Author's note: I asked for an evening time slot within this series on the Tar Sands Pipeline because I knew that what I would have to say would be longer, more leisurely, and frankly more tangential to the issue at hand than most posts in the series. To me, that says: "I'd better make this an evening diary, when people have more time." I address theoretical approaches to this question: "Why aren't people more engaged over this momentous decision?" Readers not familiar with the Tar Sands issue, about which President Obama will soon make one of the most critical decisions of his or any other Presidential Administration, please refer to the excellent and topical links found in the second green box at the end of this introduction.
This series that you've been reading about the tar sands -- it's pretty convincing, isn't it? The Midday Open Threads from recent days have included a quote from Dr. James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which I present here here in expanded context (emphasis mine):
[E]xploitation of tar sands would make it implausible to stabilize climate and avoid disastrous global climate impacts. The tar sands are estimated (e.g., see IPCC Fourth Assessment Report) to contain at least 400 GtC (equivalent to about 200 ppm CO2). Easily available reserves of conventional oil and gas are enough to take atmospheric CO2 well above 400 ppm, which is unsafe for life on earth. However, if emissions from coal are phased out over the next few decades and if unconventional fossil fuels including tar sands are left in the ground, it is conceivable to stabilize earth’s climate.
Phase out of emissions from coal is itself an enormous challenge. However, if the tar sands are thrown into the mix, it is essentially game over. There is no practical way to capture the CO2 emitted while burning oil, which is used principally in vehicles.
If you're like me, you read that and you think "how can people NOT be convinced by this? Our very survival is at stake, here and now! How can they not be pushed into action?"
A dozen years before I graduated from law school, that was the subject of my dissertation in Social Psychology. It is now the subject of this diary, my contribution to this week's "Foes of the Tar Sands Pipeline Blogathon," although it goes well beyond this issue.
I will explain a primary mental adjustment that most people make so as to maintain their equanimity in the face of such matters. And then I will explain what wealthy people do -- something different from the rest of us. "The rich are different" -- and that may kill us all.
Meteor Blades and PDNC organized this blogathon for August 14-19 before he took a "leave of absence" from Daily Kos last week. For now, this will be the last of many projects, blogathons, and diary series that the two of them have done over the years on environmental, climate change, human rights, and political issues.
In honor and respect for our dear friend and project partner, this blogathon is dedicated to Meteor Blades by our blogathon team of PDNC, rb137 and JekyllnHyde.
"Stop Tar Sands" Blogathon: How You Can Help
Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse has coordinated this blogathon with Bill McKibben, who is one of the organizers for a civil disobedience action in DC from August 20th to September 3rd to urge President Obama to not give a presidential permit for the proposed tar sands XL pipeline from Alberta down to Texas. This civil disobedience action is modeled on one that the group Transafrica used outside the Washington Embassy in the 1980s: Nelson Mandela said it played a key role in raising awareness about apartheid. The plan is for a new group of people each day of the two weeks to trespass on the sidewalk in front of the White House.
This is not a protest of President Obama. As Bill McKibben noted, the protest is designed to show President Obama the "depth of support for turning down this boondoggle" as it will be the "biggest civil disobedience protest in the environmental movement for many many years."
We know what the future will look like with the XL pipeline.
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The psychology of not caring about social issues was the subject of my dissertation, back in 1990, when I was a social scientist hoping never,
ever, to have to go to law school.
My dissertation -- not published, as it turns out, as when I began teaching I switched from social psychology to political science and the study of political attitudes -- examined many possible reasons that people would not get involved in trying to address collective threats like this. I found that one relatively subtle response to collective threats unexpectedly stood out over what had seemed the more likely ones. But I'll get to that later.
Summarizing this analysis at all involves, I'll admit, an element of misdirection. It helps explain how the public in general manages not to care about issues such as this; but not so much the decision-making elites. In the studies comprising the empirical portion of my dissertation, I found that a plurality of people managed to avoid deep agitation over collective threats in a particular way that I think will help most readers understand their own reactions, and those of others around them, to such threats. The decision at hand, however, is made by elites -- the President, his advisors, prominent figures in industry and the corporate media, and by the President's political staff, who are right now examining whether the President can "get away with" refusing to open such a large new source of fossil fuel.
Such people -- perhaps the President himself, I hope, excluded -- do not calms their nerves when contemplating the impact of the tar sands pipeline the same way as the rest of us do. The person who explained their reaction, long before I entered social science, was a man named Al Hirschman. His theory, as applied here, can be stated simply and brutally: the wealthy may think that they can avoid the effects of climate change, which the tar sands boondoggle would almost guarantee.
Those privileged few may, for all I know, be right. But if belief that they can maintain their personal security is what keeps them from extensive worried about messing with the biosphere in this way, it may also be what gives us the political wedge we need to defeat the pipeline.
You see, I don't think that the American public will take kindly to dangerous plans made by people who believe that they have already reserved spots on lifeboats to save them and their loved ones from the effects of climate change. That position, once exposed, will be highly unpopular -- I hope.
Before I begin, a brief side note on that term "climate change": I've never liked it. I've come to think that it might be called "global humidification." Most of the feedback effects, after all, can be traced back to trapped heat leading to more evaporation of water, leading to even greater heat, greater melting of ocean ice and permafrost, greater release of methane, etc. With this process in mind, even dullards can understand why warming the planet causes more snow -- and more extreme weather.
1. How we respond to collective threats
To get the ball rolling, I'll have to briefly recap my dissertation work, which addressed everyday people deal with "collective threats." (I don't have the book in front of me as I write, so this is being done from memory. The description of the studies will be substantially accurate, if not true in every detail.)
Most research in this area had (and probably still has) addressed how people cope with individual threats such as personal illness, potential bankruptcy, loss of a loved one, a mean boss. Collective threats would be the likes of like global warming, national financial collapse, overfishing, or (if you're Michele Bachmann) the decline of traditional morality. These threats affect many people; unlike individual threats, they would require solutions on a social level, involving more that one's own coping skills or a small number of people.)
There are many possible reactions to such threats, each of a dozen of which I tried to gauge in my no doubt overly complicated questionnaire studies. These studies involved presenting students from Ann Arbor with information about the local water pollution problem. For some the information was alarming; for others, less so. For some, the information was vivid -- or maybe it was concrete, for others, technical and pallid (or maybe abstract.) For some, the information was designed to make readers feel that it would apply to them personally; for others, not so much. Students then filled out questionnaire measures testing different possible responses; then were later asked if they wanted information about, or to join, a student group that would be addressing the issue of local water pollution.
One possible response to a collective threat is: a breakdown. Back in the early 80s, the threat of nuclear war was thought to do this to many people (although some of my earliest research showed that this effect was far smaller than most scientists believed.) A breakdown is a failure of all mechanisms for coping at all.
A second possible response: abject denial. You see this with climate change deniers who simply reject the notion that anything unusually threatening is happening at all. These are the "haw-haw, it snowed today, Al Gore is fat" types. The problem with this, as Freud knew, is that abject denial is very hard to maintain.
A third possible response: avoiding information on the topic. This isn't so much an intrapsychic mechanism as a crude behavioral response: "I don't want to think about that." "That makes me sad. Let's eat ice cream."
A fourth possible response: devaluation of the problem. In extreme form, this is "fatalism": "well, everyone dies sometime, so I'm not going to worry about it." (With collective threats, this may become "every country," "every civilizations," "every planet," etc. People are very good at professing fatalism; less good at living fatalistically.) Fatalism can also involve religiously-based toppling of the game board -- "reality is an illusion" or "after I due I will be in Heaven enjoying my eternal reward" -- that refuses to "play the game" of keeping score on the basis of how well and how long people continue to be happy, healthy, and wise. There's a non-religious version of this fatalism as well: "So long as I do my part to solve the problem, I absolve myself from blame."
A fifth possible response: "Get active!" Try to work with others to reduce and ideally eliminate the collective threat. Some people actually do this. Tell them that a river is polluted and they'll wonder how they can work with others to clean up the river. Activism is, as you may imagine, not as common a response to collective threat as we might like.
I'm sure that I'm forgetting a few, but I'll lump a bunch of the possible responses into one category: psychological defenses. For those of you familiar with the concept of "defense mechanisms" -- I hope they still teach this stuff! -- this would involve such things as repression, rationalization, and a variety of others. (This may be a good moment for you to "place your bet," so to speak, as to what you think the unexpectedly most common psychological refuge in the face of collective threat might be. Do you have a hunch in mind? Then let's continue.)
A sixth possible response is to deny personal responsibility for solving the problem. That is, the person believes that the problem is solvable but that others, such as on the government level, are responsible for solving it. A seventh possible response is to or agency deny personal efficacy for solving the problem, believing that others are the only ones able to solve it. The problem with these defenses arises, of course, when one doesn't believe that those responsible are going to do what they have to do to solve it. Then it tends to lead to one of the other responses.
An eighth possible response is to deny, rather casually and without taking reasonably sufficient steps to secure one's safety, that one will be personally liable to be harmed by the collective threat. "Flood waters are coming!" "It's OK, I'm a great swimmer." "Babylonian flu is on its way!" "It's OK, that mostly affects the young and the old, not people like me." You get the idea.
A ninth possible response is to defer the solution not to others, but in time. This is what I found to be the unexpectedly common response in my study. People don't deny the gravity of the threat, but what they do instead is have faith that a solution will be found in time. Sure, some may suffer, but before anything really terrible happens the people responsible will surely come up with something. This is a great way of maintaining one's equilibrium, but it's also insidious, because unlike something like "global warming isn't occurring," which is hard to falsify, this includes faith in technology and human ingenuity and human goodness and in being rescued in the nick of time, just like in the storybooks we grow up with. "We'll come up with something before it gets too terrible" is a lot harder to falsify than "everything is all right!"
This, I argued, is one reason why collective problems are so hard to solve: the motivation to believe that "someone will figure something out" is much greater than with individual problems. If you have cancer, you know that you had better go out and cure it. If you have climate change -- well, it's less simple, isn't it? For one thing, no one is trying to get elected on a platform of your not having your necessary chemotherapy.
There's a tenth possible response (among others that I can't now recall or never thought of), one that is largely the province of the wealthy: "buy your way out of the problem." Make a "separate peace." "Save yourself" -- if you can.
Why do so many people reject cooperating with others to prevent climate change? One reason, I suspect, is that they think that they can arrange it so that they'll be OK. They don't deny the existence of the problem. They don't deny its importance. They don't deny its urgency. They may take no stand at all regarding its solvability. They simply believe that they can shield themselves from its worst effects -- just as so many have done with the financial crisis.
To understand how this works, we need to turn to the writings of Albert Hirschman.
2. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty
Albert O. Hirschman is an influential economist who, among much other writing, authored two accessible and influential books on political economy. One, The Rhetoric of Reaction, noted that most criticisms made by conservatives of liberal initiatives reduce to one (or sometimes more) of three arguments: perversity, futility and jeopardy. But that is not the topic of the day -- although you have the link there if you want it.
The topic of the day is Hirschman's earlier and most successful book, which addresses how people deal with the threatening problems (Hirschman would call it the "decline") of their firms, organizations, or even nations: Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. (You can think of "organization" extremely broadly: a company and its customer base constitute an organization. A political party and its activists, donors, and targeted voters do as well.)
The premise is simple (although the elaboration is complex): when things start to go wrong, people involved in an organization -- again, including a nation -- can respond in essentially one of two ways: they can try to change things or they can check out. The latter of these is "Exit"; the former is "Voice."
Both terms are broader than their literal meaning. "Exit" includes physically leaving an organization; it also includes refusing to take part of plans to address the problem collectively, trying to limit the effects for one segment of favored people within the organization (such as oneself and one's allies), or becoming depressed and uninterested in and cynical about solutions. This maps on to several of the defense mechanisms described in the previous section, but Hirschman makes sense in lumping them together: they all say "I will not be part of a collective solution."
"Voice" is more than generating sound waves: it's doing something to address the problem. It may or may not be constructive. It may be confrontational, although when it is it is still aimed at improving the relationship with the organization.
The relationships between Exit and Voice with each other, with the presence of threat, and with Loyalty, the third concept introduced below, are what gives the model its power. In the absence of threat, you won't see more than baseline levels of Exit and Voice; some people always leave and others complain. But as threat levels raise, a hydraulic relationship arises between Exit and Voice. Pressure grows to do one or the other (or both).
If you prevent opportunities for Voice, you see more people engaged in Exit. If you prevent opportunities for Exit, more people must engage in Voice. You cannot entirely cut off both possibilities because the default alternative becomes psychological exit: checking out of the problem, retreating into cynicism, fatalism, passive refusal to cooperate and (although Hirschman didn't to my knowledge use the term) snarkiness.
(Where my views differ from Hirschman's, if it's not clear, is that I think that "perceiving a threat as not imminent" offers an additional way out. You can still view yourself as an engaged and cooperative member of an organization (that is, refusing to Exit) without exercising your Voice if you believe that something will turn up and that the people most capable of doing so will solve the problem. Hirschman's model sees people as a bit more rational than does mine.)
The relationship between Exit and Voice is mediated by Loyalty. From the Wikipedia article linked above, with the terms of art capitalized:
[T]he interplay of loyalty can affect the cost-benefit analysis of whether to use Exit or Voice. Where there is Loyalty to the organization (as evidenced by strong patriotism politically, or brand loyalty for consumers), Exit may be reduced, especially where options to Exit are not so appealing (small job market, political or financial hurdles to emigration or moving).
In other words: by cultivating Loyalty to the organization, you reduce the amount of Exit. People may still exercise Voice, but given higher Loyalty it is less likely to be deployed in an adversarial way. "Support for the leaders" is, after all, Voice.
Here's a problem, though: what if the leaders themselves engage in Exit? What if they themselves no longer feel Loyalty to the organization? In Political Science, Economics, and Law, this is often known as the agency problem: the interests of agents may not be perfectly aligned with that of the person or people (or populace) that they are supposed to represent. (Warning: that Wikipedia article will make most people's eyes glaze over, but I think that people can at least handle the overview.) Government officials, petty or grand, taking bribes is a straightforward example of an Agency Problem. They favor their own parochial interests over that of the state.
Another classic example of the agency problem appears at the end of the movie Dr. Strangelove, in which the title character, having learned that a nuclear explosion will trigger a global "doomsday device" that is intended to destroy the world,
recommends the President gather several hundred thousand people to be relocated into deep mine shafts, where the radioactivity would never penetrate so the United States can be repopulated. Strangelove suggests a sex ratio of "ten females to each male," with the women selected for their stimulating sexual characteristics and the men selected for youth, health, intellectual capabilities and importance in business and government. He points out that with proper breeding techniques, the survivors could work themselves up to the present Gross National Product in 20 years and emerge after the radioactivity has ceased in about 100 years.
What do you have if people making decisions think that they and others like them can survive a disastrous collective threat? If they see Loyalty to an organization as futile, as a "sucker's bet," then we have an agency problem -- a huge one.
Some leaders can and do look past self-interest. They may contribute to a collective solution out of the kindness of their hearts, their sense of honor, or their sense of shame -- but not for reasons of self-preservation.
If the people running the economy believe that they will be personally secure against the consequences of economic disaster -- and, in fact, if they make assuring this one of their top priorities -- then we have an "agency problem."
If people running the school system send their own children to private schools, if they can afford higher tuition at universities, then we have an agency problem.
If people making health care policy believe that they can maintain their access to the best health care, then we have an agency problem.
If people making policy regarding crime believe that they and those close to them can be secure with gated communities and personal bodyguards, then we have an agency problem.
It doesn't matter whether they're right. What matters is how their beliefs affect their motivations.
This is why, as I've occasionally noted in these virtual pages, statements that "health care outcomes in the United States are below the average in the industrialized world" or "a lower proportion of the U.S. is literate than those in 50 other countries" or "the life expectancy of the U.S. is declining" cannot be relied on to impress national decision-makers. Their health care outcomes aren't going to be the average ones for our society. Their children and grandchildren (except children of whoever has been disowned) will be literate. Their life expectancy will be just fine, thanks. The problem of the inner city, of the reservation, or of the failing small town are not the problems of the political leaders themselves unless they are the sorts of decent people who have the good character and strength of will to make them their problems.
If you want to see what problems leaders will naturally care about, divide up all of these collective threats and see where the threat falls along distributions of wealth. Poor elementary education? Not so much of a problem for the most wealthy. Copyright infringement? HUGE!
Where political leaders think that they have the ability to "sign a separate peace agreement" with a problem, to shield themselves from the ills at hand, we have an agency problem. And so, with every social problem we face, we have to ask: do our political leaders believe that they, to the same extent as the rest of us, have "skin in the game"?
And with that, at long last, we return to the Tar Sands Pipeline.
3. Are we all in the same lifeboat?
Because I can hear the distant crackle of veins popping among some readers who have made it this far, I want to make one thing clear: the questions I ask are not even primarily asked of President Obama himself. More so than anyone else involved in the process, he has his reputation, for the rest of what we hope will be a long national history, to worry about. This applies, however, to his advisors, to those who will toast or torment him in the media, and particularly to those who will advise him politically. They are asking these same questions about people who will fund him or his opponent:
"Do they really care about 400 ppm"?
Let's review part of that quote from Dr. Hansen again:
Easily available reserves of conventional oil and gas are enough to take atmospheric CO2 well above 400 ppm, which is unsafe for life on earth.
How unsafe? Unsafe for them? As with the wonderful Paraguayan water supply now supposedly serving the Bush family's getaway compound in Peru, we have to ask: do they think that they face the same consequences that we do?
If they don't, then from a purely amoral perspective, they'll be fine either way and President Obama's decision is simply about impeding their ability to make money. And they are very, very serious about making money.
We should not exceed 350 ppm of atmospheric CO2. We here all know that. But what if it goes to 400 ppm? What if temperature does increase by a certain number of degrees over the next decade, over the next century? Do the powerful people advising and threatening the President believe that they and those close to them will still be OK?
Is it hot out? Turn on the air conditioner.
Is the power to run the air conditioner expensive? Don't worry, we're off the grid.
What is missing in the debate over the Tar Sands pipeline is knowledge of how the most powerful people in our society -- and in our planet, because that carbon is intended to be shipped to Texas for export -- think they and those close to them will fare in a changed global climate.
Do Canada and Russia really object so much to warmer global temperatures? They're not exactly Bangladesh. If the wealthier segments of the more powerful nations of the world can afford to absorb the blow of global warming, then what is 400 ppm to them? What's social unrest to them? The wealthiest areas rarely burn; a portion of the population can be dispatched to control those most unruly.
I want to know what the lifeboats of the wealthy look like in case we exceed 400 ppm. "Unsafe for life on earth" is too vague of a phrase. I want to know whether they think that they can beat the system -- because, if they can, then only their better angels prevent them from pressuring President Obama to approve this pipeline, and those angels have proven unreliable.
We do, however, have some advantages.
First, in dealing with the public: the Tar Sands Pipeline decision has the advantage, if we credit Dr. Hansen's argument, of being decisive. That is, up until now, people may have been able to believe that "something will turn up to ward off the threat." We need to convince the public that this is the critical moment of choice: after this, we will have crossed the Rubicon. There will be no turning back. This attacks that calming and prevalent defense mechanism at its heart.
Second, in dealing with the elites: we must, in front of the public, ask them about their lifeboats.
We need to ask them about how they will personally fare if global warming accelerates past certain levels. "How do they plan to survive?" We need to see the looks of panic on their faces -- or, more likely, the absence of panic.
It's a pretty simple question. If they acknowledge the effects of global warming, do they also acknowledge that they, personally, like the rest of us, have no means of escape? That they can't tow an iceberg to a deep mine and have drinking water? That they can't have their personal solar systems and float above the fray?
I'd like to see such questions asked right in front of the public. I would like to stir resentment if it does seem that we are here facing an "agency problem." I would like to put our leaders on, as it were, the "hot seat."
If our leaders believe in the legitimacy of their ability to Exit, then they must lack Loyalty. If they would let the rest of us suffer while they have made provisions for themselves, then they lack Loyalty.
I see approval of the Tar Sands Pipeline as evincing a basic lack of loyalty to the people of our nation and of our world. So, there's your campaign issue for 2012, if the President wants to grasp it: Loyalty.