Opening up difficult conversations

I repeat the same advice to people who ask me how to deal with conversations like this: listen; open up the conversation; try to understand the other person’s position; empathise with the dilemmas; explore the conflicts; try not to get angry. I still think this is good advice but are there occasions when it’s not appropriate? Definitely. There are times when you need to challenge someone, times when you should get angry and times when you might risk falling out with even your closest friends.

As a therapist I spend a lot of time trying to understand other people’s experience. Empathy is essential. It’s critical to appreciate the complexity of someone’s mixed and conflicting feelings. You need to have compassion for the anxiety that produces paralysis and for the fragile self that struggles with self-criticism and self-doubt. You need to attend to the unconscious roots of seemingly irrational behaviour and self-destructive actions. You listen; you suspend judgment; you try to help someone through the tangle to a more creative solution.

Authenticity and truthfulness

But there are also times in therapy when you challenge someone. Authenticity and truthfulness matter as well and it doesn’t help to be a pushover or to collude with someone’s self-destructive impulse. I once listened for a long time to a man explaining his distress at losing his driving licence following a series of speeding incidents. He was struggling with alcohol but had somehow avoided being breathalysed and had to date succeeded in avoiding accidents too. After a while of listening to his self-justifications, I said ‘Actually, I think the court was right.’ He was angry with me, but I was also standing up for a better part of himself, the part that knew that he was dangerous behind the wheel.

Understanding the defensive moves

These situations are always complicated. Sometimes a friend is trying to wind you up. If they can succeed in becoming the victim of your anger they can feel relieved of any guilt they feel. You will be in the wrong for attacking them. They will be the innocent party. Sometimes a friend is seeking your absolution. They want to be accepted and forgiven for acts they feel are not really justifiable. They treat you as a parent who will offer compassion for their powerlessness or their need to be special. Sometimes a friend is asking you to collude. They are inviting you to share in their denial, encouraging you to ease their guilt by joining them in pleasures it might be better to forfeit.

In the course of one of these conversations you will encounter all the defensive moves that Stoll-Kleeman and colleagues[i] describe so well in their discussion of climate change denial. Things like:

• It’s the clothing company’s responsibility not mine
• If I don’t buy from Matalan, the garment workers won’t have jobs
• I’m too small to make a difference
• The plane was going anyway
• China needs people like us to put them on the right track
• My contribution is unique – I have to go there to make it
• I have to make a living
• If I don’t do this, someone else will
• It’s too late for mitigation

It is important to address these objections sympathetically, explore their origins, tease out their emotional charge and the social constraints that reinforce them. But it is also important to hold your ground, know when you are being manipulated and when to offer a challenge.

Gregory Bateson

In the 1970s, systems theorist and polymath Gregory Bateson expressed this moral challenge very clearly in an appeal which drew, surprisingly, on St Paul. If ever there was a man who understood the intricacies of both human relationships and ecology, it was Bateson, but here he is with a crystal clear statement of what I have elsewhere called ‘the ‘no’ of nature’[ii] – the incontrovertible fact of the limits of nature which challenge our narcissism, our phantasies of immortality and our blindness.

“The hardest saying in the bible is that of St Paul, addressing the Galatians: ‘God is not mocked,’ and this saying applies to the relationship between man and his ecology. It is of no use to plead that a particular sin of pollution or exploitation was only a little one or that it was unintentional or that it was committed with the best intentions. Or that ‘If I didn’t, somebody else would have’. The processes of ecology are not mocked.”  Bateson 1970 p.480[iii]

Sometimes this is a challenge which needs to be spoken straight.

Last week, Alex did an interview with me, mainly about Carbon Conversations but also about issues of loss and climate change, based on my 2009 paper.

You can listen to the interview here http://www.ecoshock.net/affiliates/20130417EcoshockPart1.mp3 or if you’re quick, catch it 7 am Thursday morning (18th April) on Resonance FM 104.4.

It’s a good one! Alex is a great interviewer and runs a terrific programme.

Beddington was unusual in making such a clear statement. Why don’t more scientists do so? Why are they so reluctant to describe current events as due to climate change? Often they cling to words like risk, bias, probability and uncertainty, which have quite different meanings in science and in ordinary language. They explain this as scientific rigour. They emphasise that they are not crystal gazers but rational men (they are usually men) offering the best opinion from what they have discovered. Science, they say, must stay neutral if it is to retain the confidence of the public. It must not get mixed up in policy or politics. It must not overstate the case.

Mixing science and politics

In other fields however scientists are not so modest, nor so careful. As Hilary and Steven Rose point out in their book Genes, Cells and Brains , some geneticists, pharmacologists and neuroscientists are keen to promise the moon, on the flimsiest of evidence, when there’s an investment opportunity in the offing. They are happy to be mixed up in techno-scientific entrepreneurialism.

The truth is that the mix-up has always been there. Science developed in lockstep with capitalism. Its discoveries fuelled the new technologies that transformed the world from the mid 18^th century onwards. Profits from these successful enterprises were funnelled back into universities and research departments, resulting in new discoveries and new opportunities for capital to exploit. For the most part, scientists have thrived in this relationship.

What is different for climate scientists is that their research – if they follow through on its implications – places them out of kilter with those who might previously have seemed their natural allies. The news from climate science suggests that late capitalism with its endless pursuit of growth and its ruthless exploitation of natural and human resources is the problem. It has to change. Industrialists, financiers, politicians and the public all need to be challenged about their stake in a system that has become unsustainable.

Implicatory denial and psychic gymnastics

It is hardly surprising that climate scientists have been reluctant to be the bearers of this particular piece of bad news. In a recent post on the Climate Psychology Alliance website Paul Hoggett makes the point that implicatory denial – the term is the late Stan Cohen’s – is our common heritage when it comes to any distressing event. It is not the choice of a crazy minority but the default position of most of us and I include myself here. Most of us acknowledge briefly the truth of the news from Syria, statistics on child poverty or climate change. But we would rather not follow through with the implications. We don’t want to connect world events to our own actions. We don’t want to acknowledge our complicity in the disasters that befall others, the relationship of our comfort to their suffering or the need for our lives to change and for us to become politically engaged. In order to stay sane, we turn the page quickly.

We each have our own particular version of the psychic gymnastics that achieve this, our own way of holding incompatible facts in separate compartments of the mind. For scientists, turning away from the social and political implications of their knowledge can be achieved by stressing scientific doubt, concentrating on the uncertainties and reminding us of their objectivity. We shouldn’t be surprised when they do this: they merely demonstrate a defence that they share with the rest of us. But we should applaud when they break clear and speak out.

Corporate bullies

What goes on when a big corporation makes a threat like this and someone like me, who wasn’t even there, automatically fears for their own safety? The answer is that unconscious memories have been triggered. I’m back in the school playground. I’m alone. I’m small. I know that I have not understood the unwritten rules and that even if I have, they will be changed to disadvantage me. Fight is not an option. Flight is not an option. There is only endurance, avoidance and – perhaps – survival.

These are the visceral feelings of being faced by a bully. They are universal. Sometimes the bullies are other children. Sometimes, disgracefully, they are adults wielding sadistic and arbitrary rules or making perverted sexual demands. You are unlikely to have escaped childhood without some experience of bullying. Everyone knows the sick fear in the pit of the stomach. Everyone knows, at some level, the terror of looking around to see that everyone who might help you has left.

EDF knows this too. It knows that people like me will feel fear, think again about joining a protest and retreat to some mild and ineffectual tut-tutting in a letter to my MP or the Guardian. Just like the playground bullies staking their territory it wants to hollow out the public space where protest takes place. Its attack is an attack on democracy.

Liberté, egalité, fraternité?

Electricité de France had its birth in the country that gave us the universal ideals of solidarity and protest against injustice. It pretends in its (now discontinued) support of climate week to care about climate change, sustainability and the environment. Its legal action against the No Dash for Gas activists gives the lie to those claims and places EDF decidedly on the wrong side of the barricades.

I have to admit that I’m a wuss when it comes to demonstrations. I hate crowds. I can’t run. I’m afraid of being pushed over. I don’t like shouting. I hate being cold. I claim that I’m too old (not true). I claim that I’ve done a lot of demonstrating in the past (true but irrelevant). I claim that I do lots of other useful things (also true and also irrelevant).

You can support the No Dash for Gas activists by signing the petition here

https://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/tell-edfenergy-to-drop-legal-action-against-no-dash-for-gas-activists

And, if you’re a wuss like me, you can struggle against the internalised fear of the bully and stand up more strongly next time you are asked.

Denial and disavowal

Denial is a familiar idea in relation to climate change. Its most common form is not the outright “black-is-white” argument of the denialist industry but the common capacity to keep the awkward knowledge split off in one part of the mind so that ‘life as usual’ can go on. Psychoanalysis often refers to this as ‘disavowal’. People know and don’t know simultaneously. Uncomfortable knowledge is shelved. The awkward facts of climate change are put in a separate box. In this way the anxiety, guilt and disturbance they cause can be managed.  Loss doesn’t have to be faced. Anne Karpf described this process well in her recent Guardian article Climate change, you can’t ignore it  and I discussed it in my piece The Id and the Eco in Aeon magazine a couple of months ago.

Also familiar are the contradictory statements and policies of governments and big institutions as they respond to pressure from vested interests and stakeholders. BIS (the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills), the Treasury and DECC (the Department for Energy and Climate Change) set off in mutually opposing directions. The ‘joined-up government’ trumpeted by the Blair administration in 1998 as a solution to ‘wicked’ problems like climate change was quietly dropped. Cameron and co have no interest in reviving it.

What is less familiar is the way a process of denial can be enacted within a specific public policy. This is an altogether more insidious process as it contributes to confusion in the public mind, reinforcing and legitimising the status quo of disavowal. The government’s Green Deal, launched this week as a programme to upgrade the UK housing stock, is a sad example.

The need for big changes

In 2006 the government-commissioned Stern report was clear. Stern argued that dealing with climate change required investment of 1% of GDP a year in order to avoid much greater costs later on. Stern later agreed that his figures were optimistic and that 2% was more realistic. Others suggested that even that was inadequate. What was not up for debate was the fact that climate change will cost money. Priorities need to be realigned and the economy transformed.

When you come down to specifics, research on the UK housing stock is equally clear. Both Brenda Boardman’s research for Oxford University and energy modelling done by DECC and the Scottish Government show that we can’t meet our obligations under the Climate Change Acts unless almost all the possible upgrades to existing houses are made. This includes a long list of projects whose costs outweigh their monetary savings.

So what does the Green Deal offer? It provides loans to householders and landlords that are recouped through energy companies making a charge on fuel bills. At its heart is the idea of the ‘Golden Rule’. No upgrades to housing should be made that cost more than the savings that can be made on energy bills.

Perversion and the avoidance of reality

This is a policy which simultaneously accepts and denies reality – the process at the heart of disavowal. On the one hand the Green Deal acknowledges that something must be done to reduce the energy demand of UK housing. On the other it suggests that this is a matter of choice not necessity, that no loss to the individual will be involved and that the key consideration is financial. Many of the actions which in reality are needed are placed out of the frame, along with the arguments for taking any of them.

The perverse lie at the heart of the Green Deal is the idea that each energy-saving action should have a ‘payback’ time. When governments in the 1960s provided grants for toilets, bathrooms and electricity in the nation’s run-down Victorian housing, the ‘paybacks’ on these works were not calculated. The motive was to provide decent, healthy housing for all the population. In the 21^st century a similar programme is needed to transform the housing stock to cope with climate change – a programme needed once again because it is the necessary, decent, human thing to do.

The Green Deal policy could be seen as a prime example of what Paul Hoggett[1] (in his essay Climate change in a perverse culture) describes as a perverse culture, where processes of thinking have been corrupted and policy-makers operate in an ‘as-if’ world where it becomes more important to appear to do something than to actually make a difference. This is a world in which evasion, half-truths and collusion thrive. Morality is blurred. Targets are substituted for actions. Tricks are preferred to truth. Complexity provides a smokescreen for ineffectiveness.

Newspapers from the Guardian to the Daily Mail have predictably picked up on the problems at the heart of the Green Deal. Its confusing rules, complex processes and muddled finances are easy to pick holes in. Sadly, instead of offering leadership that spells out the unpalatable truths, accompanied by genuine incentives to make meaningful change, the Green Deal both colludes with a public that prefers not to face the issue and provides a framework for further denial.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sustainable-business/blog/2013-prediction-climate-change-cop18

Take a look at his piece I wrote for Aeon magazine

http://www.aeonmagazine.com/being-human/rosemary-randall-climate-change-psychoanalysis/

Sherwin’s example was the kettle. It may be responsible for 4% of UK household emissions, so reducing that figure would be useful. Sherwin’s answers are better water-level indicators, bringing back the old-fashioned whistle and convincing people that water at 90ºc is still fine for making tea. (George Orwell, author of the classic essay ‘A nice cup of tea’ would not agree about that!)

Social practice

Like many ordinary household behaviours boiling the kettle and making the tea is what social scientists call a ‘social practice’. It is heavy with meaning. People feel that the way they do it matters. It expresses relationships and values. It symbolises and expresses people’s sense of identity. It’s done slightly differently in different families. It may be part of a negotiation around leisure and work time or symbolise willingness to share troubles. It connects people into wider systems of trade and power. In the home context tea-making is strongly linked to people’s sense of themselves as home-makers, generous, maternal or caring. In the workplace the tea break and how long it takes is a key element in employer-employee relations.

The meaning of small acts

A while ago, I asked a number of people to reflect a little more deeply on why they overfilled their kettles. These are some of the answers they gave:

“It means I get a longer break – it makes staring out of the window and day-dreaming legitimate. If I put in the right amount I’d be in and out of the kitchen in seconds.”  Joe used the kettle to ‘steal’ a few more minutes from his employer. He didn’t have the status or perhaps the courage to take the break he wanted. Putting in just the right amount of water would remove his daydreaming time or leave him hanging around in the kitchen feeling anxious that he would be challenged.

“What if there isn’t enough for everyone? I’d feel awful if someone had to wait while I started again. It feels like meanness, being ungenerous.” For Sheila, the behaviour was deeply connected to her sense of herself as a generous, loving person. She also kept the heating and lights on throughout the house in order to make it feel welcoming should anyone drop in. Putting in just the right amount of water would make her feel she was being selfish and lacking in her role as home-maker.

“It gives me time to lay out the tea-tray.” Doris was in her 80s. She followed a familiar ritual of putting milk in a jug, arranging cups and saucers, adding a slice of cake or two biscuits on a favourite plate, warming the pot and making a small pot of tea. This all went on a trolley ready to be wheeled through to the sitting room. The time it took to boil a full kettle of water was perfect for these preparations. A whistle part way through or even the click of a half-empty kettle turning itself off would have made her jump and interrupted the calm of this comfortable process. She saw the suggestion of boiling a small amount of water as an intrusion into her life by busybodies who didn’t understand what it meant to be old.

Would a smarter kettle have helped? Maybe. Design may make the shift to a new social practice easier but if it robs people of customary satisfactions, frustrates valued relationships and identity or blocks symbolic meanings it is likely to be resisted.

In Al Gore’s 2006 film, he speaks of the need to find ‘…the place between denial and despair…’ – the place from which it is possible to act on climate change. It was a perceptive phrase. It catches the psychological truth that one source of denial may be an unacknowledged despair that anything can be done. In those more hopeful times it made sense to encourage people to believe that runaway climate change could be prevented and that their actions mattered. It could truthfully be said in 2006 that despair was not the most appropriate emotion.

A changed situation

The situation in 2012 is quite different. The last year has seen increasingly disturbing weather events – droughts, floods, wildfires and unusual weather patterns – being attributed by scientists to climate change, and all taking place against a backdrop of rising CO2 emissions and the failure of international action. The view that IPCC predictions were conservative is being borne out. The world seems set on a pathway to 4 or possibly 6 degrees of warming.

In the face of this, despair may be an altogether more realistic reaction and the people one might expect to express it would be those working closest to the action – scientists, policy makers, campaigners and community activists. It is an emotion that is rarely given voice however. One is more likely to encounter silence, or a cheerful focus on practical actions and a ‘we’re getting there’ narrative that focuses on small successes. Despair itself seems subject to denial. If conversations about it are taking place they are doing so in private, as if to voice them publicly would be to admit defeat or open the doors even wider to the tide of opinion that deems the problem too expensive, difficult or irrelevant.

The consequences of silence

Silence however has consequences. It involves a loss of authenticity. It is an act of bad faith. It creates a sense of make-believe about every campaign and every encouragement to reduce carbon emissions. Emotions that are not expressed do not vanish. They re-appear as symptoms, infecting actions with a sense of half-heartedness or leading to withdrawal. George Monbiot wrote presciently in his 2006 book Heat of the desire that “…we will wish our governments to pretend to act.” Paul Hoggett explores this dynamic in a fascinating essay Climate change in a perverse culture in the collection Engaging with Climate Change. Unacknowledged despair can take us in a similar direction, making our actions feel privately pointless and hollow.

The process of despair

Why should we still try if so much is lost? At a deep personal level each person will find their own answer to that question. Despair is a process to be lived through. It might matter most to you that some small part of bio-diversity hangs on for longer or has a better chance of survival. You might decide that anything that keeps the temperature lower rather than higher is worth doing. You might feel that it’s a question of justice and that the consequences of climate change should be more equitably borne. You might feel that it is an ethical question – why would the prospect of failure make you act any differently?

So should we be shouting our despair from the rooftops? No, I don’t think so. But we should risk speaking of it to each other and be open to conversations that share it more widely if we are to remain effective at all in the work that we do. For there is still work to be done, and it needs to be done from an engagement with reality – however difficult – rather than from a retreat into illusion.

Illusion and reality

The political philosopher Antonio Gramsci took as his slogan Romain Rolland’s phrase ‘Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.’ It appeared on the masthead of L’Ordine Nuovo, the newspaper he edited in the 1920s, and he returned to the idea repeatedly in his prison writings. What I think Gramsci meant was that one should look always at the difficult truth, refuse illusion and yet still find the determination to fight for what one believes to be right and just. I often find myself misquoting the second half as ‘…optimism of the heart…’ because it seems to me that it is feeling as much as determination that allows people to continue when so much seems lost or impossible and it is connection with others that helps us carry on while acknowledging the despair that comes with the defeat of strongly held desires.