A while back I criticized the new global-warming ads from Environmental Defense for relying entirely on fear. I wrote an alternate script, based on hope and uplift.
According to near-universal consensus, my alternate script ... sucked.
Fine. But I still maintain that while fear might serve the short-term purpose of getting people's attention, like a burst of adrenaline, it won't suffice to produce substantial social change.
Happily, I'm not the only one thinking this way. Today in Salon, Kevin Sweeney offers an eloquent defense of hope.
The facts of climate change can be overwhelming. I recently observed focus groups in South Carolina, part of an effort to create messages to help moderates and conservatives understand the urgency of climate change. I saw lively conversations progress to a point when, abruptly, some of the participants began to shut down. As they grasped the urgency, they couldn't envision solutions or the political will to bring them about. They looked depressed.
Peter Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist, wrote, "It is hope, not despair, which makes successful revolutions." While this is a notion most American generations haven't needed to understand -- ours has been a fortunate history -- it may be time for us to learn it. When we tell stories of potential desperation, we must also find ways of offering hope. Always.
Word.
Comments
View as Threaded
EcoReason Posted 11:46 am
04 Apr 2006
It is important to notice the problems, identify them, worry over them, but making righteous indignation - of which sometimes too much on this blog - the center of political discourse and using it to frame of political motivations leads (after the adrenaline rush) absolutely nowhere.
A great book on the sixties, The Unravelling of America, by Allen J. Matusow makes the same point about the New Left; after the dust settled and Vietnam ended and Civil Rights bills were passed, there was little left to be righteously indignated about (well, actually there was a lot left, but it had been carefully packaged for the increasingly pliant U.S. media) and the movement descended into a kind of self-destructive madness (secret terrorist organizations bombing college campuses and kidnapping wealthy debutantes, etc.). It only knew what it was against, it never got its head around what it was for, and so when the things it was against seemed to disappear, well... Matusow argues this was an absence of true ideology, something we enviros suffer from too.
So, I follow up David's insistence on this point with a question that Matusow says the New Left never really answered for themselves:
Absent the great evil that motivates our anger and despair, what does the world look like if and when we've won? Let's take a minutes and stop talking about what we're fighting against and talk about what we're fighting for?
What is your hopeful vision? I dare you.
Peace,
Kip
Permalink
atreyger Posted 12:14 pm
04 Apr 2006
Permalink
EcoReason Posted 11:27 pm
04 Apr 2006
Who said there was anything hopeful about climate change?
The question was: What's your vision? Not, Why are you depressed. Is sitting around and wallowing in the fact that climate change is happening all you got for vision? Is that our future? Or are we allowed to try to think about what it is that is worth fighting for, and consider ideas that will appeal to people and generate the kind of political change that can help things? What is it that you'd like to see? Or is complaining and being depressing the only option?
Seriously, if you cannot think of what you are fighting for, then you are putting yourself into the same arena as those who create these problems, and, I'm with Matusow, it ain't got traction. They will out maneuver you in those grounds. You will fail and then you will really have reason to sit around and complain and be depressed, but, at that point, no one will be listening.
Any other takers?
Peace,
Kip
Permalink
Kif Scheuer Posted 11:44 pm
04 Apr 2006
People are paralyzed by climate change, not because it is too overwhelming, but because they're hearing about it in a society that has made no coherent effort to deal with it. Increasingly you hear people (Barack Obama may be the latest) talking about climate change as the next space race, or comparing it to the national mobilization of WWII, and I think that's where hopefulness comes in. During WWII we were confronted by very big, very scary problems - a world war led by facist countries with genocidal policies. Did the government avoid gloom and doom? No, just the opposite. People were told what the stakes were and exactly what they would and could do to help win the war. A stance of mobilization and unity behind a problem allows us to confront the very real challenges - as scary as they may be - but feel like we're 1) not alone in trying to do something and 2) hopeful that together we can beat this problem.
We should use fear and hope together. We don't just tell people what global warming is (which is overwhelmingly fearful) but we tell them how we will have to deal with it (with national level mobilization), what individuals, organizations and local governments are already doing (plenty in some areas), and what they can do to plug into that movement. If climate change is framed this way I believe people will be capable of facing the fear without losing hope.
Permalink
EcoReason Posted 12:55 am
05 Apr 2006
By this, I don't mean, what's your strategy? (Because I think your strategy is clear, and a good one.) I mean, what is the strategy trying to accomplish? What does a non-climate-changing, non-bio-diversity-destroying, human-health-respecting, vibrant-habitat-enhancing world look like? Is it dominated by huge multi-national coporations that control knowledge and information through slick ad campaigns? Is it led by nation-states rooted in the military and warfare? Does it contain 1 billion immiserated fellow human beings living in squalor? Do authoritarian leaders enforce environmental standards? Or, are we seeking something different? Can we really become green within the constraints of the current global power structure? Do we want to? These are the kinds of question that remain unanswered, yet. (And that all the informed fear in the world will probably not answer.)
Peace,
Kip
Permalink
Kif Scheuer Posted 1:58 am
05 Apr 2006
I do think a vision is required for this new world and I believe the current model does not offer that vision. Despite the popularity of Friedman's book, global warming (among other things) will push us back to a very un-flat and very local world. However, it's not just my world and I don't have the arrogance to think my vision is 100% correct - It was our culture of arrogance that created much of this mess to begin with (Diamond's "Collapse" and Scott's "Seeing like a state" have great historical examples).
Visioning a sustainable future is a lengthy, involved process that is equal parts discussion and experimentation. Utopian communities continually fail for a reason - if you lock up your future in today's vision, you have a hard time adapting to the messy fluid realities the future will bring. I've spent some time looking at how cohousing communities are forming in the US. Many of them set about with a single, seemingly simple goal - increasing community. Along the way, as they engage in a lengthy discussion about what kind of community they want to have, they often discover that just talking about what community means to them brings up environmental and equity concerns, they didn't know would be important when they started.
I think climate change is going to put people, willingly or not, in a position of trying out countless local visions. Some will be based on the current systems, some will be vastly different. But if I am correct in assuming that global warming is going to force some pretty intense re-localizations, then we are about to enter a period of experimentation about just which visions work. Some may be uglier than what we have today, some may be much more benign, but there is simply no way to control which ones people pursue, and even trying to could derail opportunities or disengage participants who may have a piece of the vision that we all need.
Personally I think we're going to have to use the system we've got to get the ball rolling and that means some of those same institutions are likely to endure for a time at least. So is the future likely to have multinational corporations, slick media and poverty? Yes. Is that my vision for an ideal future? No. I plan on engaging my local and professional community in discussions about those visions and hope that we can work towards a society that assigns "value" to things that bring about health, well-being and joy (a la Bhutan or redefining progress' GPI). At the same time I look forward to seeing other communities explore their visions and perhaps share in their discoveries.
Perhaps in one sense I've totally dodged your call to describe my own vision, but in another sense I've described my vision of a society in which the definition of what we want from life and society is an ongoing project with much more visibility than we have today. In such a society I believe more of the things I believe are goods (like equity, environmental health, restraints on corporate power) will be valued and sustained. I guess my vision is about how we relate to each other not about the color of our houses.
Permalink
dlondonx Posted 2:21 am
05 Apr 2006
Permalink
David Roberts Posted 2:55 am
05 Apr 2006
www.grist.org
Permalink
EcoReason Posted 6:11 am
05 Apr 2006
This is the sort of thinking and articulation that all of us ought to be doing:
"A society in which the definition of what we want from life and society is an ongoing project with much more visibility than we have today." [emphasis added]
"In such a society ... things like equity, environmental health, restraints on corporate power will be valued and sustained."
This is the kind of hopeful place we want to go, I think. These are the hopeful futures (presents) that we aim for.
While I completely understand the nature of the concern, I don't think Dave or anyone should be afraid that articulating their vision represents hubris. Certainly some people's visions may be arrogant and wrong-headed, but that's the whole point of saying this stuff out loud; it helps sort out the good stuff from the not so good stuff.
For my part: I would like to live in a world absent of human created suffering. A world that uses the very best of what we've learned in our relatively short history of (self)consciousness and our much longer history of evolutionary biology to build a dynamic human society that allows all humans to flourish alongside flourishing ecosystems. That society will have learned how to face up to the actual world in which it lives, it would have learned how to take honest responsibility for its actions, it would have developed workable and effective means to equity, and it would provide justice where equity is absent.
Peace,
Kip
Permalink
caniscandida Posted 6:47 am
05 Apr 2006
One thing we should make quite explicit is, we are talking about a terrificly important, and embarrassing, characteristic of democracy, when we ask whether our language should be more hopeful or more fearful. That is, in order to get anything done, we need to build a majority. And the way that is done, historically, is by not being so concerned about telling the truth. This is where spin, rhetoric, propaganda enter in. I have observed that in a number of different Grist threads, on one kind of topic or another, many participants -- all good democrats! (small d!) -- have shown remarkable interest in devising ways to persuade people to come along. Telling the truth to them does not work.
Well, fine. I do not know enough political science and sociology yet to be able to decide if my own vision includes a society in which we do not quite tell people what we really believe the truth to be.
On the two often cited examples from mid-century US history: I suspect the vision of Americans steeling themselves to fight WWII was rather nostalgic; "once we get rid of all the fascists and their ilk, we will be able to return to the good old days." And JFK's vision, of putting "a man on the moon," had further off Arthur C. Clarke's, and Kubrick's, "2001: A Space Odyssey." Yuk yuk, here it is 2006, and I have never yet gone jogging inside a toroid spaceship. Still, the space program has done a few wonderful things: the Cassini/Huygens mission is not quite the vision of the 1960s, but is marvelous all the same.
Permalink
sunflower Posted 7:08 am
05 Apr 2006
I have been pressing against the problem of global warming for decades, and thought we had more time before the self reinforcing mechanisms kicked in the tipping points. Unfortunately time is not on our side, this storm is coming upon us sooner than expected.
My organization is nonprofit, and I do not like greed, but greed is a very strong and sustainable motivation. So try this vision: Global warming is a very rich gold mine, stake your claims and make lots of money. Now hiring, do you want a job that pays big bucks? No resumes necessary. How about triple your investment in new ideas? This is the biggest emerging industry in the history of humanity. Fun in the sun for all. Easy money. Not a scam, this is the real McCoy. Get on-board the gravy train.
You know the drill, we can do this.
Permalink
Vincenze Posted 12:20 pm
05 Apr 2006
We've know about these problems for decades, sure you need to prove it fine, but now we need to focus on fixing it...i.e.
Global warming is a problem, here is how we can fix it, but we need your help...
Vincenze.
http://vincenze.com
Permalink