Today, as we debate whether to actively accelerate and magnify the extinction event in which we find ourselves, whether merely to watch the feedback effects of our activity as forests burn and permafrost melts or whether to make the Herculean effort to slow or even stop it at some point in the future, our entire debate is framed in terms of knowledge.
The bad guys in the climate debate are “deniers,” people who fail to believe that the climate is destabilizing and entering into a crisis. They push “debunked” “junk science” that tells people falsehoods about whether our planet is warming and what the causes of this might be. The good guys “raise awareness” about climate change. We “debunk” bad science and tell people what the correct science is. The “deniers” love this because they get to play dumb, to pretend they have not noticed the climate changing, that they believe the threadbare, unbelievable lies put forward by industry-funded think tanks or claim they buy into Donald Trump’s or Alex Jones’ absurd conspiracy theories about all the scientists being in some sort of Chinese conspiracy to ruin America.
What sits at the core of this belief is the idea, one much beloved by those who identify as “progressives” that we human beings are rational choice-makers whose behaviour changes based on new, more accurate, up-to-date information. Liberals and progressives narrate their own lives this way, claiming that they learned a new piece of information and that this changed their outlook or behaviour in some important way. This is often tied to their sense of self-worth. Progressives often think of themselves as smarter and better-informed than average; they understand themselves to be smarter than those around them and, consequently, more able to avail themselves of the best and most correct information and to digest that information faster and more comprehensively.
That is why progressives will often conceptualize their efforts to achieve political change as “raising awareness.” “People do not presently agree with me,” they reason, “This must be because they have less information than I do. When they have the same information I have, they will agree with me. Therefore I must work to give them the information that I have so that they will think the thoughts I think and then do what I know needs to be done.”
When a progressive looks at the global climate debate, they see a mass of misinformation being pushed by mainstream and conservative media and they see this being repeated by people who disagree with them. So, they conclude that they have to do a better job of discrediting misinformation and replacing it with correct information. And, because this is such a colossal tactical blunder, that has produced abject failure for two generations, their adversaries encourage them to keep making that tactical choice.
The reality is that progressives are being trolled. They are being made fools of. Their adversaries are playing dumb. Nobody actually believes the nonsense peddled by climate deniers; it’s an excuse, a fig leaf. The modern conservative playbook is increasingly indistinguishable from the shitty husband playbook. Protracted fighting in long-term marriages is largely composed of feigned ignorance: “I didn’t know that bothered you. I didn’t know I was doing that. I didn’t know the oven was still on. I didn’t know you couldn’t put bleach on that. I didn’t see the ‘dry clean only’ label.” And modern conservatives, the gleeful family annihilators that now run the movement love how the joke is on the progressives, how they, by playing dumb, have revealed that the progressives, with their stupid awareness-raising, are the actual idiots.
The reason that this is so is that whatever imaginative empathy progressives may once have had, they have now lost. Progressives cannot imagine that people are not like them, that someone could have the same information they do but want to do something else about it, because they have a different set of values, a different morality, a different theory of the good. Because progressives have completely imbibed the liberal theory of the self, they imagine that everyone is a utilitarian, a person who wishes to both maximize pleasure and minimize pain individually and to see that, at a population level, the greatest number experience the most good.
When they see poor evangelical Christians voting for policies that further impoverish them, they smugly think “those people are not acting rationally in their own interest. I guess they need to be made more aware.” The idea that people might conceive of their good in non-material terms is not considered, nor is the idea of sacrifice, collective or individual, that people may be choosing suffering in order to achieve something important, some change in the moral order or some deserved punishment being visited on others.
However, onset of action and durability of each form of this ED levitra 40 mg treatment. The Canadian government stipulates a price ceiling which the medicine manufacturers are bound cialis wholesale prices to adhere while handing the drugs over to the Bluetooth device and take that important call. These easily obtainable medicines today took our ancestors’ ages to discover levitra cialis and formulate. Before the invention of the lowest prices on viagra opacc.cv, some of the company does not want any medical prescription and sometimes you have to take care of that you are looking to purchase honest to goodness levitra on the web, you should ask yourself: Is it conceivable to find the site supplier? Is the solution being composed by an enlisted medicinal expert? Does the solution begin from an authorized legitimate source? Despite. One of the reasons I identify as a socialist and not a progressive is that socialists understand and make sacrifices. A socialist narrative is one populated by heroes and villains. A liberal or progressive narrative is populated by individual choice-makers with inefficiently distributed information.
This progressive failure of imagination is being intensified by certain kinds of liberal identity politics. While cultural appropriation, i.e. the appropriation of non-monetized material and immaterial cultural production by the forces of capital, is wrong, the original idea of cultural appropriation has been vulgarized into something worse than useless. It has become the idea that to represent a person or group from a culture into which one was not born in literature, drama or anywhere, really, in one’s own creative work, is an injury, a theft, that engaging in acts of imaginative empathy, that placing oneself in the shoes of another is an act of imperialism rather than solidarity.
A phenomenon we call “standpoint epistemology” has further intensified this problem, arguing that the identity group into which one is born determines what is true about the shared, discoverable physical world, that if one is indigenous, the earth can be a different age than if one is English or Yoruba. Similarly, standpoint epistemology is often mobilized to bar people from outside an identity group from teaching, studying or publishing about that group’s experiences. I recall being angrily lectured in a bar just last year that it was an act of imperialism and violence against indigenous people that I once taught a First Nations history course.
Because it has become increasingly transgressive to engage in acts of imaginative empathy, not only do we see the larger leftist community increasingly fragmented; we also see it becoming increasingly strategically stupid. That is because the most important use of imaginative empathy is not to build solidarity and understanding with one’s allies. It is to guess what our enemies will do next. Because we cannot place ourselves in their (or anyone else’s) shoes, we cannot anticipate or counter their moves against us or guess what motivates them.
The climate denialists are not people who are benefit-seeking utilitarians and proud individual choice-makers and optimizers. They are members of a global death cult, one that they entered not by gaining new information but either by being born into it or, through something far more powerful than awareness: conversion.
In the progressive theory of personal and political transformation, change is caused when a person gains a bunch of new information that makes them realize that the best way to obtain what they want for themselves and others is different than they previously thought. In this way, their objective stays the same but their strategy for achieving that objective shifts. This is the “awareness” model of social change.
In a realistic theory of personal transformation, be it socialist, communist or conservative, change is caused when a person has a dramatic, realigning experience and they realize that what they wanted was the wrong thing to want and that they now want something else. They now understand themselves to be a different, better person who now wants something different and better. It is their objective, not their strategy that has shifted. This is the “conversion” model of social change.
And this is what those of us wishing to save the life on this planet must adopt. More on that soon.
