Consider what the two worldviews have in common. One of them looks back to a period of the past that is considered to be superior to the present, and draws inspiration from it. So a ‘primitivist’, for example, may look right back to the Palaeolithic era, before the development of agriculture, and hail this as the high point of human development. We lived in harmony with the natural world until the first grain seed was cultivated, after which we slid into a future of hierarchy, control and ecological destruction. Because there is no possibility of getting back to this period, and because we know very little about it, it is easy to project our emotional needs onto it. This is essentially the Christian narrative of the Fall retooled for an anti-capitalist age, and it has the same primal appeal.
It’s not hard to find people who swim in these waters. I’ve swum there myself, and I find it a tempting and comforting story. Perhaps buying into narratives such as this is foolish, or perhaps it is just human. But if it is foolish, is it any more so than indulging in fantasies about Moon bases and salvation by silicon chip? What is the difference between those who project their needs onto the past, and those who project them onto the future? What is the difference between someone who sees perfection in the ice age, and someone who sees perfection in the space age? It may not always be realistic to look to the past for inspiration, but at least we know, more or less, what the past was like. We have no idea what the future will bring. Perhaps that is the attraction: space is empty, in every sense, and that makes it big enough to contain all of our dreams, however baroque.
Still, if we are going to use words like ‘Romantic’, we should at least understand their provenance. The Romantic movement, which flourished during the first half of the nineteenth century, was a reaction to the utilitarianism of the eighteenth-century ‘Enlightenment’. It responded to the dehumanising impact of mass industry, the rationalisation of nature and the increasing emphasis on human reason, with a defence of an emotional, intuitive reaction to the natural world and to human relationships. Though it is perhaps best known today through the poetry of Wordsworth or the art of the German landscape painters, it was at the time just as deeply entwined with radical politics and an assault on the dogmas of materialism and scientism. If it sometimes idealised the past, that was probably an inevitable reaction to the bombastic championing of the future that was going on all around.
Personally, I don’t think the word ‘Romantic’ should be used as an insult at all; like its counterpart ‘Luddite’, it is a misused historical term. But if it must be – and perhaps it is too late to turn things around – then at least let it be an equal-opportunities insult. If it is to be used to condemn those who idealise particular time periods, let the time periods encompass those yet to come as well as those that have gone.
Looked at this way, the Mars-base future, like the future in which we rebuild passenger pigeons in laboratories, breed babies in machines and download our consciousness into silicon chips, is an exercise in space-age Romanticism. The kind of people who are disgusted by an idealised past can often barely contain their enthusiasm for an idealised future. And when objections are raised, they can dress their visions up in moral language: we must save the planet; we must provide new space for humans to develop and meet their ever-increasing needs. Expect to hear more of this in years to come, as the situation here on Earth grows more desperate.
What is to be done about this? The answer to this question, as so often, seems to me to be personal rather than political. There is no way to prevent this society from Romanticising progress and technology, and there is no way to prevent it coming down hard on visions of human-scale and ecological development. It will continue to do this until its own intellectual framework, and probably its physical framework, collapses under its own weight. These attitudes are in our space-age DNA.
But what we can do, when presented with a vision that projects an ideal onto either the future or the past, is examine our own personal need to be deluded. Engage with any of the world’s great spiritual teachers, or many of its secular philosophers, and you will come across the claim that most of us, most of the time, are caught up in our own delusions. That is to say, we are creating our own mental maps of the world, by which we navigate its harsh tracts, and we are hugely reluctant to see these maps taken from us, or to see any of the directions printed on them questioned. These maps may be religious, philosophical, political or any variation of these things. But they mean that when we look out at the world, we don’t see the world itself, we see our own perception of it, and that perception of it is coloured by our own emotional needs.
So, if we need to believe in progress, we will believe in progress. If we need to believe in Apocalypse, we will believe in that. If we need to deny the existence of climate change, or believe we can go back to the Pleistocene or forward to the Martian future, we will believe those things, and as long as we want to believe them, nothing can tear those maps from our hands.
The purpose of delusions is to comfort us, and our space-age delusions comfort us on a civilisational level. The best way around them is probably to examine our own mental maps – and thus our own minds – and try to deflect them as they come. This is the work of a lifetime, but perhaps in the end it is the only work.
‘All that we are’, explained the Buddha 2,500 years ago, ‘is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think we become.’ We can see what our civilisation is becoming, and where it is going too. What delusions brought us here – and how do we begin to strip them away?
Global Oneness Project, 2013
The Quants and the Poets
If, a century ago, the keenest talking heads of the age had battled it out among themselves about the future of infrastructure and energy, what would that debate have looked like? If, say, they had all agreed on the importance of rolling out a massive, global plan stretching decades into the future, based on endlessly argued-over scientific ‘facts’, which themselves disguised a lot of underlying political, cultural and social assumptions about the way the world is – what would they have been arguing about? Precisely how many ostlers would be needed by 1950? The importance of a large-scale dung clean-up operation on the streets of major cities? A research and development programme to investigate the plausibility of time machines? Sourcing the funding for an urgent nationwide rollout of dirigible charging stations?
Thoughts like these have been drifting into my head, then drifting out again, in recent weeks, as I have observed the world’s intellectual classes arguing furiously about nuclear energy. Not for the first time, a major nuclear accident – this time at the Fukushima plant in Japan – has focused human minds, at least for a few days, on where and how their miracle supplies of energy are produced. As usual, the result has been rancorous and almost entirely inconclusive.
I am, it is safe to say, no scientist (something I have in common with most of those who hold strong opinions on nuclear power, by the look of things) and I have no real idea what has gone on in those Japanese reactors (ditto). I don’t know, either, whether the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl will turn out to be the high-water mark of the global nuclear industry – something that would apparently be a triumph or a catastrophe depending on which pundit you’re listening to.
But I do wonder whether it is a high-water mark for the environmental movement. For a long time now, the green movement has been in retreat, and that retreat now seems in danger of turning into a rout. From a standing start four decades ago, the greens have seen some of their ideas (mainly the ones about using ‘our resources’ ‘sustainably’) spread widely and sometimes deeply into popular and political culture. They have also, inevitably, seen those ideas watered down. I have covered this subject before and don’t intend to do so again here in any detail, but it might be worth reflecting a little bit on the bind that the environmental movement now finds itself in, across the world.
At this point in history the all-consuming global industrial system – R. S. Thomas’s ‘Mach
ine’ – is effectively unstoppable; it will run on until it runs out. This Machine needs ‘resources’ – the products of natural systems – like a fish needs water. When the global scrabble for these resources is combined with accelerating technological change, a rising human population, the virus-like spread of consumer values, a mass-extinction event, a changing climate and resource scarcity in a number of (admittedly contested) areas, the results do not look pretty.
At this point, things get complicated. If we are highly politicised people, whose values and self-image are predicated on being ‘activists’ in the cause of preventing such terrible things, we may simply not allow ourselves to be honest about this. This is understandable and I know what it feels like, having been there myself for quite a long time. At this point, we have to lie to ourselves – to go into denial for the sake of our psychological health. So we might pretend to ourselves that ‘one more push’ (in other words, doing the same thing again) may do the trick. We might tell ourselves that The People are ignorant of The Facts and that if we enlighten them they will Act. We might believe that the right treaty has yet to be signed, or the right technology yet to be found, or that the problem is not too much growth and science and progress but too little of it. Or we might choose to believe that a Movement is needed to expose the lies being told to The People by The Bad Men In Power who are preventing The People from doing the rising up they will all want to do when they learn The Truth.
Whatever the story, it will be a story based on the need for an external event or events, which can only be brought into being by way of more ‘action’. This way, we can tell ourselves that the only thing to do is to keep on keeping on. After all, the alternative must be ‘giving up’ and watching the world burn.
This is where the greens are today. It is a hard place to be, and it is a place made even more fearsome by the single-minded obsession with climate change that has gripped environmentalism over the last decade. The fear of carbon has trumped all other issues – so much so that is now common in popular culture to see ‘green’ ideas represented simply as arguments about carbon emissions. Everything else has been stripped away.
It is in this context that the nuclear rumpus has occurred. A Japanese earthquake and tsunami ripped apart a nuclear power plant, and with barely a day’s grace the pundits were swooping on the place. Most of them seemed to see this tragedy simply as an opportunity to restate forcefully their existing positions on nuclear power – It will kill us! It will save us! – even as the fuel rods were still melting. But whatever the argument, the growing – and understandable – sense of desperation was the same.
If you believe that climate change will wreck the Earth – or at least this incarnation of it – and that the only way to prevent that from happening is to ‘reduce emissions’ in a fantastically short time period, then you are in a very perilous place. It’s not that this argument is necessarily wrong – it probably isn’t, though the lack of certainty is always worth highlighting. But it is so obviously impossible to do what it is claimed Must Be Done to stop it, that futility or despair can end up being the only places to turn.
My feeling is that the green movement has torpedoed itself with numbers. Its single-minded obsession with climate change, and its insistence on seeing this as an engineering challenge, which must be overcome with technological solutions guided by the neutral gaze of Science, has forced it into a ghetto. Many popular environmentalists (if that’s not a contradiction in terms) now spend their time arguing about whether they prefer windfarms to wave machines or nuclear power to carbon sequestration. They offer up remarkably confident predictions of what will happen if we do or don’t do this or that, all based on mind-numbing numbers grabbed from this or that ‘study’ as if the world were a giant spreadsheet that needs only to be balanced correctly.
In this, the green movement is only reflecting and feeding on wider societal trends. We live in a remarkably literal-minded and reductionistic culture. I’m struck listening to or reading the news, for example, by how nothing is seen to be ‘real’ unless it is sanctioned by the priesthoods of either Science or Economics, and preferably both. This is the kind of culture that produces an environmental movement made up of frustrated, passionate people who feel obliged to act like speak-your-weight machines in order to be heard.
If we want to move beyond the futility and despair imposed by the cold narrowness of this worldview, where do we look? What is missing here is stories, and an understanding of the importance of stories in getting to the bottom of what is really going on. Because, at root, this whole squabble between worldviews is not about numbers at all – it is about narratives.
The fight between the pro-nukers and the anti-nukers, for example, is actually quite archetypal. Though both sides pretend to be informed by ‘science’ and ‘facts’ both are actually informed primarily by intuition and prejudice. Whether you like nuclear power or not is a reflection of the kind of worldview you have: whether you are a confident embracer of the Western model of progress or whether it frightens or concerns you; whether you trust science or tend not to; whether you are cautious or reckless; whether you are ‘progressive’ or ‘conservative’. On issues ranging from genetically modified crops to capitalism, these are the underlying stories that inform the green debate. That they are then supported by a clutch of cherry-picked facts – easy to come by, after all, in the age of Wikipedia – is a footnote to what’s really going on.
The mess that the greens have got themselves into is at least partly due to them paying more attention to numbers than narratives. Green political thought, in its early incarnations, was radical and challenging. It was about the stories we tell ourselves about the world: stories about progress, industry, the conquest of nature and the like. The early greens challenged these stories with others, drawn in some cases from ecotopian imaginings about a better future but in many more cases from the stories of existing non-industrial societies: the Kalahari Bush People, for example, who lived for 35,000 years in a culture that managed to survive in remarkable harmony with non-human nature, even with lions prowling around the huts of its people. You want ‘sustainability’? The Bush People were the longest-recorded human culture. They were genuinely sustainable for longer than we can imagine. Industrial society got them in the end, like it gets everything, but the example remains.
This kind of thing, of course, was what made it so easy to attack environmentalists as Romantics and primitivists (which some of them were and still are). In response, environmentalists decided to get ‘serious’, so as to be listened to in the corridors of power. They started wearing suits and pretending to be economists and speaking the language of business and science. It was a perfectly sensible approach – the only approach, if they wanted to be heard by the power-brokers – and it yielded many clear dividends.
But it may also have doomed the greens in the longer term, for now they find themselves caught in a narrative of other people’s making. Almost by accident, mainstream green politics and argument threw out most of the alternative stories it grew up with, like a child throws out his old teddy bears: that was then, but this is now, and now we are Grown-Ups. This approach has left environmentalism in a position where its advocates now find themselves unable to do anything but argue about which machines they would prefer to use to power an ever-growing industrial economy. Any sally outside this tightly controlled ghetto sees them rained with bullets from all sides: accused of wishful thinking if they talk about zero-growth economies; called snobs and hypocrites if they criticise consumerism; attacked as terrorists if they engage in direct action to protect wild nature; called naive idealists if they ask whether planning for a future much like the present is really such a good idea.
This has always been the case, of course, but now the greens are being heard in the corridors of power the stakes are much higher. A global anti-green movement now exists and is growing in power and influence. Meanwhile, a once challenging movement has been taken over from within by smooth-tongued
purveyors of business-as-usual without the carbon. The message is clear: stick to arguing about the machines, and you’re welcome to play with the big boys. But drop all the other nonsense, OK? This, demonstrably, is how radical movements die.
I’m currently trying to get my head around exactly how the 2008 economic collapse happened, and in the cause of doing so I am reading John Lanchester’s book Whoops!, which explains it in terms that even people like me can grasp. This evening I was reading Lanchester’s description of how banks have changed in the last few decades. When the author’s father worked in banking, it was a staid business populated mostly by non-graduates. Today, if you don’t have a first-class maths degree from Oxbridge or an Ivy League university, you’ll find it hard making it in the industry. This, Lanchester suggests, is part of the problem: banking has become so specialist, so complex, that most people – including many bankers – simply don’t understand how it works.
The maths geeks who now run the futures and options operations in banking are known as ‘quants’. One MBA student quoted in the book reported that on his course the students were required to identify themselves as either ‘quants’ or ‘poets’. That is: did they do numbers, or did they do words?
These days, the green movement is being taken over by quants. It’s easy to see why. Quants present easy, numbered, labelled arguments which may sometimes require a maths degree but don’t require a rewiring of your worldview or an examination of your narrative. A green quant might be telling you to change your lightbulbs or come out on the streets in favour of a nuclear power plant or a windfarm, but he’s not asking you to examine your values or your society’s underlying mythology. And if you talk to him about this, it is very easy indeed for him to laugh and tell you loftily that this is all very nice but is hardly comparable to the serious business of saving the world one emission at a time.
Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays Page 4
