President Bush was right. Not something you’ll often hear me say even in relation to Bush Sr rather than Shrubbery Jr. But when he spoke to the US military in Pearl Harbor in October 1990 he said “What we are looking at here is good and evil, right and wrong”. Now, in retrospect, it seems like the incident he was referring too wasn’t actually true, but it does illustrate the fundamental point of politics.
Politics isn’t just the intricacies of voting systems, constitutional arrangements and foreign policy. Nor is it just law and order and ‘elf n safety. It’s definitely not the brutal partisanship of my team versus your team; shoving our leaflets through your door and pocketing the stack of their leaflets left on the close stair. Not that that happens, obviously.
Politics is ultimately about morality, about who lives and who dies now and in the future. It’s about choices which materially affect the lives of people like the Rowleys in ways which the people legislating for them, like Dan Poulter, are often quite detached from.
That’s not to say that we should be dogmatic about politics – quite the reverse. As Mill argued, dead dogma leads to stagnation, ill considered positions and incorrect thought. Rather politics is so profoundly important, so visceral, so vital that it is only through healthy, open discourse that we can hope to improve the positions we hold.
Similarly ideology is something which shapes how we think and how we interpret the world but it’s not something which should be clung to in the face of empirical evidence. However we frame things there is an objective reality which remains regardless of interpretation, at least that’s ones of the things I take from Popper.
Recently weeks Glasgow’s hosted Aye Write and I’ve been lucky enough to make it to a few events, one of which was Paul “goggles and a cycling mask soaked in Maalox” Mason, Newsnight economics editor / riot correspondent which seem to be increasingly related roles. His current book, “Why it’s kicking off everywhere” is a good overview of the different British, American, Greek, Libyan and Egyptian revolutions that happened last year (and I’d also highly recommend Live Working or Die Fighting for people wondering how we got here). I also got to see Gabrielle Walker (“Antartica: An Intimate Portrait“) and Doug Allen talk about their varied experiences at the poles.
For all of Paul Mason’s energy and erudition, I thought it was the latter of those two talks that had the more important political messsage. By burning fossil fuels at a faster rate than they are being produced we’re warming the planet at a faster rate than it’s ever warmed before. The description of glaciers retreating visibly striking distances in short time periods was worrying enough but I was genuinely frightened by the description of what was happening to the relatively understudied, but most vulnerable, parts of the Antarctic ice shelf. If that ice shelf collapses there’s a real risk that, in the space of a short few years, sea levels might rise by a metre or so with utterly catastrophic consequences for the millions of people who live on the coast, let alone the rest of us.
Any answer to this has to be a political one. It’s the only way we can possibly hope to mitigate the most severe consequences of the climate changes that our species have committed ourselves to out of ignorance and prevent those turning from unspeakably awful for some to catastrophic for all. That’s the choice we’re face with. As part of that we need to build a fairer, more equitable, sustainable society however all of that will be for naught if we don’t address the existential crises facing us.
We live in an age where politics is not about class struggle, when it’s not about a clash of ideologies or utopian visions. As the pictured German said, we’re beyond good and evil. It’s about continued existence of our civilisation and possibly our species. The earth has been hot before all the carbon we’re releasing was in the atmosphere for millions of years before plant and animal life absorbed it, died, was buried and locked it up as coal and oil over millions of years. We don’t need to save our planet, we need to save ourselves.
#1 by Daveinmaryburgh on March 29, 2012 - 12:22 pm
Thanks Aidan and Better Nation after a couple of days of Jerry cans and pasties was starting to think that the UK had finally turned itself into a badly written comedy drama. Nothing like the end of civilisation to cheer oneself up…..
#2 by Nikostratos on March 29, 2012 - 7:02 pm
We need to save our Children’s planet ourselves don’t matter
#3 by Allan on March 29, 2012 - 8:23 pm
“Why It’s All Kicking Off Everywhere” originally came from this blog post ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/paulmason/2011/02/twenty_reasons_why_its_kicking.html). Wouldn’t have minded going to see him – and possibly Owen Jones as well.
Disagree with the use of the word Morality, i think that values is a better, less religeous phrase that signifies choice. Other than that, good post.
#4 by douglas clark on March 30, 2012 - 11:09 pm
Aiden,
Well said.
Couldn’t agree more with your sentiments. It is hard, really hard, to argue against the oil lobby. But it has to be done, for the reasons that Nikostratos alludes to. We are in a game between oil money and our future as a species. And it is deadly serious.
Minor point, I think we are burning up millions of years of fossil fuel very quickly. I don’t think it is a renewable resource in the sense of a balanced account? Unless I’ve missed something.
#5 by Indy on March 31, 2012 - 7:28 am
Everyone says these things but do we really mean them? Let’s take a case in point. The SG changes the way buses are subsidised so that the bus companies are no longer paid on the basis of how much fuel they use but on the basis of the distance travelled. All hell breaks lose. Now it is fairly obvious that a system where higher fuel = higher subsidy is environmentally unfriendly. But that doesn’t matter, it is literally impossible to even make that point amidst all the ballyhoo. So I don’t really think much will change to be honest because there is too high a price to be paid for doing anything that is unpopular. Unless you can get agreement across the board e.g. that renewable energy is quite a good thing, progress will only be at a snail’s pace.
#6 by Barbarian on March 31, 2012 - 1:33 pm
If they would switch their focus on renewabels away from wind turbines it might help. Tidal and hydro seem to be a better option. And I’d strongly suggest they keep coal in mind as well, since we do have rather a lot of reserves.
#7 by Craig Gallagher on March 31, 2012 - 7:53 pm
We’re crashing against a fundamental limitation of humanity, here. However much we try, there are boundaries to our conceptual capacity that almost all people lack the ability to overcome. By this, I mean the average human being rarely operates outside of the ebb and flow of their own life, and when they do, it’s for escapist purposes. It has always been the case that a minority of humans, of broader thinking or perhaps greater intellectual strength, think outside the box and are cognisant of wider trends at work in human society as a whole. I am a firm believer that anyone can be taught to think this way, as the legions of sociologists and anthropologists who inhabit the Academy these days proves, but most people just aren’t exposed to that kind of macro-critical thinking.
Thus, climate change, and the very real danger that we’re walking into a disaster. I would submit that this may be the only time, ever, that humans are both causing, and capable of realising they they are causing, an environmental disaster. Our powers of communication have increased so remarkably that we can now summon the linguistic power of the entire species to our task. But it’s worth remembering that it has never been done, in all the ages of the Earth. We have never been able to save ourselves from ourselves.
We wiped out basically the entire planet’s megafauna, leaving only those creatures which evolved alongside us (and therefore knew to fear us) in Africa as testaments to this planet’s capacity to create mammoth organisms. We destroyed the natural biosphere of vast swathes of the continents during the agricultural revolution, by favouring certain types of plants over others. Like it or not, this planet we live in on is remarkably man-made, and that we are in the process of sabotaging it owes as much to our destroying its ability to fight back in ages past as it does our rapidly accelerating population and fecknessless.
The challenge, quite simply, is accepting our limitations as a species, both conceptually and actually. We’re rapidly overpopulating the Earth, which calls for either the decentralisation of human settlement away from primary watercourses, or the serious consideration of extraterrestial alternatives. Nothing short of a wholesale change of strategy can avert the oncoming crisis.
There are times I wonder if Nietzsche had Scottish ancestors.
#8 by J Lindsay on April 3, 2012 - 3:05 pm
Fundamental limitations of humanity? Sounds somewhat Malthusian, and that was a clear fallacy. Man is a product of nature, we are not somehow above it all. If we make ourselves extinct, then it follows that nature made us extinct.
“We have never been able to save ourselves from ourselves” – nice rhetoric, but completely the opposite is the case, else you and I would not exist.
Now to the article. This strikes me as worrying -> “As part of that we need to build a fairer, more equitable, sustainable society however all of that will be for naught if we don’t address the existential crises facing us.” … It sounds to me like what you’re really saying is “Forget the fairer, more equitable, sustainable society stuff, that stuff can wait. Politics must be 100% focused on climate change else we are all gonna die!!” Haven’t you got this back to front? Do you seriously think the unjust, unfair, inequitable, unsustainable society in which we live has a hope in hell in tackling such a seemingly existential problem? You’ve got that back to front.