denial, habit, and the cliff

Last night I finished reading Six Degrees by Mark Lynas, a sketch of our global future in a warmer world. The final chapter, in which he discusses the challenge of preventing the global temperature from rising more than 2°C, I found especially interesting because of his treatment of the major stumbling-block in our path: the psychological defense-mechanism of denial.

There are many different defense mechanisms (Anna Freud made an extensive study of them in the 1930s) that we use to protect ourselves from potential emotional pain. Among them, denial is a key one. According to one explanation, when we experience cognitive dissonance--the conflict in our minds between two strong but irreconcilable beliefs--we feel such discomfort that we deny the truth of one of the beliefs. The classic example is in the behavior around addictions, such as smoking. A person with otherwise healthy self-esteem is confronted with two data: smoking is damaging to the body; and nonetheless, I smoke. Denial in this case usually takes the form of "smoking is not really damaging", or "it won't damage me." But sometimes a smoker might assert, "I"m not really a smoker--I smoke less than a pack a day." Either way, one is spared the pain of confronting one's own self-destructive behavior.

Lynas is saying that this is the dominant mechanism preventing action on the problem of global warming. He says:

One study used random-sample focus groups in Switzerland to investigate attitudes to climate change. Its results showed how the "tragedy of the commons" is reflected in people's belief "in the insignificance of individual action to change the order of things," with the result that perceived "costs to the self are greater than benefits to others." However, the researchers found that the most powerful motivator of denial was more straightforwardly selfish--an unwillingness to abandon personal comforts and consumption patterns. People would complain that public transport is late, dirty and overcrowded, therefore they "need" their cars. Or they might argue that their lives are busy and difficult, so they "need" foreign holidays for a couple of weeks a year.

Lynas goes on to list eight specific expressions of denial catalogued by the Swiss researchers:

• the "metaphor of displaced commitment" ("I protect the environment in other ways, like recycling");


• denial of responsibility ("I am not the main cause of this problem");


• condemning the accuser ("You have no right to challenge me");


• rejection of blame ("I've done nothing wrong");


• ignorance ("I don’t know the consequences of my actions");


• powerlessness ("Nothing I do makes much difference");


• comfort ("It is too difficult for me to change my behavior"); and


• "fabricated constraints" ("There are too many impediments").
  

Quite the list. I recognize pretty much all of them operating in my own psyche (my special favorites are the last three). Together, they form a powerful bulwark against behavioral change.

I had another thought while I was reading the chapter: denial may have a large share of responsibility in preventing change, but let's not forget good old habit. Habits by definition are behaviors that have become automatic, and they have become that way because we find them to be effective in achieving our aims. Most of our behavior is habit, with or without any psychological defense-mechanism running alongside it. William James stresses its powerful, even paramount, role in our mental lives.

But recently I read another interesting take on habit: it was by Arthur Koestler in The Act of Creation. He says that it's easy to form new habits. What is difficult is to break old ones.

This is because all of our mental apparatus is programmed precisely to form new habits. We automate our behavior in order to free up attention for the novelties in our experience. When we're learning how to walk, it ties up our attention. We have to concentrate on where to put our feet, how to balance ourselves. Once it's learned, it becomes automatic, so that normally we can walk without giving it even a moment's thought. Only special conditions, such as walking on an ice-rink, or across a stream via stepping-stones, or when we have pain, force our attention back to the task. Otherwise, we can walk, talk, and yes chew gum all at the same time.

What does all this imply about our common future? Will we be able to give up the herd mentality and status-seeking that have us moving ever farther into remote suburbs and commuting to work in ever larger carbon-spewing vehicles? We have to cut through the layer of denial, then through the layer of habit. Will we? Or will the lemmings plunge dutifully off the cliff, secure in the knowledge that we didn't break ranks?

Not to dodge personal responsibility, but much does depend on leadership. Even though we believe in freedom, we follow leaders. After all, one of those lemmings has to be the first one over the cliff.

helping Earth to quit

The air has turned suddenly colder. Rain started to fall just now as I lugged our recycling out to the back lane in the morning dark.

I again lay awake for long stretches this morning after 3:00. Pushing its way to the top of my list of nighttime worries is global warming, fueled by my reading of Six Degrees by Mark Lynas. Based on his survey of all the scientific literature, he reckons that in order to have a 75% chance of keeping the average heating of Earth below 2° C, net carbon emissions have to peak by 2015, after which they must continuously and quickly decline. If we fail to hold the average heating below 2°, there is a strong likelihood that positive-feedback mechanisms will kick in, causing a cascade of further upward surges in temperature to 6° and beyond, rendering planet Earth unrecognizable--and mostly uninhabitable--to those now living on it. Much of it will be arid, baking waste: like the Sahara Desert or Death Valley, or the naked rock of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. The shrunken circumpolar temperate zone will be buffeted by ferocious storms, as well as unpredictable droughts and heatwaves.

Those are just the openers; the real problems are much worse.

When I was a boy, I, like many others of my age, loved dinosaurs. I had a set of plastic dinosaurs to play with. I knew their names (triceratops, ankylosaurus, etc.), and soon I knew which geological period each came from, whether Jurassic or Cretaceous (with the odd Triassic specimen thrown in). I knew that these were different times in Earth's ancient prehistory, but I didn't know what they signified, why the periods were separated and given different names. I assumed that time was continuous, and that things just gradually changed so that one set of creatures turned slowly into another. The names were just arbitrary labels for sections of time, like the hours of the clock.

I was wrong. I didn't know that the different geological periods were separated from each other by distinct and obvious transitions. They're called geological because they show up as layers in underground rock. A thick, homogeneous layer represents a long period of time when things were more or less the same. A thin, very different layer shows a time of sudden transition. This gives way again to another thick, homogeneous (though different) layer.

Those transitions are not smooth and continuous; they are more like changing television channels: an quick disruption, followed by something completely different. The disruptions--those thin layers--are relatively sudden, catastrophic geological and climatic events that shake the Earth (figuratively and often literally) and everything living on it or in it. In the past they have been due to asteroid collisions with Earth, or massive outpourings of magma from the interior--or sometimes more than one event happening at nearly the same time. This is what is believed to have happened at the boundary between the Permian and Triassic periods, 251 million years ago. The catastrophes of that time destroyed 95% of the species living on Earth, from the depths of the sea to the highest mountaintop. The survivors were very few.

Imagine what it would take to have such a result, what kinds of cataclysm could produce such vast and total die-offs. Even if we detonated every existing nuclear warhead right now we could not produce such devastation, even after allowing for all the radioactive fallout. Indeed, if humanity were wiped out, plant and animal life might recover in the radioactive world. This is what has happened at Chernobyl in Ukraine, now a place of thriving forest and animal life, precisely because it is still a no-go zone for humans.

Greenhouse gases are a much more powerful and pervasive force than nuclear weapons for stressing the globe. For my part, I need no further convincing that we are already well on the way to the next major die-off and geological-climatic change on planet Earth. The current droughts in Atlanta, California, Portugal, Turkey, Greece, and Australia are some of the early symptoms of a regime-change that will continue to get much stronger even if we stop carbonating the atmosphere today.

And of course we won't stop today. The question is whether we can start cutting down by 2015. Due to human agency, Earth has become a smoker. Hydrocarbons are her nicotine. The voices in the halls of power have been saying that smoking is not hazardous to our health. Now, with increasing evidence that it is hazardous, they're saying that we can't quit--maybe can't even cut down. The habit is too strong. We'll keep puffing and hope for the best.

I have about seven years in which I can choose to help my species and my planet. How should I spend them?

That's what kept me awake this morning.