Modernity and the climate change response

Opinion
Christopher Nagle
09 Dec 2009

Jo Chandler, a Melbourne Age journalist, wrote an article in its June 13th 2009 issue about a climate scientist by the name of Graeme Pearman, who out of frustration at the widespread non response to the science of anthropogenic global warming, started to explore the psychology of this phenomenon.

Pearman grasps at this vexed problem by referring back to a long accumulation of economic practices, social norms and collective understandings that are forced to confront an overwhelming awful question about the sustainability of where they are leading us.

Pearman talks of Prof Ross Garnaut’s comment that the climate issue has ‘diabolical’ qualities that push the issue into the far too hard basket. What is surprising to me is that this is surprising, or even needs its own special investigation.

Denial, evasion, crabbing, delay and obstruction of unpalatable information and attempts to act on it, are normal human behaviors, at all levels, all the time.

And always, eventually, the unpalatable facts have their way, at a cost to the protagonists in direct proportion to the initial severity of the problems they raise and the compounding damage caused by the delays and obstructions in dealing with them. The reasons aren’t hard to find and historical precedent is instructive as to why various societies do or do not respond to powerful change vectors.

The Chinese and the Japanese in the middle nineteenth century were very similar in many ways, but when the Westerners smashed in their front doors, the Japanese soldier governors embraced the industrial package being rammed at them and rapidly built one of their own. The Chinese mandarins couldn’t bring themselves to do this and the country rapidly became a shambles that took over a century to fix.

The Chinese had been so large, so successful, so technologically advanced, so cultivated, and until the European Industrial Revolution, possessed of by far the most powerful state on earth since Egyptian times, as well as boasting a very secure existing dynasty to run it. They didn’t feel the need to change a thing or learn anything new, especially from smelly and hairy faced white barbarians.

The Chinese cities had long been ready to industrialize, but in 1432 the Imperial Government suppressed the emergence of capitalism. What self respecting society could possibly allow jumped up merchants and manufacturing artisans to get above their station?

When they eventually did start to westernize, the traditional political and cultural system of administration completely collapsed, descended into warlordism, became vulnerable to foreign interference and invasion, and nothing in the way of western innovation that they adopted seemed to work, except in isolated foreign dominated enclaves.

The Japanese on the other hand, could face the challenge, not because they were any less conservative, xenophobic, arrogant or isolationist than their neighbors, but because a significant part of the feudal ruling class of soldier intellectuals had long been seething with curiosity about The Westerners, even though this was forbidden by the government at the time.

Japan’s military dictatorship was firmly in control and had been for two hundred years, but fundamentally its political arrangements were unstable and depended on military mastery at the center, which was promptly punctured when the Westerners arrived.

Japan’s political outsiders in particular were impatient to get hold of world beating modern military toys, the arsenals that would make them, the modern economy that could support their development and the modern state that would organize the necessary large standing armed forces necessary to repel barbarians and build an empire of their own.

Japanese cities were ready to industrialize and chaffing at the restrictions placed on them. When they did westernize, only the business of producing goods and services changed. Everything else remained exactly as it was. Its institutions were imported but its ethos, capital base, command and major ownership structures were strictly samurai.

By embracing the threat and empowering themselves to act to meet it very decisively and rapidly, they were able to do it their way and stay in control of their fate.

Like the Chinese, we confront an epoch changing challenge every bit as formidable as the crisis of modernization itself, with the same sort of sunny assumptions about the superiority of the system we live under.

The Industrial Revolution, which marked the mature emergence of modern times on the world stage, made its way into history through the mining and conversion of buried carbon into mechanical mass production. This was and continues to be its enduring underpin and defining symbol.

More, every time this new system looked like it might run into a problem, whether it was the Malthusian population time bomb in the eighteenth century, or Erlich et al on the resource limits to growth in the later twentieth, it has always found a new seam of technological fixes and/or resources to mine, to confound the naysayers.

There is therefore an overwhelming and almost universally accepted cultural assumption about the ‘progress’ of the last two hundred and fifty years, that the industrial system is both irreversible and infallibly self correcting.

What couldn’t and still can’t be countenanced, was that Malthus’ and Erlich’s warnings might bide their time inside the system’s exponential growth, waiting to return to bite us on a vastly greater scale than the original critics could have ever imagined.

Still less to be countenanced, is that a gas that is as benign for plants as oxygen is for us, could suddenly come out of left field and not only trump them all, but leverage many of the other threats waiting in the wings.

Modern Times brought pre modern societies challenges that were as deadly and painful as they were inescapable. The ability to meet this challenge was not just a matter of material resources and know how, but on the fortuitous alignment of social forces engaged at the point of historical contact

In Japan, disruption of the status quo caused by outside intervention, triggered waiting and available forces of change. In China there weren’t any and it just triggered contempt, indifference, then grudging marginal accommodation, reactionary denial and finally, an uncontrolled plunge into the maelstrom.

We are doing ‘a China’ because there are painfully few social forces with any sort of clout, that see themselves as benefiting from changes towards a lean running society. It is going to take a lot more than a few Green Senators and some miserably small green industries to transform our situation, either rapidly or decisively.

If we were going to save ourselves from sailing past the critical two degree global temperature increase mark, powerful social forces for change should have already emerged to take us there.

The trouble is, nobody wants to lose any of their myriad technological servants and conveniences, or the physical ease of capital intensive work, or the bright lights and glitz of the cities, or the security of a nanny state, or the prospect of ever more and better toys, fixes and pleasures.

The consumer society has been phenomenally successful in meeting the needs we need and the needs we don’t. And even if the price of gaining this lifestyle has been ecologically and socially horrendous, who can now imagine ‘going back’ or giving anything up? Who really wants to completely restructure and downsize our economy to keep global warming from going over the critical tipping point of no return?

And the fact is we have built a whole world completely dependent on the ongoing success of this system. We have gone far too far and far too long with the industrial experiment now to contemplate the unthinkable possibility that it was all a fatally flawed mistake from the beginning and that the Chinese Imperial mandarins were quite right to throw it into the garbage bin of their history.

In the circumstances, might not retreat be every bit as fraught with danger as gambling on the next technological fix, breakthrough or discovery?

Only as a result of overwhelming scientific warnings (but still in the face of stiff industrial resistance and populist pseudo scientific denialism) are we glacially moving from contemptuous indifference to the threat of global warming, to wary tinkering at its edges in ways that maintain the status quo, just like the Chinese did.

And we will likely suffer the Chinese fate as dominant entrenched economic interest fight to the last gasp (just as the ‘Peking’ Imperial government did) to hold onto their past glories, or pull off one last gambit, while docile civil populations passively go along with them because they are not capable of or willing to shake them off.

China’s failure to modernize cost it a tragic century. Similar failure on the tail end of the modern period will be global, apocalyptic and last for many millennia. Ecological disturbance doesn’t fix itself within human historical time scales. I think that is what Pearson meant when he spoke of this problem as being ‘diabolical’.

An emergent counter force will only ever happen if it can redefine wealth sufficiently to keep us ‘rich’ and ‘growing’ even as the old consumer society is disassembled back to the basics, by replacing it with social and psychological software product, organized and delivered by a network marketing system to the poor at heart and the spiritually hungry.

The cultural landscape of the late consumer period is rapidly becoming a dysfunctional nightmare in the face of protracted social asset stripping by an increasingly totalitarian market system.

Thus any organization that can credibly deliver a program to reverse this will grow very quickly, because it will meet a primary need and have a very familiar ‘feel’, that uses the terms and understandings of a modern society to deliver what would in a previous age have been called salvation, or redemption.

It will in all likelihood emerge too late now to do anything but make the best of a bad situation, by building tougher, more stable, more resilient, more disciplined and socially attractive people, who at their best, will have an aura about them that will make them seem capable of thriving when all else seems lost.

This is not a gaunt hope, but a rich one for what will become a gaunt, wracked and dangerous time to live.

Pearman’s attempt to enquire into the psychological roots of our tardiness with regards to human induced climate change lacks the perspective of social and historical analysis, but it is nonetheless an important part of the process of understanding our predicament, even if right now there is very little we can do to change it in time to avoid substantial damage.