Posts Tagged ‘imagination’

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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Earth Climate Dreams Book Launch

January 26, 2020

Bonnie Bright and Jonathan Paul Marshall (eds) Earth, Climate, Dreams: Dialogues with Depth Psychologists in the Age of the Anthropocene. Depth Insights Press.

0997955023 and 9780997955026

From: Amazon.au ; Amazon.com ; Amazon.co.uk

Bookdepository ; Wordery ; Barnes and Noble

The book, as should be obvious, reports on what 13 Depth Psychologists have to say in response to the Anthropocene. It is a collection of interviews with people like Stephen Aizenstat, Jerome Bernstein, Veronica Goodchild, Jeff Kiehl, Susan Rowland, Robert Romanyshyn, Erel Shalit, and other important people, and finishes with a multi-logue between seven of the participants.

[For descriptions of the interviews, and some critical responses, see an earlier blog post]

These people are all major contemporary figures in Depth Psychology, as some of you will know.

I’m going approach this launch in three ways. Firstly I will talk about the background question of the book, then one of my problems with the book and, thirdly, what is great about the book, and why you should buy it.

The fundamental issue

The background issue is that in the West, and most likely elsewhere, we are facing what can be called an existential crisis. That is, we are coming to recognise that our whole modes of being, living in the world and preparing for our future, is undermining our capacity to exist in the world. If we keep on living, acting and thinking as we do, we face destruction generated by those ways of living and thinking. The Anthropocene (the world-systems changing effect of humanity) marks a problem for our whole existence, and undermines our future.

The existential crisis presents a problem at all levels of our being: it is a psychological problem, it is a sociological problem, it is an economic problem, it is a technological problem, it is a cultural problem, a problem for all our relationships to everything. Once recognised, it is both hard to ignore and disorienting, to put it mildly – approaching trauma might be more accurate.

This crisis is the starting point for the book, and the necessary starting point for almost any relevant discussion about the future. The conversations are conducted with Depth Psychologists, because Depth Psychology attempts to deal with the total span of human existence, which includes all that I have just mentioned, from psychology to the world. Depth psychologists are uniquely in a position to approach these issues from a non-specialist position, and to offer tools to help people work with the problems, from their experience of group and individual therapy, from symbolic work with art, literature, and dreams, and from their sense of the intertwining of individual and collective.

My issue

Let me begin discussion of this book by talking about one of the things I find slightly problematic about it, and show why it turns out not to be that problematic, and how it generates insight, when approached with fewer assumptions.

My problem in reading this book was that, sometimes, I thought people found it much too easy to talk as if ‘spirituality’ (whatever that is) was a solution to our problems.

As I argue in the introduction, some types of spirituality might help constitute our problem, and this has to be faced. It cannot be suppressed, and I don’t think anyone in the book would want to suppress this issue.

As a culture, we in this room, have a religious or spiritual history, and in that history people have primarily been taught to see the world as a prison, a testing ground, a den of sin and iniquity. We have been taught to see our human destiny as leading us somewhere else, not this Earth. We are heading for heaven or hell or, at best, the new World after the Day of Judgement. We are not fundamentally creatures of Earth, born with the earth and tied to the Earth. In that sense, the Earth has to be fought against and dismissed for our salvation. If you actually love the world, you are being distracted from your love of God who is not ‘material’; you are loving something inferior and fallen.

This form of spirituality constitutes a problem, it could well be part of the reason it is Christendom that has led the charge into ecological destruction as an unintended consequence of its otherworldly spirituality. If so, then implying that a move from ‘materiality’ to ‘spirituality’ is a solution to the problems of the Anthropocene, is not a solution. Spirituality is part of the problem. Rather than just ‘spirituality’ itself, we need a new psychological and spiritual orientation to the world and to our actions within it.

However, if you actually listen to what people in the book are talking about, and remove the assumption that you know what they talking about, then you can begin to see what they actually mean, and the kind of psychological orientation they are pointing towards, and how this is not just a matter for our consciousness, will power, or decision.

In our society, because of our (spiritual and other) heritage, ‘natural processes’ are largely seen as disposable or replaceable or, to use Heidegger’s term ‘to hand,’ as resources for our own use and mastery of. In our dominant ideology, natural processes only exist for us to exploit. If they cannot be exploited and turned into profit, then they have no value. Natural processes are not something we should have a relationship with. You can see this attitude everywhere, with things like the Westconnex tollway, where we chop down every tree, undermine housing foundations, dispossess people, and fill the air with smog and noise, while providing a tax on travel in Sydney. Or with mining under water tables, rampant landclearing, mining in agricultural regions and so on. Natural processes are, officially, a lifeless backdrop to be pillaged for profit. They have no other value. The world is to be subdued to consciousness and will. The world is secondary to what we can make of it.

Yet this is not humanly true at any deep level. It does not resonate with real human being. Almost every human I have ever met has some kind of relationship to other natural processes, whether living forms, place, or to their own part in the system. They might only notice the connection when the creature or plant or animal has gone, but that is part of our disconnection from reality. This relationship may be to individual animals (their pets, or the dog down the street), to specific trees they feel connected to, to landscape that may seem to be part of us, and so on. Even those people busy despoiling other people’s environments and landscape, can have deep feelings for their own.

This is not really strange, because we think with, and in, this world. We use objects in the world to think with, to feel with, to learn with. We cannot live outside the world. It shapes us. We cannot escape from it. Nature and ecology is part of us, we are part of it; we are plural and connected by our existence, in a living network beyond our understanding.

When we realise this, then instead of treating nature, or other people, as resource objects, we can approach this world with reverence and awe; with a sense of mystery, recognising that we do not fully comprehend it, that it is a being that is both independent of us and impinging upon us. It is us and not us.

We can approach the world with our full ‘psyches’ and, in this, recognition of ‘complexity’ and interconnectedness, are themes which keep recurring in the interviews.

Why use the term ‘psyche?’ Because when we use other terms like ‘psychology’, ‘mind’, or ‘soul’, we already think we know what we are talking about. But we don’t. We don’t consciously know how our minds function, as they function. At least I don’t. I don’t know how my mindbody functions, how one thought gets linked to, or progresses into, another, how language works, how brain action generates mouth and arm action, how my skin heals, my stomach digests, my lungs process air, and so on. Much, probably most of the important things in life, operate outside of our limited awareness, and necessarily so.

“Psyche” plunges us back into the unknown, the entangled complex, interconnected, mess which is reality. We are inextricably if vaguely linked; my psyche does not exist without your psyche. I did not invent the language or all the ideas I use. Interaction with and talking to other people and to world culture has shaped me, and I have presumably shaped some others for better or worse.

We are both collective and individual at the same time. Even a sense of heroic individualism is collective at its base; something we share with others. Our psyches are already alive and part of natural processes. Our full psyches include the land, spill out into the land, into other people, into the processes that are everywhere.

And a realistic view of our selves needs to include all of this material, our culture has generally defined as extraneous, to help us to successfully resist the notion of natural process as a thing to turn into resources to make profit out of. In this new mode, with new practices and ways of perceiving, we can begin to move towards rejecting the system of thought that is destroying the world that we live in. This destructive system no longer makes sense. It seems psychotically limited and self-destructive. That awareness opens a psychological, cultural and activist position. The more we become aware of unconscious process, the less we seem driven by them, and the more free we become.

Let us return to an earlier point. As already implied, there are many unconscious processes. We are not aware of most of what is happening, although we may be more aware than we consciously know. That lack of conscious awareness of how our minds work, and how our physiology works, and how mind and physiology connect at this moment, implies unconscious processes. Some of these happenings I will have perceived, but not made conscious, perhaps because my thought or culture focuses my attention elsewhere, perhaps because there is so much to perceive that I cannot hold it all in my awareness. Even if I perceived it all, I can’t understand everything that is happening, and affecting us, even in this room. Most of life’s ongoing processes are essentially and inevitably outside my consciousness, and therefore unconscious to me.

However, I can become more aware of what is happening or more sensitive to it. I can attempt to perceive reality in different ways. I can turn attention to my neglected or repressed perceptions and drives. Recognising this possibility and being open to the strange and the unknown is what Depth psychology is about. It is fundamental to the process of discovery.

This is why Depth Psychologists pay attention to dreams, which are in some ways messages from the unconscious and the world; from our unconscious perceptions, pattern detections, and ways that we symbolise the unknown. Dreams often require work to understand. It is not always easy, but it can become more so the more we take these fleeting images and stories seriously and treat them as beings themselves. Paying attention to these, and other, neglected processes (fantasies, spontaneous images, scribbles, slips of the tongue, senses of unease, neglected feelings, suppressed thoughts) becomes a way of getting, or admitting, more understanding and data. It starts a new process of being in the world. If we repress our bodies and our dreams, we are likely to repress our awareness of the world. The more we attend to them, the more likely we are to be able to perceive messages in natural processes which are now hidden to us. Our tools for learning can expand outwards…

This new attention can represent a complete change in how we regard ourselves and experience our role in, and on, Earth. We can call this change spiritual if we want to. We can analyse and live our lives from that point of view. We might even be able to see this realisation as having much in common with reports we have classed as mystical.

This awareness involves experience of paradoxes, similar paradoxes to those around reported experiences of God, We are part of the world but separate from it. It is greater than us but still within us. The depths can lead to the heights. We are double sided: our goodness might be cruelty; our aspirations can be unreal or unsatisfying. Reality is ultimately unsayable, but it is pointable too through images and word, and it can be experienced, if we are open to it as it is. This is a new way of being, which can be called spiritual if you wish, or not if it makes you uncomfortable.

So even in the bits I personally have problems with, the book is still full of insights. Full of ways of proceeding. You may have problems too, but encountering this book may help you ponder them and open you. That is why this book is important.

The Good Bits

Let us now turn to the unproblematic virtues of the book. Its chapters are edited and concentrated conversations. They are generally excellent conversations. The primary interviewer Bonnie Bright is really good at her work. She participates in conversations. She contributes to the conversations as process. She draws people out. She listens carefully, and gets people to explain when needed. You could not have a much better interviewer for dealing with issues which could otherwise be quite difficult.

Reading these conversations, you will learn something about a family of understandings of how psyche works, through the dynamics of imagery, metaphor and feeling, and the effect of the unintended consequences of particular modes of consciousness which repress things you need to know about. As I have implied, if you take this seriously and start some of the practices, then you might gain a new view of the world. You might find a way out of the existential crisis, or a way to flourish in that crisis.

Depth psychology is important, because its mode of being, continually deals with problems that the conscious ego cannot understand. This is especially useful for facing the paradoxes, complexities and dilemmas of the Anthropocene.

Topics vary throughout the book, apart from the obvious topics of climate change and ecological destruction, subjects discussed range from discussions of pilgrimage, the aspirations of Dr. Frankenstein and what that tells us about modern life, the collapse of Mayan civilisation, colony collapse disorder in bees and its metaphorical connection to culture collapse in humans, the ways that politics and psyche interacts, the driving cultural complexes of capitalism, systems theory, unconscious forces, communication with the world, and the uses of dreams to gain insight into the world and relate to the world.

The book argues strongly, in various different ways that we need to engage with our full range of psychological processes, and perceptions, to deal constructively with the changes and problems we are facing. We need to understand how the systems we participate within, condition our minds when we suppress awareness of what is happening. If we stay in the psychology of mind we are conditioned to have, then psychological inertia, denial or other processes of repression or projection of problems and hostility onto others are likely to win out. Even if we manage a revolution we will probably replicate the problems we have, plus we will project our guilt onto others, and solve our problems through revenge.

This book explores possible tools to move beyond these psychological limitations and barriers.

Depth psychology can prove useful in this quest, because it tends to focus on neglected aspects of life and assumes that our individual psychology is at least partly collective, and it works through encouraging creativity, imagination, art and symbol production for their own sake, irrespective of judgement or profit..

As well as enlightening, this process of approaching reality is potentially fun and enjoyable; it can also be pretty horrible too, but everyone has the possibility of life changing realisations for themselves and for everyone else. As we are collectively facing similar problems, solutions to personal problems, or the symbols around those solutions, can turn out to be effective solutions for collective problems…. especially when we are working in and with groups. Anyone has the potential to contribute to our collective solutions. You go in and bring the solution back out. It is a cyclic process.

The book tries discuss ways of opening what may be a new way of perceiving the world, and approaching the world, and the role of human psyches within the world, and the way we all could develop.

This is, simply, vital work….. That is why I hope that this book will reach a large audience, even if they disagree with it, it could start discussions.

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Problems of Transition 02: Technology as Fantasy

October 23, 2019

Follows from Transformation to Renewable Energy: General Problems

Contemporary societies have social fantasies, or myths, about technologies, which may not be helpful to dealing with the reality of transition. The biggest problem, is that we all may be in the grip of these myths and fantasies without being aware of it. We can just assume the myth is common sense and that what we are saying is obvious. Obviously I am not going to be aware of all of these myths, and even if I was, I could still be captured by them.

One reason that fantasy is important is that we cannot see the future or predict the future completely accurately. Indeed, socially, we have a bad record at this. Books anticipating the future always fail in fundamental ways to predict exactly what will happen. Weather, economic and sports forecasting is difficult, and rarely always accurate. We now understand that this arises from the nature of complex systems. Trends can perhaps be predicted, but predicting specific events is hard, especially when the predictions change behaviour.

Therefore we have to imagine the future. Imagining is essential, and helpful, but it is never constrained by reality. So when we are talking about technological transition, we are engaging in imagining and fantasy. Often imagining has guiding principles which make the results seem socially acceptable, and these principles may not be correct.

Technology is either really good or bad.

In these fantasies, technologies are nearly always forces that bring either marked good or harm. There is a large proportion of the population that seems to believe technology can solve almost any problems without bringing any harms. This is rarely so, even if it is a common part of the sales techniques deployed around technologies. There are also others who think that transition to any new technology will inevitably bring disaster.

Technology is spontaneously generated when needed.

People, including economists, often talk as if, because a technology is needed or imagined, it will be developed, and it will be developed in time, and utilised as intended, with only the results expected. This is often not the case. We still do not have skies full of flying cars, we do not have bases on the Moon and Mars, but we do have climate change, which is a classic case of a known problem with technologies being ignored, because the technologies are profitable and useful and have been built into social relations, activities and hierarchies.

Technology has no real restrictions; it is magical.

There is another tendency for people to act as if technology was magical, and that because we can do one thing, or one device can be said to resemble another, then we will soon be able to do something else, which is actually difficult or impossible. Thus again, because we could travel to the Moon, we would soon have a Moon base, or we should soon be able to colonise the solar system, or travel to another star, or something. We might think computers resemble minds, so we should soon be able download individual minds into computers. We can in theory catch CO2 emissions from coal, therefore we will soon have emissions-free coal everywhere. Thorium is a good source of energy, therefore we will soon have functional Thorium reactors. Fusion is wonderful, therefore we will soon have fusion reactors. The list goes on. And the catch is that fantasy and imagining, or trying to do things which were previously ‘magical’, probably is important in developing new technology. The problem is that even if these things were possible, and I am not saying they are impossible, it does not mean they will happen now. There are other complexities to consider, including the social relations around the technology and current technology, the limited range of human attention and application, and the success of struggles for limited finance.

Technology can also be ‘magical’ in quite a literal sense, if we define magic as a way of changing human awareness, habit, focus and so on and producing ‘non-physical’ effects in the world. Technology can change the way people perceive things and think about things. For example, we can start thinking of minds in terms of computers (software and hardware), or we can start thinking of the cosmos in terms of clocks, or information processors. People can use imagined technologies to attempt to change our view of the world and our behaviour, as when they argue that clean cheap and quick nuclear energy is available, or clean coal will soon be available, or that renewable energy is already doing a large part of the energy work, and will easily be able to replace fossil fuels with no social change. Technology often seems to be part of a rhetoric of persuasion, used to change world views and actions, and to focus attention on particular parts of reality, often at the expense of others. You have nothing to fear from total computerised surveillance if you are good.

It seems easy for humans to relate to machines as if they were animate and intelligent, especially when the machines are unfamiliar; in which case their behaviour with those machines is also not purely rational. Humans give everything meaning, and use everything to try and make meaning for themselves and others, including technology, but as usual the meanings given may not be uniform throughout society, and may be a subject of struggle and disjunction. Meaning never exists by itself, so the meaning of a technology becomes tied into a web of meaning and contrasts in meaning. The technology can be made to support existing world views, even as it slowly changes them, and affects other meanings, actions and power relations. Magical/meaning warfare is not yet dead.

Unintended consequences disrupt our fantasies.

Then there is no necessity that the technologies would give the results which were intended or expected. Technologies often add complications to the task they were supposed to perform. They give people new opportunities for action and add complexities to life, and the results of those opportunities and complexities, can only rarely be predicted in detail. Even if the problems were predicted in detail, there is only a small chance many people will accept the prediction, over their fantasy. This unpredictability, can always be disruptive, in both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ ways.

For example, the Internet was predicted to bring a world of free information-literacy and democracy. However, as well as providing communication between people who would never have previously met, it has probably brought endless shopping, induced polarisation, distorted information, strengthened politics as a form of identity, provided echo chambers for any idea whatsoever, magnified fantasy, and given new forms of political manipulation and Donald Trump. It brought both (some) benefits and (many) harms, and its main harms were not expected by most analysts.

We might also expect (via the so called ‘Jevons Paradox’) that if clean coal or gas could be made to work, then we would burn more coal and gas, and cause more ecological disaster through the mining and transport of coal and gas.

Resolution of fantasy and imagined expectations is a problem.

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