Often, when we see a problem, we imagine the answer will be shaped in the same terms. The wall is damp so there must be a leak on the roof; my child failed her maths test so I must get her a maths tutor. But sometimes the answer needs to be framed in terms different than the problem: the dampness is caused by the combination of an unusually wet winter and a build up of salt in the bricks; my daughter has fallen out with her friendship group. The answer to our despair about politicians may not be about politics at all.
James Hoggan’s book, I’m Right and You’re An Idiot (2016), highlights the dire consequences of an increasingly polarised public discourse. He notes that, “We are not going to change the world by yelling at people and telling them what to do – and that doesn’t mean having to compromise on what is right, or tolerate corruption. We can make errors if we assume people are evil, just don’t understand, don’t have all the facts or are being apathetic; we need to recognise we can cause damage and add to the confusion if we hold fast to these attitudes. We become better ambassadors for the environment, or any cause, by putting ourselves in others’ shoes.” He is emphasising the importance, at an individual level, of empathy: empathy for the situation, for each other, for the politicians who serve us.
What about the evidence for what works at a societal level? Susanne Moser, in the Foreword to Engaging the Public with Climate Change (2010) by Whitmarsh, Lorraine, et al. says, “The burning question arising from ‘the science of what is happening on earth’ is: how do we break out of our hardened habits of mind and practice – and do so soon?” She goes on to note the evidence that “information and understanding are not the most important drivers of behaviour change, and in many instances – for example, in much of our habitual behaviour – hardly relevant at all.” The evidence is that we would be better to “highlight again the strong social influences on our behaviour and how many outreach efforts do not sufficiently make use of this important reality. To do so, dialogic, two-way forms of communication are more conducive to fostering change than one-way information delivery.” This aligns with what Doug McKenzie-Mohr advocates, in Fostering Sustainable Behaviour (2015). He says, “In contrast to conventional approaches {information intensive campaigns for changing poor climate change behaviour}, community-based social marketing has been shown to be very effective at bringing about behaviour change.”
In other words, for the species to start responding properly to the climate change crisis, two things need to happen. Individually, people individually need to be more empathetic, less blame-oriented. And collectively, we need collectively to participate in our communities, to develop channels for two-way communication. These two are, of course, interlinked.
The participation problem is a long running one. As Robert Putnam pointed out in Bowling Alone (2000), our levels of engagement in all collective activity have been dropping for generations. Perhaps, this is one reason why we are not as empathetic as we might be – we simply don’t rub up against enough people who see the world differently. Our civic-minded great-grandparents would perhaps have been much more collectively capable of responding to the current climate crisis than our plugged in, underactive, home-working, post-Covid contemporaries. And our relative isolation from each other is itself a cause of despair: we are a social animal, increasingly imposing solitary confinement on ourselves.
So what do we do about this? We cannot command each other to participate more. Imagine how we would respond to a politician who told us to turn off our TVs and go play table tennis! We cannot require people to be more empathetic. But we do know that there is a vicious circle between a lack of empathy and low social engagement, and that both these factors impede our individual and collective ability to change our climate change driving behaviours, and obstruct our politicians’ ability to lead us out of the mess.
My own view is that there is a deeper problem even than the decline of empathy and participation. It is the notion of agency: the sense that you, as a person, feel you have the ability at some level to shape and control your own life. As we have become less social and more isolated, we have become less personally resilient, more vulnerable, less convinced that we can change things, even in our own lives, our own rooms, our own diets. People who lack a sense of agency are more unwell, more unhappy, die younger. They become introverted – and lack the energy to be empathetic and participative, of course. All of which adds to their despair, so further reinforcing the vicious circle.
There is much that can and should be done to increase agency in society. All of our public services could be reshaped to be more participative and empowering. But the most immediate thing that all of us can do – for ourselves, as well as for each other, as this is an infectious quality that is passed from person to person – is to practise hope. We can be hopeful; we should be hopeful, we should give the gift of hope to others. It takes energy and practice to hope, but we have a duty to our species and to future generations to do it. If we do hope, there will be more empathy and more social participation; and when that happens, we will change our global warming behaviours. If we hope that things will get better, and do so fully, they will. If we despair that things won’t, they won’t.
Peter Gelf 