t need to be deceived. In complex systems even small actions can have large effects, especially if they are taken up. Every action which contributes to reduction of ecological destruction is worth performing. Anyone can pick plastic out of a river, or off the street. Many people can choose to spend money on making a better future, or on products which are ‘greener,’ such as putting solar on their rooves if they can afford it. They can write to people in power, they can vote, or otherwise participate in politics. Alone these actions may not achieve much, but if others start emulating them, then awareness can keep on building up and produce real change – it may also encourage further change in the person doing the action as they gain confidence. Doing something repeatedly without apparent effect may have beneficial long term consequences. Doing something ‘true’ always helps adaptation. The point is that we (plural) become who we are through interaction in a situation, and the situation, or the world, becomes what it is because of those interactions. No action is too small as long as it is repeated, and it has some effect.

Because we live in complex systems, it is normal for actions not to have exactly the result we intend. This is not your fault, not a reason for attacking yourself (although if you do attack yourself, accept it and let it pass rather than keep it up), but it is an opportunity to learn, and to remember all actions and policies are experiments. We learn to do better by doing and modifying as we learn.

Finally, we can embrace Climate Generosity where we don’t wait for people to act, but we team together to give things to others who might want them, to help energy (or other) transitions, such as giving and organising solar panels for community buildings, or helping to organise bulk buys. This helps build action and community, and appears to give people a sense that they are doing something. The chance could be high that others, seeing it happen, will join in. It also makes it clearer where the obstructions are, and what can be done to avoid or change those obstructions. This can be a form of communal learning.

Successful local action may be needed before we can get political parties to really support a movement against climate change, because they know they have a local base and don’t have to be quite so respectful of institutionalised destruction..

Conclusion

Lets be clear here. Being aware of emotions and techniques of suppression, does not mean that we do not need good clear analyses of what is happening. One of the themes of these blogs is that what a person thinks and understands about the situation influences what they feel and how they act; if they are fed lies then they will feel as those lies direct, and face the consequences of that. However, we need to engage with what we feel in order to act, in order to translate our knowledge that something needs to be done urgently, into action, rather than trying to go along with general indifference, or blaming other people.

It also is a call for something I do badly, and that is to write engagingly with full acknowledgement of the range of human experience and psychology, so as to involve people with their whole beings. In academia people tend to write drily, using what they usually call ‘reason’, and criticise and reject those who don’t. Or they may acknowledge subjectivity, but write in such a way that only the already initiated can understand what they are saying. Academic work is useful, but it probably will not save the world, because of the dry and deadening traditions that have grown around it, and because it tends to speak to only a few parts of human social being. In that way what academics do may be complicit with the suppression that leads to lack of action, even though that work is vital.

The point here is not to retreat, but to recognise emotional life, recognise the suppression, analyse the suppression, treat it seriously, work it out in our lives and through our interaction with others, so that people together (and individually) can act effectively with their full natures. If we know we are frightened, then maybe we can not just avoid that fear, but act to reduce that fear, and start acting as full human beings to imagine and make the new society we need.

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Psychology, Climate & Suppression 2

May 19, 2021

After the previous post, we now look, in more detail at how some modes of suppression might work. The point is to become more aware of how we might be suppressing our selves, to keep the destruction going.

Suppression in Action

Denial

Denial is usually part of a social world view, or ‘common sense’: emotions are irrelevant, the world can’t end, there is too little CO2 to have a major effect, CO2 is totally natural, humans can’t destroy the Earth (probably true, but irrelevant), powerful businesses know what they are doing and would not destroy themselves, scientists are deluded or political, renewables will be chosen by the market and stop the problem, and so on.

Contemporary denial is usually based in politics, in which fear or dissatisfaction is projected onto others. It is not my side that is promoting destruction, it is everyone else. People may claim that the Australian Labor Party really has had all its climate policies undermined by (a relatively tiny and powerless number of) irresponsible Greens who would prefer a Coalition government, rather than entertain the idea that the ALP has continually undermined itself, and its own climate action policies, and is largely incoherent, and often unenthusiastic about action when it has had the opportunity. The ALP could be said to be an organisation undergoing post-traumatic stress. It has taken what it thought were rational steps and been stymied at every turn.

Distraction

The most common form of distraction in neoliberal society is work. Work can be endless, work has demands, deadlines, restructures, endless form-filling, crises, new tasks. It can leave people too exhausted to feel worried about climate change, or to do anything about it. Even going part time may well not solve these problems, as work fills in the spaces.

Modes of leisure can also be distractions: sport, shopping, collecting, going out to eat etc. They also demand money which keeps people at work. Children can be a distraction, as you help them with homework, drive them to tutoring or sports groups, or whatever. The point is to leave you with no time for reflection or action. For poorer people getting food on the table, paying the bills, keeping the house, keeping the job, surviving the neighbourhood etc. may also act as distractions from global as opposed to personal problems. Neoliberal society resists providing people with the leisure to feel what they feel and to act as necessary. These distractions tend to keep people away from self-motivated collaborative groups such as political or climate organisations (perhaps sports or gambling clubs are acceptable) or to keep people at the familial or individual level rather than the collective and collaborative.

There are rare exceptions the the loose group around “QAnon” seems to have been composed of Americans who rightly felt something was desperately wrong, and who did lots of work trying to work out the back ground to Q’s enigmatic statements and promises. They did collaborate with each other in these inquiries, but we can suggest that the collaboration was a distraction from the real problems they faced under the neoliberal regime and under Trump. It did not help them solve those problems, but kept them looking in the wrong direction, and the misinformation split out into the worlds of those who were not involved.

It can be a distraction to focus on climate change as if it were the only problem, when we are dealing with massive ecological destruction, pollution and poisoning, of which climate change is only one symptom. Ocean death is going to be far worse for the planet and the food supply, and much harder to come back from. If we focus on climate change, then focus on replacement of fossil fuel generated electricity by renewables can also form a mode of distraction, even if it is essential. The statistics may look reassuring, but in terms of total energy usage they can be very small. And in terms of total greenhouse gas emissions reduction they can be even smaller.

Displacement/Projection

This is when we select a group or people and take them as being the obvious source of our anger or decide they represent our denied vices. Climate displacement is usually political. Our ingroup is good, and we only don’t have good results from our action because of the obstruction of others. News can also leave you permanently depressed, or angry, with an ability to focus your anger on the enemy. Things like the Murdoch Empire, particularly SkyNews in Australia and Fox in the US, spend most of their time raising anger, mockery, hysteria and abuse. There is little attempt at non-personal analysis, it is primarily about projecting rage onto a victim. You might be angry with your economic situation, blame the left, blame university professors or vaguely compassionate movie stars rather than bosses, business and bought politicians (who are also doing what they apparently have to, to survive in the system). With this kind of focus you can be assured that climate change is simply another plot to take more freedom and ability to look after yourself (your abilities already lowered by neoliberal economics) and blame someone who is less of a neoliberal. It can seem that doing something about climate and eco-destruction would make things even worse for you, and this justifies the anger.

Yes sometimes the ‘other side’ can be harmful, and can be blocking constructive change. The question is whether it is more useful to do something to use the anger and prevent their action or lessen its consequences, or to keep on being angry and blaming as distraction.

Moral Certainty

Moral certainty can feed into projection. We just keep condemning the others, secure in our moral superiority, without having to act, or to feel what is disrupting us. If one is morally certain, then one can suppress awareness of harm. If in a complex system you cannot predict the exact results of actions, then moral certainty allows you to discount what is actually happening. People can be easily sacrificed for the greater good, which creates more opposition and more despair and sense of those others being outsiders – they won’t do what is necessary.

It has taken a while, but perhaps people are now starting to realise that opposition to solar and windfarms may not just be reactionary or immoral but might have a basis in people’s experience of development (as well as being manipulated by people hostile to the idea of climate change). Moral certainty that one is on the right side may cause a person to overlook the Coalition’s corruption and tendency to only apply the market when it concerns people they don’t like, while ignoring market forces or discipline and giving massive subsidies and tax breaks to people they do like, or think essential. The best example being the gas lead recovery, and tax payer funding of uneconomic gas pipelines and gas energy stations. Likewise people may ignore the incoherence of the ALP, because they are certain they must deliver eventually, or they are better than nothing.

Fighting and name-calling other people online, can be based in destructive moral certainty, as well manifesting a form of projection, and acting as a distraction from more gentle persuasion, or applied community action. It also helps maintain the barriers between groups, and reduces the danger of mutual collaboration.

Religion (as a subsection of moral certainty)

Lets be up front, religion does not have to be an obstruction to climate action. Many religious groups encourage active compassion and understanding for humans and non-humans; they can hold that God’s creation should be respected and not destroyed, and that the duty of God’s people is to steward the Earth for their descendants and everyone else. They can look at the Earth and see that it is wondrously made, and very good, and desire to show their love and respect to God by protecting it from human attack.

However, there are those who say Earth can only be destroyed by God’s will, so there is no point objecting to destruction, that they being true worshippers will be saved, or that God has promised not to destroy His followers, so climate is of no concern to them, and there are those who go along with the idea that the market and profit are the next goods after God himself. Such people run the risk of dogmatic assertion, allying with crooks who promise them some of their requirements and generally ignoring science as it is not godly.

As I’ve said previously, it also seems likely that if your religion teaches that the body is a prison or encumbrance, and your true home is another perfect world such as heaven, then there is no point of looking after this material world. It will pass away and life goes on elsewhere.

Splitting

This is where we are caught in our split. We want to rest and get away from work, we want to act and we can’t do both. We want a comfortable life, but we cannot not act or that comfort will be destroyed, and if we act we cannot be comfortable and we risk disruption, and perhaps loss of friendships. We want to look after our children, but if we act we can’t spend time with them, and if we don’t act they may not have a future. This perception of split can be paralysing.

Splitting can also function to separate parts of life, so that they never come together and can be completely separated and inconsistent. For example you want your children to have the best in life, but you continue with environmental destruction as part of your business or politics. Splitting in this sense may be known as ‘compartmentalisation’ or ‘isolation’.

Informational focus and the ingroup

Whole media organisations exist to reassure people that their information is correct and that their understanding of a rapidly fluxing world is satisfactory, while trying to intensify those views and loyalty to those views, by screaming at those who disagree. This is one way these media corporations attempt to capture markets and keep markets. It seems more notable on the pro-corporate, neoliberal and angry right, but it likewise can exist on the more liberal side of things – such as with the common denunciation of rednecks or brain-damaged Trump supporters. Some media essentially have become complete propaganda vehicles, and politicians may encourage people to watch them, to keep them onside and confined.

This kind of media builds it’s veracity by insisting it is the same as its ‘noble’ audience, and that different views belong to outgroups who are inimical to the ingroup, completely ignorant of basic facts and hostile to all that group’s values.

Obviously media can also try to keep onside with political movements. Fox’s attempts to be a news station and not support Trump’s claims of election fraud, only lasted a short time as viewers started to move away because it was not telling them what they wanted to hear. Capitalist media exists to capture audiences, exert political power through shaping people’s ‘understandings’ and to sell advertisements, not to spread truth, or stand for principle.

Much media relies on dogma as it simplifies their audience and who might chose to be their audience. As argued many times on this blog, complexity means that we cannot guarantee the results of our actions and our theories. We cannot have ‘dogmatic’ success. However, the normal response in Western society (and increasingly in global society) is that if a dogma has not delivered the results we would like, we hammer it harder, we persist. We build more coal power stations and increase emissions, for example, while arguing that carbon intensity is decreasing, and hence we are doing good. “Free markets” have not produced widespread liberty, and have not solved the problems of politics, economics or ecology. Likewise negotiations through the UN, have not solved the climate problem, although we often think seem to think negotiations are on the edge of a breakthrough.

This persistence is sometimes useful, because it can take a while for actions to have success, but there comes a time when it seems reasonable to admit the dogma has failed – it may, in keeping with slogan number one (modes of ordering produce modes of disorder) have made the situation worse, no matter how nice it sounds. However, persistence with the dogma may give comfort and meaning and if it acted as a form of cutting off from unpleasantness, hardening the reaction can probably help hold down unpleasant awarenesses (of feeling, and failure) for a while longer.

If people continually never receive adequate information about climate change, or are told that it is doubtful, or that it will hurt them, or that it is a plot by people they have the moral certainty are evil or deceptive, then they will likely not be on board with action. Even if they think climate change is a possibility, it will seem to be being exploited by the outgroup ‘others’.

Again there is a problem that, sometimes, people are deceptive for political purposes. It may not be entirely fantasy.

Fantasy

Many climate fantasies centre upon technologies. John Kerry, US climate envoy is supposed to have said:

you don’t have to give up a quality of life to achieve some of the things we know we have to achieve…

I am told by scientists… that 50% of the reductions we have to make to get to net zero…. as soon as we can… are going to come from technologies that we don’t yet have. That’s just a reality.

And people who are realistic about this understand that’s part of the challenge. So we have to get there sooner rather than later….

We know how to invent and innovate….

Harrabin. John Kerry, US climate envoy criticised for optimism on clean tech. BBC News 17? May 2021

These fantasy technologies tend to undeveloped, largely imaginary or prohibitively expensive to maintain. Things like Carbon Capture and Storage, Geoengineering, green hydrogen. These usually serve as an excuse for doing very little to nothing; future technologies will save us. People also fantasise about plausible courses: that renewable electricity is enough, that burning trees for fuel is immediately carbon neutral. But there are also fantasies that climate change will always improve agriculture, and intensify crop growth. It also seems that fantasies of terrible futures may not motivate people to avoid them. However, hope can be a fantasy as well. Hope is necessary to get people to move, but it also can be a defense: we can hope that things are going better than they appear to be by themselves.

All futures, to some extent, are fantasies. We have somehow to imagine the future in a way that motivates people forward, rather than just appears to be avoidance of pain, and this is a problem. Most climate messaging is just, “we can keep on living as we are doing if we work hard” and for many people that is just not that attractive.

Life in this current set of social relationships, for many, seems to be falling apart. They have little apparent chance of social mobility, education is too expensive and they do not trust it, promotion is hard to get, housing is hard to afford, wages have largely frozen, jobs are precarious and have no advancement, their kids don’t seem to have a shining future… Maybe, as many of those who supported Trump appeared to have thought, they imagine the system might be improved by being ripped down, or hurried to its doom.

Finally, people tend to fantasise with the information available to them. And very few visions of a prosperous welcoming climate safe future, based on things people already know, are available. They do exist, but have almost no circulation in the West. The usual dismissal is that people who want climate action want us all to live in caves.

Without good fantasies we shall probably not succeed in motivating people to fight for that future, at best we might get grudging acceptance.

The final part of this piece looks at why considering these factors is important.

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Psychology, Climate and Suppression 01

May 19, 2021

The problem

We have had at least 35 years of public awareness of the need for climate action (since at least Margaret Thatcher in the late 1980s), and yet the situation has got worse rather than better over that time. While some of this can be explained by reactionary politics aiming at maintaining the power of those who financially benefit from the climate change causing system and who own much of the media, we might wonder at their success. How do they appeal to people in the face of destruction?

Anyone who looks at the data will realise that the situation with climate is desperate and possibly irrevocable. The work that we have to do to stop climate change getting getting really destructive is overwhelming. Some people insist that, because of effect lag, we are already going to break 1.5 degrees [1], [2] even if we stopped emissions completely tomorrow, which nobody will do. Glaciers are melting [3], [4], [5] and this will lead to world wide shortages of drinking water. World wide forest-fires [6] release huge amounts of greenhouse gases, and slow down the re-absorption of carbon dioxide, making the situation worse. That these fires can overlap, makes international collaboration to fight them harder to achieve, so they burn for longer – problems can compound. Some of the signs of irreversible tipping point are present, such as methane bubbling from the ocean depths and the tundras [7] releasing their stored methane.

To be clear the main problem is not climate change, the problem is that this climate change is rapid and unstable, rather than slow with time to adjust.

On top of this we seem to have levels of social collapse and desperation. We have uncontained pandemics throughout the world, with death and long term suffering as significant results, and no reason not to think that future pandemics could not be far worse. The US is still reeling from the effects of Trump, and the Republican party seems to be held captive by him. At the moment, there looks to be either war or slaughter arising in the Middle East, which could extend to the world, as these things often do. Everywhere we look we face significant problems.

Even if we are just tackling the total energy system we are faced with the problem that renewables provide only a very small part of total energy usage, and we have to generate the energy to build and transport massive amounts more than we have, while still keeping the system upright. There is also the problem that much of what is counted as renewable energy is biofuel which releases greenhouse gases at a much faster rate, when burnt, than the gases are absorbed back into new growth, leading to a growth in emissions.

Mainstream political parties generally do not seem able to face up to the task. They either deny there is an urgent problem or behave as if there is no urgent problem, or as if the problems can be solved without upset. In all probability these positions are fantasy.

We do face various social problems in tacking climate change so let’s list them to keep them in mind:

  • The sheer magnitude of the task, and the cost and need for global organisation to deal with it. A proper understanding of this can be overwhelming.
  • The difficulty of conceiving the problem. It is so big, so complex and so difficult to predict, and in human terms it happens slowly over decades, until it is too late and change is likely to accelerate unstoppably. In many cases the data, the figures and assumptions are also difficult to understand without a fair amount of effort and education. It is vague, and possibly overwhelming.
  • The pollution and ecological destruction causing climate change is associated with powerful established business interests, and with generally accepted models of development and social improvement.
  • The almost universal philosophy of neoliberalism, in which the interests of established business and wealth come first, and the companies and individuals associated with those businesses have the wealth and networks which allow them to finance sympathetic politicians, political parties and providers of information that denies, or diminishes, the threats of climate change. Established business and profit become God. And I mean this literally, they become the primary source of all meaning, all value, all morality and all action. Nothing should impinge upon them.
  • The neoliberal workplace is precarious, encourages constant self criticism and self evaluation, and keeps increasing work levels as it dismisses staff. This encourages the sense of being overwhelmed and tired, as well as diminishing pleasure and satisfaction.
  • Neoliberalism also encourages competition, rather than the collaboration we need to deal with the magnitude of the task, and the suspicion that altruism is a fraud. So a person might come to prefer overt frauds, rather than apparently hidden ‘cunning frauds’.
  • The politics of markets, in which markets tend to be regulated and subsidised to favour established interests – in this case the apparent interests of the causers of the problem.
  • The apparent need of capitalist economies and businesses to grow. Growth has not yet, and perhaps never can be, separated from growing extraction of raw materials and hence growing ecological destruction. Destruction is much cheaper than repair, so pro-capitalists will always try and make destruction near costless.
  • Political fractures between countries and a sense of unfairness, that leads countries to want to follow after others rather than take a lead, or reject calls for action as unjust.
  • The growing destruction of ecological cycles keeps magnifying the task – for example deforestation removes a major source of CO2 drawdown, and thus makes climate change worse.

This almost universal failure in large scale societies, to me, seems to suggest an answer in what is common to all humans: social-psychology.

Psychology

While this is clearly not an individual problem, or a problem of individuals, the responses of individuals can teach us something. Individual psychology takes place in society, not apart from it. Identity comes from the people one classifies oneself as being like, or belonging with. For example, other people with the same politics, the same religion, the same gender, the same problems, the same ‘class position’.

If a set of problems or threats is general, then they are shared, and the reactions of others to those problems, the culture around those problems, the way groups split around the problems, and the modes of communication and information, will be part of the personal psychology of the problems.

I’m not going to pretend that this argument is more than a hypothesis, and I’ve no idea how to test it, but it seems plausible, and perhaps we cannot get further without confrontation with these problems. The approach taken comes from a minimal application of depth psychology. In this blog I assume that people commonly suppress awareness of threats and misery, and the feelings associated with these threats, especially if they have no idea of how to solve the problems, or if the culture is largely not geared towards the problems, and that this ‘suppression’ (lack of awareness) has consequences.

It is impossible not to be aware of climate change as a threat. Even if you deny it is a threat, you are aware that other people think it is a threat and that they threaten to change your life to solve it. You might even think these people form an all powerful conspiracy, because you keep hearing about it, even if you dismiss it, or people you identify as part of your ingroup dismiss it. You cannot escape.

Normal human reactions to such threats include emotions of fear, despair, depression, desperation, anxiety, anger, overwhelm, loss and so on. These emotions are part of our reality (or of what makes us), but all of which appear unpleasant, particularly in contemporary consumer society. Likewise climate change suggests the death of the familiar ecology, death of society, death of normally satisfactory ways of living, and even personal death or death of loved ones. People who know children may find this potential death particularly difficult not to deny.

Getting rid of the problem

According to depth psychology and its variants, humans have reasonably repetitious ways of getting rid of these problems, through cutting off from reality as a whole. We can call these ways of acting ‘defense mechanisms’ or ‘modes of suppression’ – they are suppressing internal rebels and unpleasantnesses, moving them on as it were. This is an idiosyncratic rather than definitive list, and other cultures may use different methods.

  • Denial/Repression: where we consciously or unconsciously hold our feelings and understandings down. We may think that we don’t need those feelings: they are uncomfortable; we have to get on with life; we cannot wallow in feeling; we have things to do and feelings are a distraction. We might even fear that suicide is the only solution to ending such feelings. With denial a person may repeatedly insist the problem they feel is not real, so everything can go on as normal. We usually seek support in this suppression of feeling and awareness from others, to make it easier and seem more real, as we are all cut off and being cut off is normal. It seems to be the case that this approach uses fixed patterns of muscular tension to hold the feelings down, or to produce painful distractions, so we can forget the emotions. Suppression of feelings leads to suppression of awareness and of the body, and this produces complications in life.
  • Distraction: When a person focuses on some other minor problem or interest instead of the problems or feelings that they are really, and distressingly, facing. It is a mode of avoidance. Manic, if apparently pointless, activity seems common.
  • Displacement and Projection: where we tell ourselves and others that the problem is really something else which is manageable, or it is the fault of others who are inevitably evil and can be denounced. We displace or project our anger or fear on to something else, we can deal with, or that we dislike anyway. Often the projecting is directed upon are those who are culturally and politically legitimated targets of blame, fear or envy, and who are usually fairly harmless or remote, so that it is safe to blame them. The blamed are members of an identifiable out-group. Those people, may be selected (possibly deliberately) as those at fault, by other people we define as being in our identity ingroup, but who may side with the establishment, or their own power. This process is known as ‘scapegoating.’
  • Moral Certainty: usually involves projection and assumes we, and those in our ingroup, know what correct action is. Everyone who disagrees with us is just wrong, and to be blamed, rather than listened to. The scapegoating is morally justified, because the outgroup is morally repugnant, and if they were eliminated life would be better. Uncertainty and compassion are weaknesses if they get in the way of our certainty. We should not feel these feelings. We should suppress what troubles us: that is the way to be fully human. As the pain we feel is the fault of the immoral outgroup, getting rid of that outgroup gets rid of the pain, so we don’t have to feel distressed any more.
  • Informational focus: the information we accept structures what we perceive, and the information we are likely to accept in future. People in contemporary society tend to seek out new information that is likely to match information they have already accepted. Information and understanding can also produce feelings. Dogmatic assertions seem common, as they help bolster the suppression, or the creation of particular feelings.
  • Fantasy: occurs when the posed solutions to problems are completely unrealistic, or depend on the future not being similar to the past in an extremely beneficial manner (unspecified innovation). Again the point is to turn away from confronting the emotional pain.
  • Sublimation: occurs when a person realises the feelings and turns the energy of those feelings into a socially approved or useful action. Of course the action can involve displacement or fantasy, but it is less likely as these people are not necessarily running away from their pain.

Climate as a hyper-process

Before discussing the effects of these modes of suppression I want to briefly digress and discuss climate change in the abstract, which also gives us some idea of why it might easily become a psycho-conceptual problem, even if our responses did not involve unpleasant feelings, which we don’t want to face.

Climate change looks like what Timothy Morton has called a ‘hyper-object’. While using his general argument, I prefer the term ‘hyper-process’, to emphasise that climate change involves process and is precisely not an object.

The term ‘object’ implies the stability which climate change lacks. Climate change is closer to an ongoing, if directional, flux. Emphasising climate change is a process allows also allows easier recognition that humans, as both collectives (with degrees of unity and division), and as individuals, interact with these processes, to produce or inhibit, climate change in largely uncertain and ambiguous ways. Climate reacts to us as collectives. It is not a process disconnected from humans in general, it is Anthropocenic. The fear of climate alteration has the potential to permeate a person, and become part of their supposed inner world, as droughts, storms, flooding, thunder and lightening, ice and sea level rises (to the extent we have either experienced them, or had them presented as part of our story life) are already parts of our conceptual and feeling apparatus.

As a hyper-process, climate change involves a series of interlinked and merging events which are too big for any person, or group of persons, to encounter as a whole. It may be conceivable, but at the same time it escapes complete conception. As many 20th Century thinkers (Jung, Tillich, Voegelin etc) argued, these types of events/perceptions, tend to become ‘symbolic’ and become tied up in existing symbolic systems (which also express the inexpressible). They resist being broken up into discrete parts with discrete labels, in the ways that permanent and manipulable objects do. They overwhelm us – what can we, as an individual, do to alter them? Because of the overwhelm it might also be the case that it makes the shock harder to integrate as the shock has little form or containment.

The magnitude of the threat likewise escapes complete conception, as we have not previously experienced such a threat on a world scale. There are no precedents. As climate change is unprecedented and constantly changing (even if within some boundaries), it is impossible to describe in terms of statistical risk; normal ways of processing and estimating risk, which depend on past experience and statistics, are not remotely adequate for the job. The long fat tails discussed by Taleb and others, come into play all the time.

Likewise, because climate forms a complex system interacting with other complex systems, it is hard (perhaps impossible) to predict with accuracy. We may for example, be able to predict the sea level will rise, but we cannot predict how fast or when it will be noticed in practical terms – even if people living on low lying islands are noticing more problems than previously. Likewise we can predict that strange and destructive weather events will occur in a more exaggerated and frequent fashion, but not when and where they will happen. Likewise it is extremely difficult to tell if a particular wild storm is just a random wild storm or whether it was in anyway conditioned by climate change. This further ‘messes’ with our ability to understand what is happening or deal with it.

Information about hyper-processes not only tends to become symbolic, but tends to be not completely accurate, and is prone to modification as people learn more, and as stated above symbolic forms easily gets caught up in existing symbolic systems or conceptual formats. As a result, of this vagueness and magnitude, the field of information is likely to become political and split by existing political divisions.

When this happens, information functions as strategy – as a persuader and shaper of others’ actions. If there is a cultural ‘complex’ of collective suppression, then the information gets warped by these factors, especially if accurate information is emotionally unpleasant. Humans are likely to try and make the strange and unprecedented conventional and normal, so as to allow conventional politics, power, rebellion and stability to continue. Climate change may even function as a mode of suppression of awareness of general ecological collapse. For example, we may think/hope that generating renewable electricity will be enough.

Resolution of ambiguity, uncertainty and terror, may occur through a guiding faith/principle, identity ingroup loyalties, suppression of ambiguity, suppression of information, suppression of feeling, denunciation of largely irrelevant problems, projection onto outsiders, scapegoating outsiders, moral certainty or fantasy.

Suppression in climate change

Given that climate change is a hyper-process it is also likely that modes of suppression get triggered and become notable. These responses also act as ways of suppressing awareness of complexity or ambiguity – almost by definition because they avoid confronting the terrifying whole.

As societies, ecologies and climate are complex systems, which interact with each other, to make life even more complex. Suppression of awareness of complexity and its problems for human action (just like suppression of other unpleasant realities), will almost certainly have problematic results. Complexity is fundamental, there is no outside to get a clear view from.

So lets look at some of the ways these modes of suppression work in the next post.

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China again: Poetics and practice of nature

May 11, 2021

I just want to quote some of the Remarks by Chinese President Xi Jinping at Leaders Summit on Climate, on the 22nd April 2021, because I doubt many people have seen them.

We must be committed to harmony between man and Nature. “All things that grow live in harmony and benefit from the nourishment of Nature.” Mother Nature is the cradle of all living beings, including humans. It provides everything essential for humanity to survive and thrive. Mother Nature has nourished us, and we must treat Nature as our root, respect it, protect it, and follow its laws. Failure to respect Nature or follow its laws will only invite its revenge. Systemic spoil of Nature will take away the foundation of human survival and development, and will leave us human beings like a river without a source and a tree without its roots. We should protect Nature and preserve the environment like we protect our eyes, and endeavor to foster a new relationship where man and Nature can both prosper and live in harmony.

That seems fairly straightforward and praiseworthy. It is certainly hard to imagine Australia’s Prime Minister saying anything like this…

We must be committed to green development. Green mountains are gold mountains. To protect the environment is to protect productivity, and to improve the environment is to boost productivity — the truth is as simple as that. We must abandon development models that harm or undermine the environment, and must say no to shortsighted approaches of going after near-term development gains at the expense of the environment. Much to the contrary, we need to ride the trend of technological revolution and industrial transformation, seize the enormous opportunity in green transition, and let the power of innovation drive us to upgrade our economic, energy and industrial structures, and make sure that a sound environment is there to buttress sustainable economic and social development worldwide.

Unfortunately this sounds a bit techno-hype, as if with the right tech we can do anything….. and this suggests a technocratic approach rather than a harmony with natural systems approach. But at least the environment continues to feature.

We must be committed to systemic governance. Mountains, rivers, forests as well as farmlands, lakes, grasslands and deserts all make indivisible parts of the ecosystem. Protecting the ecosystem requires more than a simplistic, palliative approach. We need to follow the innate laws of the ecosystem and properly balance all elements and aspects of Nature. This is a way that may take us where we want to be, an ecosystem in sound circulation and overall balance.

Yes! again. Although we need to recognise we don’t know everything about nature, so attempts to ‘rebalance’ will occasionally fail – and we must be ready to change our behaviour when it generates failure.

We must be committed to a people-centered approach. The environment concerns the well-being of people in all countries. We need to take into full account people’s longing for a better life and a good environment as well as our responsibility for future generations. We need to look for ways to protect the environment, grow the economy, create jobs and remove poverty all at the same time, so as to deliver social equity and justice in the course of green transition and increase people’s sense of benefit, happiness and security.

I’m not sure about this. We must help everyone, yes, but the problem is that ecologies are not people centred. They can survive without people, and possibly survive better? People cannot, as yet, survive without the world. Ultimately I think we have to shift to an eco-centred point of view, while retaining reverence and compassion for all people. We probably have to maintain a tolerance of ambiguity.

We must be committed to multilateralism. We need to work on the basis of international law, follow the principle of equity and justice, and focus on effective actions. We need to uphold the UN-centered international system, comply with the objectives and principles laid out in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its Paris Agreement, and strive to deliver the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. We need to each take stronger actions, strengthen partnerships and cooperation, learn from each other and make common progress in the new journey toward global carbon neutrality. In this process, we must join hands, not point fingers at each other; we must maintain continuity, not reverse course easily; and we must honor commitments, not go back on promises.

The problem here is that while this is all accurate, but perhaps what it leads to is not quite so good, as with….

We must be committed to the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities. The principle of common but differentiated responsibilities is the cornerstone of global climate governance. Developing countries now face multiple challenges to combat COVID-19, grow the economy, and address climate change. We need to give full recognition to developing countries’ contribution to climate action and accommodate their particular difficulties and concerns. Developed countries need to increase climate ambition and action. At the same time, they need to make concrete efforts to help developing countries strengthen the capacity and resilience against climate change, support them in financing, technology, and capacity building, and refrain from creating green trade barriers, so as to help developing countries accelerate the transition to green and low-carbon development.

Without care this can lead to a “this is not my responsibility” attitude. Sure developed countries have to take the lead, as they have the most slack, but China is pretty close to being in that category, and certainly wants the respect which goes with that category and which it deserves. This is one of those areas in which Buberian dialogue seems needed. Developed countries also need not to think they know everything, and allow other countries to try experiments…

Last year, I made the official announcement that China will strive to peak carbon dioxide emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060. This major strategic decision is made based on our sense of responsibility to build a community with a shared future for mankind and our own need to secure sustainable development. China has committed to move from carbon peak to carbon neutrality in a much shorter time span than what might take many developed countries, and that requires extraordinarily hard efforts from China. The targets of carbon peak and carbon neutrality have been added to China’s overall plan for ecological conservation. We are now making an action plan and are already taking strong nationwide actions toward carbon peak. Support is being given to peaking pioneers from localities, sectors and companies. China will strictly control coal-fired power generation projects, and strictly limit the increase in coal consumption over the 14th Five-Year Plan period and phase it down in the 15th Five-Year Plan period. Moreover, China has decided to accept the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol and tighten regulations over non-carbon dioxide emissions. China’s national carbon market will also start trading.

The problem is that these and other promises have not been put into law. That is surprising. Given my government, I don’t trust promises which are not legislated – and even then they can be repealed if inconvenient.

As we say in China, “When people pull together, nothing is too heavy to be lifted.” Climate change poses pressing, formidable and long-term challenges to us all. Yet I am confident that as long as we unite in our purposes and efforts and work together with solidarity and mutual assistance, we will rise above the global climate and environment challenges and leave a clean and beautiful world to future generations.

Again we need more talk like this, but we also need the action, and building more coal fired energy is not the way to go, and does not demonstrate that all is on track.

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Buber and Binaries

May 8, 2021

First let me be clear I am no Buber expert, so everything I say may be wrong, but this is really a more general point.

I have in previous blogs said that I find the idea of binaries, over-common, and intellectually dangerous for several reasons.

1) Binaries tend to be conceived as opposites or negations,

However very few processes negate each other. Let us take a common binary: men and women. These categories are often conceived as opposites. Men are rational/women are emotional, men are aggressive/women are passive, men are tall/women are short. Whatever the level of plausibility here, there is lots of overlap, and the binary misses it, or even conceals it. For example while the ‘average man’ is taller than the ‘average woman’, it is not that difficult to find women taller than the average man, and men shorter than the average women. These short men or tall women are not, not-men, or not-women. The variation is not categorical but statistical. The same is almost certainly true of rational and emotive, or aggressive and passive.

Likewise the category of ‘not-woman’ contains a lot more creatures than just men: sharks, elephants, cows, bacteria, gum trees and so on. Men do not exhaust the entire category of not-women. So the category is not even logically sufficient or illuminating. Men are not the negation of women, or the opposite of women, or vice versa. The binary conceals a much more complex and shifting reality.

2) Binaries tend to have one pole made significant or dominant

This point was made by de Beauvoir although many people will attribute it to Derrida.

Using the man/woman binary again as an example, it has been standard practice to take the male as exemplary of the human, saying ‘Man’, ‘Mankind’, using the pronoun ‘he’ to include everyone, or using the term ‘the opposite sex’ to mean ‘female’, because male is supposedly the natural default sex. And of course, the male is supposed to dominate the female naturally. So the binary tends to inculcate, and indicate, dominance and passivity, or significance and lesser-significance. It lessens the chance of a mutual I-thou relationship.

Surprise?

The continual reduction to binaries, might be considered surprising when the dominant religion in the West supposedly believes that God is a trinity, and that its sacred text talks about the human triad of flesh, spirit (pneuma) and soul (psyche). Spirit and soul have been made the same, so we can have the binary of mind and body, spirit and body, mind/matter etc, with the mind/spirit dominant over, and more important than, the body, which can be dismissed and transcended.

This kind of binary might help people think their real life is in the spiritual world or ‘heaven’, and to dismiss the planet that they live on, as being inferior, and of little concern.

The solution?

Look for the third….. This is not the Hegelian or Marxist third which can be reduced to the synthesis of the original two, or a mediation between the two, but another factor altogether which co-exists with the original binary. Let’s be clear we are not limited to three, but the four tends to be reduced to binary oppositions again, so if we recognise a four, let us aim for a five…..

The Buber binary

The Buber binary is the two relations I-thou and I-it, of which the I-thou is primary.

The It-Authority relationship

I would suggest that there is at least one other possible relationship which adds to our understanding of human life. That is the It-Authority relationship. In which the ‘I’ becomes an ‘it’ in the face of authority, and there is no thou.

Before authority we are to quail, obey, stop thinking and side with the authority, or else we are to be crushed without remorse. We become instruments of the authority, without comment, or with only minor comment. The authority is not a subject and neither are we, there is no interaction other than authority’s instruction and our pleading or acquiescence.

Of course we can rebel, but we often rebel within the format of the It, just being resistant, not taking back our, or others’ ‘thouness’.

I would suggest that many people’s relationship to God is of the form It-Authority, were God is the authority, the rules, the punishments and blandishments, applied with no input from the human. This is the God who needs an eternal hell. I suspect that this is not a healthy relationship, or even a relationship at all – even if people pretend it is, so as to placate their God and hope to get on its good side, for fear of the alternative.

The It-Authority relationship seems common in sites of neoliberal employment, in which employees are an inconvenient cost centre, to be controlled, restructured and dismissed as ‘it’s, with little to no real valued input into the process….

I also suggest that the political response to ecological crisis is often conditioned by an It-Authority relationship to ‘the market’. This is the religion of the market, in which the market is neither recognised as being both made by humans, and made politically, but gets taken as a force in itself; an Authority, superior to the ecology in which it is actually immersed. The market is taken as an authority with which there is no appeal, and which will not be placated – unless it is to help out those who are already sanctified by the market, such as fossil fuel companies. This market reduces people and the world to ‘it’s, and treats them accordingly.

It makes the crisis even harder to deal with.

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Martin Buber: Psychoanalysis, Existentialism and ecology

May 7, 2021

Buber, the I, thou and it….

Martin Buber famously suggests that there are two main ways of relating: ‘I-thou’ and ‘I-it’; recognising that the ‘I’ exists within these relationships: “All real living is meeting”.

In the I-thou relationship we treat the other as an opening, a mystery, a being full of potential, full of value, which resists reduction to linguistic labels, which can modify us and be modified by us, which we have responsibility towards, offer respect towards, and so on. As we are open, we are vulnerable, so it involves a risk.

We attempt to encounter the other in their whole being; this may be impossible, but it is the aim. The relationship is mutual, possibly uncertain and ambiguous, because of its unpredictable and transformative possibilities.

In the I-it relationship the other is an object to be manipulated – the it is limited in its response, it rarely if ever opens us up, other than through what we do with it. It is an object, not another rich ‘subject’. We often tend to make our enemies its, then refuse to deal with them, and lock ourselves down. It is possible to suggest that the I becomes something of an impersonal it, when it treats an other as an it. However, much of life is easier if we treat some beings as ‘it’s, as when we build a lego object, change a light bulb, fill the car with petrol, and so on, so there is some ambiguity here – although perhaps all these it creations are forms of modern life.

This distinction seems a very simple point to make, but confusing the two, or extending the I-it relationship to situations in which it is not appropriate seems a major cultural flaw.

Psychoanalysis

You may think psychoanalysis is invalid for any number of reasons, but let us just look at one. Freud called unconscious processes the id, or the ‘it’. This automatically suggests unconscious processes are mechanical rather than subjects. The id is not something to be entered into relationship with, not something which can be plural or creative, but something repetitive to be manipulated, constrained, disciplined and brought under control. The best the ‘it’ can hope for is ‘sublimation’, or being bent to the will of the ego.

Jungians, to the extent they get Jung’s breakthrough, treat unconscious processes as a ‘thou’ another subject, with consciousness, wisdom, creativity. This may well be a difficult set of subjects to relate to, as it is made other by the ego’s suppression or misperception, but they can be respected, successfully dialogued with and lived with. They will never be exhausted, or made entirely clear; in short unconscious processes are thous.

Buber’s distinction helps us understand this difference, and it is irrelevant whether Buber and Jung got on, or understood each other, shadow processes happen to the best of us…

Without having done the research I would hypothesise that many (but not all) therapies treat internal processes as ‘it’s, to be mastered, released or accommodated to…

Existentialism: de Beauvoir

We can see a similar issue arise in de Beauvoirs ethics, and the distinction between the ‘free’ and the ‘determined’, or the ‘for-itself’ and ‘the in-itself’. Recognising oneself and the other as free opens the possibility of an I-thou relationship. To be ethical, one opens consciousness to open the freedom of the other. However, towards the determined, we appear to have no necessary care, no requirement to be open or to open, it is merely an ‘it’, something beyond relationship. It can be subject to instrumentalism, even as it escapes because of its complexity.

Where de Beauvoir adds to Buber is in asserting the ambiguities of response, of relationships, of situations, and the impossibility of always being able to produce the results we might desire, or of even deciding what is ethical in particular situations. But we can still ask, if we can behave ethically to an it? An it is not an equal. Therefore if there are defined its in the world we can attempt, but sometimes fail, to bend them to our wills. We may not have to respect their freedom or unknown way of operating.

An ethics may need to recognise that determining that something is determined it, is ambiguous at best.

Politics of Environmentalism

It seems obvious that, in Australia at least, the problems for the two main parties are that they are not able to conceive of ecology as a thou, which they can have a serious relationship with. For them ecology is an it, to be manipulated, exploited and subject to the will – or rather to the fantasies of will. Thus they fantasise, we can sell coal and gas and cut emissions. They fantasise that the world will not bite back and that they have plenty of time. They fantasise that Carbon Capture and Storage will have to work in time. They don’t really accept that the world could change – they fantasise they world is inert, a dead ‘it’, rather than a complex subject which responds to provocation in ways of which we are uncertain in advance. There is no sense, in our political discourse, that we need to establish a friendly relationship to ecology, an open relationship to ecology, or even a learning relationship with ecology. They act as if we should be the masters of it, and that ecology is an it. There is little recognition of mutuality.

With this view, we will never establish a mutually beneficial relationship. We can only head for disaster….

The tragedy is, that I doubt that any indigenous person, with their roots still in country, would need to be told any of this. They would already know much more, much better than me, and be able to ‘say’ much more if we could listen, or they might ask us to listen to the world as thou, because it seems obvious, it consists of many thous. That way we might come to learn.

****************

There are some subsequent comments in the next post Buber and binaries

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Will Covid-19 end the triumph of Neoliberalism?

May 5, 2021

Short answer: No.

Firstly, neoliberalism, its politics and economics are non-empirical – they are matters of faith and ‘logic’ from faulty premises. Their position seems impossible to falsify under any circumstances, and (in complex systems) what counts as facts can be made a matter of selection and interpretation, so they can always say ‘their facts’ support them.

Secondly, a totally free market society has never existed, and probably cannot exist, therefore neoliberal advocacy for a ‘free market’ cannot be said to have anything to do with Covid, or any other project. The fact that neoliberals only ever engineer corporately controlled markets, as opposed to free markets, makes them theoretically pure.

Thirdly, if anything goes wrong in a capitalist society, Neoliberals hold it is always the fault of government, and never the fault of capitalists, corporations, or wealthy people. If such people overtly do do anything wrong or stupid, then that is because of the government (even if it was they who bought the government’s actions). As capitalism requires regulations to function and protect property distribution, there will always be government involvement of some type in the economy and daily life which can be blamed for failure.

Fourthly, there is no explicit connection between neoliberalism and Covid. Trump, who can be held responsible for denying Covid was a problem and denying help to badly affected states, was not officially a neoliberal (he even restricted trade), other than in being a corporate supremacist who helped transfer massive amounts of taxpayers’ money to the wealthy – but his followers refuse to believe that. Likewise with Boris Johnson, and Narendra Modi. We can say that governments were influenced by neoliberal ideas and thought everyone should get back to work before the problem was solved. But again this was the fault of governments, not apparently of neoliberals.

Fifthly, because of the information confusion and the pro-corporate right’s promulgation of neoliberal propaganda, Neoliberals can if they wish embrace the confusion and say Covid was just a “summer flu” or the “common cold”, and not really that bad. They can also state that any attempt to control people or slow down transmission was faulty, badly designed or an imposition on liberty, which (of course) they officially monopolise. As many people did not die from Covid, and the death figures may confuse people (there are allegations that they are faked, presumably all over the world), then they are likely to succeed – particularly given the supposed ‘common sense’ of the neoliberal backing of the corporate economy above people, and people’s dislike of being told what to do.

Sixthly, If they can convince people that Covid was the fault of governments (which it was to an extent, when governments acted in a confused or negligent manner), that the economy was seriously hurt (because the economy is the only thing that matters), that poor people were freeloading (because poor people are evil or lazy, or poor voluntarily), that private enterprise could have solved the problem quicker (because it was supposedly in their interests to solve it), and that what action was taken was tyrannous and oppressive and so on…. then it is possible we will be even worse in our preparation for the next pandemic, and less able to respond.

And that will not be the fault of neoliberals either, because it never is…….

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De Beauvoir’s ethics??

May 4, 2021

This is a very incomplete account of Ethics of Ambiguity, made because this writing of de Beauvoir’s is one of the few ethical texts that take ambiguity seriously, although perhaps not seriously enough. It may also be one of the most interesting ethical texts of the last century. I’m not going to claim that at this stage I’ve noticed everything and understood everything, so this account is likely to be incomplete or even incorrect.

Making an ambiguous binary: determination vs freedom

The book starts with the distinction between ‘determined’ and ‘free’ which is, for humans, ambiguous (and essential) because:

  • past actions to a large extent determine what we feel, experience and can choose (the affects of the past are largely unchangeable givens – although some psychotherapists insist not completely);
  • we live amidst what appear to be determined processes (or, perhaps more accurately, processes we do not appear to have direct influence upon, which can include world and bodily processes);
  • <I’d add that we also experience the affects of unconscious processes, which may influence our thinking and freedom – but existentialism seems to have a problem with recognising these>
  • while we experience some freedom of choice.

Or as she says, in the language of the translator, “[Man] asserts himself as a pure internality against which no external power can take hold, and he also experiences himself as a thing crushed by the dark weight of other things.” This ambiguity cannot be accurately removed. I would add that culture seems to be another source of ambiguity, it gives tools teaching us what, and how, to think and thus both restricts and enables freedom.

Humans are part of the world of which we are conscious (EA: 7) and so we cannot escape being ‘messed’ by the world. Indeed attempts to escape the world are possibly harmful or limiting to both ourselves and others.

De Beauvoir argues that people (“philosophers”) often try to “mask” this essential ambiguity, by reducing reality to one side of a binary such as ‘determination’ or ‘freedom’; ‘mind’ or ‘matter’ etc, and establish a hierarchy of dominance whereby one side of the binary is, or should be, more significant than the other (and dominant) – mind over matter etc.

Or as de Beauvoir says: “It has been a matter of eliminating the ambiguity by making oneself pure inwardness or pure externality, by escaping from the sensible world or by being engulfed in it, by yielding to eternity or enclosing oneself in the pure moment” (EA:8).

We might wonder if the idea of freedom may be ambiguous itself? I’d suggest that it is a significant reduction when “philosophers” reduce the world to a binary of freedom and determination rather than a possible plurality, or continuum. Seek the third to destabilise the binary – which in this case might be those necessary and responsive natural processes, which we need to take account of to live…

Freedom as source of value

Let us accept, for the moment, the binary, but be aware of its possible reductionism, then de Beauvoir asserts that freedom “is the source from which all significations and all values spring. It is the original condition of all justification of existence” (EA: 24). To “will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision” (EA: 24). There also seems to be an assumption that freedom and openness are morally related “My freedom must not seek to trap being but to disclose it” (EA: 30). I will later suggest that for de Beauvoir ‘disclosure of being’ does not seem to explicitly include the non-human world, and that further complexity and ambiguity would be recognised, if this was the case….

We have the usual problem of why we should select freedom as the basis of ethics, without a previous ethical assumption that freedom is good. We also know from de Beauvoir’s opening, that freedom is never total, we are splitting reality into a opposed binary of free and determined and making freedom the dominant and valued pole. We could imagine someone arguing that enthusiastically embracing our fate is the real basis of virtue, or that only certain people are entitled to be free and that virtue is about accepting, or earning, these limits.

However, it certainly appears that we seem free to make choices, and most people would agree that virtue and ethics have to do with choices, or argument over correct choices in particular situations, so let us assume that this freedom to choose, is one basis for ethics, and see what happens. What is the role of the ambiguity that de Beauvoir points to?

Freedom implies an ability (to some extent) to make ourselves up as we go along, so that we become the path of our choices, and that path is open to change as we are free to choose to go in a different direction at this moment, now. However, we are not free of the consequences of that choice. Or in existentialist lingo: “To will freedom and to will to disclose being are one and the same choice; hence, freedom takes a positive and constructive step which causes being to pass to existence in a movement which is constantly surpassed” (EA: 78-9). We make our being through our choices; perhaps it is better to say ‘in the interplay between choices and the world,’ to make the freedom less absolute, and to emphasise the relationships involved.

Moving into relationship

Given her position, de Beavoir can suggest:

Freedom is the source from which all significance and all values spring. It is the original condition of all justification of existence. The man who seeks to justify his life must want freedom itself absolutely and above everything else. At the same time that it requires the realization of concrete ends, of particular projects, it requires itself universally.

(EA: 24)

Or Freedom requires that others be free. And:

the constructive activities of man take on a valid meaning only when they are assumed as a movement toward freedom; and reciprocally, one sees that such a movement is concrete: discoveries, inventions, industries, culture, paintings, and books people the world concretely and open concrete possibilities to men.

(EA: 80)

So again, we have the moral proposition that freedom should lead to the opening of freedom for others.

There are several problems here. One is whether absolute freedom is required for this ethics, as opposed to a moderate level of freedom. The other problem is what is a “valid meaning”? The construction of forts and killing machines has a meaning, and what makes that meaning invalid? De Beauvoir’s answer might be that they limit freedom by violence, but they might aim to protect freedom as well. Surely they could have both meanings, or both functions simultaneously? The meaning could be ambiguous and difficult to resolve, and indeed this is implied in her accounts of communist revolution…

It seems important to recognise that freedom of choice does not mean we can achieve exactly what we choose to attempt in the world, because of complexity, epistemological insufficiency, and unintended consequences. In other words, perhaps success involves some restraint and ambiguity itself? Freedom may even achieve its undoing, for some people, because of such factors – especially if the supposedly free being operates without paying attention to the world.

Part of the answer to these questions are that, more or less by definition, while individuals’ have ontological freedom (ie some inherent apparent freedom of choice) they do not have moral freedom by themselves alone. While you cannot probably force freedom, ontological freedom leads to the possibility of plural social and moral freedom, and the possibility of working towards it or against it. As is being implied, freedom always occurs in relationship with other people and other beings, and this may attack freedom of oppression. This sets up the “the paradox that no action can be generated for man without its being immediately generated against men.”

Sometimes increase of freedom can result in loss of some levels of freedom for oppressors. “I am oppressed if I am thrown into prison, but not if I am kept from throwing my neighbor into prison.” But oppressors try to give up nothing.

To withdraw from this problem is “a way of fleeing the truth of the present” which is that we, by choice, are opening a future whatever we do. Acting now is not the same as contemplating what has already happened – “With regard to the past, no further action is possible”.

However, this misses the ambiguity of working towards freedom for, or better with, others, while perhaps undermining it, through lack of understanding etc., although she does discuss the ambiguities of Soviet Russia… A problem is that we cannot know the result of our actions until it arrives.

Some people try to will themselves unfree to justify their choices. ‘I could do no other’ and this could be their experience, even if it is ontologically incorrect. Death is always on the horizon. How would I know what they experienced without being in the same position? which is not something that I can do.

So freedom only occurs in relationship to other beings, and this relationship is not always easy.

Relationship occurs everywhere

Every human has to do with other humans. Consciousness itself is always about the act of being in relation to, or interaction with, something else – world, humans, non-humans. There is never a consciousness by itself. So we might again suggest that consciousness is not purely free but conditioned to a degree. Consciousness arises in complexity, and in a world with its own dynamics. Because of its origination in the world, human consciousness is never as we imagine pure consciousness to be, it is permeated by feeling, by understandings, by unrealities and so on.

While De Beauvoir recognises this fundamental existential issue that we are inevitably in relationship to other people and (we add) to the world by whether we help or hinder the freedom of other beings (and hence our selves), it is not clear she recognises the impurity of consciousness.

De Beauvoir argues that our freedom inherently involves an involvement with the freedom of others. Without the freedom of others we are unfree in the moral sense (and I suspect in the ontological sense as well, because we have made our being free in tandem with this lack of freedom in others). Again I suspect people could deny this, but we cannot live without interaction, and this interaction heavily influences our own capacities. Limits we impose on others (intentionally or otherwise) may impose on ourselves.

I concern others and they concern me. There we have an irreducible truth. The me-others relationship is as indissoluble as the subject-object relationship… To will oneself free is also to will others free. This will is not an abstract formula. It points out to each person concrete action to be achieved

(EA 72-3)

One must “act to defend and develop the moral freedom of oneself and others” (EA 98). The attainment of my “moral freedom depends on others being able to attain it.” (Arp: 3) A community of free people can help us be free.

freedom always appears as a movement of liberation. It is only by prolonging itself through the freedom of others that it manages to surpass death itself and to realize itself as an indefinite unity.

“[W]e say that freedom can not will itself without aiming at an open future,” as opposed to a future of constraint. This is a problem if an open future may lead to destruction of others.

This opening may imply some level of equality or sympathy with others, otherwise our freedom may seem to depend on harming the freedom, or existential process, of others.

In which case equality, sympathy or empathy or compassion, or the ability to imagine the sufferings and restrictions of others are also bases of virtue, not just freedom. De Beauvoir has over-simplified in making the original binary of freedom and determination, although she also says ““I concern others and they concern me. There we have an irreducible truth” (EA: 78) – but it is an irreducible truth which suggests that more than freedom could be at stake. Freedom is not the all, and not the only, basis of ethics.

This recognition leads to another problem. While we can extrapolate that humans individuals exist in a network of human consciousness and culture, de Beauvoir does fully open and extended this interrelationship to non-humans and non-human world processes, perhaps because she does not regard non-human beings as free. If so, this could be said to be the use of ‘freedom’ to perpetuate a form of domination and suppression of the non-human. Perhaps this is inherent in the imagined idea of absolute human freedom? She is, perhaps, not open to enough ambiguity as to what consciousness involves?

It seems that if we recognise we live in interaction, then we probably have to recognise that we live in interaction with the sun, the planet, and all beings or processes on the planet. We may have to respect their ‘freedom’ to continue to exist. Forests may have to exist, to not be clear felled, not only to preserve human freedom, but to preserve the world. Water cycles have to exist, and not be dried out by boosting deglaciation or drainage, and so on. This too may be ambiguous, forests may be felled to make space for humans or feed humans, but at the same time we are endangering humans and their freedom. The ambiguity is huge…. and the temptation is to reduce that ambiguity by making humans, or some form of social system, more significant than the ‘other’ of the world, and to imply these humans should dominate, rather than respect the way the world’s ecologies work.

In other words, freedom (if limited to humans), can lead to the destruction of co-existing interactions and lessen the possibilities of human freedom…

I’ve argued elsewhere that ethics is primarily situational. It is a response to events, as well as an attempt to rectify, or improve those events, by some kind of measure. As people may interpret situations differently, then this also leads to ambiguity.

Moral development and conflict

De Beauvoir notes that people are not born with an innate moral sense which will lead them to agreement. This seems obvious. De Beauvoir tries to specify some kind of moral ‘styles’ and to show their inadequacies.

Children tend to take the world as they find it. Adults tell them what is moral and punish or reward is taken as being the nature of the world. “This means that the world in which [the child] lives is a serious world, since the characteristic of the spirit of seriousness is to consider values as ready-made things.”

Through social oppression some adults are forced into remaining children. “This is also the situation of women in many civilizations; they can only submit to the laws, the gods, the customs, and the truths created by the males.” This is ambiguous, as we can be complicit in our own oppression. We can try to make the oppression comfortable for ourselves, or even call it freedom. Similarly, as ‘freedom’ can be culturally defined then our views may be incompatible to begin with and without working together remain so. For example is it freedom to have to choose between working for a boss or starving, dying of easily preventable or treatable diseases, being shot or beaten by police for protesting against police violence, have homelessness thrust upon you, have the dominant classes be free to ruin your ecology and poison your air? It looks as if for many people in the US, this is the case.

Therefore it could be that working for others’ freedom might seem to be an imposition in a way that working with others for their own version of freedom might avoid. The difficulty of defining a common version of freedom, and the difficulties of arbitrating between different freedoms, adds to the ambiguities, uncertainties and negotiations we face in creating an open future.

If there is little oppression then: “With astonishment, revolt and disrespect the child little by little asks…, “Why must I act that way? What good is it? And what will happen if I act in another way?” Although there are people who are filled with such horror at the idea of a defeat that they keep themselves from ever doing anything.

Moral growth involves becoming aware that acts have consequences for others, as well as ourselves – and the skills to relate to those other beings and processes, which is why (for me) empathy, compassion, imagination etc seem as important for ethics as freedom.

Yet accepting that we bear the responsibility for exerting our freedom can be frightening, anxiety producing etc. and this can lead us away. Some people “have eyes and ears, but from their childhood on they make themselves blind and deaf, without love and without desire. This apathy manifests a fundamental fear in the face of existence, in the face of the risks and tensions which it implies.”

People can attempt to remove this fear by arguing that they are compelled, or should be compelled to behave in a certain way to be moral. In this way the freedom of others is a threat. Their acts “are never positive choices, only flights.” This reduces ambiguity, but crushes morality, empathy, imagination and freedom.

The ‘sub-man’ (and the ‘serious person’) want to reduce ethics, and the world, to the static or ‘unconditioned’. They want a guarantee. They refuse to engage with ambiguity, flux and uncertainty, and suffer a “fundamental fear in the face of existence” (EA: 42). They do not want choice, but instructions/programs, and take orders and values from authority. As such people don’t have to think, or relate carefully, they can be dangerous.

In lynchings, in pogroms, in all the great bloody movements organized by the fanaticism of seriousness and passion, movements where there is no risk, those who do the actual dirty work are recruited from the sub-men. (EA 44)

(EA: 44)

The sub-man is not very clear about what he has to lose, since he has nothing, but this very uncertainty re-enforces his terror. Indeed, what he fears is that the shock of the unforeseen may remind him of the agonizing consciousness of himself.

The serious person “gets rid of his freedom by claiming to subordinate it to values which would be unconditioned. He imagines that the accession to [agreement with] these values likewise permanently confers value upon himself.” Such a person fulfils a social role or persona: “no longer a man, but a father, a boss, a member of the Christian Church or the Communist Party.” The serious person loses all meaning if cut off from these enforced social placements, they fail to recognise their freedom, or the responsibility of that freedom; they follow the rules.

Other more ‘advanced’ types include the nihilist, the adventurer, the passionate man and so on.

“The nihilist is right in thinking that the world possesses no justification and that he himself is nothing. But he forgets that it is up to him to justify the world and make himself exist validly” (EA: 57). The nihilist flies from life into nothingness, perhaps longing for something new to fill themselves with, and become serious.

The adventurer takes “delight in living” (EA: 58) but is insensitive to needs of others, or the freedom of others. They remain “indifferent to the content, that is, to the human meaning of his action, [and] thinks he can assert his own existence without taking into account that of others.” Even ‘worse:’ “He carries the seed of [a tyrant] within him, since he regards mankind as indifferent matter destined to support the game of his existence.” He “will enclose himself in a false independence which will indeed be servitude.”

The adventurer is like the passionate man, but de Beauvoir asks, in regard to the disposition of the passionate man, “why not betray, kill, grow violent?” (EA 66).

It seems to me, that all of these deficient types are deficient primarily in their ability to empathise with others, have compassion for others, or ability to imagine what it is to be another. They also do not move beyond themselves, into their mutuality with the world. They interact with others, but these others are source of authority, or objects for their own actions. If these ways are freely chosen then it takes other processes than freedom to lift the person into another choice. And it seems that an ethics should recognise it cannot be completely driven by one ultimate alone…

Precarity of morals

As implied morality is both ambiguous and precarious. It requires work, and attention to what is happening and likely to happen. “[C]oming to recognise and accept oneself in one’s ambiguity is the necessary pre-condition of the moral life” (EA: 81).

The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won.

Why can’t ambiguity remain without being fixed or won?

Partly this had to do with inevitable insufficiencies: “man does not create the world. He succeeds in disclosing it only through the resistance which the world opposes to him”

“There is an ethics only if there is a problem to solve” and we might add, disagreement on solving the problem – ethics is also political – ‘what should we do, in this situation?’. Given different views and complexity, there is likely to be failure: “the freedom of man is infinite, but his power is limited” (EA 28), “ “without failure, no ethics.”

“moral consciousness can exist only to the extent that there is a disagreement between nature and morality” (EA 10)

From my point of view, ethics tends to be revealed in these conflicts and problems. Conflicts produces the ethical justifications, and the attempts at persuasion. Ethics is social, and ethical ambiguity and uncertainty cannot be escaped, as every situation and every problem is slightly different.

Because of complexity moral actions are always ambiguous and uncertain, we can never know whether our choice and actions are the best ones possible. There is no unambiguous guide to correct choice. every attempt in some way is a failure “Art and science do not establish themselves despite failure but through it”, the same is true of ethics.

Ethics is open to the constant tension inherent in the “perpetual contestation of means by the end and the end by the means” (EA 155).

People have to confront the contradictions: “what distinguishes the tyrant from the man of good will is that the first rests in the certainty of his aims, whereas the second keeps asking himself, “Am I really working for the liberation of men? Isn’t this end contested by the sacrifices through which I aim at it?” In other words it is the ambiguity, uncertainty, struggle and unfinished nature that makes ethical thought ethical. Because situations are ambiguous, and non-repeated, and escape understanding there are not guaranteed ethical formulas. “The movement of the mind, whether it be called thought or will, always starts up in the darkness… at each particular moment we must… maneuver in a state of doubt” or recognised uncertainty, and we cannot see what results, whether we did the right things, until afterwards.

“Ethics does not furnish recipes any more than do science and art.’ It is the failure of this realisation that ethics is never complete, never avoids risks or failures, that is one cause leading to tyranny over others (human and non human) and harm.

Conclusion

Main points of contention are:

  • The freedom/determination distinction sets up a false binary, and leads to the imposition of human freedom as the valued part. This leads to the implied value that human freedom involves domination over the world.
  • The reduction of the non-human to an inherent, pre-determined essence, rather than to independent processes, or apparent passivity before humans, essentially puts the world into the devalued pole.
  • For freedom to be any basic part of ethics, we may need to encourage the cultivation of empathy, compassion, sympathy and imagination. By itself freedom leads to a temptation to dominance, even when people recognise that the freedom of others is valuable for their own freedom.
  • Freedom is ambiguous. What is it? Does it have limits? What influences our conceptions of freedom?
  • Freedom needs to be able to enter into dialogue, and is thus not the entire basis of ethics.
  • We need to recognise the consciousness and freedom are not transcendent, they emerge out of interaction in the world. Hence we may need to recognise the nature of that world and its importance, and the importance of ethically oriented relationships with it.
  • We still do not have a basis for ethics, even though it is a useful position.
  • Ethics is difficult, and political.
  • Ethics occurs within dispute, uncertain and ambiguous situations and with uncertain and ambiguous outcomes.
  • It appears that we cannot escape these realisations without losing ethical awareness.

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