Psychology – Page 6 – a sibilant intake of breath

Dissertation extract: structural barriers to climate change action

Today I saw a Twitter post with some text that governments cut from the Summary for Policymakers from the 6th Assessment Report (AR6) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC):

B6.4. Factors limiting ambitious transformation include structural barriers, an incremental rather than systemic approach, lack of coordination, inertia, lock-in to infrastructure and assets, and lock-in as a consequence of vested interests, regulatory inertia, and lack of technological capabilities and human resources. (high confidence) {1.5, 2.8, 5.5, 6.7, 13.8}

This accords with the section on structural barriers to climate action in my in-progress dissertation.

In response, I have released a draft section from my dissertation on the structural barriers that make controlling climate change so challenging. The barriers are essential for understanding why growing scientific alarm has not translated into adequate policy responses. It also raises questions for environmentalists working to control the problem, since part of the issue is their own opposition to fossil fuel alternatives.

COVID-19 in spring 2022

As Toronto, Canada, and the rest of the world are dismantling their public health protection measures (masks are now mostly voluntary in Ontario) it seems like people’s frustration has gotten ahead of the reality that there will be further waves and variants, in part because of unequitable and insufficient vaccine distriubution globally and also partly because of the voluntarily unvaccinated who keep the virus circulating.

Based on conversations with friends and media from there the situation in China is drastically different. Tower blocks get routinely locked down by people in masks and full-body protective suits. Expatriots are afraid that they will test positive and be forced into an isolation facility.

Even if people would accept them, I wouldn’t say the Chinese tactics are necessary or attractive to emulate. Based on the reporting I have seen, their motives are more political than public spirited: declining to use more effective foreign vaccines out of nationalism, and insisting on “COVID zero” as an attempt to demonstrate the superirity of Chinese authoritarianism over chaotic democratic politics.

It’s obvious but worth repeating that the virus is unaffected by our emotions of exhaustion, frustration, and wanting the epidemic to be over. Measures including vaccine mandates and masking have always been justifiable mechanisms to slow the spread of disease and protect those with compromised immune systems and who cannot be vaccinated for legitimate medical reasons.

As so often, I wish people had a bit more fellow-feeling and less entitlement around what they should be able to do and to refuse. Politicians and members of the public desperate for ‘normality’ are delaying it by their intransience.

Between all the global forces at work today — from climate change and nuclear proliferation to loss of public trust in all institutions — I can’t help worrying that we’ll never see pre-COVID “normal” again. We may all be bound up in a developing crisis of profound global instability, where systems disrupted from the old normal trend into a new equilibrium instead of back to what we’ve grown to consider normal. Five or ten years from now, we might marvel about how normal and stable the pandemic times were.

What makes Rousseau and his self-described ‘history of the human heart,’ so astonishingly germane and eerily resonant is that, unlike his fellow eighteenth-century writers, he described the quintessential inner experience of modernity for most people: the uprooted outsider in the commercial metropolis, aspiring for a place in it, and struggling with complex feelings of envy, fascination, revulsion and rejection.

He never ceased to speak out of his own intensely personal experience of fear, confusion, loneliness and loss — spiritual ordeals today experienced millions of times over around the world. Holderlin, one of Rousseau’s many distinguished German devotees, wrote in his ode to the Genovan, ‘You’ve heard and understood the strangers’ voice / Interpreted their soul.’ Rousseau connects easily with the strangers to modernity, who feel scorned and despised by its brilliant but apparently exclusive realm. His books were the biggest best-sellers of the eighteenth century, and we still return to them today because they explore dark emotions stirring in the hearts of strangers rather than the workings of abstract reason. They reveal human beings as subject to conflicting impulses rather than as rational individuals pursuing their self-interest.

Take for instance his epistolary novel Julie, ou La Nouvelle Heloise (1761), whose socially outcast protagonist Saint-Preux is exactly the author’s own age. He arrives in glittering Paris to find in it ‘many masks but no human faces.’ Everyone is tyrannized by the fear of other people’s opinion. The airs of politeness conceal a lack of fidelity and trust. Survival in the crowd seems guaranteed by conformity to the views and opinions of whichever sectarian group one belongs to. The elites engage meanwhile in their own factional battles and presume to think on behalf of everyone else. The general moral law is one of obedience and conformity to the rules of the rich and powerful. Such a society where social bonds are defined by a dependence on other people’s opinion and competitive private ambition is a place devoid of any possibility of individual freedom. It is a city of valets, ‘the most degraded of men’ whose sense of impotence breeds wickedness — in children, in servants, in writers and the nobility.

Mishra, Pankaj. Age of Anger: A History of the Present. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. p. 90-1

Language and memory

The current consensus among memory researchers is that we need other capacities to be in place, skills that are not directly to do with the storage of information, before we can hope to carry our memories forward into later childhood and adulthood. One such factor is language. As soon as you can use words to describe your experience, you begin to have an entirely new way of encoding, organizing and retrieving information about the past. In one recent study conducted at the University of Leeds, the psychologists Catriona Morrison and Martin Conway asked adults to generate childhood memories in response to cue words naming everyday objects, locations, activities and emotions. By looking at existing data on the average age in infancy when these words are acquired, they were able to show that the earliest memories always lagged behind (by several months) the age at which the corresponding word was learned. “You have to have a word in your vocabulary, ” Morrison observed, “before you’re able to set down memories for that concept.” As has been noted many times, it is unlikely to be a coincidence that the end of childhood amnesia corresponds to the period in which small children become thoroughly verbal beings.

Fernyhough, Charles. Pieces of Light. HarperCollins, 2012. p. 64–5

Probably the one chance

I have been reminded lately — or perhaps all through the pandemic — about a false form of abundance in our social relations. When an opportunity arises to do a certain thing in a certain place with a certain person, it can easily feel like one optional example in an ongoing string of comparable offers. The perspective which I now see as more accurate and helpful is that it’s best to assume that will be the only chance you ever get for that particular thing. Outside of our control people drift in and out of our lives, and places and opportunities similarly become closed off or changed.

It can be hard to cope with the sense of loss that accompanies this realization, the recollection of all the proposed plans and assumed opportunities at another chance. Probably the most psychologically adaptive response is to focus on gratitude and the appreciation for the things that chance and timing did allow to happen. I suspect that appreciation is usually inhibited by the feeling that each experience is just an example of an opportunity that arises cyclically. By contrast, living through each experience with the feeling that it will be the only time probably helps us concentrate our attention on what is happening.

Remembering as a process in the present

I want to persuade you that when you have a memory, you don’t retrieve something that already exists, fully formed—you create something new. Memory is about the present as much as it is about the past. A memory is made in the moment, and collapses back into its constituent elements as soon as it is no longer required. Remembering happens in the present tense. It requires the precise coordination of a suite of cognitive processes, shared among many other mental functions and distributed across different regions of the brain. This is how Schacter, one of the pioneers of the approach, sums it up:

We now know that we do not record our experiences the way a camera records them. Our memories work differently. We extract key elements from our experiences and store them. We then re-create or reconstruct our experiences rather than retrieve copies of them. Sometimes, in the process of reconstructing we add on feelings, beliefs, or even knowledge we obtained after the experience. In other words, we bias our memories of the past by attributing them emotions or knowledge we acquired after the event.

Fernyhough, Charles. Pieces of Light. HarperCollins, 2012. p. 7

Memory and consiousness

Without our memories, we would be lost to ourselves, amnesiacs flailing around in a constant, unrelenting present. It is hard to imagine being able to hang on to your personal identity without a store of autobiographical memories. To attain the kind of consciousness we all enjoy, we probably rely on a capacity to make links between our past, present, and future selves. Memory shapes everything that our minds do. Our perceptions are funneled by information that we laid down in the past. Our thinking relies on short-term and long-term storage of information. Creating new artistic and intellectual works depends critically on reshaping what has gone before.

Fernyhough, Charles. Pieces of Light. HarperCollins, 2012. p. 4–5

Fry on the brain and memory

It may not be easily accessible to non-Audible subscribes, but Stephen Fry’s 12-part series “Inside Your Mind” is thought-provoking, informative, and excellent. He does a great job as a science popularizer and communicator, sharing experimental research without jargon and in a consistently accessible and engaging way.

So far, I have found the episode on memory to be especially intriguing, with the idea that memories aren’t records stored in static form like journal entries but rather ephemeral in-the-moment creations arising from the work of many parts of the brain, and neurologically very similar to imagining a future situation.

Fry associates the idea with Charles Fernyhough’s “Pieces of Light: How the New Science of Memory Illuminates the Stories We Tell About Our Pasts”, which I have added to my non-dissertation reading list.

Open thread: Identity politics

Back in September, The Economist devoted a week’s letters page to responses to their article “How did American ‘wokeness’ jump from elite schools to everyday life?“.

A couple make particularly interesting points:

Your warning on the dangers of wokeism would leave many of the old thinkers on the left turning in their graves. The stunt pulled by the illiberal left is their assertion that they are the champions of the marginalised. I do not doubt many are sincere, just as the leaders of the Catholic church were sincere in the Inquisition. Religious fundamentalists of all sorts are sincere. But thinking you know best does not qualify for making a better world. Unless you are willing to debate your ideas openly, you are by definition an authoritarian conservative.

The modern-day book-banners, no-platformers, deniers of free speech and opponents of universalism in the name of identity politics are not of the left, the liberal left or even the New Left of the 1960s. As a student in the 1960s, I marched to demand free speech, the end of the war on Vietnam and civil rights. We were condemned as communists and beaten if unlucky to be near a police baton. Voltaire and John Stuart Mill inspired us. This is what Eric Hobsbawm, a British Marxist, had to say on identity politics:

The political project of the left is universalist, it is for all human beings… It isn’t liberty for shareholders or blacks, but for everybody… It is not fraternity only for old Etonians or gays, but for everybody. And identity politics is essentially not for everybody but for members of a specific group.

The Economist has got the ball rolling in the right direction.

Tor Hundloe

Emeritus professor

University of Queensland

Brisbane, Australia

I would quibble that people unwilling to publicly debate ideas could have any non-pluralistic political ideology, from authoritarian conservatism to authoritarian communism.

The second touches on something I have personally experienced in activist meetings:

One thinks of Michael Macy’s sociology experiments illustrating how, when faced with an illogical group consensus, individuals tend to publicly agree and even condemn dissenters, while privately expressing concern.

Unsupported theories, such as those of the illiberal left, that have taken root in societies require brave individuals to break the cycle and express their disagreement, regardless of the condemnation. But someone else can go first.

Anonymous

New York

I have the sense that most people make most decisions impulsively or intuitively, and the in-the-moment feeling of going along with consensus seems like it will always be more agreeable than the feeling of friction or tension with those around you. The trouble with decisions made intuitively is that they are often based on superficial consideration of a small amount of readily available and emotive data.

Political coalition building and Canada’s antivax blockades

Emma Jackson has an interesting article on the mega-libertarian “Freedom Convoy” protests and what they reveal about coalition building:

Whether we want to admit it or not, there’s a lot that the anti-mandate movement is getting right from an organizing and movement-building perspective.

For starters, in stark contrast to the Left, the past few days have revealed how much better the Right is at meeting people where they’re at.

Instead of building an insular movement restricted to people who agree with each other 93 per cent of the time, the Right has successfully tapped into widely held resentment and built a mass on-ramp for people with highly divergent views. It’s why the Freedom Convoy isn’t just being ardently defended by white supremacists on Rebel News, but also by anti-vaccine Green Party supporters in the inboxes of mainstream environmental organizations.

…

Insularity has prevented the left from reaching the mainstream. We have an opportunity to examine our tendency to build organizations that feel more like exclusive clubs for the “already woke,” than they do welcoming spaces for political education and transformation where people feel deeply valued and needed.

Jonathan Smucker reminds us: “Politics is not a clubhouse. Politics is messy. It is meeting everyday people where they are. It’s not an enclave. It’s not being the enlightened, ‘super‑woke’ people together, learning a special vocabulary, shaking our heads and wagging our finger at all these backward other people. That is a manifestation of the same social elitism that is actively structured by neoliberal society. Instead, politics needs to be woven into the fabric of all of our lives.”

Jackson is aspiring to a populist progressive movement that advances the whole left-wing agenda of economic redistribution, racial justice, further corporate regulation, and so on. I am more interested in the politics of building a consensus around fossil fuel abolition to avoid catastrophic climate change, in which agreement on other issues isn’t a prerequisite for legitimate participation. I think that will have to be comprised of people who broadly disagree about many political issues, but who nonetheless accept that maintaining the planetary stability which is the foundation of all political projects must be prioritized. A fired-up, more inclusive movement which still advocates for the entire progressive shopping list won’t do that, and arguably feeds polarization with the idea that only a new progressive society can fight climate change. Instead, it needs to become an issue where the voters who elect the mainstream centre-right and cente-left parties that form governments will demand rapid and substantial action, and not be placated about promises that someone else will solve the problem by a ‘net zero’ 2050.

Restoring and sustaining a democratic politics that can confront the challenge of climate change requires cultivating a politically influence branch of the conservative movement which respects empirical evidence instead of choosing what to believe based on their ideology. I don’t think anyone can see the path from here to there (and events like these trucker blockades are strengthening the fantasist wing), but I think it must involve a retreat from maximilist positions and arguments that one group’s entire political agenda must be implemented as the only way forward.

Category: Psychology