Why We Should Be Optimistic About the Future
Positive thinking isn’t naive, it’s the best way to get things done http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/why-we-should-be-optimistic-about-the-future-future-crunch/
What is the right way to think about the problems facing humanity?
For many people the answer is of course, to be realistic.
Far from being wishful thinking or a cop-out, I think that optimism is a powerful way to create change.
I shall begin by quoting Angus Harvey in the above article:
'The problem with this fear-based approach, which dominates modern day media and politics, is that while it might galvanise a few people into action, for the majority of us it breeds cynicism, apathy or hopelessness. And those emotions don’t lead to solutions. We should be planning for a future in which things get better. The more people start believing we can create a better society, the sooner we can start taking action.
You don’t get people to change by scaring them, or pointing fingers. Instead, give them an alternative that’s so compelling they have no choice but to change anyway. So let’s tell stories of the new dream, not the nightmares. Let’s talk about renewable energy technologies that reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. Let’s talk about how the spread of mobile technologies offers the best promise of getting healthcare to those that need it most. Let’s emphasise that the internet is the most powerful tool we have for promoting political openness and transparency. And while we’re at it, remember, there are hundreds of thousands of people out there who also believe in the new dream, and are already hard at work at making it a reality.'
I'm beyond optimism and pessimism, beyond making predictions concerning a future that does not yet exist. There's a massive gap between the ideals, hopes and ambitions expressed at the level of climate agreements and institutional commitments and the reality we are facing. It's up to us to close that gap. We will only make the effort if we think it is worthwhile. We are not the first generation to face a major challenge. I shall continue to associate with those people who are making positive efforts to intervene in 'objective' trends and tendencies to see if we can turn the odds in our favour. It's a big ask. We do this. Or we carry on writing our obituaries. I don't think anyone is under any illusion concerning the massive climate problems we are now facing, let alone those that are ahead. Any hope that is left is going to have to be active, realistic and backed by effective praxis. We are just going to have to live into the future with faith and courage, building the resources to deal with whatever comes as we go along.
History is an optical illusion. Read the history books, all the great events, the revolutions, the big changes. We should never presume these things that happened were all bound to happen. They weren't. They happened because supposedly 'ordinary' men and women stood up, acted and made them happen. They weren't frightened and intimidated by the wild facts that faced them. I don't worry about the future. It will be here soon enough. We'll do something with it. Creative human agency is the factor that turns objective trends and tendencies around. And that is the ground for any hope we have. I'll go with what Lewis Mumford wrote in The Condition of Man in 1952. We'd come close to destroying western civilisation then, and got through by the skin of our teeth. It's a skin of the teeth moment we face now. "Without food man can survive for barely thirty days; without water for little more than three days; without air hardly for more than three minutes: but without hope he might destroy himself in an even shorter time." (Mumford 1952: 30).
If we think that the situation is hopeless, then, indeed, we won’t make the effort, meaning there will be no change and that we will go to a well-deserved demise. I can’t think of a greater victory for an exploitative, acquisitive, greedy and stupid ruling class than a condition in which people of intelligence, sensitivity and care should have become hopeless, cynical and defeatist. The beaten generation.
I am glad that the people who fought for and won democratic advances, rights and liberties, fought against slavery and racism etc didn't give up. If climate change is the greatest problem the human species has ever faced, we also have much greater resources than those possessed by those who won their victories for justice in the past. I am glad that my grandfather and his generation, who fought and beat the Nazis, had a greater grasp of human possibilities. The generations that came after benefited from their efforts. Are we going to let an arrogant ruling class, presiding over a global anarchy of the rich and powerful, throw all those efforts away? That's how civilisations collapse, they become exhausted.
We can keep on reporting the science and writing our own obituaries. Or we can get into patterns of human behaviour, see how the ways in which human beings think and act are constrained and structured by specific social relationships, and look at how we can transform these relationships. Because that is what it is going to take. Approaching the question right means so much more than an abstract moral appeal to "be good". More than scientific appeals to evidence, fact and logic. Such appeals fail for want of social relevance. We have to get into the motivational economy. The reason that people and governments have been slow to respond to what the science has been telling us, and keeps telling us, is that we have a social system that locks us into certain ways of behaving. Adapting politics to climate realities does indeed imply system-wide changes. Very big changes, granted. But this is a big problem we face.
I am certainly not going to make any predictions on this. Nobody can know how the future will pan out. We make our own history, wrote Marx, just not in circumstances of our own choosing. Those circumstances are becoming increasingly narrow in light of the crisis of the climate system.
A few years ago now, I cited the views of ‘rational pessimists’ who considered that we are on course for a 6C temperature increase. It was a distinct possibility then, and a much likelier prospect now. It wouldn’t surprise me at all. I also opined that once the planet is on the move, all bets are off. The planet is indeed on the move. Once tipping points are reached numerous positive feedback loops are unleashed. The world will be increasingly out of our control. I recognise that many say we are now past the point of no return. I’ve been saying for years that we have a tiny window of opportunity in which to act. As every year has passed, that tiny window must have got tinier by the day. It was scientifically informed speculation on my part.
“Words ought to be a little wild – for they are the assault of thoughts upon the unthinking. But when the seats of power and authority have been attained, there should be no more poetic license.”
- J. M. Keynes, New Statesman and Nation (15 July 1933)
There is no greater seat of power and authority than the natural conditions of life and its health or otherwise. We have no need to indulge in wild words. In light of climate crisis, ocean acidification, loss of biodiversity, loss of habitats, extinction of species, the facts themselves are wild enough. We have assaulted nature through an economic system that, with its commitment to exponential growth, is transgressing planetary boundaries. The wild facts that now confront us constitute nature’s assault on our unthinking faith in economic growth.
The wild facts can be stated coolly enough.
We have now passed 400 ppm in the atmosphere of CO2. This figure is based on emissions released in the past 40 years. It doesn’t take into account the emissions that are still increasing, despite the worst economic depression for eighty years. The only way we can get back to 350 ppm is to ask the invisible fairies who leave no trace in my magic garden if they have any fairy dust to spare.
So why not face facts and recognise that the situation is hopeless? The scope for creative human agency must surely, by now, have dwindled to such an extent as to disappear? I’m not sure. Scientist friends tell me that we are living in uncertainty, no one, neither optimists nor pessimists, are any kind of guide since the future really is uncertain, beyond prediction. Anyone who expresses certainty one way or the other should be treated with scepticism. They may well turn out to be right. They may not. We have no way of knowing. My own view is that there is no point in focusing our time and efforts on things we cannot change. The world could come to an end in many different ways. We will all die one die. Just not every day. And while we live, we act. I lose no sleep over the things I can do nothing about. I say that there is a limited human ability to influence outcomes with respect to the challenges we face. So I focus on what it takes to render ‘objective’ trends and tendencies subject to human intervention, engagement and alteration. This concentration upon the humanly mutable is a much more fertile field of endeavour than hand-wringing over wild facts that are considered beyond alteration. The circumstances in which we are challenged to act are complex and multidimensional and evade simple statements of certainty. I think we are charged with making the effort to join together in order to find a way forward. I like the word “collaboration”. Its Latin derivation is a combination of co- com- or col-, meaning "with" or "together", and and laborare, meaning "to labour." To collaborate, then, is to work together with others. Embracing the certainty of doom leads us into despair or hedonism, and risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Positions of hopelessness may well be based on a realistic appraisal of the wild facts we face, facts that will go nowhere by wishful thinking. It is too harsh to say that this is an abdication of responsibility for action. The people arguing there is no hope have a lifetime of activism behind them. And they are facing the facts directly. They may well be proved to have had the most realistic assessment of our predicament. Nevertheless, I will continue to join with others in order to keep sight of the humanly mutable, and keep the door open on the future for as long as we can.
These are times that try men’s souls, wrote Tom Paine. That the words apply as much to the contemporary world as they did when Paine wrote them should cause us to pause and consider whether our problems really are, as they seem to be to us, much greater than those faced in times past. That’s how they seem to us, because we are the ones being tested. But history is an optical illusion: The past always appears more certain than it was, and that makes the future feel more uncertain - and therefore frightening - than ever. The roots of this illusion lie in what psychologists call 'hindsight bias.' Hindsight bias drains the uncertainty out of history. When Tom Paine wrote the words ‘these are the times that try men’s souls’, the fate of the American revolution hung in the balance. Indeed, prospects seemed bleak, and some were drifting from the fight. The future looked most uncertain for the American revolutionaries. Paine’s call for action inspired hope and raised the spirits and the rest, as they say, is history. We, looking back, know what happened in history and are inclined to think that whatever happened was always likely to happen or even inevitable. We lose the uncertainty of history as a lived experience. Of course, when we live our own history, we experience uncertainty with respect to the future. We are inclined to see our future prospects as bleak. And it’s an optical illusion. When we seek certainty, we lose the sense of our own creative agency, will, choice, deliberation and collective action.
We have ‘an appointment with history’ here. My history teacher, in the very first lesson, picked up the course book and told us that everything contained in it is what happened, or what historians citing the facts, claim to have happened. But don’t go away with the illusion that this is only way things could have happened, he continued. Studying history is also about roads that were never taken, opportunities that were missed, possibilities that were not realised, alternatives that were not explored or were suppressed. Nothing is inevitable in history. Because the principal agents of history are human beings.
Nobody said it would be easy. Here’s Tom Paine again:
“Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated”
The point is this, whatever the nature of the threats and crises that face us, we are better placed to meet them than any generation before us has been when facing their problems. But our problems are greater, comes the response. Greater than the Black Death, Fall of Rome, the war against Hitler? We have immense material resources and technological powers and communications, global connections, expert knowledge in the full range of disciplines. What on Earth is stopping us? The politics of fear saps the energy and steals the future from us. We reclaim our future when we join together to reclaim our common ground.
It can be done. One thing is sure, if you think it can't be done, then it won't be done.
“The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were.” ― John Keats
It should always be born in mind that we, as creative human agents, are co-responsible for creating those 'obvious realities'. We are prisoners of our fate when we forget that.
I have no objection to realism. I have no truck with negativity, pessimism and death-cults. There is a danger of having our energies suffocated by fear gas. We know plenty about effective messaging and communication when it comes to climate change. It is right to be angry about the ecological destruction that has taken place on this planet. My view is that we need more than expressions of anger, we need to be cool and thoughtful and identify the specific forces behind this destruction in order to correct them. That is our only chance of remedying the problems we face. The problem with anger is that, alone, without understanding, it is impotent and does nothing to solve the problems we face. These problems have their roots in social relations and arrangements. Anger generated at their personifications is pointless, it changes nothing. And cynicism and abuse directed at those who continue to affirm hope - as I do, if that hope is correctly channelled and acted upon - is even worse, because it saps the energies of those forces which are our last and best hope to turn this climate crisis round. Here, I shall be blunt. If your realism crosses the boundary into negativity and abuse, go into nature. It's the best and most effective therapy we have. And if you persist in chipping away at the hope of those doing their best to make a difference, I'll put it more bluntly - take a hike. I don't suffer it. It is an indulgence. I associate myself with those who want to act in order to lessen the impact of climate change for the generations that will follow us. It's a good job that those who fought for rights and justice, those who fought against slavery, for the emancipation of women, for democracy, those of my grandparents' generation who fought and defeated Nazism and Fascism, didn't listen to those who, overimpressed by the force of given facts, thought the situations to be hopelesss. In acting, in struggling with the forces we seek to alter, we find the hope. In short, I will never agree with that negative, pessimistic, and narcissistic view of the hopeless future. It is self-indulgent, defeatist and a dereliction of duty. We have to keep using all we have and all we know to make the case for acting together to reduce the impact of climate change in a more more effective way than we have been doing. If we don't, Nature will make the necessary choices for us, with complete indifference to human notions of justice and fairness. Nature could care less. This is no different to the struggle to abolish slavery or to extend civil rights to all in the late 1950s or early 1960s. These changes for the better did not "evolve" in some benign way. They were achieved as a result of the efforts of dedicated activists, risking their jobs, reputations and even lives on their line. We are now in that kind of fight for the future for all life on Earth. We must act now and act effectively to convince the public there is an alternative to high carbon lifestyles that is heating the planet.
Will we do it? Anyone who says could but we won't is simply saying that they themselves won't. It's another way of saying can't.
In the end, there's only one thing you can do:
"Toss your pebble in the river, watch it ripple, and know you have moved the ocean.”
― K.M. Douglas, Cities of Blood
Start from there, see who else is in, take it from there. We may yet surprise ourselves. If everybody did what they could, gosh, things could get pretty interesting. Those few who perpetrate hateful things on the many are banking on our silence. We all have power. Recognise it. What are you going to do with it? The crisis in the climate system is a challenge to us, one and all. We are not the first generation to be challenged with a life or death struggle. We may be the first to throw the towel in and just give up.
“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”
― Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
See also a previous post by me:
Individual Choice, Moral Responsibility and Collective Action: The Improbabilities of Changing Ourselves and Changing the World.
http://pcritchley2.wix.com/beingandplace#!Individual-Choice-Moral-Responsibility-and-Collective-Action-The-Improbabilities-of-Changing-Ourselves-and-Changing-the-World/c1mbt/55529b050cf24874172b4b89