The Convenient Truth of Climate Change

We're being forced to do what we should have been doing anyway.

Hi, everyone! Sorry about the extended hiatus: in addition to traveling for a while, I’ve needed time to think about the form I want this blog to take going forward. So far, I’ve been trying to lay out at least the foundation for a comprehensive system of thought, beginning with a discussion of the nature of reality and its fundamental paradox of unity vs. individuality. And while I hope that’s been interesting and useful, I think I’m going to leave the systematizing for other forums and use this space more for one-off reflections, whether about current events or my own work. Of course, the system stuff will certainly crop up, but I’ll try to encapsulate and contextualize it among the other things I want to talk about. Hopefully that will make what I share here more immediately relevant and not require people to have read a whole bunch of older posts to make sense of what I’m trying to say.

That said, I’d reached a point in my last post where I wanted to talk less about the nature of reality and more about the ethical impact of that reality, that is, what the fact that we’re all parts of a universal whole means in our day-to-day lives. There are some abstract ethical principles that I think will be found at the heart of all the particular ethical discussions I want to have, and I’ll try to draw those out at certain points, but hopefully the more concrete topics I want to focus on will contextualize those ethical principles and make them more immediately useful.

So, for my first post back, I want to talk about the most comprehensive ethical challenge we currently face: climate change. 

This is what many liberal commentators get wrong when they assume that climate action is futile because it asks us to sacrifice in the name of far-off benefits. “How can you persuade the human race to put the future ahead of the present?” asked Observer columnist Nick Cohen despondently. The answer is that you don’t. You point out, as Yoshitani does, that for a great many people, climate action is their best hope for a better present, and a future far more exciting than anything else currently on offer. — Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything

I’ve been reading Naomi Klein’s absolutely essential book, This Changes Everything, about climate change, its causes, and its solutions, and one theme has especially resonated with me. As she herself puts it, the climate crisis is not an inconvenient truth requiring painful sacrifices for an impersonal greater good, or for a future we ourselves won’t see. Rather, the climate crisis is providing the impetus to fix what’s wrong with our economy and our culture so that we can live better lives today. The lifestyle changes required at the individual and political level that an effective climate response requires only amount to “giving things up” from a purely individualistic mindset that isn’t serving us anyway, either from an emotional/psychological standpoint or, ultimately, a physical one, as our lifestyle is rapidly degrading the conditions for life on Earth. The vast majority of human beings are not “winners” in any sense in our current system, and even among the middle and upper classes in “developed” countries there are crises of depression, anxiety, and loneliness that are the result of the individualism at the root of capitalism.

On the other hand, the economic and political changes we need to make in order to combat the climate crisis simply from a pragmatic perspective of avoiding a civilization-ending ecological catastrophe—e.g. transitioning to a degrowth economic model, ending our consumption of fossil fuels, consuming less in general and sharing more in common—have the potential to not only reduce the radical economic inequality inherent to our current system but also combat the individualistic worldview that has alienated so many people even in privileged communities. This is because these changes would be the result of our being forced to act like what we already are, both as a species and as individuals: parts of an integrated, organic whole, rather than would-be conquerors afloat in a mechanistic and hostile nature. We cannot be healthy as individuals or as a species outside of this organic context, so, far from standing to lose anything (most of which we don’t need anyway—seriously, think of all the crap we own and all the crap on all those shelves in all those big box stores), the changes we’re being forced to make will allow us to gain, or regain, many of the most valuable parts of our humanity.

There is no longer any doubt that these changes must happen, and must happen immediately if we are to avoid the greatest ecological catastrophe to ever befall the Earth. Furthermore, there are excellent reasons to believe they will improve, not deteriorate, everyone’s quality of life. So why is there so much ferocious resistance to them? The answer is that the people who have gained the most from the status quo (in a material if not a spiritual sense), and who therefore have the most to lose by its abolition, have promoted their worldview over the past hundreds (arguably, thousands) of years to the point that it has simply become common sense, invisible to rational scrutiny. This worldview states that everyone is fundamentally out for themselves, and that it is only by accumulating as many resources for ourselves as possible that we can potentially protect ourselves from the depredations of other people or the dangers of a cruel and alien Earth. Think about the fears deployed against us to force us to do things we otherwise wouldn’t: if you don’t sell your labor, you will end up on the street and die alone, unwanted by anyone. Once you do sell your labor, you have to make sure you have enough money saved to avoid getting thrown out on the street when you’re too old to sell your labor any more. And then you need even more money to defend yourself against inevitable market shocks (or it’s the street for you again). And then you need to make enough money to pay to protect your money, and on and on. This is the gun that’s held to all our heads, and every time we comply, the people in power get a little richer. This is the basic shape of our worldview of individualism and accumulation.

But the convenient truth, as Naomi Klein puts it, is that this worldview must, if even for no other reason than pragmatism, be cast aside for one that is based not on individualism and accumulation but rather on community and resource sharing. It is convenient because it’s what would be best for us anyway; we are, in effect, being forced to build the kind of world that the best of us have been trying to build anyway, one that is just, with real freedom and security for all. In order to help this transition along, though, we need to learn to recognize the self-serving fictions deployed against us by the powerful, free our imaginations to conceive of better ways of living, and, most of all, realize the kind of beings we are and the things we actually need: not possessions, but connections with other people and with nature. By making those connections, we become more fully ourselves because, in the end, we are more than individuals; we are these connections and everything they connect. We are the whole. And by making the transition to a new kind of world, we stand to lose nothing we actually needed, and stand to gain a new life for ourselves—not in the future, but now.