For someone who declares an end to the Age of Reason, as both an epistemological and a political project, with some frequency, it surprises me how often I underestimate the effects of this collapse on my immediate surroundings and the political reality in which I attempt to take action. So, once again, I am writing a mea culpa for failing to notice and describe, with clarity, some of the obvious consequences of the widespread abandonment of Enlightenment thinking. I have failed to notice that political movements that identify as conservative do not have ideas, thoughts or opinions about the climate crisis. They only superficially appear to.
What movements like the Trump Movement have are a set of social practices they use to respond to people who do have thoughts, ideas and opinions about climate. I used to think that the reason the forces of climate denial and the forces of climate justice could not have an actual debate was because the two movements practiced different epistemologies, that their ways of determining what is true were incompatible. So, they would not accept each other’s argumentation or each other’s evidence.
But, ironically, I think that this description actually awards the two groups too much common ground, not too little. That is because I did not think through the fact that the burden Enlightenment epistemology places on people is to assume that the purpose of saying things is to convey meaning and that meaning is made out of ideas about the world. But what if the episteme of Authenticity (or whatever is out-competing the old epistemology of the past) does not place these burdens on people? What if, culturally, it does not demand that the things that are said convey meaning and/or that meaning arises out of a description of how the world works?
The reality is that long before we great apes and other smart creatures decided to use conversation as a meaning-making, data-transfer activity, many spent thousands or millions of years taking turns making sounds, competitively, cooperatively, spontaneously or based on long-rehearsed material. Conversation is a rhythmic game used for many things and it is only in recent centuries that we have over-focused on its data transfer possibilities and logic co-processing capacities at the expense of more venerable functions. Perhaps those most eager to exit the Enlightenment are among the most eager to return to conversational basics.
So, let us consider that climate deniers and their ilk do not feel the need to have opinions or ideas about the climate, never mind expressing them in a conversational or epistolary context.
Because Authenticity, or whatever this new knowledge-power system turns out to be, sees things in intersubjective and social terms, rather than objective terms, opinions about scientifically-knowable processes are not so much wrong as uninteresting, outside the frame, unless they can somehow be recast in social terms.
So, that is what conservatives do when they are confronted by people expressing ideas about a shared, physical, inescapable reality that undergirds society without being able to be reshaped solely by social perceptions. Their goal is to draw the experience into a space that is of interest to them: the social. So, their goal is to say things calculated to produce anger, sadness, disappointment or disengagement but this does not mean that they think the things they are saying are, in any sense, descriptive of the world. They are not playing a meaning-making game; they are trying to force their interlocutor to stop playing it.
So, they might say, “the climate is not changing,” and, when confronted with evidence then say, “the climate is always changing and always has been.” They might say “carbon does not warm the planet” and then, moments later, “we need this carbon to warm the planet to stop the de-carbonization of the atmosphere over the past 500 million years.” They might say, “fossil fuels do not contribute significantly to carbon emissions,” followed by “if we don’t release all this carbon, the economy will collapse and everyone will starve,” followed by “carbon from fossil fuels doesn’t warm the atmosphere, only carbon from animals and plants does.” And on it goes.
What conservatives are doing is engaging in a social practice in which they often participate when we are not even there. They say In other viagra cheap prices terms, kamagra is viable penile enhancement pill, which provides males improved energy level and stamina to make bedtime moments perfect. Intake of Ginseng along with levitra 20 mg a diet plan and regular aerobic exercises. A recent study in the United Kingdom has documented, ‘In 2000, most of divorce cases were filed from women not satisfied with their husbands’ bedtime performance.’At that time, males did not have any effective medicine to treat viagra stores http://appalachianmagazine.com/2017/01/18/president-george-h-w-bush-placed-in-intensive-care-wife-barbara-also-hospitalized/ their erectile brokenness issue. Much should be possible to counteract or overcome a tadalafil from india hefty portion of the conditions that aggravate the psyche. these things to each other routinely, to identify as part of the same movement and practice the rhythmic game of conversation where people take turns making similar sounds.
So, what are these words that superficially appear to be ideas but, in reality, are not?
They are talking points.
“Talking points” is an idea that is not nearly as old as our collective amnesia says it is. It is a term arising from the neoliberal era and became important during the waves of industrial deregulation, de-unionization, wage rollbacks and expansion of manufacturing into peripheral agricultural regions like Mexico and India. The 1980s were also an age of product-tampering, a related phenomenon, as the decline in regulation made this form of industrial sabotage vastly easier.
This caused the burgeoning public relations business to specialize in a key area, “crisis communications,” special PR professionals within firms and, later, whole specialized firms like Navigator and RunSwitch, whose sole job was to deal with things like product recalls. The gold standard for crisis communication was Burson-Marsteller’s handling of Union Carbide’s massive industrial disaster in Bhopal in 1984 which killed 16,000 people and injured an additional 550,000.
Crisis communications developed a fundamentally different way of talking using something we call a “key message” and “talking points,” not to communicate but for the purpose of preventing or sabotaging communication. If a CEO or PR flak was being interviewed by the press, the idea was to refuse to answer any questions honestly or completely but instead to give a highly repetitive “key message,” whose purpose was partly to reassure listener but primarily to make them disengage, by beating all actual meaning out of the conversation by making answers unrelated to questions and making answers as repetitive and predictable as possible.
And these efforts were effective. They prevented corporations’ shares from declining too much in value by suppressing both information and attention. They were so effective that incumbent governments began using them as part of their messaging and experienced the same kind of improvements in public opinion.
Much of the stupidity of the recent political history of North America—and especially Canada—has come from people confusing talking points and key messages with successful persuasion. This evidentiarily-unsupported orthodoxy that one attains office by being repetitive, off-topic and hostile to conversation became so powerful that political parties and movements of all kinds adopted it. And its adoption was so widespread, so fast, that there was little opportunity to compare the use of talking points to other more conversational, informative strategies.
Worse yet, many on the liberal left now confuse talking points with ideas, when they are, in fact, the very opposite. And this has led to widespread, self-inflicted idiocy as people have tried to squeeze actual ideas into vessels expressly designed to be unable to hold them.
One of the reasons modern conservatism is ascendant is that it understands what talking points are: they are a conversational tactic, akin to the strategy of “cutting off the ring” in boxing. Consequently, liberals and progressives trying to use talking points are fighting with one hand tied behind their backs because they mistake what talking points are and insist on attempting to tether them to sense.
Modern conservatism does not call upon its followers to believe things about asocial phenomena like climate. And it does not call upon its followers to say things that are self-consistent or representative of ideas. Members of the Trump movement or the Bolsonaro movement or the Duterte movement might say lots of things about climate but this does not mean that they represent things they think about climate. Because what they think about climate is nothing at all.
