Climate, technology and chaos Blog

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.

Tags: depth psychology, futures, imagination, social category theory

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