People’s Climate March: Can We Scale Up the Politics of Humanity?
Failure of Imagination as an Existential Threat
You’d think a death sentence for thousands of people would be pronounced with a little more weight and solemn ceremony. Some ritual or a moment marking the occasion, perhaps? A judge wearing robes, or a pen to be broken in regret? There was none of that. He was such ordinary man, not really short or tall, neither thin or stocky, wearing nondescript clothes, sipping a cup of tea.
“I built this one strong,” he said, “as I’m going to live here, too, on the top floor.”
I was a small child, and I would understand decades later the mass death sentence he had just passed, and how all “natural” disasters are simultaneously disasters of justice.
My parents had wanted to buy an apartment, and asked the builder if the building was any good. Reassured, or perhaps without choices, they did purchase a two-bedroom, ground-level flat in that building in the scenic town of Golcuk, across the İzmit bay, under which lay the sleeping, but never dead, North Anatolian Fault line.
Yet unaccustomed to the adult world which shrugs injustice too easily, that sentence seared in my child mind. This one is strong?
In 1999, that fault line would wake up and shake the region violently, turning of thousands homes instantly into mass graves, killing about 20,000. I happened to be in Istanbul, and I rushed back along with a rescue team and some journalists, and I walked along that very shoreline promenade of my childhood, and took in the grim scenery of building after building collapsed onto itself, wailing relatives frantically digging, almost always to no avail.
As I walked, I mentally recounted which pile of rubble was which apartment building, and who had lived in it. I knew every twist and corner of that promenade, every building, every road, every shop. Now it meant I knew which pile was a distorted, twisted grave to which family.
And then I came across one building that was standing tall, barely cracked, amidst the long line of rubble.
The one that the builder had said he built strong, because he was going to live on the top floor.
Nobody died in that one.
He knew.
The fault line that passed a few hundred meters from the shore was not on the national agenda, a criminal act of negligence, but the constructors knew of it. And they knowingly built with cheaper materials and shoddy methods, except the ones they’d live in. After two weeks of living amidst the rubble, I could tell the quality of the cement — the ones in the pancaked buildings would crumble like sand in my hand. Steel rods that were supposed to be thick and hooked into each other lay among broken furniture, thin and straight.
Worst, I think, were the bodies of parent after parent we encountered in their children’s room, often on top of the child’s bed, trying desperately to shield them from the floors above that would crush them all. They had obviously rushed as the earth started shaking, and all died right there, without a chance.
“I built this one strong.” That sentence haunts me, now, as I wonder who’s going to live on the top floor of the climate-change disasters that are barreling down towards us, and whose bodies will be piled underneath.
This, of course, is the story of “natural” disaster after disaster. In Katrina, the poorest neighborhoods were the lowest ones, and were least likely to be able to afford evacuation. Low-lying Bangladesh will likely suffer much worse than low-lying Netherlands from climate-change induced sea rise. In tornadoes, it’s the trailer parks where people die, rather than solid buildings with basements.
That’s why it makes sense to march for economic and political justice as a response to the challenge of climate change, as people in New York did this Sunday by hundreds of thousands. Preparing for, and responding to the calamities that will be unleashed requires addressing resources, justice and equity. That is certainly the correct focus.
However, any attempt to address climate change requires addressing another challenge, one that is just as momentous. This global challenge exposes how the scale of our politics is hopelessly mismatched to this trial, and this, more than anything leaves me despairing.
Disasters, as documented by countless sociologists, witnessed by many survivors, and eloquently written up by Rebecca Solnit in her book, bring out the best in people at the local level. Disaster response creates a micro-politics of solidarity, altruism and humanity. How can it not? The mass death and suffering breaks through the illusions that sustain much injustice, and bonds people in their humanity. Unlike the myth of descent into Hobbesian madness, in most disasters people quietly and unheroically join to save, heal and support one another.
The question facing humanity is whether we can front-load the bonds of humanity that springs up in disaster response, and turn them into disaster avoidance and preparation?
I vividly remember, for example, the deeply religious men who worked at the cemetery in the 1999 earthquake, burying bodies and consoling the relatives. It was August, scorching hot, and the expanded cemetery — a mass grave, to be accurate — had no trees. The stench of death — the most difficult part — dominated our senses. As I worked alongside them, it was clear we belonged to different “tribes” politically — I wore jeans and did not cover my hair; they wore baggy pants and sported long, long beards. The state had abandoned us to ourselves, and there was a shortage of everything. There was a shortage of equipment, tents, shrouds, shovels, and even hats.
After a few hours in the morning, one young man, maybe the one with the longest beard, insisted I take his hat, with that brim that shielded one’s face. I refused. He insisted. I refused. “God almighty teaches me to share,” he said, “and that’s why you must take my hat”. I looked at him, and we kind of locked our gaze, looking at each other across many divides. And I realized that he must give me his hat, as much as I felt that I must not take anyone else’s hat. I took it, carefully, without touching his hand, which I know is sometimes a taboo for very religious men like him. He wiped his brow, and we greeted the next grieving family with water and the kindest words we could muster.
That little moment, though, almost certainly would not survive scaling up even one level. Is there any political institution where some differences, however grave, can be put aside for other commonalities, especially if they pertain to core human values? Can the broad political, national, transnational, and truly global alliances that must take place to confront climate change happen?
Unfortunately, the global momentum seems to be in the opposite direction, and I believe digital technology is pushing, as usual, in both directions: that of further fracturing, but also that of creating the base, perhaps the only one, that may allow attempts at scaling up our politics of commonality. Even the modern nation-state, the biggest political unit, yet still too small to address climate change, is reeling under the pressures of decentralization.
And technology-fueled connectivity is almost certainly part of the dynamics that fracture us — even as technology also helps us come together. Digital connectivity makes it easier and easier for small groups to find each other, clump together, and polarize against everyone else. “Echo-chambers” and “filter bubbles” do percolate online, and of course, fuel offline polarization. My friend Ethan Zuckerman has written about the false appearance of cosmopolitanism online, and whether we can consciously counter it through design and agency, and my colleague Keith Hampton’s research shows what many of us suspected: online media supports more political participation, but not necessarily more deliberation.
Climate change, though, is a global multi-level problem that appears as if it were deliberately designed to defeat humanity with the wrong incentives at every level. Developing countries are right that they, too, have a right to try to raise their standard of living. Rich countries are loath to let go of their privileged position in global consumption, and no politician has ever gotten elected promising less advantages. Activists and grassroots organizers are putting up a heroic effort, but yet lack the levers of political pressure that can bring about the needed transformation. In many places, representative democracy is in shambles, under the crushing grip of the already powerful. Large corporations, as usual, are mostly run for the benefit of investors and upper management. Individuals, too, are caught in these wrong incentive systems: people drive cars long distances because there is often no other reasonable way to get to work.
And so it goes…
In political science, such problems are called “tragedy of commons”: seemingly-rational choices at individual levels lead to disasters at the commons level. A traditional example is grazing herds in common grass areas: each herd owner has an incentive to let their own cows overgraze, which will eventually destroy the commons, to the detriment of everyone. Think of the park where everyone can litter, a little bit, rather than walk to the garbage can that is placed a little too far: soon the park will become too polluted for all.
One dimension of this paradox is the “instrumental rationality” (or “instrumental reason”) highlighted by philosophers of modernity from Heidegger to Marcuse. This is the idea that modernity (and capitalism) are very powerful at finding the most efficient, most powerful means of responding to short-term incentives, but lousy at considering the moral — or ultimate — outcomes. This is the kind of thinking that has grown adults creating policy based on “gaming out” the odds of surviving global nuclear war, as they did for decades in both the West and the USSR, rather than realizing that the only sane response is to do everything one can to avoid one.
The hopeful truth in this grim reality is people do overcome such incentive paradoxes all the time — disasters are a great example, when so many people put the “commons” beyond their own needs, but things need not get to that point before people respond. I know it sounds trivial, but people don’t just merely give each other their hats under the burning sun; many people will readily agree to a more sane politics that takes into account human values, if the political structures for such expression can be created.
In fact, overcoming the tragedy of commons is the human norm in people rooted in communities of mutual obligations — disaster response merely accelerates and forefronts this recognition of common bonds of humanity. Unfortunately, though, the problem is climate change is compounded by the fact that it’s not a disaster, per se, it is more like the slow boiling frog problem where everyone can reasonably tell themselves that ignoring it for another day won’t make that big a difference — and that is true. So the years, and the decades, pile up as we slowly boil. Consequently, a true response has to reclassify it as the eventual disaster it will become, and react to it as the emergency that it presents. It requires the kind of “adaptation” into resilience that Erik Klinenberg has written about from the lessons of Hurricane Sandy, and that is often the hardest political case to make. But all of those: adaptation, building resilience, prioritizing human values, are imaginable and viable. And yet, even that’s not enough.
Our core problem remains matching the scale of the political response to the scale of the challenge. And climate change requires a rooted response at the global level, a level at which we have yet no political community or institutions based on human bonds and mutual obligations. The only truly global player, at the moment, are corporations, followed by a lesser-degree by nation-states. A few non-profits, too, attempt this scale but not too well. United Nations exists as a platform, but not as a force, and is hobbled by a structure that reflects power rather than challenges it.
How do we get to a global politics that is both sane and humane?
In the middle of all this, there’s the Internet and digital connectivity, which, despite all the re-territorialization that is going on globally, still connects us at multiple levels, including globally as well as locally — which is exactly what we need. This, above any other reason, is why I study, worry and think this much about digital connectivity: not just because it brings us cool tools (it does), and new friends (that, too), but because at this historical moment, it is the only common infrastructure with the required scope and scale if we are to have any chance of confronting the issues that we face, globally, as one world.
So what’s next? I doubt anyone truly knows, and I certainly don’t, but failure of imagination at this historic juncture is surely as dangerous as not trying anything — however crazy it may seem to try, from the smallest to the grandest. “Civic tech” as it is sometimes called, can help create the base of connectivity on which such politics can arise. A group of young people based in New Zealand are building a tool called Loomio which tries to combine participatory discussions with meaningful deliberation and decision-making at multiple scales. Another group in Turkey, 140 journos, is trying to scale-up citizen journalism platforms so that content sharing and verification can happen at mass levels. A few years ago, George Monbiot proposed a global parliament “elected” online that would have no claim to power except to express human values through a quasi-representative system. This was an idea based on the fact that our consent is the most powerful tool at our disposal, and that new technologies make possible such scaling up of deliberation and expression of consent—and, more importantly, withdrawal of our consent. (Monbiot argues, and I agree, that we underestimate the power of consent and legitimacy in hegemony).
Yes, all this sounds crazy and implausible. But it’s also not very sane to sleepwalk into a planet wrecked by rapid climate changes and not try many things to save Planet A, as the saying goes, since we are lacking Planet B.
The micro-politics of humanity are deeply satisfying, and everywhere, but they alone will not allow us to confront climate change. The macro-politics of current global institutions are built on structures captured by power, and misaligned incentives, and also will not be inadequate.
I kept that hat, bright yellow with a brim, given to me so many years ago across so many political and personal divides, none of which I consider myself naïve about. Can we bridge all the gaps between these scales, forefront human values, scale up participation without getting paralyzed or hopelessly fractured, and start operating politically at a global level around core values that transcend local structures? Can we forge a new politics based on unprecedented alliances which still share common principles? Can we find levers of pressure and tools for transformation on existing global flows and structures—which we must, if we are to have a chance? I have no idea, but I’d like to think that even if climate change appears like a cruel game intentionally designed to make humanity fail, we can at least try. As we sail into this one, I remind myself that human bonds and ingenuity have weathered many storms.
