‘The inadaquecy of hope’
Posted by dvd on 18 Dec 2009 at 11:21 am | Tagged as: climate chaos, not 'hope'
Here’s an interesting article about hope and Copenhagen (it was written at the start of the conference, so doesn’t cover anything that’s happened since), by Paul from The Dark Mountain Project:
Writing about the Copenhagen summit – indeed, writing about climate change in general – is starting to make me feel like the Grinch who stole Christmas. Or, if I wanted to be more of a cultural nationalist (even one who finds Dickens annoying), like Scrooge. I’ve been watching the buildup to the summit with a kind of cranky, disinterested fascination.
Watching the endless plugging of the Guardian’s earnest ‘10:10′ campaign, for example, whose launch at Tate Modern told you everything you needed to know about the class makeup of its worthy and doomed attempt to push the nation out of its collective rut, made me feel that ‘bah humbug’ is the only appropriate response. Similarly, when tens of thousands of nice people took to the streets of London on Saturday dressed like Smurfs (or whatever) in order to – you guessed it – ’send a message to our leaders’, ‘humbug’ seemed inappropriate only because it was far too mild a response.
Now we’re going to have to read, and watch, and listen to, acres of drivel as Copenhagen builds up (’liveblog from the summit venue!’ etc) to a conclusion which will sell itself as a great leap forward in order to make the various world leaders who have turned up look like they’re doing something, and will then quickly unravel. It’s the season of goodwill, and maybe I should really be making more of an effort to connect with that all-important ‘hope’ we are all supposed to be feeling. But I can’t. Humbug, I say, to it all.
Why do I say this? I’ve spelled it out before, and we spelled it out in more detail in the Dark Mountain manifesto – but for now, the world ‘hope’ is worth focusing on. Since beginning the Dark Mountain Project I have been regularly accused by some green friends of ‘giving up’, or of not having adequate reservoirs of ‘hope’, and the use of this word has been, I think, telling. Forty years or more of green politics has come down to – what? Hope. Desire. Belief. Faith. And not a faith in anything likely or even realistically possible. A faith like any other: blind, desperate, resting ultimately on despair.
‘Hope’ on its own is a meaningless driver of any kind of change. Worse than that – it is pernicious. It is blind faith in the impossible. It is a lie. Remember the crazy ‘hope’ encouraged by Obama and his followers prior to his election? It wasn’t long ago. They’re a bit quiet now, those excitable young hopers. As quiet as those New Labour voters were from about 1998 onwards, I seem to remember. And I remember because I was one of them. I remember that hope we placed in young, fresh-faced Tony and his team. I remember its audacity turning very quickly into inadequacy. I remember the comedown.
Therefore we should all despair, right? After all, despair is the opposite of hope, and if we don’t feel one, we must feel the other. This is the accusation thrown at those of us who can’t abide this Diana-like fervour, but it’s nonsense. Hope itself is not a bad thing; but it has to be a hope built on a firm foundation.
I might plant some beans in my garden, for example, and hope they come up. If I plant them at the right time of year, if the seed is good quality, and if I water and feed them at the right times, they will probably germinate. They might not, of course; something could go wrong – blight, an unusually rainy spring, wily rats or pigeons – but the chances are that I’ll get lucky with at least some of them. That’s a pretty sound thing, in other words, to be hoping for. It’s good hope.
On the other hand, I might go into the newsagent and buy a scratchcard and hope to win a million pounds. Strictly speaking, I might do; it’s a faint possibility. But it’s so faint – the odds are stacked so high against me – that it’s effectively a false hope. It might be worth doing for fun, but it’s not something I’d want to stake my future on, unless I was very dumb indeed. It’s bad hope.
Hoping for world leaders to sort out climate change is bad hope. It’s foolish and naive and hugely unlikely. When we look at what we ‘hope’ for from a summit like Copenhagen, we can start to see why.
We hope that vast and deeply entrenched vested interests – fossil-fuel conglomerates; loggers; automobile corporations; the ‘military-industrial complex’; political parties; unions; all the wide and winding alleys of a global economy built on cheap fossil energy – can be somehow overcome in a very short time. We hope that an economy built on the need for constant growth can somehow be reattuned, also in a very short time, into some kind of fluffy, harmless, ’steady state’ system. We hope that this is possible in a world with a rapidly-expanding human population with rapidly-expanding appetites; appetites which need to keep expanding in order to keep that economy on the rails.
We hope that the ‘consumers’ of the rich world – that’s us – will be prepared to make radical changes to their lifestyles; either through personal choice (see 10:10 and a billion other such attempts) or because their governments will force them to. This requires us also to hope that democracies, which are predicated on giving their voters what they want, and promising more of it, will suddenly be able to turn around and tell them they must have less of everything without democracy itself shuddering into serious trouble.
Failing all of this, we turn to the ’supply side’: we hope, in the best tradition of post-Enlightenment Rational Man, that our technology will save us. We hope we can build enough windfarms quickly enough and that they will work. We hope we can invent a ‘carbon capture’ system to allow us to keep burning coal. We hope we can cover the Sahara with mirrors and get a ’supergrid’ up and running. We hope that electric cars will work, or hydrogen fuel cells or decentralised energy systems. We hope we can stop the Canadians digging up and selling their tar sands and persuade the Saudis to keep the rest of their oil in the ground. We hope that we can get all of this done against the interests of those who run the fossil-fuel economy and the inert and inadequate political systems that supposedly govern it, and against the competitive nature of people and nations. Failing that, we hope we can work out some way to start pumping carbon out of the atmosphere and under the sea, or to send it into space or to create cloud cover that blocks the sun’s rays, or to whack space mirrors up into the blackness to reflect the light back again.
Hope hope hope. It could be you. You might get lucky. It’s worth a flutter. After all, the alternative is global apocalypse, right? So let’s paint ourselves blue and get hoping.
We are set up to fail at this, and hoping otherwise will not lead to joy; it will lead to despair. Better, surely, to get real. Better to be honest with ‘the public’ instead of lying to them (they know you’re lying anyway). Better to look the future in the face and understand what it is likely to bring. This is not, please note, the same as ‘giving up’. Stopping the burning of fossil fuels, for example, is hugely important: however far we’ve gone, we could go further, so we should row back as quickly as we can. Living lightly is good too. All such things are good; but they are not going to keep our show on the road and if that’s why you’re doing them, you are going to end up feeling very let down. To say this is not to give up: it is to face up.
We have overshot, and like any civilisation that overshoots, we are starting to pay the price. We need to be honest about this. We also need to be honest about our own role in it as individuals. I like the laptop on which I am writing this. It’s a great machine. It is also part of the problem, and so am I. We are all part of the problem, and there is not going to be a ’solution’ of the kind presented at Copenhagen: simple, top-down, focused, technological, everything-will-be-OK, nothing-to-do-with-us.
Dealing with the fallout of this comes down to us and our kids and theirs too. I strongly believe that the first stage in coping with that reality is accepting that it is a reality. The first stage of kicking the bottle, for an alcoholic, is admitting that he has a problem. We have a problem, it is not going away, and Mr Obama is not going to solve it for us. We are going to have to live with it for a long, long time. We could get something good out of it, at least, by asking ourselves how it came about, and what lies we told ourselves to make to possible. Telling ourselves more of them instead will not make us feel better, at least when the morning comes.
We agree – the hope being touted by the environmental movement and cynical advertising campaigns such as ‘Hopenhagen’ is not going to help solve anything, it is more likely in fact to inhibit action and understanding of what needs to be done. As tempting as it is to ask and hope for our powerful leaders to do something, as hopeless as it seems to work independently of them and start small and local, we must move beyond these ‘hopeful’ actions and start really acting effectively. We need to disconnect from civilisation, and instead build the alternative within the wreckage of the old society to which to reconnect to. So stop hoping that our leaders will solve the crisis, stop hoping the current system will reform, stop hoping industrial civilisation can become sustainable, and instead start acting yourself to dismantle it and create the alternative instead.
