I should be working (1). Anyway, I am sure some of the readers (singular? plural?) of this blog will have had the experience of trying to explain that there are in fact limits – ecological, social, cognitive, physical, to someone who just denies it all and says, oh, you know the drill “limitless capacity for ingenuity, need to be optimistic, not a luddite blah blah.” And it’s circular, whacamole stuff and you’re talking past each other, and at best planting seeds of doubt in onlookers’ minds, though we are way waaay past that (2).
Thoughts inspired by buying, for 25 pence, one of the latest “everything is fine, the eco-doomers are mentally unwell and just want to share their misery don’t let them” screeds, ‘Apocalypse Never’ by Michael Shellenberger. It looks very predictable and predictably wrong. I googled and found a detailed (but not too detailed) evisceration of it by a scientist I respect, Peter Gleick. And from that there was this good just read a good blog post from 2006 (which is a very long time ago) “why it’s hard to debate cornucopians”
It’s worth your read. Following observations I’d make.
It’s probably not worth the aggravation to debate a cornucopian without an audience. They’re very very invested in only seeing/hearing what they want to, and they’ve “drunk the Kool-Aid”. If there’s an audience, it might be worth the aggravation. Depends how public spirited you’re feeling, and if wading through bullshit seems like you to be a fun way of spending the last few “good” years as we circle the drain. Everyone’s mileage may vary on this.
Because there are ‘structural’ reasons why cornucopians are at an advantage (akin to capitalists being ‘structurally lucky’ in their dealings with the state). I won’t go into them all because I lack adequate a) intelligence, b) time, c) motivation (probably in that order).
This though.
- lay audiences want to hear things are gonna be okay.
- lay audiences (and cornucopians) have never really thought that deeply about the dangers of technophilia, and can’t even really see it (it’s the water we swim in, all of us), and its cousin, anthropocentrism
- lay audiences have a dodgy heuristic about the seriousness of problems – it runs like this “it can’t be as bad as this eco-loon is saying. Because we (one or both of the following) a) live in a Just World, where virtue (money, power, belief) is rewarded b) we live in a time of great intelligence and information and if it were as bad as all that those people in charge, who went to the Right Schools (3), would have taken action by now. Ipso facto, the eco-loon must be wrong.
In the face of that, you can present all the information, historical perspectives you like. In the politest of arenas you will be heard out, and get a perfunctory smattering of applause. Elsewhere you will be ridiculed, ejected etc.
Meanwhile, the carbon dioxide accumulates in the atmosphere, and the web of life is hacked at, hacked at, hacked at. Breeders, why aren’t you shitting yourselves with fear for your ‘precious’ children?
Footnotes
(1) Or is this a form of work? Could I create a mosaic, come at it all sideways, fooling myself into completing something for once? Answers on a postcard to the usual address.
(2) And were by the 1980s. But I digress.
(3) I went to the right schools and universities. I know these people in charge. They really really are not that smart. Without going full McNulty (“they’re in the ballpark”), they’re really not.
marchudson.net 
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