Why do we care so personally about national politics? Instead we might get proud and bitter about, for example, the boardrooms of the DJIA components. A corporate C-SPAN would cover routine business and most consumers would own and vote shares. But no, it’s politics. The reasons we care at all are mostly obvious and good. What worries me is how we often care too feverishly – how much it’s encouraged to be zealous and dull about politics. I think it’s because politicians have told us about the culture war.
What do we do in wartime? In myth, we go kill people. At least we young males, war’s target demographic, are supposed to. But measured by what most people are doing most of the time, war is not about violence, it’s about fear and entrenchment. Armies don’t entrench anymore, but everyone entrenches psychologically. War reaches into the brain and squeezes some gland whose juice tells us to protect our genes and memes, unify against outsiders, stick to what we know works, and sacrifice unhesitatingly in our duty. This is the bundle of instincts that gets tribes through famine and pestilence. It’s conservatism.
When progressive politicians say how crazy conservatives are, for example, they appeal to conservatism. They’re using the heaviest thing they know to outweigh the obvious pointlessness of an individual ballot: the fear that people unlike you and me, scary people, bigots panicked by demagogues, are going to ruin things if we don’t vote.
I can’t denounce this. I believe some of it. I’m just saying it’s propaganda. Like any advertising, it’s attached its product to something we already want. I think most of us in the developed world want to struggle. We remember savannah times. We miss the fraternity and simplicity of things we know are wrong, like hunting enemies. We find it, made relatively harmless, in games like football, gossip, and World of Warcraft.
When we find it in politics, something is broken. The warlike mindset leads us to err in the large and the small. In national politics it has us think too much in terms of our party winning and losing, leading to the normality of functional treason like gerrymandering. In state and local politics it makes us useless; we have a taste for yelling about big abstractions and are bored by the gray pages of school boards, sewer bonds, and homeless shelters, where our vote is big.
So I think our politics are ill-served by the metaphor of war. It confuses us about what we can do, what we should do, and how we should do it. The metaphor is only so compelling by an quirk of psychology – our succeptibility to moral panic and allied fervors – and it helps no one except politicians as a class. By embiggening the import of national abstractions, it pulls us away from good opportunities to work on simple, tangible, everyday things.
Working on simple, tangible, everyday things can kill us in another place. It’s called environmentalism
, which is the capstone of a branding disaster. The environment
connotes externality when we want to talk about integral things like eating and breathing. If we could, we ought to call it internalism or longtermism.
Environmentalism has been built by liberal instead of conservative efforts. Liberalism is the feeling of boom times; the luxuries of safety: generosity, expression, tolerance, and so on. It’s work toward a culture of abundance. It was a fitting sponsor of environmentalism when environmentalism amounted to the idea that we shouldn’t kill too many of the prettier kinds of birds. Things have changed.
Why is saving pandas still thought of as serious goal of environmentalism? Pandas are cute. Permafrost is not cute. If the last wild pandas die, that’s a real shame. If the last wild permafrost melts, whole ecosystems are obliterated and hundreds of millions of people starve.
Environmentalism now had better do what the idea of getting entangled abroad did around 1940. What has been an idealistic ethical concern ought to become a pressing defense of human civilization. Let us turn environmentalism over to our faculties of war – not violence, but survival through sacrifice, discipline and solidarity. Conservatism.
What makes conservatism wrong in some places makes it right in others. Conservatives sometimes say that climate alarm
is the modern version of medieval apocalypticism, as though this dismisses it. I don’t see how calling it medieval dismisses it any more than it would dismiss, say, conservatism in general. For these kinds of fearful behaviors to have survived, they presumably did more good than bad for our ancestors. If apocalypticism is fear, urgency, and hope, look at our CO2 concentrations and be apocalyptic.
I want posters. Fish populations depend on you!
, Have you done your part for the thermohaline cycle?
, Loose emissions caps sink Bangladesh
. People are nostalgic for Keep calm and carry on
, for the courage it suggests. We need it again.
I remember hearing The Moral Equivalent of War quoted in The Idea of North. I assumed that in context James was saying that we ought to convert our warlike instincts to benign ends, and that coming to terms with nature was the obvious choice. Now that I read it, I see James was thinking not in neutral but in negative terms about nature: it was squarely his adversary. But if you read his against nature
as for nature
, you get something very strong (besides racist and sexist) a century later.
We encourage each other to feel responsible for our cultural ecology at the largest scale – Roe v. Wade, science v. faith, welfare v. laissez-faire. We should make as big a fuss tending the culture right in front of us – raising children, jury duty, block parties.
We encourage each other to feel responsible for the ecology right in front of us – litter, gas milage, sorting the recycling. We should work as hard on ecology at the largest scale – mass-sequestering CO2, figuring out what to do about the 2 billion people who want cars for the first time, irrigating the Sahara.
Politics should be less warlike. Environmentalism should be more.