Messengers will get shot; Dan Papworth’s lovely summation

We are pack animals, tribal. That’s entirely sensible in predictable environments. Those who are “outside the norm” are more likely to get eaten by passing leopards etc. For millennia, doing what the tribe said you should do was very sensible.

The trouble starts as systems become more complex, and the tribe’s way of life – and of rewarding conformity – becomes untethered from physical ‘reality.’

This is the shituation we are in now. The ways we measure “success” – economic growth and the accumulation of stuff – is not the way that physical reality is measuring stuff. The numbers that actually matter are, well, atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, top soil left, etc etc – the “planetary boundaries”.

We should be paying extremely close attention to these. It will shock you to learn that, mostly, we aren’t.

There are all sorts of mechanisms available to those who are “on top” to keep the tribe’s ability to see and understand reality limited. Obviously, keeping people away from serious education is one. Offering them distractions is another. If these fail, and people insist on examining the world and seeing where things might be going badly wrong, and they refuse to be fobbed off, well. That is when the tribe’s Squealers dismiss those raising the alarm as “alarmist”. There is an entire industry around dismissing

• Scientists (specifically those working in impacts) as “pointy-headed elitists”, “ivory tower intellectuals” “grant-grubbing” etc.
• Journalists who stray too far from accepted pressrelease-ese are “motivated”, have “lost their objectivity.” (ditto for academics, who become ‘normative’).
• Joe and Jane Public – “ignorant” or (if women) “hysterical”(1) or “communist” or “Luddite.”

This, by Dan Papworth, is a nice summation of what has been experienced by XR/JSO types over the last few years.

Footnotes

(1) This is not to say Joe and Jane Public are always right!!

Further reading for me –

Epistemic injustice and epistemic positioning: towards an intersectional political economy