Climate Change, Seriously
Urgency can be the enemy of seriousness
What does it mean to take something seriously? Curiously, and unfortunately, if often means to be distracted from a serious matter by the question of its seriousness, and the style in which its seriousness is to be lived out. Serious matters are matters we believe require concentrated and urgent attention, but a preoccupation with the seriousness of the issue at hand can get in the way of the kind of serious action that might be called for, precisely by insinuating itself in its place. Aristotle believed that the work of human begetting required concentration on the job in hand, to the point of thinking that birth deformities might be the result of allowing your thoughts during copulation to wander to the likely winners of the upcoming chariot races. One of the compensations for being a professor of literature is being able to reveal to generations of incredulous undergraduates that it has been possible to build an entire novel around the consequences of this kind of interrupted coital cognition.
In the case of climate change, the temper of its seriousness involves a deflection of questions of rational action to questions of belief, or, more precisely, of faith. I must here try to encourage assent to an important distinction between belief and faith, as follows. Faith is the optative mood of belief; for beliefs concern things we take to be true, while faith concerns things we feel the need to be true. Faith is the opposite of warranted belief because it is both the expression and the auto-satisfaction of the need for it. I believe in gravity, and the warming powers of fire, and the near-certainty of the sun reappearing at the end of the regular periods of darkness known as nights, just because I have no need to believe in them. I would only need faith in them if I actually entertained doubts about them which I was looking for ways to countermand. In the long and continuing transaction between humans, their needs, and their beliefs, magic means have often been recruited for this countermanding.
You can easily believe that climate change is occurring, and will continue, and that it is occasioned or accelerated by human actions, and, as a consequence focus your attention purposively, and even ardently on the actions to be conceived and carried out. But that is not the quality of the seriousness which attaches to writing and thinking about climate change. Its seriousness seems to concern faith, to be characterized as a mode of fantasy, definable in its turn not as false belief, but belief in things the truth of which is intensely and agonistically desired. For, in the usage I favour, fantasies are not untrue things, but things we want to be true, whether or not they are. The wanting of things we crave has a sweet tooth of its own: hence the voracity of veracity.
It might be said that the turbulence over the question of the truth of climate change, and the denial of the possibility of anything short of absolute faith in it, a shortfall which is anathematized as ‘climate denial’, is just the rhetorical rather than the executive wing of climate change action, which is concerned with building and securing opinion in favor of certain policies. In my view, however, the building of the sense of the special, all-encompassing, and excitingly apocalyptic kind of seriousness that characterizes the idea of climate change, a seriousness that depends upon absolute and total submission to the Truth, goes far beyond this kind of opinion-formation, or, more precisely, goes a very great distance to the side of it. If there were no detractors from climate change science, this would mean it was not any kind of science at all.
One of the problems with serious things is that they are taken to be urgent. Some of them are. But really serious things require more than urgency. Emergency responses tend to be highly energetic, ruinously expensive, inordinately exhausting and therefore inefficiently episodic. So actually, really serious matters require the opposite of urgency. They require actions that can be assimilated into the unnoticed routines of everyday life, meaning that we need to engineer ways of keeping them at work without needing to keep them in mind. Humans beings tend hugely to exaggerate the necessity of keeping things in mind, partly perhaps because we are so very bad at it, hence the invention of memorials and moral codes. Really serious matters are matters that it is important to find ways of pushing into the background. If we are engaged in a strange kind of war against the world, in order to maintain our relations with it in something like the form to which we have become accustomed, then we will probably need to mobilize as people do during a world war, as war becomes a form of life, which can be maintained over a long period of time.
There is little I can do to protect against this being taken as a warning against intense feeling and a counsel of rational coolness, but let me try. Passion is not the opposite of reason: the opposite of reason is unreason. Whether a belief is arrived at or adhered to in serenity or vehemence has exactly nothing to do with its utility as a belief, which depends on the quality of the attention to its object it embodies. The more cultic appearances of climate change discourse are a defection from seriousness not because of their passion but because of their absorption in it. No religion can last for long on thunderbolts and afflatus: if it is to survive, a religion needs to be turned into a bureaucracy. In the meantime, it will be wise to keep the devotees of the church of emergency from getting in the way of the emergency workers.
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