I enjoyed this week’s NYT interview with Vaclav Smil, whose work I’ve been meaning to read for a while.
Smil scores a lot of painful points that I’m sure will enrage some climate activists but it would be wiser to just accept the generally accurate diagnosis of some serious tactical and strategic errors to date and move on in wisdom from there.
The thing is that experts inside and proximate to the academy are bad at politics (except for institutional politics, where they vary) and that because climate activism is substantially expert-driven, that has been consequential.
That activism is completely right about anthropogenic climate change both in terms of cause and its likely outcomes. But there’s a gap between being right about that and envisioning what to do about it. Smil observes that the expert-informed politics behind climate activism doesn’t actually appreciate the magnitude of what it is calling for in relationship to the deadlines it is setting. That failure of appreciation calls the expertise into question if it’s just a genuine lack of understanding. If it is not, it suggests instead that experts are being hyperbolic on purpose in the belief that this is the only way to get political leaders, businesses and voting populations to take the need to make changes seriously. Even then, as Smil notes, it means that the experts really don’t understand the political scenario they’re working with and the inadequacy of the institutions they’re hoping to mobilize for undertaking those changes.
He makes the point I’ve made here to students and colleagues now and again—usually to little avail—that among other things that transformation if undertaken in a very short timeframe requires us all to develop a completely unprecedented sense of devoted care for people who will be born long after we are dead. Not our children or grandchildren, but complete strangers. But equally importantly it takes a dead stop of so much of what we do and expect to do—something that almost no climate activist is modelling except in relatively abstract terms.
For a place like my own college, if we were going to live into the scale of the needed transformation, we ought to immediately stop supporting all air travel to workshops and conferences and for most research (and put lots of money into digitization and into paying on-site researchers to produce qualitative data for fieldwork-oriented scholars); we ought to begin transitioning to accepting students who almost entirely come from within 300 miles of campus and also build a residential model that minimizes travel to and from home while a student is enrolled (e.g., dorms open all summer, all holidays); we ought to take all the urgent steps required to make a no-fooling zero waste campus; we ought to require faculty and staff to live within 60 miles of campus along major train lines and support bicycle transportation within this area; we should be looking critically at the energy inputs required to sustain certain lines of research and instruction, and so much more. The greenest company or nonprofit or agency on Earth is doing almost none of the things it arguably could do that would look like the world we’re being asked to make because many of them are extraordinary interventions into rights, freedoms, and prerogatives that most of us treasure.
What I think that shows is that expert-driven politics is still primarily focused on gaining command of the state and using the state to compel universal changes in behavior via some kind of legal commandment, transformation by force majeure of a sort. I guess that’s an understandable if insufficient vision, as far as it goes—I mean, it’s not going to work in the sense that the 21st Century nation-state does not even have the structural power of the nation-states that implemented Progressive regulatory reforms, that created public goods, or that instituted forms of social democracy in the 20th Century.
The problem really is that many experts don’t think anybody notices that this is what they mean to do. And that experts don’t think about their own social locations in relationship to either the state or to hierarchies of social class, and neither do they think anybody else sees that social location. We look to the state the way that we do because we interpenetrate it, because we see it as friendly to our own economic and social interests, because we believe it is (or should be) our genie in our bottle. We think the state understands us and we understand the state. We don’t see, mostly, what that means for how everybody who experiences the state as regulatory, carceral or hostile, or who can be convinced ideologically (often falsely) that the state is the entity responsible for their own declining social and cultural power.
There’s no better example of how that all comes together than Smil’s observations about the disconnect between claims about the imminence of catastrophe and the everyday behavior of most of the people making expert predictions about catastrophe. I’m not talking here about the notion that we can beat climate change just by switching to green detergents and eating less meat, through individual consumer choices. But the magnitude of the transformation required means some form of global-scale coordination of action that is completely unprecedented and it means centrally engaging and unravelling capitalism as a system in all its facets. Few of the experts who talk of catastrophe and its prevention think at all about what is politically required for that talk to be meaningful. They look to states as they stand to reach the kinds of agreements they’ve previously reached and use the forms of compulsion that they customarily deploy, which isn’t going to happen and wouldn’t be enough anyway if it did.
Expertise in these forms ends up acting like it is inside a duck blind looking out. We talk ourselves into rhetorical frameworks which use simplistic and superlative constructions that don’t match the complexity and uncertainty of our predictions or models because we say that it is all that the public and the politicians understand, that we have to sound the alarm in the most strident way possible just in case there’s a famine, just to muster the minimum necessary precautions for a probable disaster, just to get the wheels turning. And we think nobody sees inside the blind, sees us looking out, sees the mismatch between a rhetoric that envisions a massive transformation of everything (which is very likely true) but that speaks to and calls for action by banally ordinary institutions and structures which are plainly unsuited for the task and will be plainly impeded by powerful interests if they try. There is a kind of technocratic-rationalist expertise that thinks it is issuing instructions to governments and through governments that are about meeting any number of crises rather than just being a sidekick who hands some rhetorical clubs to the powers that be that are used as post-facto justifications for what those powers have already done. We want to do politics without the burden of a political imagination or a political plan; we demand action that would be a revolutionary transformation of the entire world system without having to be revolutionaries. In fact, we don’t even want to be incarnate beings who speak from somewhere, with some tangible collective interests in mind and some consequences we will bear as real people. We want to be the message from nowhere, the ghostly etching of mene, mene, tekel, upharsin on the walls of princes and presidents, so that they can somehow make the world do the consequential things that we ourselves can barely imagine and could never voluntarily undertake.
Image credit: "5 star duck blind" by jc.winkler is marked with CC BY 2.0.