Shilling Past the Graveyard – Living in Truth or Tokenism?
[Update below]
Here is an excellent essay that lays out our predicament:
Our Society Is Living a Massive Lie About the Threat of Climate Change — It’s Time to Wake Up
It applies Vaclav Havel’s “living in truth” framework to the climate crisis.
I strongly recommend that you read the whole thing, but I want to provide one excerpt, only because it makes the point I was trying to make in yesterday’s post:
(of course, tokenism, a form of denial, becomes affirmative evil when it is pursued for self interest, i.e. shilling for state and corporate funding )
Tokenism
Environmental tokenism plays a major role in maintaining the Climate Lie. Tokenism asks that you reduce your carbon footprint, recycle, bike, and turn off the lights when you leave a room. This is the dominant discourse on climate change. When people think: “God, climate change is terrifying! What should I do to stop it?” the answer they usually find or is supplied for them is to reduce their individual emissions.
This approach is a-political, even anti-political. The “solution” takes place individually, in private. It is not organized and shared. It does not challenge existing power structures.
Further, it belies a fundamental misunderstanding of human civilization. We are not merely a collection of individuals. No man is an island; we live in a web of complex systems, which are bigger than us. No one of us created this mess, and no one of us can end it. Individual consumption decisions can never create a carbon tax, they can’t build public transit systems, and they can’t make a city more resilient to hurricanes. Voluntary individual actions can’t do much, really, they are a drop in the bucket.
And that is why individual attempts to reduce consumption are tokenism. They substitute insignificant action for significant action. They give the feeling of making a difference without really making one. They serve as an act of symbolic cleansing. Letting us say, “I have done my part. My hands are clean.” These actions serve a magical function, psychologically, like a lucky rabbits foot. If we perform this ritual (recycling, turning down the AC, etc), if we make these sacrifices, maybe we will somehow avert ecological catastrophe. But Environmental tokenism will not save us. It is the wrong scale. Environmental tokenism tells us that what is happening to the climate is a private matter rather than a political, social one.
[End note: this excerpt from a Tim DeChristopher interview illustrates one part of the Climate lie, and suggests why those in science and government have a moral duty to disclose and speak the truth as they know it:
TIM: Yeah. I met Terry Root, one of the lead authors of the IPCC report, at the Stegner Symposium at the University of Utah. She presented all the IPCC data, and I went up to her afterwards and said, “That graph that you showed, with the possible emission scenarios in the twenty-first century? It looked like the best case was that carbon peaked around 2030 and started coming back down.” She said, “Yeah, that’s right.” And I said, “But didn’t the report that you guys just put out say that if we didn’t peak by 2015 and then start coming back down that we were pretty much all screwed, and we wouldn’t even recognize the planet?” And she said, “Yeah, that’s right.” And I said: “So, what am I missing? It seems like you guys are saying there’s no way we can make it.” And she said, “You’re not missing anything. There are things we could have done in the ’80s, there are some things we could have done in the ’90s—but it’s probably too late to avoid any of the worst-case scenarios that we’re talking about.” And she literally put her hand on my shoulder and said, “I’m sorry my generation failed yours.” That was shattering to me.
TERRY: When was this?
TIM: This was in March of 2008. And I said, “You just gave a speech to four hundred people and you didn’t say anything like that. Why aren’t you telling people this?” And she said, “Oh, I don’t want to scare people into paralysis. I feel like if I told people the truth, people would just give up.” And I talked to her a couple years later, and she’s still not telling people the truth. But with me, it did the exact opposite. Once I realized that there was no hope in any sort of normal future, there’s no hope for me to have anything my parents or grandparents would have considered a normal future—of a career and a retirement and all that stuff—I realized that I have absolutely nothing to lose by fighting back. Because it was all going to be lost anyway.
[Update 9/11/13 – I want to anticipate some pushback by SNJ fans and make an important clarification.
“Tokenism” comes in many flavors and varieties.
It is not limited to individual private actions. Collective, social solutions can be tokenism too.
Planting a butterfly garden is an act of beauty, not sustainability. So too with rain barrels an rooftop gardens and compact fluorescent light bulbs and solar soccer balls. So are well meaning collective recommendations arrived at via democratic means with no teeth or funding.
Some factors that suggest “tokenism” are:
1) the misfit between the scale of the problem and the scale of the solution and the marginal impact on the problem (including an inability to be scaled);
2) the voluntary nature as opposed to mandatory nature of the action and it inability to change behavior, investment, or regulation or impact on the ground conditions;
3) the reliance on corporate power and the maintenance of corporate power and market values;
4) the deference to and reliance on market relations, where an individual or collective is subordinate role as consumers, not citizens;
5) the lack of funding and implementation mechanisms;
6) the extent to which the action diverts from existing legal and public policy frameworks and obligations, e.g. substitution of a mandatory state regulatory program with a voluntary local market based one.