Climate Symbolism - by Rolf Strom-Olsen
A general truism of astroturf front groups that shill for one or another (nefarious) special interest is that their name is typically the exact opposite of the agenda they are pursuing. The laughably awful group of self-righteous, thin-skinned Karens who assemble under the absurd moniker “Mom’s For Liberty” is really a coordinated effort of pseudo-moral grandstanding to impose censorship in public schools, because someone has to stop the evil ideas spread by Charlotte’s Web. So too the “Alliance for Responsible Citizenship,” which just had its inaugural conference this fall in London. Following the rule, this means it is an alliance for irresponsible citizenship – which, indeed, it is. Their agenda: a smorgasbord of right-wing cultural outrage, but primarily climate change denial. If you watch the promotional video for their conference (but don’t do that), here are literally the first lines you hear: “There was once a day in Western nations when we took seriously the extraordinary value of every single human being.” What??
This breathlessly counter-historical fatuity (pronounced by the I’ve-never-heard-of-her conservative mountebank Philippa Stroud) tells you all you need to know. I mean, maybe there was once a day when that happened, but if so it was for about three hours on a Saturday morning when the much deeper-seated agenda of not taking seriously the extraordinary value of every single human being was lying in bed hungover from having celebrated the general success of that agenda too hard the night before. Unsurprisingly, a central theme of the conference was that the threat of climate change has been grossly exaggerated by radical leftists who want to use it to distract you from their ulterior efforts to make your life miserable and impoverished. I wonder where they get their funding…?
Anyway, the sudden appearance and absurd discourse of this right-wing pseudo-luminary posse (including infamous Canadian temper-tantrum-in-a-suit Jordan Peterson, who – predictably – cried) brings to mind a famous work by the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages. Huizinga’s basic point is that as a mediaeval cultural, social and economic system became increasingly untenable and even ridiculous by the end of the 15th century, largely as a result of the 14th-century walloping that European society took from the Black Death, the response by political elites was to dig their heels in extra hard and engage in a kind of fingers-in-ear, I-can’t-hear-you denialism by holding even more jousting tournaments, cause that’ll show ‘em. Those with a stake in a system that is disappearing insist upon its virtue with ever more ferocity, looking ever more ridiculous, at precisely that moment when it is self-evidently no longer feasible. In effect, Huizinga’s was a “the bulb burns brightest before it burns out” argument. Now, as a social historian of the Burgundian court (proof), which Huizinga used as his primary example, I can say with some confidence that his argument is not entirely convincing in its particulars. But the general point has always struck me as sound: as systems change, that change produces a backlash that tends towards a kind of nostalgic reading of a largely imaginary past of lost values and virtues that can be extolled as normative and held up as a falsely aspirational beacon, as if to shout, don’t go forwards! Go back!
Which brings me to my point. (And, as always, it has taken me too long to get to the point, for which I would penalise my students, but such excess is a luxury of grading one’s own work.) This year has been a remarkable one within the larger annals of anthropogenic climate change (floods, fires, storms, etc...) because the instability of global weather systems caused by our voracious carbon appetite has been amplified by an unusually strong El Niño effect. But – next year is going to be worse. Because El Niño is just getting going (can I say, warming up?), the worst effects are not predicted to make themselves felt until next year. So there is very good reason to believe that the global shitstorm of catastrophe that we saw this year was just the struggling local indy band with a dumb name and a pretentious emo setlist that precedes the headliner. The image of Taylor Swift (yes, I know who Taylor Swift is, shut up) struggling to breathe in the stifling heat of Rio, where the heat index hit almost 60º this month, is likely an apt foretaste of what next year holds in store for us.
Now, we are, to quote Terence Deacon, a “symbolic species.” While Deacon’s book was about the co-evolution of language and cognition, a point that I think he made (not gonna lie, it’s a tough read, especially for a mediocre historian of the Burgundian court, see above) was that we developed a desire for language at the same time as we developed the neuro-cognitive ability to understand the world around us, not just in empirical terms (e.g. leaves are green), but symbolic terms as well (leaves sprouting = hope). We respond, in other words, to symbols, precisely because our brains can (a) distinguish things as symbols and (b) imbue them with a value. Maybe that’s not what he said, but let’s go with it for now.
So, this is why 2023 and 2024 are, as I see it, potentially decisive moments in the larger story of holocene climate change. The events of this year and next (and next, and next…) are not “climate change” per se, since climate change is no one single thing, but instead a planet-wide reordering to a new equilibrium point. But they are symbols of climate change, and given our neuro-cognitive predilections, that is essentially the same thing.
As it stands, there is nothing particularly surprising about this year (or next, should it so transpire), meaning that, while indeed exceptional and extraordinary, it was nonetheless predictable that we would see headlines like this one:
That is because, given the amplification effect of El Niño combined with observed climate trends, it was certainly well within the range of possibilities that we would see, as we did, earth-shattering, or last least earth-scorching, earth-flooding, earth-burning events. So what is really happening is that the predicted consequences of climate change are now becoming, all of a sudden thanks to the boost from El Niño, much more visible. It’s like, oh shit that thing that over the last three decades we were told was going to happen, look, it’s happening now! Put another way, the reality of climate change has progressed from visible lines on a graph (zzzz) to visible symbol. You can show people the Keeling Curve til the cows come home and just get a shrug of under-informed indifference:
But burn down a couple of hotels on a Greek island, or shroud the Eastern seaboard in unbreathable air from half of Quebec going up in smoke, and the boring math of climate change becomes an urgent symbol of climate change. And we respond to symbols.
This is worth thinking about, especially as another pointless COP (#28 if you’re keeping score) assembles. Indeed, this year’s COP is almost insultingly pointless since it is not only being hosted by an oil-company-cum-nation, but was apparently going to be used to sell more oil. At this point, the organised international response to climate change has become a mean-spirited PG Wodehouse novel.
But, at the same time, I have some confidence that our capacity to process things symbolically will mean that the visual and immediate images of both this year and, crucially, next year will start to produce a more concerted and aggressive popular response to the climate crisis as the urgency to act is made alarmingly visible. That is a critical precursor to the scale and pace of change that we need to see, a possible lever to hoist a willingness to rethink our social and economic priorities and pressure particularly Western governments towards doing something they have never been very good at, namely (as someone recently put it) to take seriously the extraordinary value of every single human being.
It is, I suspect, because of the rising symbolic intensity of the impossibility of the business-as-usual path that explains the kind of pushback represented by the Alliance for (ir)responsible citizens. Following Huizinga’s point, I, for one, think that flashy gatherings of hyped up right-wing culture-warriors telling us to lean into Old Testament morality and to burn more fossil fuels because that’s how we save human civilization is actually an encouraging sign that the long-overdue changes we need to implement may actually occur. In the 15th century, feudal elites countered the undercurrents of change with over the top feasting, pageantry-filled jousting tournaments, and lots of reading of the Roman de la Rose; today, as our forests burn and our rivers overflow their banks and our crops wither in the crushing heat, it is Jordan Peterson crying over Abrahamic myths or the Danish Quisling Bjørn Lomborg reassuring us we have enough life rafts for everyone, so just chill the fuck out. I concede it might be wishful thinking, but that feels like the bulb is about to burn out.
I also have a guess as to how those changes and their implementation will procedurally come about, but I will save that for another post. Thanks, as always, for reading and please take the time to “like” or comment on this post.
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