Day after day I wade through the self-perpetuating, self-consuming cycles of climate despair on Facebook. I try my best to ignore it, pass without comment. But I have to read masses of this stuff, accompanied by self-righteous finger pointing at others, in order to find the good stuff. I've long since reached saturation point. The hateful, spiteful stuff I can do without in my life. Facebook is useful as a tool, but is an absolute swamp that can absorb all your time, effort and energy if you treat it as anything more than that. It induces people into compulsive behaviour, stimulating a hunger that can never be fed by these means. There is a pathetic belief that an awful lot of internet action gradually accumulates into an awful lot of substance. It doesn’t. You just remain on the same level, day in and day out, repeating your pet themes for all eternity. Rhiannon Williams in The Independent writes that social media has brought the ‘crushing social pressure to be perceived as having a good time, all time.’ (6 December 2017). I haven’t noticed that, I have to say. I must be keeping the wrong company. I’m seeing the relentless posting of doom and gloom on the climate, day in and day out, promoting the self-image of truth-tellers being martyrs to an unpopular cause. No one is listening! No one is acting! The world is in denial! Same message, every day. It's Dante's Inferno. It's a tuneless noise.
No one underestimates the seriousness of the climate crisis. The few who are in denial of this crisis are not worth wasting breath on, and are not to be engaged with in this way. There is a denial, though, one relates to those who fail to take ethics, politics and economics seriously in terms of constructive models and their implementation, as well as in terms of winning sufficient numbers over to the alternative economic so as to make it viable. I've been conducting an experiment on Facebook, just to see the balance between those who get excited about climate problems and those who get excited by climate solutions. Interest is heavily weighted in favour of the former. And even when it comes to solutions, it is the technological stuff that is the principal focus, with a little bit on law and government. When it comes to my field, practical reason, the springs of action in ethics and politics, character and virtues as qualities of successful living - I may as well have written it all in hieroglyphs. It's like MacIntyre and such like like in another dimension. There just seems to be no bridge at all between reason and the world. It is easier to moralize, point to the problem as it mounts, and then point to the finger at others. I loathe the spite and the malice, the misdiagnosis of the problem, the abuse hurled at people for acting the way they do, as though, within the structured patterns and systems of social life that exist individuals could act differently. As for the endless pronouncement that the end of the world is nigh - such vanity and narcissism! That’s the very self-important egoistic assertion that has got us into this mess in the first place, under the guise of other-regarding, caring, compassionate environmentalism. It's anything but. I am now tired of defending environmentalism against accusations of being a misanthropy. There is a definite strain of misanthropy in some of these people. I've seen and heard it too many times now to ignore it. 'It's time to cull the herd,' I have heard people say. Let's give governments the power to choose who shall live and who shall die, then. It's saves us the hard work of transforming social relations and furnishing the appropriate institutional infrastructure. I see people as solutions, not problems. But I worry that there is a certain environmentalism out there that is preparing the grounds for people management on the part of governments. Of course, it won't be the rich and powerful who will come to be managed at all, the ones whose environmental impact is the greatest and the worst. It will be those deemed surplus to requirements. Those who obsess over population are sleepwalking into a nightmare. Their misanthropy turns my stomach. Such people haven’t got the first idea about real people, and find it easier to engage in the endless writing of our obituary as the planet unravels. And they are sociologically and politically clueless, and haven't the first idea about social systems, how they are structured, and what it takes to transform them from within.
How real do people want it? The physical facts they peddle as a daily routine concern only the obvious stuff. They don't bear repetition, and the fact that these people repeat the same message endlessly, despite the fact they must surely know that it has no effect, suggests they are already in a psychic Hell of their own. Are they inviting the rest of us to join them? Nothing seems to bring them out of it. It is good preparation for the real thing that is sure to come. They keep telling us climate catastrophe is coming. This is their raison d'etre, their only source of excitement in life. Without it, it seems they would have nothing to occupy their time. Anyhow, as you might have guessed, I have exchanged words with several of them, and today was the final straw. They are hopeless, the doomed and the damned. The only thing left to them is to keep saying 'I told you so,' and point a disapproving finger at all and sundry who do not subscribe to their misanthropy and misery. I don't need to be reading them. It is patently obvious they don't believe a word of anything I say. So it's a parting of the waves.
I shall finish my Dante piece, and if people look askance, as they do, then I shall shrug my shoulders and carry on. These are the people in denial. These are the people who peddle their insipid and inane utopias, backed by nothing practically and institutionally, not to mention anthropologically, by way of their realization, with not a cat in Hell’s chance of anyone supporting them in numbers sufficient to make them feasible. No doubt they'll occupy their time name-calling the deluded masses, looking forward to the day they all get their comeuppance.
I put the inscription that Dante hung over the gateway to Hell on this image above for a reason – because the repetition of the same words on Facebook, inviting the same damned – and I mean damned – pious, pathetic and pointless lamentations, suggests nothing more than Dante’s Hell as a hopeless condition and an eternal prison. And I've ignored them too long, in the hope - a word they loathe - that they might actually learn something from the way I argue the case for practical reason. Nothing. And now the nonsense is just provoking me into arguments from which no one learns anything. And which I don't need. I do live in a real world, and I don't need to be hanging around this FB world for the odd moment free of antagonism and irritation.
Are we to remain paralyzed with fear in face of the horror? Or are we to get the purgation underway, get moving and start to transition towards self-knowledge and salvation?
If the former, then we are consigned to the hopeless state of Hell - hello the relentless doom and gloom of FB.
If the latter, then we find the hope that lights the path, and start to walk. Many are already doing that! I am overrun with so many options for action that I exhausted myself last year and came very close to breathing my last at Christmas. One year on, and I've moved on - the same idiocy on FB suggest others haven't, and never will. And still I have people on Facebook demanding strategies and actions from me! If something should be done by somebody – YOU identify that something, bring it to others, and never forget that YOU are that somebody! And those transition strategies are out there! God knows, I have posted on them often enough - pick on, join one, contribute!
Of course, we have reached a stage where all those who write of ‘hope’ are themselves denounced as deniers. The crisis is so bad that collapse is inevitable and there is no hope, it is said. Anyone proposing solutions is guilty of peddling ‘hopium.’ Please. Don't make me laugh. People have almost completely lost touch with ethics, they really do think it is just a series of likes and dislikes. They are utterly blase about notions of moral truth, and yet are the first to whine about the post-fact, post-truth society, as though scientific truth is the one and whole truth. The problem is much, much deeper, and we have been mired in it for a very long time. The fact that these people don't realize it indicates the depth of our predicament. Denial comes in many forms, and this moral denial may well prove to be the most fatal of all.
We have overturned God and taken morality into our own hands. Morality is our own invention. Men as gods as authors of their own undoing. People post repeatedly on California burning, showing an ill-disguised relish at the rich Californians getting their just deserts, and the followers like and lament away. This is infernal retribution, a world that is far removed from divine justice. That is what men as gods, taking morality into their own hands, produce - a cycle of reprisal and counter-reprisal that will finally consume the world. The choice is between cannibalism and communion. Those acquainted with Dante will know what I mean by that (clue, the Ugolino passage, and the notion of retribution in the Inferno).
I have tried to keep posts constructive, focusing on commons transitions. The interest? Negligible. I could keep doing that, hoping that here and there, the odd person may investigate further. But it seems unlikely. Find your transition team and jump on it. As for FB, it is an obscene spectacle, a passive radicalism that leaves the world unchanged. It reinforces prejudices rather than changes minds. I have communicated, I have informed, and I have pointed to the movement underway. I have nothing more to say or do there. I'll be damned if I'll be spending any more time reading the dreary rubbish posted on there day in day out.
There is some quality, mind, and praise to those who remain clear and concise and concentrate on the point at issue. And praise to the transitioners and designers that I know, whose work I share on FB. They use FB as it should be used. But there are times when I look at this FB world and think that the world is in the grip of a death-cult. Give 'em hope and they reach for a revolver. Or just become abusive. I just see despair mired in a hopeless condition, with an understanding of nothing outside of the physical flesh to console them, nothing to sustain any kind of transcendent hope. They are beaten, and defeat is etched over their every word. Even the alternatives they suggest are so utterly impossible and utopian as to reek of hopelessness. ‘Civilization’ is to blame. Indeed. Politics, economics, religion - of course - everything that human beings have done - agriculture and industry, all of it is to blame. Such generalisations save the challenge of a focused critique. And they are not true to what we know of human nature, as revealed by .. well, culture and civilization. I posted a tribute to the art and architecture historian and inspirational writer and teacher Vincent Scully, who died November 30. It received two likes and one comment. Art, architecture, culture, learning, civilization.
'Vincent Scully, America’s most important architecture historian, died on Nov. 30, at age 97. The architect Philip Johnson proclaimed him “the most influential architecture teacher ever.” But Professor Scully was more than a teacher. He was a critic and a passionate public intellectual. He brought his interests, intellect and knowledge to bear on the world around him. Thanks to him, generations of architects, urbanists and scholars learned to see the world around them through the lens of human tradition and experience.'
'As a teacher he not only inspired would-be architects and scholars like myself, but also literally thousands of Yale undergraduates from a wide variety of majors, who went on to a wide variety of careers but would all take away from his classes a sense that they too had a responsibility to help shape the physical world.'
I could quote on. Just read up on the man, and you will see the depth of the man's achievement as a scholar and as an educator. He was a great humanist. He got two likes. How serious are people about creative a new civilization? I'd suggest not very ... but, of course, the click-button community of Facebook is not a fair test of seriousness.
Down with civilization! Even I have been surprised by the extent to which people indulge 'back to nature' fantasies, utter regression in face of the big, wide world. We ought to know that we could never have been happy with habitual behaviour up the proverbial tree – this is not so much environmentalist as the narcissists’ soliloquy as we face the final curtain. Because the error here is all mine - I've just twigged that we are not supposed to listen to that much on Facebook, and only take anything we read seriously if we can indeed take it into the real world of real people. Well, I have done that, and I am now tired of the unreality pocket the characters on this medium keep inviting me into. I don't recognize their views of people and the world as real.
There are ample opportunities to engage in appropriate and effective environmental actions and politics, more transformatory organs and agencies than have ever existed in history. We need greater interimbrication so that they come to scale up to the challenge in front of us, because on their own their actions cannot sum to the effective collective response we need. But they exist. And if you are still demanding ‘action’ on electronic forums, then you really are hopeless.
I’ll give people the words that excite them: “We're doomed!” In other words, I’m out of the endless doomsterism on Facebook. I'm gone. I had the wake up call a year ago. I've spent a year cutting back, and yet still being harassed and harangued by assorted fruitloops, fantasists, dogmatists and fanatics. There are smart folk on there, and all credit to them, they do seem to know how to set the boundaries and avoid irritation. I can't do that, I lack that facility. So I drown in nonsense. I don't need to read this stuff. There seems to be an unhealthy obsession with staring “Hell” in the face and engaging in infernal retribution by pointing the finger at others. The only excitement comes when someone tries to shake them out of their psychic torpor – they walk like zombies. I’ve seen these characters in Dante’s Inferno. Mention Dante and ethics and universal authority, government and law, some effective politics and ethics, and they suddenly spring into life, and proceed to run as far away as they can – and then go back to staring at Hell and restating the problem in its most obvious physical forms. And then they have the nerve to keep demanding strategies and solutions! Treat the problem with the depth it deserves, and they say it is impossible or implausible. We’re in trouble, take it as read. We are in for x degree temperature increase. Pick any number you like and multiply it by any factor you like. Make it a big number pointing to bad things. Oh, but it’s so much worse than that. This is a conservative estimate. I’ve heard it every day for years now. Heard it too many times, I find it completely unmoving now. And if I am unmoved by it, so too will be the people you are trying to reach (or purporting to). As for death – why the surprise and hysteria that death comes to us all? I didn’t think the universe had any purpose or design. The liveliest minds out there have been telling us this for ages. It doesn't matter, none of it matters, so why are you so upset? 99% of species that have ever existed have already gone extinct. You keep telling us there is no God. Do you think there should be? Or did you think your machine gods would grant you eternal life? Welcome to Hell, for which Facebook is good psychic preparation. I don't care to live my life in such a place and with such company. It is unhealthy.
I have now had it with wild speculation, with the moralising that exhibits a barely-concealed misanthropy, the scarcely-reasoned nihilism with respect to culture and civilization, the preaching to the converted, the abuse of heretics who dare suggest something a bit different, the radical stances backed by nothing but hot air, the recriminations, the idle threats, and the taste for climate collapse as nature revenging itself upon the rich and powerful. Face it, you folks are just engaged in the endless writing of our obituaries, and eschew any serious engagement with real people. And you do it because you are politically powerless and clueless. Given the scale of the problem we face, the failure to seriously engage in the field of practical reason is a dereliction, and is the very thing that obstructs transition. There are far more of you than there are of climate change deniers, and you have the great god of science well-nigh 100% on your side. If you can't succeed on that basis, then you are doing something very wrong indeed. You are stuck in the endless cycles of Hell.
We need to be clear, concise, to the point, working for collaborative agreements and concerted action, getting the politics into line and creating the political will to buttress governmental action. So many people are sceptical of the politics of climate change. They don’t trust arguments for government action based on a necessity delivered – they say ‘dictated’ – by science. I believe that such collective action is necessary, for the reasons given in the scientific research. But here comes the tricky bit. Are we trying to persuade people, as active, informed citizens whose voice matters, of the need for and legitimacy of this climate action? If we are, then we need to engage in the political mechanisms – and address the structural dependence of the conventional political sphere upon the private economy. You see? The capital system is not a public domain that is subject to democratic persuasion but a regime of private accumulation in which accumulation is the one and only law: ‘Moses and all the Prophets’ as Marx put it. To demand that people, at the level of individual agency, break a systemic power as entrenched in the entire social metabolic order as capital is, is fanciful in the extreme. To point an accusing finger at those individuals as architects of the climate catastrophe to come is pious moralising, useless, tedious, and frankly obscene.
We need to give people the science on climate change, we need to point people in the direction of solutions when identifying problems, we need to come out of our cliques and find commonalities, we need to get movement underway, communicate, win people over, get them involved in transitions, create a sense of ownership when it comes to climate solutions. Or are you happy in Hell? If you just want to reinforce your prejudices, then carry on, you will get precisely nowhere. You will post away to the benighted end on Facebook, lamenting the fact that no one is listening. I’ve listened, and I have learned. And I am leaving Hell behind.
I have posted on bad religious ideas: Real Reformation
It is based on an article by Valerie Tarico called Religion’s Dirty Dozen – 12 Really Bad Religious Ideas That Have Made the World Worse. Among the ‘really bad’ ideas are notions of the ‘chosen people,’ ‘God’s elect,’ and Hell. Throw in judgment and retribution while we are at it. ‘To paraphrase Christopher Hitchens, they belong in the dustbin of history just as soon as we can get them there.’ That seems reasonable, you would think. Except that I have noticed the extent to which certain humanist/atheist voices on the environmental left, the ones who go big on this kind of anti-religious animus, (and the people I have associations with in fighting climate change), constitute a sanctimonious, self-righteous, chosen few indeed. Self-chosen, of course, but indeed few, and destined to remain so. They make a virtue of being the few enlightened, lamenting the greedy and ignorant and complacent masses who pay no heed to their endless warnings. It could be the company I keep, but they are the most hateful, spiteful, judgmental and retributive people I know, and are utterly lacking in the mercy and forgiveness of God’s justice. They have clear contempt for the people they purport to appeal to - and people sense it, and give them a wide berth. I'm not interested in the politics of permanent protest, it is an infantile indulgence. So much of this environmental politics is preparation for the defeat that is certain to come. And far too many of these folk are plainly looking forward to the impacts of climate change falling on people they don’t like: the rich, the powerful, the privileged, the comfortable, which in the general onslaught on civilization includes the ordinary folk who didn’t heed their warnings, the people who don’t bow to the far-sighted wisdom of the elect, the people who don’t down tools and go ‘back to nature,’ the people who don’t buy utopian fantasies and don’t have much faith would-be environmental philosopher-kings. Are you in there? Pretty much everyone but the environmental elect is. And now they are reduced to reporting endlessly on flood and fire, taking a perverted pleasure in seeing the people they think the architects of unfolding climate catastrophe getting their just deserts. It’s not ‘the revenge of nature’ at work here at all – it is what Nietzsche calls ressentiment, the impotent and spiteful rage and malice of those who lack what it takes to win their arguments in public platform, and relish getting their own back against those who frustrate their designs. They identify with ‘alien’ nature – the deleterious environmental consequences of the activity of certain humans – and take vicarious pleasure in the pain and suffering of people they don’t like. It’s called revenge. And the people they don't like are many.
I have defended environmentalism against charges of misanthropy over the years. But misanthropists there are in the environmental cause, and an incipient misanthropy there is in certain statements of ecological principles drawn from a nature that excludes human beings. It leaves a sour taste in the mouth. It is infernal retribution, far removed from divine justice. Me, I prefer to do judgment properly, set within true justice, and tempered by mercy and forgiveness – all of which presupposes the very ethical system these characters have so casually cast aside as repressive and totalitarian. And I prefer to do a proper critique of political economy, involving a thorough analysis of the social metabolic order, and a strategic conception of politics as based on the structural and organisational capacity to act. It beats moralism every time. And there’s no way I can avoid a major falling out with moralizers who hide their vindictiveness behind high moral principle. I don't need that kind of engagement. But it has become impossible to maintain silent contempt in their presence. I need to move on by, and focus on those who are getting their sleeves up and working on collaborative solutions.
It's no wonder that people stay clear of environmental politics, though, when the misanthropes speak with the loudest voice. That's nothing to do with the rightness and justness of the environmental cause, nothing to do with problems with the scientific case, nothing to do with uncertainties with respect to the evidence on anthropogenic global warming, and nothing to do with ecological principles - it has everything to do with the hectoring, lecturing, dictatorial, sanctimonious, and downright elitist tones of certain environmentalists - they don't like real folk, let's say it plain and simple. It's not my kind of environmentalism. I don’t need that kind of company. It’s not good for my physical and mental well-being. And I have better things to be doing with my time.
Actions have consequences, and the iniquity of climate change is that the selfish actions of some will inflict damaging environmental consequences upon many: those who bear least responsibility for climate catastrophe will be hit first and hardest, and already are being. I don’t doubt that a day of reckoning is coming. There is a need for judgment. But we need a well-tempered justice: justice without retribution and without recrimination. Otherwise, who are we? Vengeance is not ours, least of all when administered through an ‘alien’ nature.
My last post on Facebook is on philosophy and virtue. We live, as MacIntyre argued long ago, ‘after virtue.’ And people are oblivious to the implications. They think morality is merely a series of value judgments, subjective opinion, likes and dislikes, and nothing more than that. They run a mile from morality. They think it is repressive, and they think it has something to do with God, whenever they hear someone argue that ethics involves more than nature (as it does). And they are mystified why the world is in the mess it is in. There is no mystery. Virtues are qualities for successful living. They need to be backed by communities of practice. We lack those communities. We live after virtue. We have been politically and ethically disarmed, and not enough people are interested in rearmament. If you think you can press science into doing the work of practical reason, then you are deluded. And on that delusion, your causes will fail and you will be confirmed in your despair.
By Simon Sinek
A fifteen minute talk that is well worth watching on this theme. People are responding to Simon Sinek’s message because it is framed in language they can understand. I’ve been trying to deliver the same message through what is not called ‘traditional morality’ and virtue ethics, and not getting much by way of response. Because that language, once an eminently practical morality which shaped character traits, habits, practices and relations, has become foreign to an age reared on subjective choice, emotivist likes and dislikes, consumerist infantilism, morality as value judgments.
Watch the entire talk, but go further. For me, the issue is not simply one of millennials, narcissism and entitlement. I quote the ‘iron cage’ passage from Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Rise of Capitalism frequently. Line after line packs a wealth of profundity with respect to the predicament of a modern world that advances individual liberty as a subjectivism whilst undermining the social and moral structures that support autonomy. Weber refers to a ‘mechanised petrification embellished with a convulsive self-importance,’ a ‘nullity’ that imagines itself to have attained a higher stage of civilization than has ever before been reached. That was in 1904. Those words make it clear that this problem goes to the very heart of liberal capitalist modernity. And that’s precisely how I address it in my own work. The effect? Negligible, I think. Some researchers and academics see the point, the odd political ecologist. But in the main, people remain cold, preferring their own modes of understanding, failing to make the connections. I try to piece the science, (social epigenetics), the ethics (virtue, character, habits, ‘traditional,’) the critique of political economy drawn from the likes of Marx, the sociology of the likes of Weber, and ecology together. In an age of specialism, though, people approach the questions from one aspect.
So praise to Simon Sinek for getting through on this point, because my attempted recovery of ‘traditional’ morality in social and political ecology – putting character formation alongside Marx’s emphasis on social formation, grounding morality in the form and forms of the common life and mutual relations – has not got through. It can only get through in practice, which needs people. Who are were? Calling for politics and ethics to fit ecological realities .. on the hyperreality that is social media.
Watch Sinek, ponder what he says, and then translate his message into the ethical themes I have attempted to highlight over the years, and then it will become clear why I insist on ethics as ethos, a practice, a way of life constituted by relations within community, on character construction, codes of behaviour, and the acquisition and exercise of virtues. It has been condemned as moralistic. In truth, it possesses an eminently practical bent and creates the springs of action, without which all the knowledge and know-how in the world is ineffectual, mere ability to act rather than the actual action.
Sinek refers to dopamine, the numbing chemical that is behind addictive behaviour like drinking and gambling. This is what people receive on social media. The term ‘social media’ in this context is a misnomer. Because what we are dealing with here is an anti-social media, an abstract, electronic form in which individuals separated from one another seek a connection mediated by a remote device. And it is here that they seek approval outside of normal social ties in family, community, workplace etc. Under stress, people will not turn to other people, grounded in warm bonds, affective ties and trust relations in community, but to the means of their addiction.
Sinek is referring particularly to millennials. I see the problem as much wider and deeper, located in the power of separation and abstraction constituting capitalist modernity. The moral and cultural resources of generations knitting communities together have been subjected to the displacement of the capital system and its accumulative imperatives with respect to money and power. In a famous passage from The Community Manifesto, Karl Marx claimed that all human ties have come to be reduced to the ‘nexus of callous cash payment.’ That was in 1848. It has taken this long for the moral capital of a previous age to be dissipated and dissolved. The capital system is parasitic on previous morality, but can do nothing to replenish the stock.
Sinek argues that on account of allowing unfettered access to these dopamine producing devices and media, behaviour is becoming hard wired, with the result that too many people don’t know how to form deep, meaningful relations. Ethics is a practice, involving character constitution within mutual relations. Instead of warm, affective ties and bonds, society is being organised around self-interest and the most ephemeral of connections, money, self-interest, calculation, utility. Again, in 1843, Marx described how each uses the other as means to personal ends, with the result that ‘all become playthings of external power.’
Sinek points out the extent to which friendships have become superficial. People don’t rely on their friends to meet the demands of everyday social living, but see them as mere instruments of personal pleasure; they will have ‘fun’ with friends, but will cancel on them, or know that they will cancel on them if better options for ‘fun’ come along.
Sinek continues: “Deep and meaningful relationships are not there because they have not practised the skills set and, worse, they don’t have the coping mechanisms to deal with stress.” And that points to the loss of a moral infrastructure capable of shaping, guiding and orienting behaviour. That has been rejected as a constraint on individual liberty and repressive in its implications. The result is a rootless and fruitless subjectivism, with people miscalling an abstract electronic form ‘social’ media. In truth, it is a media that measures the distance that has grown between people and between them and their places.
“So when significant stress starts to show up in their lives, they are not turning to a person, they are turning to a device, they are turning to social media, they are turning to things which offer a temporary relief. We know, the science is clear, we know that people who spend more time on Facebook suffer from higher rates of depression than people who spend less time on Facebook.”
Sinek’s words here are particularly true with respect to communications on global warming, climate change, ecological degradation, loss of biodiversity, pollution, environmental disasters, floods, fires, famines … Day in, day out, this impotent howl of people addicted to bad news, people who feel the need to report on the collapse that is sure to come. They are mired in misery, and have become sunk in despair, relying on a media that fosters and feeds depression.
There’s nothing wrong with social media as such, just as there is nothing wrong with alcohol as such – it is the imbalance and over-reliance that is the problem, the substitution of one means of expression and communication for all others. With respect to climate change, this is a media that can be used as a tool of information, but no more. The relentless posting that takes place has itself become the form of action. And it denotes an inaction that reinforces the sense of despair. The problems accumulate, yet nothing seems to be getting done to address them. There is a myth that continuous low-level activity on social media will issue in a high-level achievement that has the power to change the world. It doesn’t. It is merely a constant reproduction of low-level activity that lacks the capacity to scale upwards to the next level, let alone the highest level required for effective action.
“If you are having dinner with family and friends and you are texting somebody who is not there, that’s a problem, that’s an addiction. If you are at a meeting and you put your phone on the table, you are telling others that they are not that important. You are addicted.”
And if you are repeating the same doom and gloom climate message, without pointing to the next step in terms of practices and solutions, and without ensuring that those practices and solutions are actually realistic possibilities within reach of people, government and business, not impossibilities that betray a complete innocence of the field of practical reason, then you are addicted. You are paralyzed in despair, cut off from the springs of action, cut off from people. You are and will remain a minority, when the political task before us is to build majorities. If we are to take politics and ethics seriously, rather than engage in pious impotent moralizing. It is easy enough to write ideal solutions in the abstract. The hard part is the practical work of bridging the gap between theoretical reason and practical reason, and that involves an embeddedness in communities and relations of practice. Modernity has placed us within the paralyzing paradox of how to continue advancing the central value of autonomy within autonomy-denying practices and structures. We are living with the consequences of a society that promotes subjectivism at every turn whilst dissolving the various corporate solidarities by which human society holds together and liberty is supported and enhanced. Social media can never work as a surrogate for those solidarities, and soon paralyzes the will when it is considered as such.
I shall leave you with the daily news.
'A new study based on satellite observations finds that temperatures could rise nearly 5 °C by the end of the century.'
I just have a hunch that there are folk out there reporting on this who will be telling us that it's a whole lot worse than that. 'We're doomed.' Welcome to the world in which we get to write our own obituary. The situation is bad enough. I can do without empty promises, idle threats, pious moralizing, resentment and recrimination. And I can do without the constant tension and feckless argument and howls of impotent rage. Goodbye and good riddance to all of that, and welcome to a sane and sober reckoning with realities.
As I wrote in Of Gods and Gaia in 2012:
'Human hubris has more than deserved its nemesis and maybe the best thing that human beings can do now, if we really are past the point of no return, is to settle accounts and make our peace with nature within and nature without.'
If it's over, then it's over, and you have more serious business to attend to than resentment and recrimination, and better things to be doing than saying 'we're doomed' over and again on social media. 'I say show some real guts and face the music. Human beings have brought themselves to the Judgement Day.' There is no technological workaround, they are just puny attempts to escape the day of reckoning - we need to 'face fearlessly the consequences of having lived as gods for far too long.'
Or are you calling out for help and hope? It is out there, but you have to have faith and courage. And love too. Or is this all a little too religious for you in these godless times? We can go a long way together, and to labour together in love is the only way in which we will get home. The new idols of 'economic growth' and 'progress' have locked us into a nihilism, and we cannot live in such a destinationless state. You can join with others, exit Hell, and get moving. But you have to make an existential choice here:
'Not I, not anyone else can travel that road for you. You must travel it for yourself. . . .'
—Walt Whitman
You ask for strategies and solutions, I say we need to call back the soul. That, and an emphasis on character formation and social formation. Transition strategies only work in context. Fail to provide the conditions of the common life, and all that you have are means and mechanisms devoid of agency. These are the kinds of empty questions that are asked on a 'social media' utterly detached from communities of practice and from real people.
What was it that Dante wrote of the virtuous pagans he placed in Limbo? Without hope, they live in desire. They are far from being bad people, and they long for the good: it's just that they are just cut off from hope and the source of hope. I can't say anything to them that will pull them out of despair, and I don't need to speak of them and waste words on them that are better spent elsewhere. I have things to be doing. I shall just pass on by from now on.
Let’s reason it this way, is 30 hours spent on Facebook three times more effective than 10 hours reading? I’d suggest that an hour spent reading is many times more effective than many more hours spent on Facebook. We should spend less time talking about doing things on social media, and more time actually doing them. Or reading. Reading is quality time, whereas a lot of social media is quantity time. Social media suffers from rapidly diminishing returns. It absorbs more and more of your time, long after the benefits it offers have been exhausted. Spending 30 hours a week on social media is not anything like three times as effective as spending just 10 hours – and the things that social media is useful for doesn’t require much by way of time. It’s the addictive quality that draws us into diseconomies of scale. Facebook is a drain, a distraction and a diversion. It has a cult like effect. It saps the energy. It puts the mind to sleep. It’s a hell of constant crisis, conflict, permanent protest, defeat and despair. It breeds the illusion that endless keyboard activism makes some powerful practical contribution to changing the world for the better. It does nothing of the kind. It drains the energies, leaves the world unchanged, the problems mounting up, breeding frustration, stoking despair, conflict, anger, depression. It stimulates the worst aspects of the psychology. Leaving Facebook is leaving Limbo behind and entering Purgatory, a world of movement with purpose, an ascent with purpose in which you become proactive in the world, instilling a sense of meaning, direction and, even, self-control in the sense of having an end which properly orders one’s energies, fulfils them. I mean, day after day, I see the same people posting the same things, making the same comments, and getting a thrill that can only be described as sexual when finding an article or a comment which confirms their worst fears with respect to the environment. It’s the worst kind of religion, a perversion, a distortion, a neurotic obsession, a self-absorption in one’s depression, powerlessness, hopelessness, misery, an addiction, a kind of group therapy in which others are invited into the Slough of Despond. The exclamation marks give it away. ‘Shared!’ Such excitement at the sight of climate impacts on people in the western world! Yes, the uncontained glee as rich and privileged white westerners getting knocked about by the climate. That's how pathetic some people have become. We need to be cultivating good habits, engaging people, building linkages, developing communities of practice, creating an eco-citizenship capable of constituting the Ecopolis. Instead, there is this perversion. Addressing climate change practically involves much more than technology, more, even, than systems and system change – it involves serious politics and ethics, climate justice beyond retribution, resentment and recrimination. And that will require a considered, prudent and concerted activism that is targeted, just, intelligent, nuanced, and appropriately calibrated. These are qualities sadly lacking in the environmental addictivists on Facebook, the ones for whom electronic communication has served to narrow their vision rather than open it out into links with the outside world.
Additional:
Well, well, within five days of penning these words on the despair of Facebook, the former vice-president of Facebook comes clean and admits that FB is a wasteland.
Chamath Palihapitiya, former vice-president of user growth, expressed regret for his part in building tools that destroy ‘the social fabric of how society works’
The thing is soul-destroying, a fake community, a substitute for activism, a pretend radicalism, a cul-de-sac. Chamath Palihapitiya, who was vice-president for user growth at Facebook before he left the company in 2011, said: “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works. No civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth.” Any hope I had of possibly influencing people has been lost, I see plainly that people merely like to talk to themselves, this emphasis on 'likes' serving as the self-cultivation of conformity and the encouragement of a flabby loyalty. It is weak, it destroys the intellect, it dissipates the character, and it detracts from social engagement. And it has blunted my edge. Palihapitiya called on his audience to “soul-search” about their own relationship to social media. “Your behaviors, you don’t realize it, but you are being programmed,” he said. “It was unintentional, but now you gotta decide how much you’re going to give up, how much of your intellectual independence.” Nothing, intellectually, politically and morally. Out of misplaced loyalty, in the hope people would learn something, add something I offered that was a bit different, I toned my own distinctive voice down. The result? I was treated to climate change lectures I could deliver in my sleep. Facebook’s founding president, Sean Parker, criticized the way that the company “exploit[s] a vulnerability in human psychology” by creating a “social-validation feedback loop” during an interview at an Axios event. There are people on here mired in climate despair, and creating a community of collective grief that is utterly debilitating, as well as narcissistic. People do seem to enjoy the thought of being among the chosen few privileged to live in the end of times. It's an expression of the same self-importance that has brought us to this.
Site’s founding president, who became a billionaire thanks to the company, says: ‘God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.’
I am very glad to have kept my little job in the community going, working on foot, street to street. My community connections, my involvement in local affairs, my fellowship with the 'ordinary' folk who turn up, day in day out, put a shift in, keep the everyday life world ticking over. There are too many electronic mouths in the world; it's the doers and their practices that count. I'd like to say that I'm impressed with the learning capacities of people exchanging electronic information, but I'm not - rather than mutual learning, the experience is one of reinforcing prejudice. I've tried to move things outside of the sterile grooves, only to be met with accusations of 'idle intellectualizing' and 'posturing do-nothing' and much worse. I do plenty. I only went on Facebook in November 2013 to promote my tutoring business, but started to engage in climate communication. It's the Last Great Cause. But what a waste. Far too many are lacking in anything like the political and ethical sensibility, let alone the popular and community connections, required for effective and enduring action. Naifs hectoring in the abstract and making claims on other people's time and money - you know what the problem is, solve it! Take practical reason seriously! And not only respect people, be one of them, not some self-appointed environment educational dictatorship, build a constituency for action from within the forms of ecological self-socialisation, develop some real linkages as a matter of practical politics. For people who consider themselves 'naturalists', they show an unhealthy obsession with electronic media... How real do people want it?
Facebook and Google have become “obstacles to innovation” and are a “menace” to society whose “days are numbered”, said billionaire investor and philanthropist George Soros at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday.
“Mining and oil companies exploit the physical environment; social media companies exploit the social environment,” said the Hungarian-American businessman, according to a transcript of his speech.
“This is particularly nefarious because social media companies influence how people think and behave without them even being aware of it. This has far-reaching adverse consequences on the functioning of democracy, particularly on the integrity of elections.”
In addition to skewing democracy, social media companies “deceive their users by manipulating their attention and directing it towards their own commercial purposes” and “deliberately engineer addiction to the services they provide”. The latter, he said, “can be very harmful, particularly for adolescents”.
“The power to shape people’s attention is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few companies. It takes a real effort to assert and defend what John Stuart Mill called ‘the freedom of mind’. There is a possibility that once lost, people who grow up in the digital age will have difficulty in regaining it. This may have far-reaching political consequences.”
Soros warned of an “even more alarming prospect” on the horizon if data-rich internet companies such as Facebook and Google paired their corporate surveillance systems with state-sponsored surveillance – a trend that’s already emerging in places such as the Philippines.
“This may well result in a web of totalitarian control the likes of which not even Aldous Huxley or George Orwell could have imagined,” he said.
In November, Roger McNamee, who was an early investor in Facebook, described Facebook and Google as threats to public health.
In the same month Facebook’s founding chairman, Sean Parker, criticised his former employer: “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains,” he said.
Don't get stuck in Limbo! Get moving! Keep moving! You can't live a destinationless existence.