Giddens’s Paradox
Not one given to false modesty, the sociologist Anthony Giddens has named a paradox after himself, Giddens's Paradox. Giddens’s Paradox runs like this: no matter how great the dangers posed by climate change, their lack of immediate visibility in the everyday world means that people will not act to deal with them; by the time the dangers are immediately visible, it will be too late for any action on the part of the people to be effective. The effects of global heating are now becoming increasingly apparent. According to Giddens’s Paradox, that means that it is now too late to act? We are about to see the truth or otherwise of that Paradox.
The point of the Paradox is that issues which are invisible and intangible at the level of the immediate sense may well be massive in their effects and impacts. To those anticipating the dire consequences of climate change, the need for the renewal of our energy infrastructure has been long apparent. Yet, successive governments have dragged their feet. They may well be representing the immediate views of the electorate, but not their long term interests. But what is a politician to do when the voters can’t see it and won’t vote for it? We live in an idiocracy based on individual wants and desires, not a democracy based on creative self-realisation in a public life that unites individuals in a common purpose. We do not have a house of commons, only a congeries of atoms. That’s the individuals composing the demos as voters and consumers, self-interested atoms with no connection to the common good.
We need to develop a long term strategic capacity that allows us to see the transitory features of techno-urban civilisation come and go, setting our lives under the species of eternity rather than time. The natural law sees nature through the eyes of reason, itself an innate natural gift. Can we achieve balance between our moral and technical capacities? To do so, we need to set our technics within a social and moral matrix.
“In whom some bright spark lived – stronger than time.” (Shelley)
To see with the mind of eternity, not of time.
The Confederation of British Industry has come up with its own energy strategy. Whilst this includes a questionable demand that Ministers should approve new coal plants, the CBI is surely correct to argue that the necessary renewal of our energy infrastructure offers an opportunity to begin the transition to a lower-carbon footing. Nearly 40% of Britain's carbon emissions derive from electricity generation, so there is ample scope for reductions through the creation of a new energy infrastructure.
Yet the renewable industry is struggling to raise finance as a result of the economic downturn. Even giants like BP are feeling the pinch, cutting 620 jobs from its solar energy business.
The climate crisis is the biggest market failure we face, yet we remain prisoners of myopic market economics. Just as we need a focus on the long term, the short term bias in market economics is getting even shorter. The damaging effects of neo-liberal economics is even more apparent as a result, with governments favouring a private-led approach to both energy provision and to adapting to climate change coming to be trapped into short term thinking. Governments around the world remain manacled to neo-liberal ideology, despite its manifest economic failure. There are political reasons for this. Neo-liberal economics conceals and rationalises the global anarchy of the rich and the powerful. Neo-liberalism is most effective in redistributing wealth from the poor to the rich than in generating any genuine economic health and prosperity, hence its appeal to national and global elites. Why the people of the world continue to tolerate governments and parties espousing such naked class ideology is a political mystery. Until that mystery is resolved, governments will continue to evade the crucial question now facing us, how to reconstruct the global economy in such a way as to reconcile economic prosperity, social justice and environmental security. At the moment, neo-liberalism is delivering failed economies, bankrupt states, social injustice and inequality, and ecological catastrophe. The biggest mystery of all is why political parties of the centre left are so keen to keep trying to breathe life into the capitalist corpse rather than lead the way to social reconstruction. Instead of financing the Green New Deal, providing infrastructures for the low-carbon economy, money is being burned in an attempt to reheat the very carbon-intensive economy that is not only economically moribund but ecologically destructive. South Korea claims that 8l% of its fiscal stimulus is green. In Britain, the figure stands at a meagre 7%, a truly pathetic figure that is half the world average.
In the middle of the biggest economic crisis for eighty years, with climate crisis indicating market failure on a massive scale, the governments of the world are failing to show the required leadership and foresight with respect to the long term common good. This has to change. It is the duty of governments to govern. But it is also for the governed to insist on good government.
If Giddens's Paradox is correct, there’s nothing that can be done anyway. It’s a question for the human species. Have human beings got what it takes to look beyond the immediate and the tangible and engage in strategic long term thinking so as to act for the common good? If not, we remain entangled within Giddens’s Paradox and, sooner or later, we will go to oblivion. Climate change has set the challenge, it is for human beings to respond accordingly. Or else we are merely writing a requiem for the species.
On a critical note:
"Perhaps more discomforting is the apparent moment of academic hubris when Giddens takes a well-known phenomenon — that people do not act on an incrementally growing threat until it becomes visible, by which stage action may be too late — and names it "the Giddens paradox". In climate change circles this concept, which is not in fact a paradox, has been cited in the literature for decades. If there is a "Giddens paradox" to be found in this book it lies in the stark contrast between the author's compelling and sensible third-way philosophy on climate policy and his frustrating inability to translate that philosophy into concrete policy options. Overcoming that paradox is what will lead to actual progress on climate policy."
A third way by Roger A. Pielke
New philosophies on climate policy are well and good, but to be meaningful they must be translated into concrete policy options.
http://www.nature.com/climate/2009/0907/full/climate.2009.61.html