As the registration system in Copenhagen broke down yesterday, thousands of delegates to the global warming conference were left shivering in the cold.
Reinhold Niebuhr would have liked this; irony was one of his favorite things — God’s commentary on man’s futile striving.
But Copenhagen is more than Niebuhrian; in many ways the global warming conference is reaching Augustinian heights of irony. It was after all St. Augustine who used to wonder why God had not answered his prayers to achieve chastity; then he realized that those prayers had not been sincere. Every time he prayed to God to make him chaste, his real self chipped in with the crucial reservation “but not yet.”
This seems to be the world’s prayer at the moment. On the one hand, as this very eloquent essay by George Monbiot puts it in The Guardian newspaper, there is the feeling that we are at a fundamental crossroads. And there is a feeling of urgency; Al Gore told the conference that the sea ice in the Arctic Ocean may disappear by 2014. (It’s not clear that he’s right; the London Times ran this morning with an article suggesting that the scientist Gore used as an authority scoffs at the prediction.)
Yet at the same time, it appears more and more that whatever happens at Copenhagen, it will fall well short of the hopes that have been vested in it. Monbiot writes that he continues to believe that the delegates at Copenhagen “will sell us out.” The London Times agrees: “World leaders — with Gordon Brown arriving tonight in the vanguard — are facing the humiliating prospect of having little of substance to sign on Friday, when they are supposed to be clinching an historic deal.” The New York Times seemed to share the pessimistic assessment, pointing to a standoff between the United States and China both over the scope of China’s commitments to reduce energy intensity and the question of how its progress can be verified.
Rabbits can still be pulled from hats, and with so many world leaders putting their personal prestige on the line by traveling to Copenhagen, the pressure on delegates to produce something they can sign is intense.
Still, there is little doubt that the ratcheting down process continues. Copenhagen was originally supposed to produce a legally binding treaty. That objective has been shelved; it was too hard. Now the pressure is on for a ‘binding political agreement’ whatever that is, that would lay the groundwork for a legal treaty next year. We shall see; I suspect that the perfect global warming agreement will always hover a little out of reach, like Augustine’s goal of chastity.
Monbiot’s Guardian essay shows why this is so hard. For Monbiot, the fight against global warming is, literally, a fight against human nature. To solve this problem we must fundamentally change: “No longer may we live without restraint. No longer may we swing our fists regardless of whose nose might be in the way. In everything we do we must now be mindful of the lives of others, cautious, constrained, meticulous. We may no longer live in the moment, as if there were no tomorrow.”
Yet, faced with this call to change the basic ways we interact with one another, and the clear necessity of doing so, we fail. “For all their earnest self-restraint, the negotiators in the plastic city are still not serious, even about climate change,” Monbiot writes.
The enemy, says Monbiot, is human nature. “We are the universal ape, equipped with the ingenuity and aggression to bring down prey much larger than itself, break into new lands, roar its defiance of natural constraints. Now we find ourselves hedged in by the consequences of our nature, living meekly on this crowded planet for fear of provoking or damaging others. We have the hearts of lions and live the lives of clerks.” The anti-Copenhagen movement celebrates this primal aggression and assertiveness, he says. “Clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but knowing at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings.”
Monbiot acknowledges that this primordial aspect of the human character is here to stay, but he believes we can sublimate this basic aggression into fantasy and video games, allowing us to live out our bestial impulses in cyberspace while building a decent, humane and sustainable real world.
I wish I believed him. I am afraid that the truth is darker still and it’s not just that video games and fantasies may stimulate rather than soothe our inner beasts. The line between our bestial, aggressive impulses and our most idealistic aspirations is not nearly as clear as Monbiot suggests. Those swivel-eyed fanatics clutching their Ayn Rand novels that worry him so aren’t consciously acting on base impulses. Like Rand, they honestly and sincerely believe that a decent social order is produced by the workings of the invisible hand rather than by the rational agency of human planning. They are in their own way idealists and visionaries. They look evil to Monbiot because he doesn’t believe in their ideology and so their contradictions and their self deception by which self interest is transmuted into ‘ideals’ is clear to him. But that kind of deception happens on both sides of the climate wars. Even noble, earnest climate researchers massage the data and write nasty emails to one another. Even Al Gore can stretch the truth — in a noble cause, which is also paying him very well.
If Monbiot is right, and the climate problem can only be solved by a radical change in human nature, then my advice is to buy lots of light clothing and invest in Saskatchewan. The beast within will not be tamed, in Copenhagen or anywhere else. If the only solution is a total solution, there is no solution.
Fortunately, I don’t think the choice is so stark. Failure to reach One Big Treaty at Copenhagen or anywhere else does not by itself doom the planet. Human beings aren’t just competitive, selfish and destructive; we are also rational problem solvers. We are creative, innovative and adaptable. Coordinating the actions of more than 190 governments with very different interests and political horizons to deal with a danger still some years off is something people are spectacularly bad at. Coping with problems, solving big problems a little bit at a time, that we sometimes can do.
Reinhold Niebuhr took the Christian concept of original sin and made it a political idea that Christians and non-Christians could use. Maybe we need to do the same thing with concept of ‘grace’. Our worst fears don’t always come true; thankfully, we don’t always get our just deserts. A theist would say, as I do, that God sometimes gives us a boost, and enables us to do things we could not do on our own. An non-theist might say that humanity has evolved in ways that make us responsive to the demands of the universe in ways that go beyond our conscious knowledge or intentions. We sometimes do the right thing despite rather than because of ourselves.
Those who dislike the idea of grace generally say that it makes us lazy; the prospect of a divine bailout on global warming or anything else creates moral hazard. We lie back eating bonbons and wait for God to save us.
That’s not how it looks to me. I find Monbiot’s combination of fierce moral urgency (we MUST act decisively on global warming now or we are doomed) with his total ethical demand (acting now involves a total transformation of human nature and society) added to his ethical despair (nobody, not even the delegates at Copenhagen is really sincere about fixing the problem) deeply disenabling and discouraging. It’s like Calvinism without Christ: predestined doom. You’re headed for hell — so why struggle?
Human beings work harder and work better when they think the Force is with them. Given that global warming is only one of the problems we face — nuclear proliferation, the development of biological weapons of mass destruction, the rise of new geopolitical rivalries, conventional pollution and environmental degradation (especially of the oceans and fisheries) — it will take a lot of faith to get us through what is coming.