Posts Tagged ‘myth’

George Marshall talk and comments

March 22, 2022

George Marshall (author of Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change [1], [2]) gave a really interesting talk/discussion to the Climate Psychology Alliance last night, and this is a two part summary and comments.

He opened by pointing out two things

  1. That we have already started to slip into probably irreversible climate change (not only the recent massively high Australian floods, but even more importantly the recent temperatures in the polar regions)
  2. We need to understand our possible psychological responses to this ongoing disaster.

He began by saying that psychologically, we have been guided by our approach to problems by a myth of the hero.

Essentially in that story, the hero (often with unexpected aid) faces up to the challenge (the monster, the wizard, the king, the enemy army etc) and defeats the challenge and all is restored to its right place, or a new piece of culture, picked up in the adventure, is added to the cultural repertoire (fire, iron, a magic weapon, some new understanding, a new god, etc). Essentially all is solved.

However, he went on to suggest that climate change is not a monster which can be slain, or an enemy which can be defeated anymore. We have left it too late. Climate change is now more like a terminal disease, which will keep getting worse, or an attack in which the missiles and bombs never stop and will never stop. The effects are out of control; in term of a human life time, they probably without end or resolution. The hero myth is not useful to us, and may even sabotage our responses.

I’d like to suggest that there are other hero myths which might be more useful. In these the hero makes a tragic mistake, or their strengths, successes and overconfidence lead to failure and death, while the rest of the world often carries on. We can think of the end of King Arthur and the Round Table, a burst of ‘civilisation’ comes to an end through Arthur’s attempts to keep himself safe. Oedipus’s valour leads to famine and shame. Hercules’ bravery and agression leads to an intensely painful death.

What we face seems more easily generalised into something like Toynbee’s challenge and response idea. Sometimes a culture succeeds and changes (or changes and succeeds), but people often fail to deal with the challenge. A recurring theme is that this happens because those in power keep the old and previously successful ways of functioning going despite the fact those ways of success are now deadly and destructive. Just as fossil fuel burning is now deadly and destructive and needs to be phased out.

The effects of a continual storm, or impossible to deal with disaster, is socially common. Many indigenous societies have withered for a long time under colonialism, and a violence which was inconceivable to them. Some of these societies have also survived under hideous conditions, and many are being brought back. This will probably not be exactly the same as what was lost, but the movements help restore something and to regain the fight for people’s lives and ways of being. This is success.

It may sound hideous but we, whose societies participated in this cruelty and destruction, may now be able to learn from these rebirths when we face up to the climate change we have also created. This could also be seen as part of the way that indigenous societies are succeeding. And it is interesting how many people in the climate movement, seem to have been influenced by directly received (public) indigenous teachings or been influenced by books written by indigenous authors. This appears to be part of the growing eco-consciousness.

Toynbee implies that successful responses to new challenges often involve a new religion or cosmology. In this sense a religion or cosmology is a way of understanding the world and perceiving the world, which has a large symbolic component.

I suspect that a religious response is extremely likely to result during climate change, as climate change has to be represented symbolically: its too big to perceive directly; it is way too complex to enumerate all the possible factors involved; it’s unpredictable; its not controllable, etc. Given this kind of state a response will have to involve a completely new (to capitalism) world view or religion. It’s clear enough that our current views will not work, and are not working to deal with the problem. It is also probable that the variant which arises will not be consciously designed, but emerge from unconscious processes of pattern seeking and symbolisation. This process does not have to result in a beneficial conception, we could argue that Nazism was an unconscious symbolic response to the crises of the post WW1 era, and it was not beneficial at all.

The process is dangerous, but it will happen, and in processes like Q, and ‘Trumpism’ you can see the delusional versions occurring, in some forms of eco-consciousness you might see the constructive forms emerging. The point is to be aware it is happening, and that it has both good and bad sides.

The next article in this series will discuss Marshall’s list of psychological states.

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Myths of Climate 04: Prometheus

December 30, 2019

Continues from: Myths of Climate 03: Apocalypse and Millennium

Prometheus brings humans fire which is needed for culture and development, and is chained to a rock by Zeus, with an eagle devouring his liver every day, until he is eventually rescued by Heracles.

The myth of Prometheus encapsulates both the idea that technology can save us, and the counter-position that technology leads to retribution or destruction.

While the two parts of this myth are usually kept separate, it may be useful to bear both in mind simultaneously.

God Like Technology

The ‘technology is always positive’ side of the duality reassures us that technology can save us. Influenced by this myth we tend to be carried away into technological fantasy, into thinking that we have solutions to problems, when we don’t know if those solutions work or not. It often promotes non-existent ‘fantasy’ technology (like clean coal, carbon sequestration, or mirrors in space, portable nuclear power stations, fusion power) as saving us from having to abandon coal fired power stations. Or it may claim potentials for existing technologies that have so far been largely unsuccessful at containing ecological destruction (biofuels, thorium reactors, new hydro power, etc).

Within the myth, we expect technology to arrive to save us, just as part of the natural order of things. Some people even argue that something like this is part of economic fundamentals; if there is enough need, then investment will occur and the technology will be invented and appear. However, this is never guaranteed, and it encourages us to forget the unexpected effects of technology, and to ignore complexity and assume we know all the interconnections in a natural system, which we cannot.

In this mode, human technological endeavour is heroic, even godlike. No radical change is needed and we can retain the status quo; we can continue as normal with a technological add on. Some writers can even move away from climate change acceptance and any tinkering with the corporatised market, by arguing that ecological degradation has nothing to do with climate change or forms of economics, and that it can be fixed by easily deployed technologies.

In the ‘technology is good’ side of the equation we also tend to think that technology is determinate, and indicates degree of advancement and proficiency – this is something of a contradiction to the technology as add on idea, but it is used in different arguments about technological superiority and usually kept separate. We often mark out history by supposedly technological periods which follow in succession, a kind of “technological ladder”: Stone Age (Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic), Bronze Age, Iron Age, Agricultural Age, Age of Print, Age of Sail, Age of Steam, Industrial Age, Atomic Age, Space Age, Computer or Information Age and so on. Each ‘Age’ is supposedly better than the last, rather than just partly the same and partly different.

This allows us to dismiss any wisdom or knowledge possessed by ‘earlier’ ages, and also makes it hard to see the complexities of reality, such as ‘Stone Age’ Australian Aboriginal people appear to have had complex systems of ‘agriculture’ which are completely different in their ways of working to European systems (see Bill Gammage and Bruce Pascoe) (Some references to the controversy over this).

Harmful Technology

The counterposition makes science the cause of all our problems. Not only does it suggest Prometheus’ punishment is more primary than his success, but it suggests the Tower of Babel with God striking down human technological presumption, or that our technology will escape and take over the world, destroying us, as we can see in many science fiction scenarios. It implies that technological presumption leads to disaster, perhaps even to the end of the world.

The dark side myth can be used to imply technologist and scientists are evil, as with the “climate change ideas only exist because of a world wide socialist conspiracy” trope. All experts can be ignored, if they don’t agree with positions we already hold.

This view can also be used to imply that people ‘down’ the ‘technological ladder’ had generally much greater wisdom and lives than we do today, which may not always be the case.

At best this side of the myth implies that technology alienates us from something essentially human, even though humans always seem to have used technology of some sort. We often hear people arguing that the internet destroys our capacity to think, or to have an inner life, when (if we were loosing our capacity to think etc) there might be many other reasons – like being fed false information for political purposes, or being so busy and nervous at work that we have no time for reflection.

One writer rebuffs the idea of using windmills to generate electricity as they are a medieval technology and make an infernal noise – reference to the sound of hell is not accidental, even if unconscious, and that implies the possibility of punishment from God. Yet I suspect the writer does not object to other noisier technologies like aircraft. But this does not seem clear to him. To be real, and of the future, technology has to look a certain way, a demand shaped by myth, or at least by films of a great future (do we have those any more?). Likewise President Trump seems somehow aware that building windmills can involve pollution, even if he seems unaware of the pollution from coal mining and burning, or he chooses not to emphasise this. Likewise with bird killing.

In this part of the myth new technology becomes seen as corrupting and inherently destructive of the social, or natural, order, and indeed it may well change those orders.

When technology becomes part of the social order, it does so as a complex system within other complex systems, and unintended consequences are routine. At a simple level it can open opportunities for some groups to consolidate or increase their social power and influence. Although this is usually only considered disruptive if people from lower groups get raised. If people from dominating groups increase their power, this may not be portrayed as a problem.

The Conflict/Paradox

What one side hears as the solution sounds to the other like a charter for further destruction. Technology is simultaneously, saviour and destroyer, potentially part of the solution but currently part of the problem. Which position we choose to argue from determines where we end up, and the alarms (intended or otherwise) we raise in other people.

However, both positions have equal possibility of being true. In this case, it is possible that putting the two halves of the myth together may help us deal with problems of transformation/transition.

Some technological breakthroughs could save us, or at least help us. And we may not have to wait for them, we already have renewable sources of energy. However, it is also true that renewables may not be able to save us, if we wish to keep using more energy, or bring everyone in the world to the energy use of the average Australian or US American. A change in lifestyle and life plans may also be required. Some people may loose wealth so as to stabilize the system, some people may gain wealth to stabilized the system. This could be disruptive and it would be easy to make people fear this change, because who knows where it will end up? We also appear to have the capacities to lower pollution and waste production, but it is difficult because it is not profitable, and profit is what counts in our economic and political system. In this case the technology is being disrupted by the maintenance of other systems.

It is also true that new technologies can be disruptive or harmful, and they may well need to be vetted, but this is not easy.

Ultimately a significant part of the problem with technology comes down, not just to the myth, but to our inability to think in terms of complex systems, and, of unintended consequences as being normal.

We have tended to deal with unintended consequences, just by arguing about them afterwards, or generally ignoring them, as with fossil fuels, with the possible exception of the London smogs. These were solved by government action, information work, and regulation. They could have continued to be ignored, there is no reason why the death of ordinary people should impinge on the souls of those seeking profit alone. Probably enough of them lived in London to accept the reforms, or feared the rise of the poisoned working and middle classes and gave in.

As the consequences of technology are often unintended and unexpected we cannot easily predict them, but part of the problem is that we do not try – we often do not seem to consider this at all.

Exploring the dynamics of unintended and unexpected consequences should be a major research project. All policy, corporate or governmental, should consider the likelihood of unintended consequences, and determine how these consequences will be looked for, and taken into account.

Technology does not escape myth.

See also: Problems of Transition 02: Technology as Fantasy

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Myths of Climate 03: Apocalypse and Millennium

December 25, 2019

Continues from Myths of Climate 02: Eden and the Fall

In the myth of Apocalypse the end of the world is cataclysmic, and out of our hands. While there are warnings of its coming, it’s arrival is sudden and abrupt. It is the will of God, yet it is monstrous. However, in this myth, the good survive; they may even, in modern versions, be rescued intact in the Rapture, before much that is horrible occurs. There is a sense in that, as ‘we,’ or the, good survive and it is the end of historical disorder, Apocalypse can only be welcomed or encouraged. It represents a potential end of misery for those who make it. It is out of our control and we may not be good enough to pass into the new world (we may even end up in hell), so what can we do?

This myth, renders us largely helpless. It may prod us into action but it is a confused passive, and more or less individualistic action, as we can only be responsible for our own salvation at this moment. It promotes an acceptance of destruction as God’s will, or acts as a call for us to separate out from the sinful world, perhaps proposing the obliteration of others, or at least the acceptance of that obliteration, as we uneasily side with an apparent cosmic murderer to prove that we are among the good, and worthy of being saved.

If we are convinced of our own immortality and safety, then there is payback for our current suffering in the destruction of others, and it is not us being vicious; we can remain calmly moral. Apocalypse, further potentially reduces existential crisis by positing a specific end to the current disorder, and again we don’t have to do anything to solve the crisis and its problems; the need for action in the world is taken away.

There is a sense in which knowing the Apocalypse is coming can be soothing. The Apocalypse becomes both unstoppable destruction and relief. Given that it is sometimes not clear what we can do, the relief of just having to wait, could be even greater.

One problem is that the myth implies that while there are warnings of its coming, which are obscure to read, and possibly stages to its arrival, there is really one event. And yet the climate change is slow and gradual, a series of apparently disconnected events until perhaps tipping points are reached. It has been hard to tell climate change is happening, despite the record temperatures and the huge amounts of property damage from weather events. We can only say that it is likely these result from climate change, and the likelihood is increasing. There is no definite proof until after it has happened. Apocalypse is not a good model for thinking about climate change….

Despite the models inadequacy, much talk of climate slides into Apocalypse, especially when being “realistic”. For example, James Lovelock claims that:

The tropical and subtropical zones of the Earth will be too hot and dry to grow food or support human life. People will be forced to migrate towards the poles to places like Canada. There will be less than one billion people by the end of the century (Lovelock 2009).

That is more than 6 billion people will die – and probably die in warfare as migration, and resistance against migration, becomes violent. The UN World Health Organisation, far less dramatically, warns that even assuming:

continued economic growth and health progress… climate change is expected to cause approximately 250 000 additional deaths per year between 2030 and 2050

That is a ‘mere’ 5 million people, but we have no real idea what will happen when we go over 2 degrees. It is unlikely in the extreme that there will be continued progress in dealing with health problems, as so much is likely to start breaking down.

The process is unfortunately cumulative, not one-off, as the myth of Apocalypse suggests.

The problem again is that the numbers of potential deaths are overwhelming, especially when we factor in deaths from pollution, heat stroke and loss of water. This magnitude also can lead us to feel that our individual action is worthless, and to start conceiving in symbolic terms, which may make the myth of Apocalypse seem even more real, and reinforce our sense of helplessness and hope that we will get through anyway, without doing anything.

More problematically, Apocalypse is also such a common trope that it is easy to demote one form of Apocalypse for another, or even to argue that because we predict bad results are due, the prediction is worthless. For example, it can be suggested that we have not yet produced “grey-goo” through nanotech, or that as Y2K was not disastrous, this just ‘proves’ climate change is not so bad, when it has little in common with either.

People can even spend more time planning what to do in a Zombie Apocalypse than in planning to prevent, and adapt to, climate change.

Using this kind of move, Paul Johnson, implied that reports of climate change come from evil people and predicted an economic apocalypse if we tried to deal with climate change – presumably economic disorder is worse than climate disorder:

Those who buy in to global warming wish to drastically curb human economic and industrial activities, regardless of the consequences for people, especially the poor. If the theory’s conclusions are accepted and agreed upon, the destructive results will be felt most severely in those states that adhere to the rule of law and will observe restrictions most faithfully…. We shall all suffer… as progress falters and then ceases and living standards decline.

In other words, acting is intrinsically unfair, and leaves you open to exploitation. He imagines the rest of the world will take advantage of those who act fairly, not only ignoring a history of ‘unfair action’, but projecting shadow to make those who believe in climate change seem deluded or evil.

More recently Australia’s prime minister has warned about not taking a “wrecking ball to the economy” (which implies that acting on climate change could produce economic Apocalypse), and is supporting coal exports supposedly to support reduction of poverty overseas, and arguing that it is unfair to expect Australia to curtail its GHG pollution, and unrealistic to expect it could have any global effect if we did.

Again, it is suggested that it is attempting to deal with climate change that produces Apocalypse, rather than climate change itself. Morrison also uses the idea of Apocalypse to try and discredit protestors and justify prevention of protests, as protestors are “apocalyptically inclined” and hence irrational. He even says that protestors tell Australians what to think, and so it is apparently justified for him to tell people what they should think or be punished for.

While phrased in terms of justice for the poor (showing how easily ‘justice’ is co-opted to continuing the status quo), the implied logic of both positions is that as the consequences are discomforting, then climate change must be a negligible problem, or a problem for others.

Psychologically this also seems an attempt to make the world familiar again so that previous patterns of virtue, action and belief still work. The framework suggests that as action opposed to the current system is uncertain then we should do nothing; even if the results of action supporting the same system are likely to be as equally uncertain. Apocalypse is apparently either ‘on’ or ‘off’, consequently the myth does not describe real events very well, as they tend to form a continuum, even if that does involve sudden tipping points.

In Morrison’s case, because of his active religion, it is possible that the idea of a secular apocalypse without God, seems irrational to him. The Apocalypse will happen only by God’s fiat, and not beforehand; and if it is coming, not only will he be saved, but what can be done?

The myth is active whatever ‘side’ you are on.

Millennium

Apocalypse shades into the counterposition of the myth of Millennium. In this myth the world spontaneously changes into a paradise (perhaps after apocalypse), often by a mass change of consciousness and there are no further problems. This is often seen in new age thought, where mysterious breakthroughs in consciousness are supposed to be happening all over the globe. Even the internet can be seen as forming a global mind which ushers in a new age of prosperity and enlightenment, or produces a melding of human minds into a super-intelligence. Again this kind of fantasy could distract from the actual problems, or the effort of acting.

Millennium can also call for the deaths of millions, as a necessary sacrifice of those who could not transform. This mythical framework suggests both that change is to be feared and accelerated.

Apocalypse and Millennium both demand purity from evil. In a dialogue with George Monbiot, Paul Kingsnorth (2009) writes:

The challenge is not how to shore up a crumbling empire with wave machines and global summits, but to start thinking about how we are going to live through its fall, and what we can learn from its collapse

Elsewhere he claims:

We’re deniers every time we say “80 percent by 2050,” or even “80 percent by 2020”; every time we refer to tipping points in the future tense; every time we advocate substituting “clean” energy for “dirty” energy; every time we buy a squiggly light bulb or a hybrid vehicle; every time we advocate for cap-and-trade, or even a carbon tax; every time we countenance the mention of loopy geoengineering schemes; every time we invoke the future of our children and grandchildren and ignore the widespread suffering from global climate disruption today.

Every time we say these things and more, we’re promoting denial of dire climate reality…. We’re denying that our consumption and waste have far exceeded planetary capacity, possibly irreparably so.

Such purity can produce the despair or depression as reported in interviews with climate activists. What actions can be enough when the end really is nigh? When it is declared to be too late. Yet, by acting, as opposed to not acting, we can make the changes and crises we have to deal with lesser than otherwise. This may not be perfect, but stopping before we increase by 3 degrees is better than going to increases of 4 or 6 degrees.

And indeed Kingsnorth seems to celebrate this collapse and, as George Monbiot suggests, the death of billions of people, by associating it with a return to Eden (Kingsnorth and Monbiot 2009).

Apocalyptic optimism and despair generate hopelessness and refusal of action. For Kingsnorth, putting effort into clean energy is a pointless diversion on our way to the end. Here he (perhaps inadvertently) joins together with Paul Johnson, and other refusers, who suggests that as biofuels did not solve the problem and caused an increase in food prices, we should do nothing. That biofuels were not a solution does not mean there is no solution, but maintaining purity of categories in Apocalypse or Millennium demands that if something has failed then we should not bother trying something else. The myths join ‘believers’ with ‘deniers’ in helplessness or in false optimism of supposing miracles will necessarily occur.

Conclusion

It does not seem that these myths are terribly useful for dealing with climate change, and life after climate change, but we cannot ignore its pull, or its effects. It needs to be faced into with others, and new schematas found.

Continues in Myths of Climate 04: Prometheus

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Myths of Climate 02: Eden and the Fall

December 24, 2019

Continues from Myths of Climate 01: Creation, order and disorder

The myths of Eden and the Fall, tell us there is something unspoiled, friendly and beautiful in the environment and elsewhere that we have lost. It appears to neglect the fact that living systems are complex systems, and that there never has been an unchanging ideal and primal world.

Eden

The myth of Eden suggests a return to a simpler age, with attempts to restore ravaged nature, or to preserve nature in some pure and pristine state beyond change. We can see this with natural parks and ‘wilderness’ movements. Eden is perhaps the foundational myth of wilderness, and often invoked when we are shown an area teeming with what we think of as ‘wild life’ but with no humans.

The aim of restoration and perfect preservation of the natural world is impossible as nature is a complex dynamic process and continually changing. The process we call evolution is constantly at work; creatures fail to reproduce, genes do not replicate perfectly all the time, new variants of species and new species are continually coming into being. Creatures move out of one ecology into another. ‘External events’ such as volcanic eruptions, meteorite strikes, climate change, storms, fires, and so on change ecologies and change how the system of life might work, opening it up to possible colonisation by new species, or recolonisation by old species. It is not normal or ‘natural’ for complex systems of life to remain the same, or to be without competition and co-operation, which affects some members deleteriously.

Attempts to keep nature pristine and unchanging have to rely on human force and thus violate any natural pristineity. As Cronon argues, Edens are essentially artificial. This does not mean that national parks and wilderness areas may not be necessary, especially to save environments from those extractive industries which would change them completely and forcibly, but that natural systems are complicated and changing – as all complex systems are.

If we were to wish to restore the world, as a whole, to an artificial purity in which we could easily survive, then we would have to kill a large portion of the world’s human population and a massive number of other ‘pests’ that have moved into new places. This might be morally difficult (certainly not ‘pure’), and we have no surety as to the percentage of people who would need to die to restore the lost Edenic world. However, there are people who seem to celebrate massive disasters with huge death tolls as ways of engineering the return to nature. Perhaps they neglect the destructive effect of those disasters on the non-human world as well?

The Fall

This myth also holds a counter-position, in which post-fall nature can be seen as harsh and hostile, as opposed to humanity, as ‘brute’, uncaring, violent or primarily cruel. The world may even be a place of punishment, a substitute for the way it was meant to be, or a reminder of loss.

This hostility, and departure from the intended reality, suggests that the brutal and savage fallen world, and humanity, requires both law and enforcement. Here we have both desire and fear together – the fear propelling us to control, to impose the lost order of God on the world. We are riven here, caught within unresolved opposites, which I think we generally solve by keeping them separate, so that the law becomes better than the world, while the rebellion of the world against the law or, more accurately, the failure of the law in the world, is taken as showing the supremacy of law and the evil of the world.

Many writers rely for their persuasiveness on the topos that nature is hostile without our ordering (as implied in myth 01). However, both positions of Eden and the Fall are projections, as the world just is what it is.

Humans seem to be not just fallen or bad, but competitive and co-operative, capable of being both violent and loving, cruel and kind, selfish and absurdly generous, and so on. Most evidence I am aware of suggests that most humans are not as violent as portrayed in our society; they have to be trained to be repeated killers, even when drafted to be soldiers, and they tend to suffer trauma and pain afterwards. Group violence and orders help sponsor individual violence; people tend to do what they need to survive against what other people show them is normal.

We may both expect humans to be too bad to change, or demand that they be so good they fail. Neither place might be helpful. The myth of the fall suggests we cannot progress even a little, and we must always expect the deliberate worse from humans and world, rather than that humans stumble and life is difficult.

In this myth we are riven, caught within unresolved opposites, which immobilise us. When we invoke one side of the mythic topos, say by arguing that we should preserve nature, some listeners will hear that we wish to preserve the brutality and precariousness of the fall. If we wish to discipline nature with law, we are destroying the natural Eden.

Whatever we do will invoke the contrary myth, leading to resistance and possibly paralysis.

Conclusion

Relating to the world as Eden or Fall, distorts our perceptions of the world and our actions in the world. We may need new ways of mythically relating to the world, and that may come again with sitting with the contradiction.

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Myths of Climate 01: Creation, order and disorder

December 22, 2019

Continues from Climate change and ‘myth’

Introduction

Creation myths organise symbols and form templates for how we think the universe behaves, the nature of order, what is ‘natural’ itself, our place within the world, the process of development, how we can act, and what could be possible. Perhaps not all creation myths do all of this, after all that would be overly ordering, but the potential is there for them to say something about the fundamental nature of the cosmos and the world, and influence our thinking about that world.

The Western Creation myth and order

The most prominent of Western creation myths is in the Bible. It emphasises that the underlying act of creation is ordering, and that disorder is the natural and bad state of things. It sets up the opposition that order is good and disorder is bad. However, everything real and alive is disorderly to some extent, and this sets up a serious problem for Western understanding and action.

In Genesis, after the initial creation, the earth begins as chaos. It was “without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep”.

God makes the world through a process of ordering; through separating out Light from Darkness, Day from Night, “the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament”, the Land from the Sea and so on.

In this myth, without the ordering and sorting actions of God there would be no constructive dynamics and no life. God goes on to make sure that things reproduce after their kind (miyn – portion), in an orderly manner, and so on. 

This myth implies that the world must be ordered by someone to work, that any natural ‘rest’ state is disordered, and that virtue is putting things into order.

This idea that order has to be imposed is so strong that it even constitutes an argument for the existence of God in the standard argument by design which claims that the order we perceive cannot arise by itself so therefore there must be a God doing the ordering.  This whole argument depends on the myth that order requires an orderer, which may not be correct, and without the myth, may not even feel correct. Sometimes people compare the universe to clocks, and say that as clocks have builders so the universe has a builder. Again the same assumption is being made. In reality, we can guess a clock has a builder, because it is completely unlike anything found in nature without humans, so this is not a good argument about things which are found in nature. So if you have ever felt the pull of the argument by design then you feel the pull of this story.

You do not have to believe the myth, to be influenced by its assumptions and implications.

People influenced by this myth may think that without ongoing ordering, and recognised authority, the world will collapse into disorder and original chaos. The myth could also imply that disorder can result from the activity of people who disrupt God’s order. Christianity takes this point and insists that disorder and disobedience are regressions to chaos and evil, (so that disorder is punished eternally in hell) although in the Genesis story there is nothing to indicate the Serpent is evil as such, just disruptive of God’s apparent plan through encouraging thought and disobedience.

People influenced by the myth are likely to also hold that, as there is only one true God, there is only one true order, and are likely to claim they know what that true order is, so other forms of order are really chaos in disguise and must be suppressed. There is one truth, one plan. In this view life becomes a never ending struggle against disorder, and an attempt to suppress whatever seems like disorder. Every sign of disagreement has the potential to become a heresy which is to be suppressed.

For example, while business people and neoliberal politicians frequently claim to want business processes to work without regulation or interference, we nearly always find they have a desire to keep everyone busy and dependent on business, and to order and regulate the world heavily in their favour. We are not offered de-regulation, but a choice between a regulation which might benefit most people, or regulation which might only favour the wealthy and powerful for a short while.

Disorder and unpredictability, can become joined in the binary of good and evil. For example, ‘Conservative’ English author Paul Johnson, in an article discussing climate change demands complete predictability from climate science and Marxism, but seems unconcerned about his ability to predict the result of his favoured ‘good’ policies. For him, what he defines as ‘good’ must already be orderly, and what he defines as bad must be without order.

The Myth channels into the position that disorder arises either from: a) us not doing enough ordering or; b) from the work of those who are evil.

Life = Chaos = Evil

However, living things and living systems, are not completely orderly. Indeed the more alive something is, the less easy it becomes to predict what it will do, the harder it is to control, to keep it in what we have defined as its rightful place. Another way of putting this is that life, naturally, forms complex systems that are beyond our total control and ordering, and that attempts to order living systems (ecologies) will have unintended consequences.

The absence of total order as we expect it in the world, and the idea of the omnipotence of God, reinforces the idea that there is a power of disorder and chaos, which is evil. This force, often called the devil, or Satan, is evil because he epitomises disorder.

While this idea is common, it has been challenged by fiction. One of the intellectual breakthroughs of the Dungeons and Dragons game was to suggest that some demons can be ‘lawful evil’, and exhibit orderly evil – they keep contracts and their word is their bond, although they will look for loopholes. Disordians suggest chaos is part of world order. Michael Moorcock pointed out in his novels that extreme order, like extreme chaos, is equivalent to death. He suggested we need balance, but this idea is still precarious.

In conventional thought, insects and bacteria, however radically different, seem chaotic. They get everywhere. They are out of correct place. They eat things we would rather they didn’t and spread disease we see as disorder. They are vermin, plagues. The only way to solve this problem within our myth, is to kill them. And hence we try and kill them, and disrupt the ecologies that depend on them, creating more disorder…. We become Daleks, exterminating all that is not immediately useful to us, and driven by that extermination, to exterminate even more.

The problem

When our virtuous one true method of ordering starts obviously producing chaos, then there appears to be no way forward; any movement from the perfection of ordering appears to risk disorder. We may feel we have to strengthen our mode of ordering rather than relax it. We need more neoliberalism, applied even harder, rather than less. We need more development, more consumer goods, more growth, rather than less. We need more fossil fuels, rather than less. We may even need more pollution, to free up business creativity, rather than less.

It is likely that our ordering urges produce more disorder, which then promotes more of the failed ordering, which produces more disorder and so on. We cannot try something new, until the social order starts obviously collapsing (and even then we might delay), or new people rise up with new ideas and take control to impose their order.

This is the model of many of our approaches to climate change and, so far, it has spread through the world, bringing disaster with it.

Other styles of myth

This approach does not have to be the only way. Other creation myths might suggest that order will arise if we stop doing things, or may suggest that chaos has a constructive role in the universe, or is not removeable.

In Hesiod’s myth of creation, Khaos, the void, is one of the primal principles, along with Gaea and Eros, that reproduce with each other in order to make the Gods and other forces. In this view of the world, ‘being’ itself is productive, and ordering arises through ongoing interaction and development, which may or may not be harmonious.  Khaos is vital to this process, even if uncomfortable or dangerous.

Elsewhere Hesiod declares that there are two forms of Strife, “wholly different in nature”.  One form of strife fosters war and battle, and the other prods us towards action and culture. This second strife is enabling.  In this myth strife and disorder can be valued and there is no single source of order.  Good people can fail, there is no personal safety net in virtue. 

As a another example, Gregory Bateson reports an Iatumul myth from Papua New Guinea in which the great crocodile Kavwokmali was paddling hard, mixing up the mud and the water.  Then Kevembuangga came along and killed Kavwokmali with his spear and the mud settled and the dry land was formed.  In this myth, making ‘chaos’ takes work, and ‘sorting out’ occurs if that work is stopped.  People with this myth might aim to remove the sources of disturbance and allow order to settle out or emerge.   They may be more motivated to surrender their orderings in able to allow the ecological disturbances of climate change to settle down themselves once the work of disordering has been stopped.

While some Chinese Creation stories suggest that the myriad things were blended together and needed to find their way out of chaos, the stories are not uniform. Taoist philosophy has a different approach to order and disorder, which it is useful to elaborate. The West has little of the Taoist sense of working with nature to find its own level.

The most well known Chinese story about chaos (hun-tun) comes from the Chang tzu and is roughly as follows:

The Ruler of the Northern Ocean was Shu (Heedless) the Ruler of the Southern Ocean was Hu (Sudden), and the Ruler of the Center was Chaos (hun tun). Shu and Hu were continually meeting in the land of Chaos, who treated them very well. They consulted together how they might repay his kindness, and said, ‘Men all have seven orifices for the purpose of seeing, hearing, eating, and breathing, while this (poor) Ruler alone has not one. Let us try and make them for him’.  Accordingly they dug one orifice in him every day; and at the end of seven days Chaos died. [Chuang Tzu, Chapter Seven, Quoted from, The Texts of Taoism, trans. James Legge (New York: Dover, 1962), 1:266-267.]

Legge takes the standard Western here and writes: “But surely it was better that Chaos should give place to another state. ‘Heedless’ and ‘Sudden’ did not do a bad work” [ChuangTzu, p. 267]. 

But the fairly obvious point is that, trying to impose an order, which seems to be beneficial elsewhere, can bring something else to an end. Through their well-intentioned ordering Hun-Tun, Shu and Hu killed a being who had treated them kindly, and who provided a place for them to meet. Through rigid conceptualisation and putting fixed boundaries in place we loose touch with reality – we no longer flow with the tao.  The consequences were not necessarily good for Shu and Hu, not to mention Hun-Tun.

Legge’s translation of the names as ‘Heedless’ and ‘Sudden’ (although there are other possible translations), suggests the killers did not pay attention to unexpected consequences or adjust their actions according to those results, they just acted without thought or feeling according to their preconceptions.

Taoist philosophy, seems to posit that the natures of things are inherently un-understandable, and thus must be allowed to express themselves with their own dynamic. They have an intelligence or dynamic which cannot be completely expressed in language – the ‘tao which can be tao-ed is not the ongoing tao’.  Tao is process, it is not static and thus cannot be encapsulated by static or unchanging categories.  This notion has resonance with what we might mean by saying that the world is a complex system. Thus:

The actual world presumed by Taoism is anarchic since it is without archai or principii serving as determining sources of order distinct from the order which they determine. The units of existence comprising nature are thus self-determining in the most radical sense (Hall 1974: 274). [although we can be skeptical about the phrase ‘units of existence’ as there may be no unchanging atoms of any relevance, but this shows the difficult of exact expression.]

As everything is constantly in a state of transition from one state to another, the universe is flux rather than expressible in fixed reasoned categories (Hall 1974: 275-6). Similarly the interplay of the ‘principles’, reminds us that nothing is entirely bright, active and ordering (yang), and nothing is entirely dark, passive and ordered (yin).  An excess of yang produces yin and an excess of yin produces yang. 

Sufferings and harm arise from imposing willed action upon the flow of tao without sensitivity to its flow, its existence, its intelligence, or its ‘needs’, just as Shu and Hu, imposed regularity on Hun-tun.

My understanding of the Confucian text Doctrine of the Mean (which may be wrong) suggests that the best we can hope for is to produce temporary islands of order in the chaos and flow, and that (being all we can do) is enough. This is not a bad thing, this is the nature of things. Eternal Order does not arise from human action, therefore we watch for the conditions to make order, and let that order pass when the conditions change. We do the best we can, attentively, and that might be enough.

Conclusion

Western myths clearly distinguish order from disorder. Ordering is creative and good. Disorder is bad. The myths do not encourage a conceptualisation of disorder as arising from beneficial acts of ordering. The myths do not encourage us to consider the existence of what seems to be beneficial disorder, or to conceive disorder as a necessary part of the process of life. If bad things happen then: a) there is a disordering force working against us, or; b) the ordering is to be classed as evil, rather than: c) the beneficial order had unintended, or unexpected, consequences which have been ignored because of that order’s supposed benefits. This formulation is particularly problematic when we are faced with the likelihood that complex systems are not orderable, and that living systems are not orderable.

These mythic templates do not help us to realized that unintended consequences are almost inevitably going to arise from our actions, and so it is hard to change direction. It is difficult to attend to the unintended. We tend to stick with the harmful acts that have been successful so far, because they must be good or, on the other hand, perhaps we aim overthrow the whole corrupt existing order because it must be ineluctably bad.

Never-the-less, there are ways of relating to disorder (even if they are not immediately available to us), which inculcate different ways of behaving and understanding. Perhaps knowing these other stories and feeling their resonance might change something in the ways we can approach the problems we face, as when the order of fossil fuels, which produces the orders of our societies, also generates the disorders of climate change.

Perhaps we can learn to work with the flow of the cosmos, and with the unintended consequences we generate, rather than to persist in destruction.

Continues in Myths of Climate 02: Eden and the Fall.

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Climate change and ‘myth’;

December 20, 2019

Introduction: Conceiving complex systems

In the next ten or so posts (!) I will try to describe what happens when humans attempt to conceive something like climate change, that is not comprehensible in detail, and how that affects our actions and abilities to cope with the problems it presents.

Climate Change is a global phenomena, beyond individual experience and beyond our abilities to manipulate easily (especially as individuals). It is what Timothy Morton calls a “hyper object” although I would prefer “hyper-process” – or simply “large scale complex system”.

Being a large scale complex system, Climate change is

  • not completely predictable
  • not completely modellable
  • not completely and easily comprehensible
  • hard to manipulate by individuals or small groups.
  • not completely separable out as a phenomena of its own. For example, climate change involves weather, vegetation, animal life, local ecologies, large scale ecologies, human social behaviour, human economic behaviour, human political behaviour and so on. Normally separate categories interact and blend.
  • prone to tipping point behavior in which things radically and quickly change from the current ‘state’ to a new one,
  • likely to appear disorderly and paradoxical. For example, some places might suffer more cold, and some more heat. Rainfall might become more intense, but occur in fewer days, and thus increase the extremes of flood and drought.
  • constituted so that actions have unintended consequences as a matter of course.

Not being completely comprehensible or predictable, when we try to conceive climate change, we tend to use what we might call the ‘symbolic register’. That is, we, as humans, tend to try and represent it by using existing symbols (or patterns of symbols), that are used to think about other hyper-processes, like life, being/existence, or even religious experience.

These symbols are not constituted as fully formed ‘scientific’ or ‘logical’ categories, but will have traces of magic or power (awe, mana), hanging around them. If you prefer, then you can think of climate change as being responded to as we might respond to “the sublime” or even to God.

This is not the same as saying that climate change is like God, in any other way than it is also bigger than us, beyond complete comprehension, and appears to be out of our control.

This is one reason why I am calling these patterns of conception, ‘myths’ and ‘symbols’; reflecting the kind of language or understanding used by theologian Paul Tillich, psychologist Carl Jung, and historian and political scientist Eric Voeglin; although I clearly am not using their systems in their full complexity, as they are not necessary for the points I’m trying to argue.

Myths defined

In this framework, myths are defined as strings of metaphors and templates for thought and experience that provide affective and narrative links between disparate things, events or processes (especially those that are overwhelming), thus producing an appearance of order. Myths, as the term is being used here, also act as rhetorical topoi, or as organisers of argument and perceptions of truth in situations of relative uncertainty, overwhelm and incomprehension.

Defined this way, myths and symbols are different from what we might call ‘signs’, where the words and the processes and objects they are applied to, are relatively easy to manipulate and understand, if we have the right technology etc. Signs and symbols form a continuum, rather than staying as fixed binary oppositions, and conceptions can slide around between the poles adding to the confusion…. but this is extra detail, not needed for the moment.

Particular uses of a mythic topos can also mark group allegiance. Using the wrong kind of mythic topoi in a discussion, might exclude a person from being listened to, or accepted by another group.

Other formulations of the problem of patterns of thinking: Marx and Foucault

The idea that our ideas are gathered around particular kinds of basic formulations is not new. Marx famously argued that ideas grow out of regular social practice, and that the ruling ideas of the time, the ideas which get most promotion and justification, are those ideas which justify and promote the rule of the ruling class, and their practice and experience. Neoliberalism, and its variants (what I will later call ‘religion of the market’), seem to be good examples of this.

If you are lucky in a Marxist world, then other classes might develop ideas which help them understand the world in terms of their practice, and act as counter-positions to, and critiques of, those ruling ideas, and allow actions against established power relations. If you are unlucky then you get the development of ideas which help the people reconcile themselves to their position, or even support their own domination – such as the sense that they are loosing out to minority groups, and their culture is being destroyed and undervalued by intellectuals, and they need more ‘free markets.’ Such positions may express the group’s practice to an extent, or they would have no appeal, but the positions may also ignore people’s more immediate problems, and propose solutions which only add further pain to their position.

Foucault, in his early work, suggested that ideas were patterned by an ‘episteme’ which linked things together in particular ways. For some reason or other (its not clear to me), the ‘episteme’ would change, and previous ideas would no longer make sense, or seem persuasive, and a new episteme would begin, which would have been incomprehensible to people working in the old episteme. For Foucault, Marxism is just another 19th Century mode of thinking that is no longer comprehensible in the current episteme, without a lot of work.

What I am suggesting is that these Marxist and Foucauldian positions are too systematic and, to some extent, ignore the force of previous developments on current popular forms of ideas.

Myths again

Myths are related to some previous patterns of ideas or tradition, and not any idea is likely to have mass appeal. There are many possible patterns of thought, not just a few, there is no extreme break between succeeding patterns, or necessary coherence between co-existing patterns.

The ‘myths’ I am discussing, are tied in with previous Western ways of understanding the world. They don’t have to mesh with each other perfectly. They can be wheeled into play when a group thinks them useful, or effective. Importantly, all these myths imply paradox or what I will call ‘counter-positions’. They imply a contradictory movement, as part of the myth’s governing dynamic. These paradoxes, when unrecognized may not help us deal with the situation we find ourselves in, they can split our energies and undermine our attempts at conceiving reality and our attempts to deal with that reality, but recognizing the paradox may open us up to new, more beneficial ways of conceiving the world.

Looking at the myths used to express Western relations to nature and disorder helps us to understand our ways of conceiving and persuading. People do not have to believe these myths, or take them as absolutely true, or nameable, for them to have effect; the myths are present in their collective history.

Here, I will discuss stories which I have classed as ‘Creation’, ‘Eden’, ‘Apocalypse-Millenium’, ‘Prometheus,’ ‘Justice’, ‘Reality is Elsewhere’, ‘The Problem’, the ‘Religion of the Market’ (see also Hulme 2009) and ‘Individualistic Rebellion’.

Although these myths are only nine amongst many, all are rife with immobilising paradox. The hope is that by realizing the source of our immobility, and being able to sit with the paradox, we may be able to move forward in a more creative way….

Next: Myths of Climate 01: Creation, order and disorder

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