Fact, Value and Political Ideology: Competing Political Models on Climate
I’ve gathered some statements I’ve received from ‘libertarians’ and ‘sceptics’ with respect to ‘big government,’ ‘socialism,’ and ‘climate change.’ The worldview is always the same, the points made absolutely consistent and unwavering, the objections and rebuttals always the same ones.
I’ll not waste your time or mine with my attempts to rebut the claims and unravel the issues. I’ve been doing that for years. I was dealing with accusations of ‘alarmism’ years ago, so when I hear the same term of abuse from someone, I know to move on and not waste my time and energy. It’s politics, not a genuine and open exchange in search of truth and illumination.
More interesting is what this mindset reveals about the kind of world we live in. I have spent years trying to expose the science vs religion debate as utterly misguided. The separation of the worlds of fact and value in the modern age is debilitating to both, and this exchange shows why. The assertion of social interests and political ideology over scientific fact shows the need to ground science in ethics. In denying the rational basis of ethics, making morality mere value judgments, a mirror of the subjective preferences of the economic market, we lack a rational means of defending the value of science. We have been citing the statements on climate change from every major and many a minor scientific body on the planet, and a whole lot more besides. And still, the same hoary myths of global cooling are repeated. And that’s before we get into the category mistakes and the (deliberate) misunderstanding or conflation of elementary conceptual categories (climate change and global warming, climatology and meteorology), a problem that gets even worse when it comes to policies, treaties and agreements. Analytical clarity and logical rigour are in short supply in the world of politics. Who benefits from clouding issues in murk and bias? Power decides, of course.
So I attempt to check the deliberate errors, fabrications, distortions, deceptions, and misrepresentations of the denial of climate problems and solutions, and am thankful to the efforts of scientists, scientific bodies and climate communicators. It’s long and boring work, but it needs to be done. Because it gives us a grounding and a reality check that affirms that there are such things as scientific truth and moral truth. Lose those, and we really are just in a political world in which the great transcendent ideals of truth, justice, and freedom become mere ideological functions of dominant power. And that demoralisation and devaluation is precisely what those free-riding on the planet and free-riding on others want – the denial and destruction of the objective standards and criteria by which to hold power to account. Such a world is beyond right and wrong, good and bad, truth and falsehood – truth is whatever you can impose on others and get away with. Of course, as I argue in The Climate Commitment, if we reduce the climate crisis to a choice between politics and physics, then we will be on the side of nature’s losers.
“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”
Richard P Feynman, Shuttle Presidential Commission 1986
There is a reality, and there will always be a reality check. It is easy enough to expose the claims made my climate ‘sceptics’ as untruths. But that presumes a respect for science and its methods. Remove the reality check, and all we have are constructions as functions of power. Whether or not they are truths depends on which side of the political divide we stand. Socialist or conservative, ‘big’ government or ‘small’ government depends on political and ideological commitments impervious to any objective scientific and ethical standards. One side believes in true freedom, the other side believes in the very opposite .. How to decide? Power and power, force, even violence if need be. That’s the way it has been in history. I recently had someone object to my quoting of Marx on creative human agency. Marx was profoundly wrong on violence as the means to a better society. That is the kind of caricature for political and ideological reasons you get when rational and moral standards are suspended. A careful reading would place Marx plainly on the side of Plato and transcendent justice as against Thrasymachus’ assertion of the interests of the strongest. (True, the issue is complicated with respect to Marx’s historicism, but that question is for elsewhere). But this idea of violence as the means of enforcing and institutionalising sectional self-interest as the general interest of society, the ideological identification of one’s own good with ‘the good society’ has been the dominant force in history. The greatest check against that force has been the affirmation of standards existing outside of prevailing laws, institutions, practices and relations, by which to evaluate, criticise and orient social institutions and relations.
There is no resolving the issue on the science. No matter the wealth of scientific facts, from every major scientific body on the planet, the same rejection.
There is no resolving the issue on the ethics. Not even a belief in God brings sides together. There are as many gods as there are individuals and interests.
All conflict thus reduces to the endless ‘yes/no’ of politics. After the initial statement of principles, either side quickly resorts to the caricature of the other side. In the absence of a common language, a shared standard on fact and value, the debates merely descend into endless assertion and counter-assertion, followed by abuse.
Notice the assertion of ‘individual liberty’ over ‘collectivism,’ ‘socialism,’ ‘big government.’ Individual liberty in those terms trumps all authority.
That is outright prideful self-assertion and the identification of freedom with human self-invention.
That’s sophism and the world of Thomas Hobbes, a world in which there are no transcendent truths, norms and values outside of the conventions of politics in time and place. That’s a world of naked power struggles and relations, in which humanity splits into different sides and they fight it out, with no criterion or objective standard outside of that conflict by which to evaluate, regulate and orient choices. Might is right.
There are two positions:
Transcendent norms, truths and values, involving a notion of scientific truth and moral truth;
A conventionalism in which ‘truths’ are relative to time, place, power and social interests and are ‘made up.’
The claims on global warming and climate change are the sheerest nonsense, and don’t withstand the briefest check against the science. Science is our best check against reality. But the value of science can only be defended if we can ground ethics too in reason. Once we make morality a series of value judgements, we remove ethics from the realm of reason and make it a matter of irreducible subjective opinion, individual choice and opinion. That is a demoralised terrain. The appeal to God only works if it is backed by communities of character and practice, a common adherence to that ‘objective’ ground outside of our egos and preferences. The problem is that in making morality a matter of a) subjective preferences and b) God we end up making the grounds of morality unknowable or ineffable. And we lose the grounds of valuing the truthseeking of science.
And that suits the world of sophistry and conventionalism fine. That is the victory of Thrasymachus over Plato. Might is right, power is its own justification, and justice is the interests of the strongest. Forget science and ethics, fact and value, Nature and God – the real world is the political world of prideful humans within asymmetrical power relations, riding roughshod over others and over the environment.
If you have a strong stomach, read on, but I shall issue a warning – too much of this stuff can leave you with blurred vision, a headache and an uneasy feeling that you are living in an unreality pocket.
‘My priority is maximum individual liberty with limited government acting as a truly benign referee. The individual liberty is rooted in property rights. Socialism, to any degree, necessarily violates property rights and sacrifices individual liberty in exchange for what the self-appointed "elites" running the government determine is the collective "good"’.
‘Necessarily’, by definition, my side is right and on the side of freedom, and any deviation from that, is not. Of course, with a wealth of argument from anthropology, sociology, history, philosophy and sheer practical experience, that construct ‘individual liberty’ can be repudiated outright to begin with. The source of all our distortions and delusions is right there, with its flat assertion of individual liberty over against the facts of dependency and interdependency. It’s an illiteracy that serves an ideological function.
[‘self-appointed elites’ – straw man alert]
But note the explicit political and ideological commitment. We may agree with it, or disagree with it, in accordance with our preferences, interests, prejudices, and that is indeed how the ‘yes/no’ game of politics goes. The problems come when the political world comes into collision with a reality outside of that world, a reality which is the ground of all that exists.
So now we get the rejection of climate science. This is the interesting bit for me.
‘I also reject the idea that "big government" is necessary for any reason, but especially for a giant hoax like climate change. I call it a hoax because its track record of inconsistency and being flat-out wrong now outweighs its claims that the proverbial sky is falling. The so-called environmental movement has changed its claims at least three times during the last 45 years; first it was "global cooling" that was going to lead us all to destruction. Next, when the earth started warming, "global warming" became the "crisis". When the earth stopped warming for the last 19 year period, "global warming" suddenly became "climate change". Yet, the alleged cause of all three "problems" remained the same throughout: fossil fuels and carbon emissions caused by our capitalist system. I've even read "studies" and "reports" that claim that "climate change" can be curbed if we go about rectifying the "income inequality" problem around the world. It's ludicrous, and it's certainly not worth sacrificing our liberty to self-declared elites in government who have as their goal the acquisition and maintenance of political, economic, and cultural power.’
Every single fallacy here – and there are many - has been unravelled a million times, and I no longer waste a second of my time on such ‘debates.’ There is a deliberate (that is, political) conflation of separate issues and misrepresentation, the arguments for the new ice age and for global heating are two entirely different things. Check the issue out for yourself, not what I’m concerned about here. But, I’ll have a quick trot through on one fallacy above. There has been no shift from global warming to climate change, technically, they are two different things. “Global warming” applies to the long-term trend of rising average global temperatures as a result of human emissions of greenhouse gases. “Global warming” became the dominant popular term in June 1988, when NASA scientist James E. Hansen testified to Congress about climate, specifically referring to global warming. He said: "Global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and the observed warming." “Global warming” became the dominant popular term in the aftermath, but there was another term used at the time, which fell from view, “global change.” “Global change” encompassed a wider range of changes. “Climate change” is a broader term that recognises the fact that carbon pollution does much more than warm the planet (“global warming”) but is changing precipitation and snow patterns, raising sea levels, and increasing the risk of intense storms and droughts. “Climate change” thus refers to much more than surface temperature increases, hence the distinction between “climate change” and “global warming.” There are ample resources available to facilitate understanding of the difference. The two terms are not interchangeable, and the dominant use of one doesn’t mean that the other has ceased to be a problem, still less that both are merely ‘made up’ for political reasons.
Having said I won’t waste any more of my time explaining questions and unravelling fallacies and errors … I do it again … and again, and to no avail. But at least I get to state clearly and openly, backed not only by fact and logic but by a wealth of hard-earned experience, that the worlds of fact and value, science and ethics, the real world, are being trumped for selfish political interests, however dressed up they may be in a self-serving, self-validating ‘philosophical’ system that is nothing more than the hermetically sealed world of the ideologue.
Again, note the ‘libertarian’ identification of ‘big government’ with ‘self-declared elites.’ It is caricature, aimed at elites whose ‘goal’ is ‘the acquisition and maintenance of political, economic, and cultural power.’ In politics and economics, such motivation characterises all who could be described as ‘elites.’ We can engage in a class analysis instead and define these ‘elites’ in more precise terms in relation to the property system and production relations, showing how their goal is ‘the acquisition and maintenance of political, economic, and cultural power.’ The present world of politics, that is, the world which is denying science and ethics and refuses each, any and every reality check to dominant power.
“Free market capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other economic system in the history of the world…. The American federal government is tasked with doing certain specific things, and concerning itself with the income of our citizens and redistributing it according to the fickle, left-wing notions of "fairness" and "equality" is not one of those things. Which economic systems we prefer depends on what we consider ought to be the top priority. My top priority is the maximization of individual liberty and the constant and consistent limits on federal power and scope. I consider the sacrifice of individual liberty in exchange for a government promise of security; whether it's economic or social, that has never been realized, to be immoral.”
That’s an ideological conception based upon the false antithesis of “the individual” and “the government” as an abstract and external body. Which individual? This individual too is an abstraction. There is no individual apart from specific social relations and identities. One abstraction generates another. This is an argument based upon a false antithesis, generating the very abstract and remote conception of government that is to be rejected as an infringement of individual liberty. There is no such infringement when individuals are treated as social beings – it’s not just socialists who argue this, but Aristotle, natural law, Aquinas, Maritain, MacIntyre, anthropologists, sociologists … err … everyone who examines what kind of thing human beings are – who need a public life in order to individuate themselves. That’s quite a trite observation, but it becomes politically significant once we conceived these individuals as social beings to be citizens who, through the principle of self-assumed obligation, actually play an active role in forming the law and constituting the government to which they are subject. The biggest complaint of the present age is that there are indeed ‘elites’ who have usurped the power of the people in this way, and who exercise undue influence over law and government, in contradistinction to the principle of popular sovereignty. We clearly see that the defence of limited government is an elite defence of private power against the democratic will of individuals associating together as the citizen body.
You can point out that “97%” of climate scientists have overwhelming data showing the link between human activity and global warming, to be met with the response that science is not about consensus. No one is saying it is. It is the quality of evidence in the first place that is generating the consensus in the second. Any single source within this 97% should be sufficient to establish the strength of the case. Refute any one single source within that 97% if you can with an alternative explanation of known facts. And the figure isn’t 97% anymore and hasn’t been for years. I’d be hard pushed to cite more than a handful of papers within the climate science field that takes an alternate view.
My point is, in clarifying the point on consensus and pulling the debate back onto the quality of evidence, we get the claims of hoax and collectivism and socialism and globalism made again.
The truth is obvious, to acknowledge the science is to deflate the ideology, and with that lose all the claims made with respect to individual liberty etc etc (any political action or law that goes beyond methodological individualism as ‘socialism’ and ‘totalitarianism.’)
But my charges of ideology met with a robust response:
“Being entirely mired in ideology, for example, is wholeheartedly and without question believing an assertion that is based on: a) a computer model that speculates what might happen; b) the "findings" of scientists with a definite, demonstrable agenda who've already been exposed as practicing dishonest science with the advancement of their agenda, rather than the discovery of truth, as their primary goal; and c) the denial of actual facts, such as the temperature of the earth not rising in the last 19 years--particularly after the same alarmists who predicted 20 years ago that the earth's demise was going to be...well, now. ...but your IDEOLOGY dictates that you believe that whether the earth's temperature rises, lowers, or stays the same, it's a problem...and it's a problem caused directly by the energy industry and "income inequality" caused by capitalism. When facts don't advance the collectivist agenda, collectivists discount and then ignore them.”
When facts don’t advance the libertarian agenda, libertarians discount and then ignore them.
It’s a pancake, you can flip these words, independent of any grounding in fact and value, any which way you like. It’s called politics.
But
a) climate science is not based on computer models, the data that goes into those computers is based on good solid physics and chemistry, evidence from the real world, and checked against that real world. That claim has been made a million times, and never alters no matter how many times it is checked.
b) which scientists have been exposed as practising a political agenda? Oh yes, ClimateGate again. How many times have the scientists been independently cleared of wrongdoing now? Again, in the interests of truthseeking, I don’t need to state the facts on this, I know what they are and am entirely unafraid of inviting people to go and find them out for themselves. There is indeed a ‘definite, demonstrable agenda’ in play here, on the part of people ‘practicing dishonest science with the advancement of their agenda, rather than the discovery of truth, as their primary goal.’ The kind of people who break into private emails, selectively release and misrepresent information from those emails, and who carry on with the smear, despite no wrongdoing at all on the part of the scientists.
c) the repetition of the myth of global cooling, despite record temperatures, land, sea and atmosphere. Again, check it out for yourself. I’m more interested in the stock-in-trade claims of those who are in denial of science and ethics out of their commitment to a political agenda.
Here’s the libertarian refrain:
‘The leftist/statist/collectivist ideology; to which you STRONGLY adhere regardless of whether or not you admit it, is nonsensical and insulting to the intelligence of independent thinkers. The idea that certain human beings are somehow more intelligent, noble, and able to make our decisions for us is absurd. Even democratic socialism of Western Europe requires that the national government make economic decisions, tax at confiscatory levels, and establish economic, medical, and social priorities for their citizens. That is not success if one values, to any degree, individual liberty and the worth of every human being. Yours is a strict ideology based almost entirely on cheap, emotional appeals.’
My appeal is based on fact and value, with ethics conceived as the rational science of human nature and human life it once was. And there is such a thing as emotional intelligence, and the attainment and use of that is far from cheap. But talking of cheap … this populist appeal to the intelligence of individuals… I’ve studied Kant in depth. Kant defined the motto of enlightenment as: ‘Have the courage to use your own reason.’ But read Kant. His view on politics and ethics amounts to far more than an assertion of libertarianism. That libertarian appeal, of course, is associated with the dominance of social existence by external force in the shape not merely of alien government, but of financial and corporate power as well as the anonymous ‘market.’ The abstraction of the centralised state rose hand in hand with the capital system, that system is collectivist to the core in its constitution of power and control. If we are going to attack ‘statism’ and ‘collectivism,’ then look no further than the capital system.
Checking these claims, allied to the increasingly irrefutable evidence of the senses, may well play a role in swinging public opinion behind climate action. We shall see. It would have been better had reason prevailed over the senses, mind, since if we wait until the effects of climate change are tangible, it will be too late, we will be in the world of mitigation, and no doubt still trying to deal with the obstruction of ‘libertarians.’ I’ll end with some cheap emotionalism – what price the principle of ‘individual liberty’ once the world is on fire?
I have more of this stuff saved in my archives. The world doesn’t need to read any of it. I could have done without it myself. But there are words and phrases that set the alarms ringing in my head now. Same words, same phrases, same claims, same fallacies that are impervious to fact, logic and value. It’s the same case made time and again.
And it is that, in the end, that is my concern here. I shall state myself provocatively. The political right claim to stand for transcendent standards and eternal truths, for things that are right and good across time and place, irrespective of social position and interest. The political left reject such idealism, and point to social and class relations in time and place. The right claim that the left are historicist and relativist. I think the left assert these transcend norms, truths and values, whilst denying transcendent philosophy, whilst the right practice the plainest sophistry in the interests of the rich and the powerful, whilst affirming transcendent philosophy.
It’s a strange world is politics. Thank God it’s not the real world. And that’s not blasphemy, but the profoundest wisdom.