The Unity of Social Formation and Character Formation
Social formation and character formation proceed hand in hand as two aspects addressing the same central problem of political philosophy: how human beings are to live well together as a condition of living well at all.
I look at this argument exploding within environmental circles and am inclined to despair at how slow simple lessons are being learned. I have long argued for a political and social ecology, politicizing the environment and making facts existentially meaningful. But I have gone further than this to argue for a moral ecology. The scientistic and technocratic character of environmentalism has left it politically and socially vacuous and morally inert, hence the reliance on ‘big government’ (and big green economics, let’s just call it capitalism within the corporate form) and impotent moralising.
I don’t intend to labour these points. I will simply say that Michael Mann has a large part of the truth, here:
"People are trapped in their behaviors because of bad public policies, not personal choices."
The problem goes deeper than public policies, though. Human beings are social beings and exist within socially structured patterns of behaviour and relations which confer certain identifies and forms of rationality.
There is also a need for personal moral effort and responsibility. These things are not either/ors. I have emphasised for years now that social formation and character formation proceed hand in hand, and you lose the one whenever you lose the other.
Suffice to say that I have presented the argument for character formation, personal moral effort, co-responsiveness and responsibility for many years and in many places in my work. I just despair at the extent to which certain dominant strains of environmentalism treat these key questions of inspiration, motivation, and action as technical and engineering questions, devising systems so perfectly modelled on nature that no-one actually needs to acquire the virtues and be good.
Hectoring and lecturing, naming and shaming, mobbing and guilt-tripping are not the same thing, merely an ersatz virtue ethics for an age that has long since lost understanding. People may be able to pronounce the terms, but they don’t actually know what they mean. Like parrots, they repeat keywords, and claim it all so ‘inspiring’ and ‘empowering.’ I hold it in contempt, the fantasy of freedom combined with the reality of slavery, the convulsive self-importance that Weber thought defined the complicity of modern individuals with the ‘mechanised petrification’ of a capital economy that determines the lives of all with ‘irresistible force.’
The article says that ‘the climate debate has taken a nasty turn.’ It says something that raising critical concerns can be considered ‘nasty.’ That’s what happens when you present an argument or a figure as unarguable, sacred even. That’s a cult, and it thrives by cultivating unthinking allegiance, loyalty, conformism, and deference to authority. The debate, the article says, ‘is no longer a shouting match between climate affirmers and climate deniers. Now the finger-wagging is taking place among climate affirmers on the subject of personal responsibility for combating climate change.’
I’ve weighed in on this and got precisely nowhere, and so have abandoned environmentalism as congenitally incapable of taking politics, ethics, and the field of practical reason seriously. It speaks the language of the experts in imperative voice. It denigrates citizen agency. And the people with the biggest voices are nowhere near as smart as they think they are. In fact, they are socio-economic and political illiterates and moral oafs. Hence the evident failure of environmentalism over decades.
The article identifies the two key actors in this unfolding saga.
‘One embraces the importance of individual responsibility while the other derides it.’
Like there is a choice to be made here! This is such a non-issue.
Greta Thunberg says "I want to walk the talk, and to practice as I preach. So that is what I'm trying to do."
There is indeed a need for personal moral effort, otherwise great collective schemes and actions are without existential content. But individual responsibility alone will not suffice to achieve the systemic changes requires and, indeed, become an apology for the collective socio-economic drivers of environmental degradation.
For Michael Mann, climate scientist and campaigner of long standing, ‘any talk of behavioral changes and personal responsibility reflects a soft-form of climate denial.’ That’s wrong. The problem is an emphasis on personal responsibility to the neglect of systemic actions. Changes in behaviour are bound up with system change. Again, it is not an either/or.
Whilst Mann did not mention Thunberg, he seems to have her in mind when he says: “First of all, there is an attempt being made by them to deflect attention away from finding policy solutions to global warming towards promoting individual behaviour changes that affect people’s diets, travel choices and other personal behaviour…. This approach is a softer form of denial and in many ways it is more pernicious.”
Addressing climate change requires that governments enact new climate laws and build a renewable energy infrastructure. These are climate actions that entail massive, system-wide changes. Since this is so, individual-level actions to become climate virtuous will not suffice. The infrastructure ‘can be provided only by the government,’ claims the article. The question goes much deeper than even that. These governments are implicated within the capital system and serve as capital’s political command centres. To load demands upon governments without transforming wider social relations merely establishes an authoritarian environmental regime within an expanded capital form under corporate control. More of the same, just writ-large as an environmental rescue squad.
In Mann’s thesis, individual-level actions serve only to delay the necessary transition since they permit the fossil fuel industry to blame consumers for the climate crisis. That point applies generally. Those making money in each and every form of industry can claim that they are not responsible, since they are only delivering the goods that people demand. People are hooked on their particular lifestyles, and business merely serves their choices. There are over a billion cars in the world today because people like their cars, is the industry claim. Against this, the Mann thesis would suggest that people drive cars because governments do not invest in mass transit. Hence ‘people are trapped in their behaviors because of bad public policies, not personal choices.’
Against Mann’s focus on large-scale government intervention, the Thunberg thesis makes the case for personal responsibility. This makes climate change ‘a symptom of overconsumption.’ This is why Greta Thunberg does not fly, is a vegan, and adopts a stop-shop philosophy.
The importance of this approach should not be overlooked in favour of substantive governmental actions alone. To address the crisis in the climate system requires substantial governmental action and a change in consumption habits. In fact, it requires more: it requires substantive and system-wide action and a change in behaviour as a singular process. Hence the need for an environmental praxis in which social change and self-change coincide.
There is a profound message in the emphasis on individual responsibility that should not be decried: advocacy of climate action is far more effective in conditions of ecological virtue, so that those who talk the climate talk also walk it as best they can in present circumstances, whilst engaging in the transformative actions that will make walking easier in the future. And there is a social dimension to this walking the climate talk.
‘Scientists make a very persuasive case for phasing out fossil fuels. But, these policies impose pain on coal-miners, Teamsters, farmers, and blue-collar workers, who are already facing enormous economic hardships.
The transition to the low carbon economy needs legitimacy. For this, all must share the pain. Are climate scientists sharing this pain and communicating solidarity with the farmer and the blue-collar worker?
We don’t think so.’
It is for this reason that Just Transition needs to be emphasized. It’s been talked about a lot, but not walked to anything like the extent that is required. The emphasis on individual responsibility, personal moral effort, and change in behaviour, therefore, has a strong social dimension.
The article says that ‘Behavioral changes enhance the credibility of the message.’ This is basically a call to practice what one preaches, out of recognition of the fact that words without deeds are idle. One of my most favourite activists and writers is Gerrard Winstanley. He wrote a lot in a three to four year period at the end of the 1640s and he wrote well. But he was an activist who established and led a number of Digger communities. He wrote:
"..yet my mind was not at rest, because nothing was acted, and thoughts ran into me, that words and writings were all nothing, and must die, for action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing."
Gerrard Winstanley, A Watch-Word to the City of London and the Armie.
I develop the concept of ecological virtue to emphasize personal moral commitment, the importance of cultivating the inner motives, and delivering action. The view has been disdained by those who emphasize the necessity of large-scale ambitious actions on the part of government.
This so-called ‘debate’ is utterly misconceived in that the large and the small go together, each enthusing and supporting the other, providing the whole with moral content. Large-scale plans for environmental action may well be necessary but they will only succeed if they are rooted in social proximity, virtuous practice, and love of place. Nothing in this requirement undermines the case for large-scale action; on the contrary, it buttresses the case for such action with a popular legitimacy and social content.
‘The bottom line is that when people take personal responsibility, they begin to have skin in the game. Climate action becomes personal and it makes them more politically assertive in demanding policy changes. Instead of pointing fingers at individuals who walk the climate talk, climate scientists should start doing it themselves.’
Walking the talk requires a substantive social transformation in which collective and individual responsibility proceed hand in hand.