After Sustainability

Denial, Hope, Retrieval

John Foster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781134549382
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

Dangerous climate change is coming.

Some people still deny that it is happening. Others refuse to recognise that it is now too late to prevent it. But both these reactions spring from the same source: our pathological attachment to 'progress', of which sustainability has been one more version.

After Sustainability traces that attachment to its roots in the ways we make sense of ourselves. Original and accessible, this is philosophy on the edge, written for anyone who glimpses our environmental tragedy and cares about our future.

Does the challenge to stop pretending offer our only remaining chance? Read this book and make up your own mind.

I Denial

1 VARIETIES OF DENIAL

DOI: 10.4324/9781315888576-2

Denial is, as we have seen, an environmentally crucial issue. But we need to be clear what is being meant by the term.

There are of course still a few people who will deny that humans are decimating the biosphere and warming up the atmosphere, simply because they believe these things not to be the case. That, however, is a position which by now, in a wired and mass-communicating world, can only really be taken by the ignorant or the misinformed. The extent and direction of cumulative adverse change have now been so plainly evident to the relevantly expert eye for so long, while the scientific, economic and sociological explanations that decisively relate this to human activity have also been so widely available, that deniers in this very crude and basic sense no longer have any vestige of an excuse.

Human nature being what it is, the ignorant will always be around. But it is not with them that the real trouble lies. After all, in the ordinary way of things, ignorance is removed by correct information combining with appropriate experience. If, however, simply telling people the truth about what they can increasingly see to be happening to the world were all that was required, we might have expected there to be a far more active acceptance of the need to make radical changes to Western lifestyles in the face of global warming, in particular, than any evidence suggests there has been.

The forms of denial that should worry us are those that are in one way or another willed – those where what is denied is also, and at some other level, recognised to be true, or to have a good chance of being true: where denial is not straightforward, albeit misplaced, belief to the contrary, but explicit rejection of what is tacitly admitted but unacceptable. Such denial is not amenable to being overcome by improved access to the facts – exposure to the facts can, indeed, tend to strengthen it. That is because willed denial always goes with vested interests of one kind or another. It is always a form of refusing to know something that really we do know, or have at any rate very strong grounds for suspecting, because we have too much staked on not admitting it. It has been recognised for some time that this reaction is peculiarly prevalent among those who are not ignorant or misled about anthropogenic climate change.

Denial: literal, interpretive and implicative

As such, willed denial takes various forms and operates at different levels. These can be explicated effectively within a framework originated by the late Stanley Cohen.¹ A sociologist, he develops his analysis in the context of reactions to atrocities, human rights violations and other kinds of abuse, but it transfers readily to environmental situations, and in particular to that of climate change.

Cohen distinguishes literal from what he calls interpretive and implicatory denial. We could sketch a quick preliminary distinction among these varieties as follows. Literal denial says, of something tacitly recognised as a cause for concern, that there is nothing really the matter – appearances here are deceptive and actually, on proper scrutiny, there's no problem. Interpretive denial says, usually more plausibly, that while something is indeed the matter, it's not actually that serious – what is at issue has been wrongly interpreted, misconstrued, maybe blown out of proportion by doomsayers, but there's nothing here we can't deal with. Implicatory denial pursues the same goal of reassurance, but by a different route. It says in effect: OK, it's serious – let's not go there. This recourse clearly cannot be adopted as blatantly as that. Indeed, for it to work at all the fact that it is being resorted to must not be crudely apparent. But changing the subject, that is, quasi-intentionally not following up on the uncomfortable implications for thought and action of the admission that things are serious, is nevertheless the essential tactic.

How it is that the human mind can play this kind of trick – can simultaneously both recognise and avoid recognising the same thing to be the case, while also both knowing and not knowing that this is what it is doing – is a fascinating study in itself. Attempts at explanation have included the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre's classic account of bad faith – ‘a certain art of forming contradictory concepts which unite in themselves both an idea and the negation of that idea’ – as a fundamental potentiality of human consciousness,² and also the Freudian concept of disavowal as a mode of psychic defence against traumatic experience and anxiety-inducing perceptions.³ I have myself invoked the former, and others more recently the latter kind of account, in relation to our stance towards climate change.⁴ We shall need to return to this briefly at the end of the chapter. Meanwhile, we must see how these three forms of denial are actually represented in the climate change arena.

About literal denial there is no call to say much here. This appears in our field as the assertion that anthropogenic climate change isn't really happening. It is different from mere substantive ignorance, and much more reprehensible, because it involves identifiable processes of active ignoring. It is most clearly evident when a great deal of well-funded ideological effort (in the service of very obvious corporate vested interests) goes into rubbishing the relevant science and encouraging climate change scepticism. Literal denial here involves the choice, which will always at some level be a matter of willed inclination, to get one's ‘information’ on the topic from this kind of source, or from the hired press which lackeys it. We already know quite enough about the bad guys. But much more to the point, as I suggested in the Prologue, is to explore how denial has also been apparent on the side of the angels.

Not that some of the bad guys haven't visited the reformatory, albeit under compulsion. Closely related to literal denial here, and often driving the disinformation that facilitates it, is refusal of responsibility – a self-interested turning away from the climate issues by those hoping to profit from carbon-intensive activities in the short term and leave the mess for successor generations to deal with. One very notable achievement of the environmental movement to date has been to make this irresponsibility harder to get away with than it used to be. Even corporations can be shamed, and a good many whose strategy this was (the naming of names would for obvious reasons be ill-advised, but readers will be able to supply their own instances) have now been forced, either by consumer pressure, shareholder activism or simply changing public attitudes, to move to a less exposed position.

That position, however, has typically been one of interpretive denial. They have joined the very numerous camp of those who admit the carbon threat, but deny that it represents anything beyond our technological and administrative capacities to overcome. In interpretive denial, the facts are not challenged but are interpreted in a way that makes them acceptable, or at any rate significantly less unacceptable: in Cohen's examples, ‘I am a social drinker, not an alcoholic; what happened was not really “rape” … this was population exchange, not ethnic cleansing; the arms deal was not illegal, and was not really an arms deal … ’.⁵ As regards climate change, those now doing the damage or variously complicit in it, having been compelled to recognise that it is indeed damage that they are doing, clearly have vested interests in interpreting global warming as something essentially tractable and manageable. In particular, runs this interpretation, we can address and manage its consequences without having to change dramatically the structures and ‘standard of living’, so-called, of the advanced Western societies – to which we in those societies have so long been accustomed, and which the rest of the world strives increasingly to emulate. Those who profit from selling the blizzard of stuff constituting the standard of living, or the means to the frantic mechanical scurrying in the course of which we acquire and dispose of all this stuff, or the complex network of services that support the whole mad merry-go-round, have their vested interests in going on turning a quick buck, even if some of the bucks now have to be, or to be represented as being, ‘green bucks’. And those charged with governing the societies and administering the economies have a vested interest in covering their backs by seeming to square up in a competent and hard-headed way to problems about which growing numbers of their more articulate constituencies are disquieted, while actually doing nothing that would make the whole business of daily modern life noticeably different.

Meanwhile, the majority of people, whose main vested interest is in getting through that ordinary business of life without being haunted by a huge background worry of this kind, rely complacently (when the issue is allowed to come up at all) on the reassuring thoughts that our scientists are marvellously inventive and nature is actually a lot more resilient than we suppose.

So far, so all-too-sadly familiar. As we shall see, however, that is not the whole story, and interpretive denial of the facts of climate change has lately acquired some unexpected new exponents.

‘The social production of innocence'

Perhaps the most interesting place to start probing, however, is with an environmental example of Cohen's implicatory denial, where what are denied or minimised are not the facts or their ordinary significance, but rather the psychological, political or moral implications that would conventionally follow from such facts. A disturbing recent book has shown in close detail how a case-study community both widely alert to the issues and directly exposed to the early consequences of anthropogenic climate change, still deploys what are in effect collaborative forms of double-think to preserve the ways of life that it can see to be causing the damage.

In this study,⁶ Kari Norgaard provides a thorough, careful and well-documented exploration of how various social processes implementing this order of denial operate. The case-study community is from Norway, which as well as being probably one of the best environmentally-educated societies in the world is (or was in 2009) the world's fifth largest exporter of oil and second largest of natural gas. It is a land, too, both of traditionally eager skiers and of winter snows which are – thanks to climate change – observably receding. Norgaard demonstrates how, faced with these tensions in theory and experience, members of a representative Norwegian community rely on a cultural toolkit of resources for negotiating them. She shows the community bringing to bear, through its ordinary daily interactions, social norms of conversation, emotion and attention to screen, by tacit common consent, what can acceptably be talked about, appropriately felt and brought into any shared practical focus.

Norgaard notes how ‘ignoring something – especially ignoring a problem that is both important and disturbing – can actually take quite a bit of work’.⁷ Active ignoring, we have already noted, is also a main feature of literal denial – but in this Norwegian case, the effects of climate change are simply too visible for their non-existence to be asserted, so the work involved is a lot subtler and requires a good deal of carefully inhibited self-awareness. In the nature of this work, it is not going to be achieved by the individual alone – it is bound to be a tacitly collaborative enterprise. With abundant illustration drawn from a considerable period of local engagement as a participant-researcher, the author shows this enterprise being carried on through observation of a variety of dialogical norms: the broaching of climate-change topics mainly at the level of small-talk, so that discussion cannot get too intense; confining political discussion to the local and do-able; ensuring that ways of raising the topic in educational contexts are positive and not disconcertingly scary for the kids; and keeping family and friendship conversational spaces undisturbed by ‘external’ worries. In parallel, norms of emotion emphasising the importance of control and self-possession (key traits, apparently, in the traditional Norwegian self-image) are deployed to mute the experienced intractability of climate change and to distance whatever cannot be brought within the domain of the rationally manageable. At the same time norms of attention – ‘the social standard of “normal” things to think about’ – construct a double reality in which climate change futures are acknowledged, but kept out of the sphere of ‘real life’ organised by predominant attention to the past and the present. All this is aided by an underlying mythic narrative of Norway as a small but well-ordered land of pristine nature and committed nature lovers, an image that plays a large part in maintaining what Norgaard calls, in a telling phrase, ‘the social production of innocence’ in relation to climate change.

But innocence here is a much more fine-grained condition than mere lack of knowledge or agency. What is socially produced under these pressures is not so much the suppression of well-attested information about causes and consequences, as the muting of its discordance with ordinary life-expectations in an advanced technological society; not so much the refusal to acknowledge collective responsibility, as the rendering acknowledged responsibility collectively habitable. The Norwegian locale and situation were chosen in large part for the peculiar starkness with which they bring out these features, but once alerted to them we can see that the issues are of quite general relevance. They transfer very readily, for instance, to the British context if we substitute slightly different norms and mythic references (the stiff upper lip, the amused, tolerant dismissal of eccentrics who take things too seriously, or the narrative of Britain as a liberal society with a long tradition of careful, adaptive assimilation of new ideas and developments). Social processes of implicatory denial, in fact, subsisting in culturally and historically varying patterns of relation with the literal and interpretive varieties, can be seen to characterise all those societies advanced enough for a strong leavening of climate change awareness to have permeated them, however that is expressed in their different political arrangements and intellectual profiles. Faced with a choice between, on the one hand, registering unequivocally what is both understood in principle and actually obtruding itself on their recognition, and, on the other hand, continuing in the courses of activity in which they have invested their lives, people find ways of both seeing and not seeing – and not just in Norway but across the Western and ‘Northern’ world, and increasingly elsewhere.

Nor is it just the essentially uncommitted who react thus: and here we come to a point of major importance. Paradoxically (at first blush), these ways of seeing-and-not-seeing often include engaging, and even engaging still more vigorously than before, in various forms of environmental activism at the level of small-scale local improvements in ‘sustainability’. This is an obvious and on the face of it perfectly rational response to living in ‘risk society’. As one of the people quoted i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Prologue: the end of pretending?
• Part I Denial
• Part II Hope
• Part III Retrieval
• Coda: can we learn?
• Bibliography
• Index