Do you wanna change the world? Naomi Klein does. Elizabeth Kolbert is becoming more and more convinced that it can't be done. I'll have more on that below.
If you wanna change the world, the first step is remarkably but deceptively easy. Just ask yourself this question:
Do we humans have the capacity to address our big self-created problems? *
* the climate, the oceans, extinctions, disappearing top soil, melting ice sheets, etc.
When you ask yourself this question, and take the question seriously, really ponder it, you may not change the world, but you will certainly change yourself. I will return to this subject at the end of this post
Reader Alex alerted me to a "debate" in The New York Review of Books between Elizabeth Kolbert and Naomi Klein (here and here). The word 'debate' is in quotes because Kolbert is attempting to grapple with reality, and Klein prefers soothing fantasies. Klein is doing what humans always do, while Kolbert is going further and further out on a tenuous limb which could break off any moment now. Kolbert's evolving view is that humans don't seem to be capable of fixing their self-created problems. She's right, but she better be careful if she wants to write for The New Yorker and review books in the NYRB in the future.
Kolbert starts off like this.
Every fall, an international team of scientists announces how much carbon dioxide humanity has dumped into the atmosphere the previous year. This fall, the news wasn’t good. It almost never is. The only time the group reported a drop in emissions was 2009, when the global economy seemed on the verge of collapse. The following year, emissions jumped again, by almost 6 percent.
According to the team’s latest report, in 2013 global emissions rose by 2.3 percent. Contributing to this increase were countries like the United States, which has some of the world’s highest per capita emissions, and also countries like India, which has some of the lowest. “There is no more time,” one of the scientists who worked on the analysis, Glen P. Peters of the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo, told The New York Times. “It needs to be all hands on deck now.”
A few days after the figures were released, world leaders met in New York to discuss how to deal with the results of this enormous carbon dump. Ban Ki-Moon, the secretary-general of the United Nations, had convened the summit to “catalyze climate action” and had asked the leaders to “bring bold announcements.” Once again, the news wasn’t good. It almost never is.
“There is a huge mismatch between the magnitude of the challenge and the response we heard here today,” Graça Machel, Nelson Mandela’s widow, told the summit in the final speech of the gathering. “The scale is much more than we have achieved.” This mismatch, which grows ever more disproportionate year after year, summit after summit, raises questions both about our future and about our character. What explains our collective failure on climate change? Why is it that instead of dealing with the problem, all we seem to do is make it worse?
The question I opened this post with is implicit in that last paragraph. Kolbert turns now to Naomi Klein.
These questions lie at the center of Naomi Klein’s ambitious new polemic, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. “What is wrong with us?” Klein asks near the start of the book. Her answer turns upside-down the narrative that the country’s largest environmental groups have been telling.
We needn't be concerned with Klein's "narrative" (motivated bullshit, storytelling). Klein is merely preaching to the choir (the social groups she identifies with). She is harmonizing with those people, who presumably (and not coincidentally) are the same people who will buy her book.
(Part of Klein's "narrative" asserts that capitalism is what is wrong with us, but her standard "answer" presumes that capitalism per se is not a characteristic expression of human nature, or at least goes a long way toward satisfying fundamental human needs. See Adventures in Flatland — Part IV, which is forthcoming.)
Kolbert schools Klein in her last paragraph.
To draw on Klein paraphrasing Al Gore, here’s my inconvenient truth: when you tell people what it would actually take to radically reduce carbon emissions, they turn away. They don’t want to give up air travel or air conditioning or HDTV or trips to the mall or the family car or the myriad other things that go along with consuming 5,000 or 8,000 or 12,000 watts.
All the major environmental groups know this, which is why they maintain, contrary to the requirements of a 2,000-watt society, that climate change can be tackled with minimal disruption to “the American way of life.” And Klein, you have to assume, knows it too. The irony of her book is that she ends up exactly where the “warmists” do, telling a fable she hopes will do some good.
Kolbert gets only one thing wrong: "all the major environmental groups" and Klein too believe their own bullshit. In Flatland, I call this the attribution of rationality where there is none.
More stories (Klein's "fables") don't change anything. Telling stories is what humans do. That's just human nature. Stories are just stories. The stories themselves needn't have anything to with reality, and usually don't, but human storytelling and the stories themselves do reveal a lot about how humans work. Reality is not just another story. It is possible to know things.
If you wanna change the world, you've got to focus on the question Klein asked but ultimately could not take seriously:
What is wrong with us?
Klein might have gone further, asking:
What is wrong with me?
If Klein had turned the question inward, she might have made considerable progress in answering the "us" question. In any case, it is only a short leap to our introductory question:
Do we humans have the capacity to address our big self-created problems?
You will not change the world if you ask yourself this question, but, if you take the question seriously, you will almost certainly change yourself. Prolonged comtemplation of that question forces you to take reality seriously, and when I say "reality" I mean human reality (our nature) as it is expressed at the species level (Homo sapiens) or at the level of large populations.
I will skip the book and leap to the conclusion.
After prolonged grappling with this question, and close observation of what people do, not what they say—this is what Elizabeth Kolbert is doing—if you decide the answer is "Yes," then please feel free to beat your head against the wall until you are at long last translated to a higher sphere. Surely there is great meaning in a life of utter futility instinctual human socializing
If you decide the answer is "No," then live your life with all the joie de vivre you can muster in this human-created world, what Kurt Vonnegut called this "crock of shit." For example, when I was young, I sometimes vacationed on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, a wonderful place. But climate change is going to destroy the Outer Banks within a few decades, perhaps sooner, perhaps in my lifetime. My recommendation? If you want to enjoy the Outer Banks, go now.
Finally, and paradoxically, if enough people on Earth — who can know how many is enough? — asked themselves our question, for the first time ever in human history it just might be possible to change the world because asking the question, and taking it seriously, raises one's consciousness. — it becomes possible to understand who we humans are.
Of course, videos like this one cast considerable doubt on that ever happening (observe the change at the 1:45 mark).
The tripling of our numbers in my 70 years is the plague that requires addressing. We are complex, but are just social mammals. Nature will see to a rebalancing when any species goes into Plague Phase. We are not exempt from feedback.
Posted by: Steven B Kurtz | 12/08/2014 at 11:08 AM