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| Published 2014, "written" in 2393 |
This book by two historians of science examines
our world through the lens of dystopian fiction. For anyone looking for plot
and character, go elsewhere. (I think that they’d recommend the work of Kim
Stanley Robinson, whom they acknowledge in the book.) This is a “history” book
written by historians looking back from the year 2393 while working in the
"Second (Neocommunist) People’s Republic of China". But if you want to learn
about what we currently know, what we’re currently doing (or not doing), and
how our choices extrapolate into the future, then this is a worthwhile book.
Anyone who’s read this blog or followed my Tweets knows that climate change and
our collective indifference to it and the future that it holds for us is a major
concern of mine. I used to say that this concern would be the problem that my
daughters and their generation would have to face. Of course, events have proven
this expectation false—it’s here now, staring us in the face, as these two
authors make abundantly clear.
Because the authors are both historians of
science, they enjoy street cred with both the science community and the larger
community, or at least me. (I won’t give my “all knowledge is a matter of
history” talk here, but if you need a quick refresher, see below*.) In a previous
book, Merchants of Doubt: Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco to Climate Change (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010), these two authors detailed the use of
scientists to peddle doubts for the purpose of delaying action on issues of
public health from tobacco use to global climate change. They understand not
only the science involved in these issues but also the social context in which
that science is practiced. Indeed, the whole point of this exercise is the
examine how we in the early 21st century have convinced ourselves
that we can ignore these issues and blithely continue down our current path
toward disaster. They cite a great deal of relevant science, and they
extrapolate from our current knowledge about what may happen to this Earth of
ours given our current choices. But their observations about canons of
knowledge and ideologies are the more unique and insightful aspects of their
project.
Following are some of the more interesting points
taken from the book with my commentary following.
The physical scientists
studying these steadily increasing disasters did not help quell this denial,
and instead became entangled in arcane arguments about the “attribution” of
singular events [floods, fires, storms, droughts & other weather-related
events]. Oreskes, Naomi; Conway, Erik M. (2014-06-24). The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future (p.
7). Columbia University Press. Kindle Edition.
Although they don’t come out and say it (Oreskes
is a Harvard professor), the scientific community often lives in an ivory
tower. Science is a social enterprise, a human enterprise par excellence, and to ignore this all too human aspect of science is
a terrible mistake. To whom much is given (to wit, money for research grants),
much is expected. While arguments over standards and protocols are important,
they don’t override the greater concerns of society as a whole.
[M]ost countries still
used the archaic concept of a gross domestic product, a measure of consumption,
rather than the Bhutanian concept of gross domestic happiness to evaluate
well-being in a state. p. 8
It’s good to realize that the word about the
utter inadequacy of GNP as a measure of well-being is growing in popularity. But
we should move beyond our snapshot in time (as the authors later suggest) and
beyond the immediate human world in measuring performance and well-being.
Though leaders of the scientific community protested, scientists yielded to the demands, thus helping
set the stage for further pressure on scientists from both governments and the
industrial enterprises that governments subsidized and protected. Then
legislation was passed (particularly in the United States) that placed limits
on what scientists could study and how they could study it, beginning with the
notorious House Bill 819, better known as the “Sea Level Rise Denial Bill,”
passed in 2012 by the government of what was then the U.S. state of North
Carolina . . . . pp. 11-12
This is a really frightening realization, one that
makes Tennessee’s outlawing of the teaching of evolution (as displayed in the Scopes
trial) seem trivial. Really, in 21st century America this could
happen? This is Orwellian—or more bluntly, Stalinist. (Orwell, of course, decried
such lies; Stalin and his cohort used the airbrush on history and reality with
abandon.)
It is difficult to
understand why humans did not respond appropriately in the early Penumbral
Period, when preventive measures were still possible. Many have sought an
answer in the general phenomenon of human adaptive optimism, which later proved
crucial for survivors. p. 13
We humans believe that we can always prevail in
the last reel. Maybe, but reality isn't a Hollywood movie, and we test the limits at our peril. One thing that the authors don’t
do in this “history” is to explore fully all of the likely social, political, and
economic disasters that will likely befall humanity if our environment comes
crashing down around us. The Four Horsemen of war, famine, pestilence, and
death will ride freely throughout the world. To think that we can “innovate”
our way out of such a situation amounts to fantasy, mere wishful thinking.
Even more elusive to
scholars is why scientists, whose job it was to understand the threat and warn
their societies—and who thought that they did understand the threat and that
they were warning their societies—failed to appreciate the full magnitude of
climate change. To shed light on this question, some scholars have pointed to
the epistemic structure of Western science, particularly in the late nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, which was organized both intellectually and
institutionally around “disciplines” in which specialists developed a high level
of expertise in a small area of inquiry…. While reductionism proved powerful in
many domains, particularly quantum physics and medical diagnostics, it impeded
investigations of complex systems. Reductionism also made it difficult for
scientists to articulate the threat posed by climatic change, since many
experts did not actually know very much about aspects of the problem beyond
their expertise. pp. 13-14
Again, an important criticism of what is typical
of academia: learning more and more about less and less. We can’t afford this
now. Specialization and narrow focus can be a tool in some situations, but like
many useful tools, it proves useful only for particular occasions.
Other scientists
promoted the ideas of systems science, complexity science, and, most pertinent
to our purposes here, earth systems science, but these so-called holistic
approaches still focused almost entirely on natural systems, omitting from
consideration the social components. Yet in many cases, the social components
were the dominant system drivers. It was often said, for example, that climate
change was caused by increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases.
Scientists understood that those greenhouse gases were accumulating because of
the activities of human beings—deforestation and fossil fuel combustion—yet
they rarely said that the cause was people, and their patterns of conspicuous
consumption. pp. 15-16
This is a good point about systems and
complexity theories. They are better (i.e., more useful in this context) than
reductionist theories, but some do divorce humanity from Nature. We are at once
a part of Nature and apart from Nature. We now need to appreciate just how
much a part of Nature we are.
Other scholars have
looked to the roots of Western natural science in religious institutions. Just
as religious orders of prior centuries had demonstrated moral rigor through
extreme practices of asceticism in dress, lodging, behavior, and food—in
essence, practices of physical self-denial—so, too, did physical scientists of
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries attempt to demonstrate their
intellectual rigor through practices of intellectual self-denial. These
practices led scientists to demand an excessively stringent standard for
accepting claims of any kind, even those involving imminent threats. In an
almost childlike attempt to demarcate their practices from those of older
explanatory traditions, scientists felt it necessary to prove to themselves and
the world how strict they were in their intellectual standards. Thus, they
placed the burden of proof on novel claims—even empirical claims about
phenomena that their theories predicted. This included claims about changes in
the climate. p. 16
This is a fascinating insight: scientists as the
new ascetics. This helps me understand someone like the late Seth Roberts, who
was (in essence) a human climate-change denier. I argued (in comments on his
blog) that the judgment was a practical one requiring action, not one that
should be governed by abstract principles of skepticism. My thinking came from
my knowledge and experience with the common law tradition of making judgments
about practical matters of liability. He never made clear (to me anyway) the
nature of his skepticism in the face of so much contrary proof.
Much of the argument
surrounded the concept of statistical significance. Given what we now know
about the dominance of nonlinear systems and the distribution of stochastic
processes, the then-dominant notion of a 95 percent confidence limit is hard to
fathom. Yet overwhelming evidence suggests that twentieth-century scientists
believed that a claim could be accepted only if, by the standards of Fisherian
statistics, the possibility that an observed event could have happened by
chance was less than 1 in 20.. . . . We have come to understand the 95 percent
confidence limit as a social convention rooted in scientists’ desire to
demonstrate their disciplinary severity. p. 17
I’m so glad to read this. I’m untrained in
statistics (one of my many shortcomings), but it always seemed to me that the
whole enterprise could be quite arbitrary. This is what they say: you have to
do better than 1/20 to have “statistical significance”. That’s probably an
extremely useful heuristic, but as a “law”, it’s junk. And as a guide for
action? Maybe, but maybe not. The appropriateness of any standard depends upon what’s at stake, other sources of confirmation or disproof, and the time scale
in which we must judge. In other words, a common law type of judgment: the likelihood
of harm, the magnitude of possible harm, and the cost of alternatives serve as benchmarks
for decision-making.
Western scientists built
an intellectual culture based on the premise that it was worse to fool oneself
into believing in something that did not exist than not to believe in something
that did. p. 17
Again, which is the worst mistake depends on the
practical outcome of the actions taken as a result of the belief or unbelief. The
likely practical consequence of a mistake, not the cause of the possible mistake, should guide action.
To the historian
studying this tragic period of human history, the most astounding fact is that
the victims knew what was happening and why. Indeed, they chronicled it in
detail precisely because they knew that fossil fuel combustion was to blame.
Historical analysis also shows that Western civilization had the technological
know-how and capability to effect an orderly transition to renewable energy,
yet the available technologies were not implemented in time. p. 35
Exactly: how can we be so dumb? (And by dumb, I
mean in action, not simply as a means of name-calling.) This is a
social-political problem, a problem of persuasion and decision-making of the
highest importance.
The thesis of this
analysis is that Western civilization became trapped in the grip of two
inhibiting ideologies: positivism and market fundamentalism. p. 35
Yes!
[T]he overall philosophy
is more accurately known as Baconianism. This philosophy held that through
experience, observation, and experiment, one could gather reliable knowledge
about the natural world, and that this knowledge would empower its holder.
Experience justified the first part of the philosophy (we have recounted how
twentieth-century scientists anticipated the consequences of climate change),
but the second part—that this knowledge would translate into power—proved less
accurate. p. 36
This suggests an extreme naiveté in the
scientific community and those who support them.
A key attribute of the
period was that power did not reside in the hands of those who understood the climate
system, but rather in political, economic, and social institutions that had a
strong interest in maintaining the use of fossil fuels. Historians have labeled
this system the carbon-combustion complex: a network of powerful industries
comprising fossil fuel producers, industries that served energy companies (such
as drilling and oil field service companies and large construction firms),
manufacturers whose products relied on inexpensive energy (especially
automobiles and aviation, but also aluminum and other forms of smelting and
mineral processing), financial institutions that serviced their capital
demands, and advertising, public relations, and marketing firms who promoted
their products. pp. 36-37
While I’m skeptical of conspiracy theories in
general, I do believe that the mindset of the "carbon-combustion complex" (in part held as an intentional choice and in part as a matter of false
consciousness or akrasia). In any event, this mindset trumps rational judgment because it's based upon tangible special interests, and it's repeated frequently and widely
disseminated. If the propaganda of communist governments had proven anywhere nearly as effective as the promotion of the "carbon-combustion complex" and market fundamentalist ideology, those regimes would probably still be around today.
[A] large part of
Western society was rejecting that knowledge in favor of an empirically
inadequate yet powerful ideological system. Even at the time, some recognized
this system as a quasi-religious faith, hence the label market fundamentalism.
Market fundamentalism—and its various strands and interpretations known as free-market fundamentalism, neoliberalism, laissez-faire economics, and
laissez-faire capitalism—was a two-pronged ideological system. pp. 37-38).
The first prong held
that societal needs were served most efficiently in a free market economic
system. Guided by the “invisible hand” of the marketplace, individuals would
freely respond to each other’s needs, establishing a net balance between
solutions (“supply”) and needs (“demand”). The second prong of the philosophy maintained
that free markets were not merely a good or even the best manner of satisfying
material wants: they were the only manner of doing so that did not threaten
personal freedom. p. 38
Another example of good ideas gone bad. A market
economy is better than other forms, but it isn't perfect, and as we humans tend
to do, we overreached and made the market absolute.
The ultimate paradox was
that neoliberalism, meant to ensure individual freedom above all, led
eventually to a situation that necessitated large-scale government
intervention. p. 48
This forecast is probably correct. How ironic!
Period of the
Penumbra The shadow of anti-intellectualism that fell over the
once-Enlightened techno-scientific nations of the Western world during the
second half of the twentieth century, preventing them from acting on the
scientific knowledge available at the time and condemning their successors to
the inundation and desertification of the late twenty-first and twenty-second
centuries. pp. 59-60
This leads me back to an insight that I’ve had
since I started thinking about this world: human power—via technology—has outrun
human wisdom. We've set loose a genie that we can’t control. We humans are the Sorcerer’s
Apprentice and none but Nature (the Master Wizard, if you will) can restore order. And it will be messy.
[Naomi Oreskes being interviewed]
The nation in which our historian is writing is the Second PRC, because we
imagine that after a period of liberalization and democratization, autocratic
forces become resurgent in China, justified by the imperative of dealing with
the climate crisis. EC [author Erik Conway]: Chinese civilization has been
around a lot longer than Western civilization has and it’s survived a great
many traumas. While I’m not sure the current government of China is likely to
hold up well—the internal tensions are pretty glaring—it’s hard to imagine a
future in which there’s no longer a place called China. And as Naomi explains,
authoritarian states may well find it easier to make the changes necessary to
survive rapid climate change. With a few exceptions, the so-called liberal
democracies are failing to address climate change. p. 70
The authors suggest that China will “go
renewable” sooner than the West and will adapt more effectively than the
Western nations. Maybe. Currently, China is hell-bent on further economic
development, and we can see the effect every day in the air quality. [N.B. As I write these words I'm living in China.] The
central government currently has the power to make drastic changes, but
how drastic and under what conditions would create a major stress test.
The assumption of anything less than a Hobbesian state of nature (or the rise
of a Leviathan led by someone as bloodthirsty as a Stalin or a Hitler) seems
overly optimistic to me if things deteriorate with the speed and to the extent
that the authors suggest that it might.
This was a one-sitting read. It goes along with
William (Patrick) Ophuls and Thomas Homer-Dixon on my (electronic) shelf about
the challenge of global climate change. I hope that we can prove their “history”
false.
P.S. The NYT article interview tipped me off to Oreskes and her work, and her TED talk on the practice of science.
* In sum, the history of anything amounts to that thing itself. History is not a social science but an unavoidable form of thought. That "we live forward but we can only think backward" is true not only of the present (which is always a fleeting illusion) but of our entire view of the future: for even when we think of the future we do this by remembering. But history cannot tell us anything about the future with certainly. Intelligent research, together with a stab of psychological understanding, may enable us to reconstruct something from the past; still, it cannot help us predict the future.
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