Psychology – Page 14 – a sibilant intake of breath

Cultivating a conservative climate movement

Let’s begin with two simple premises:

The amount of climate change the world experiences depends on the total quantity of fossil fuels that get burned. As such, there is little value in avoiding burning particular coal, oil, and gas reserves in one time period if we then burn them in another
In Canada, the US, and the UK the electoral pattern for a century or more has been alternating between relatively left-wing and relatively right-wing governments

I think it follows from this that for climate change mitigation policy to succeed, it cannot only be supported by progressives or supporters of left-of-centre parties.

It’s true that the most prehistoric form of climate change denial (saying there is no problem, or it’s a problem too small to require action) is concentrated among political conservatives. It’s also true that the fossil fuel industry has outsize influence over conservative politics, parties, and politicians. To me — however — these observations are akin to the argument that since 85% of the world’s energy currently comes from fossil fuels it is imposible or unrealistic to try to replace them. In both cases, the depth of the current dependency demonstrates the need for change, rather than its impossibility.

Recently, UK Conservative MP Alicia Kearns and U.S. Republican congressperson John Curtis co-authored an article in the Times of London: The left should not dominate the conversation on climate change.

They also appeared in a recent panel hosted by the Hudson Institute:

Progressives tend to be very opposed to the argument or idea that conservatives need to be won over to climate change mitigation through fossil fuel abolition. The intersectional climate justice analysis holds that climate change is a symptom of systemic injustice and cannot be corrected through narrow solutions which do not eliminate colonialism or capitalism or patriarchy. It is a joined-together worldview that clearly motivates a lot of people, but I don’t think it’s a sound strategy for avoiding catastrophic climate change. Furthermore, I challenge the claim that only systematic change in our political or economic system can solve the problem. Progressives also tend to assert that renewable energy is cheaper and better in every way than fossil fuel, implicitly acknowledging that it could be possible to replace where our energy comes from without fundamentally changing much more about society.

I can see at least a couple of routes for moving forward with cultivating a conservative commitment to climate change mitigation.

Thinking about the span of the next couple of decades, I think conservatism in the English-speaking democracies may be posed for a huge splitting apart between comparative pragmatists who are willing to accept what science has unambiguously shown and pure ideologues whose policy preferences do not relate to what is really happening in the world. If that split can be enlarged to the point of crisis — when those on the empiricist side will no longer tolerate supporting the same candidates and parties as those on the fantasist side — those willing to consider evidence will likely have a long-term electoral advantage as those most implacably opposed to climate action die off, young people with a better understanding of climate change become politically dominant, and as the undeniable effects of climate change become even plainer.

Another plausible route to cultivating conservative support for climate change mitigation is through faith communities. The Catholic Church, United Church, Anglican Church, and others have been outspoken from the centre of their institutions about the need to control climate change. It’s true that there are some whose theology sees the Earth exclusively as a set of resources to be exploited, or who believe that a religious apocalypse will soon bring an end to the material world making long-term problems irrelevant, but I suspect there are many more in all faiths and denominations who can be won over to the view that we have a duty to care for creation and not to pass on a degraded world to our successors.

I think part of the progressive wariness about outreach to conservatives arises from how the intersectional view ties climate change into the social justice and economic redistribution agendas which animated the left long before climate change became a mainstream concern. Cooperating with conservatives on the narrow issue of replacing fossil fuels would not advance the general project of abolishing capitalism or re-ordering the global system. Some see climate change as a crisis which would be ‘wasted’ if our response only sustains planetary stability. Others convincingly point out that even without climate change as a problem the idea that resource use and waste production can increase indefinitely is fundamentally at odds with a finite planet. All that said, climate change seems to be the most pressing and serious societal problem facing humanity, and resolving it would give us more time and a more stable global environment in which to pursue other aims of justice.

I don’t believe either progressives or conservatives can or should win one another over to their entire worldview. The progressive climate change movement is an enormous success and source of hope, and I am not calling for it to be dismantled or fundamentally altered, though they ought to give more consideration to cross-ideological alliances on certain vital issues. As long as effective climate change policies are something which one side assembles and the other dismantles we cannot succeed, and so winning over conservatives to climate action is an indispensable condition of success.

This uncivil city

780 km of exercise walks since August have brought me much into contact with people on the sidewalks and pathways of Toronto. Particularly in the last couple of months, I have had the sense that people in general are stressed, frayed, and emotionally on-edge. I see this in their egocentrism: their determination to do as they wish and let hang any who question or obstruct them in doing whatever they feel entitled to, from walking dogs off-leash which then come charging up to me, to driving as though taking out a few pedestrians is a fair exchange for getting where they want faster, to raging out and screaming at people when asked to follow some basic legal requirement or expectation of civil conduct. Toronto strikes me less and less as a place where a desirable sense of community exists, and more as the anarchic arena in which millions of selfish desires overlap and clash.

It has now been a year — since the last March 8th — since I have been in voluntary COVID isolation, going beyond whatever confusing and contradictory public orders are in force to simply do what I can to minimize human contact and the risk of virus transmission. I’m certainly worn down myself, from lack of life-sustaining activities like voluntary associations with in-person meetings, from the stress of Toronto’s horrible housing market and the abuses it perpetuates, from the drawn-out uncertainty of never knowing when my dissertation will be done because there are always more comments and changes, and from the lack of any exercise but walking (and that increasingly done in fear of the people who I will encounter).

This micro-level frustration and alienation from others arises in part from and parallels the macro-level ways in which the world has gone wrong. Rather than snapping sharply back from the aberrant direction of the Trump administration, the U.S. seems to have bent irretrievably into a new shape, further calling into question its long term stability and even coherence as a single polity. As Canadians peering across the border, that is surely an ominous development, not least because whatever political storms arise from America coming to terms with its own diminishment will not stop shrieking and toppling trees when they cross north into us. Nor can we look to much of the rest of the world for encouragement. Europe is weak and divided, with a political elite happy to sell out to the Russians for oil money, and the political institutions and legitimacy of the EU under constant strain. China is an authoritarian, crassly nationalistic and militaristic threat to its own citizens and the global order. India is increasingly governed on the basis of religious nationalism. At the political level, decision makers everywhere are responding to stresses in the global situation counterproductively, by reinforcing the selfish tendency to reject multilateral cooperation for noisy nationalistic confrontation, contributing toward the tendency of nuclear arms to proliferate, and valuing short-term fossil fuel profits over the perpetual safeguarding of a living prosperous Earth.

Quite possibly it is wrong to see most of this as new. Even in the ancient world plenty of people were happy to stomp others for their own advancement. Maybe part of what makes it piquant — or which helps to explain the intensity of our current alienation from one another — is that people have stopped believing archetypal stories about power generally being benevolent and about a universe, society, or diety with a comprehensible notion of ethics and the willingness to apply those rules with greater consistency and determination than people do. Instead, we see the universe as an accident in which there is no automatic tendency for goodness to be repaid with goodness or vice versa, and in which people who hold authority do so as the victors of the egocentric struggle, talking about the public good for public relations purposes but truly only interested in an idea like justice as a means for further advancing their own power and interests.

Constraining social media use

Alie Ward’s Ologies postcast about gratitude was a reminder of the benefits of in-person activities and the problems which arise from the incentives of social media firms. Like casinos that profit mostly from people mindlessly putting money into slot machines, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are just designed to keep people on and coming back, no matter whether they become misinformed through the process. In response, I changed my Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram passwords on December 14th and put them on a card at home to look up if I ever specifically decided to check these platforms. I’ve done so a couple of times since and had the strong impression that I haven’t missed anything.

One reason for using these platforms less is how ongoing social media monitoring is dragging out the completion of my dissertation, since there are always developments and new news on divestment. It’s better to get the thing published than to keep dragging it out with new information, so I am no longer actively monitoring social media.

Secondly, during the time surrounding America’s disastrous election (still a disaster, even though Trump lost) I realized that I don’t need endless amateur commentary on what is going on, and that getting it is needlessly emotionally provocative.

I took Twitter off my phone in 2017 but this is much more complete. In particular, it helps break a cycle of checking social media out of habit, seeing links to outside resources, and then getting caught up with reading them before returning to social media.

I am trying to read more books now, and to hike outside.

Near Sunnybrook Park

On an exercise walk tonight in the Bridle Path area I listened to Alie Ward’s recent podcast on happiness research: Awesomeology (GRATITUDE FOR LITTLE THINGS) with Neil Pasricha.

It reinforced how the smartphone and the media in general is “the slot machine in your pocket“, with intermittent variable rewards that habituate you into scrolling through dreck, depression, and unrealistic comparisons to your own life because the occasional joy or pleasant surprise sets us up like rats hoping for a food pellet, pressing the lever over and over, or the people who put more into slot machines than society spends on baseball and making movies.

I’m going to try a few new behaviours in response:

Not sleeping with my cell phone in the room
Putting my phone in an envelope at night, with some required actions before I can open it, like having a cup of coffee and a shower and going outside for five minutes
Putting all my social media passwords on a piece of paper, keeping them logged out by default, and only checking them periodically

One other note from the walk: I ankle around in Rosedale often, so I have seen a lot of ostentatious mansions, but nothing in Toronto yet like one house on Park Lane Circle which displays the aesthetic sensibilities of Saddam Hussein, behind such an ornate gold and black fence that I wondered whether it was the residence of the Lieutenant Governor of Ontario before I checked myself with the memory that neither the Governor General’s house in Ottawa nor Buckingham Palace is quite so ornamented.

Operation DeFam

In Jurassic Park, the t-rex isn’t able to see people unless they are moving. Something similar really happens in our own brains: once we expect to see something in a certain place and arrangement with other things we effectively stop seeing it. We’re habituated and it becomes part of the background.

In life generally I appreciate the value of defamiliarization — the benefits which can arise from breaking up the expected order. That can be as basic as changing how you light things. Looking at my room for the first time using just a bright flashlight and no room lights, I saw so many cobwebs in the stucco that I immediately had to vacuum the ceiling. Try using just a flashlight in any dark and familiar room and you’ll start to see it differently as you are reminded of things which have become so familiar they’re forgotten.

Going a step further, we can maintain a dynamic living situation by insisting on moving things around. My standard rule is that unless something is a genuinely useful special-case item which gets brought out every few years to save the day then anything which you own which you haven’t touched for six months you probably don’t need. One way to bring all this out and think it over is to reorganize your space. Swap the bed for the bookcase and see how waking up in the morning feels.

A move-in-place is another tactic. When we had a gap between flatmates I was able to use the largest room for the equivalent of doing a defrag operation on a hard drive. I opened every box and container, laid everything out, and then decided what should be kept, archived, or gotten rid of and how the kept things should be organized.

An experiment which I invented yesterday is the “use desk.” Previously, I kept on my desk a mixture of materials for reference, tools I use daily, tools which seem appealing to keep on hand, and decorative objects. As I was cleaning my clear glass desktop, it occurred to me that I would have more usable space and fewer distractions with a rule that only things I am actually currently using for work should be on the desk. I’m going to try it for a few weeks and will report back on the effect.

Mental health and PhD programs

Even without a pandemic-driven lockdown and absence of in-person social life, grad school involves a lot of psychological and mental health challenges. It’s extremely hard to work on a gigantic solo project for years on end and to structure your time with no day-to-day management or supervision. It’s also hard when most people in your life have at least a somewhat distorted sense of what a PhD involves. One well-meaning response which I find frustrating is when people assert extreme confidence in my abilities and probability of success when they have no information about how the program is actually going. Confidence without evidence is wearying rather than heartening for me.

Anyhow, I just came across a paper in Research Policy which looks into some of these dynamics:

Results based on 12 mental health symptoms (GHQ-12) showed that 32% of PhD students are at risk of having or developing a common psychiatric disorder, especially depression. This estimate was significantly higher than those obtained in the comparison groups. Organizational policies were significantly associated with the prevalence of mental health problems. Especially work-family interface, job demands and job control, the supervisor’s leadership style, team decision-making culture, and perception of a career outside academia are linked to mental health problems.

I’m having trouble finding it now, but I remember an earlier article about how PhD students are pretty much by definition those who experienced a lot of academic success earlier in their lives, in the much more structured conditions of undergraduate and perhaps master’s programs. Going from that to a situation where there are far fewer opportunities for incremental successes (working toward getting the whole dissertation done and defended), poor program completion rates, and an extremely challenging (it’s fair to say hopeless for most) academic job market definitely creates mental strain.

When people ask me now about the wisdom of starting a PhD, I give them two warnings. First, I tell them that it’s only worth doing if you enjoy being in school so much that you are willing to sacrifice considerable lifetime earnings and financial security in retirement, since almost all employers would prefer job experience to a PhD and the process of getting through one is expensive and debt-inducing. Second, I warn them that all PhD programs carry a risk that you will not finish because of factors that have nothing to do with your competence or determination. There is always a real chance that the time you have put in to it will amount to nothing in terms of credentials because factors outside your control force you to stop. Indeed, feeling powerless and not in control of your own fate is probably a central reason why PhDs are so stressful, why comparatively few people finish, and why the grad school environment encourages mental health problems.

COVID in winter

Toronto is returning to a partial COVID lockdown because of rising case numbers.

It has limited practical effect on me since I have been in isolation anyway since early March, only going out for groceries and socially distanced walks for exercise.

I suppose the pandemic and the public policy response will always be subject to multiple interpretations. I can’t recall any comparable disease control measures in my lifetime, so you could say that the world has responded with unprecedented energy. At the same time, the pandemic is a constant reminder of how many people put their own comparatively unimportant preferences (like for entertainment and variety) ahead of protecting themselves and others, limiting the effectiveness of public health measures and extending this entire unpleasant experience for everyone. Like climate change, the pandemic provides endless examples of people who begin with what they want to do and then choose beliefs which are compatible.

All told, the behaviour of governments and populations highlights how poorly human beings respond to slow and generalized threats, as opposed to the fast and personal kind. That’s not an encouraging precedent at a time when the future of humanity is in jeopardy if we cannot cooperate, moderate our selfish desires, and do what’s necessary to control the problem.

Living without limits

I find it’s good practice to approach literally anybody, from a municipal worker who I am passing on the sidewalk while they’re performing official duties to clerks in shops with an immediate attempt at a substantive conversation, not just a rote exchange of greetings or well-wishes. By that means the other morning I got the chance to ask why Toronto had removed all the foot-pedals from the municipal garbage and recycling bins (you can see one on the right here), which had been a convenient way to avoid touching the machine and not having to push a spring-loaded cover back with the refuse you’re trying to deposit. The two crewmembers told me it is because people did too much illegal dumping with the footpedal-enabled system, and it let to too much disruption as waste went bad and was gotten into by creatures.

The draw of martyrdom

Describing the period in the 1980s when Osama bin Laden was emerging as a major private fundraiser for the mujahideen resisting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan:

The lure of an illustrious and meaningful death was especially powerful in cases where the pleasures and rewards of life were crushed by government oppression and economic deprivation. From Iraq to Morocco, Arab governments had stifled freedom and signally failed to create wealth at the very time when democracy and personal income were sharply climbing in virtually all other parts of the globe. Saudi Arabia, the richest of the lot, was such a notoriously unproductive country that the extraordinary abundance of petroleum has failed to generate any other significant source of income; indeed, if one subtracted the oil revenue of the Gulf countries, 260 million Arabs exported less than the 5 million Finns. Radicalism usually prospers in the gap between rising expectations and declining opportunities. This is especially true when the population is young, idle, and bored; where the art is impoverished; where entertainment—movies, theater, music—is policed or absent altogether; and where young men are set apart from the consoling and socializing presence of women. Adult illiteracy remained the norm in many Arab countries. Unemployment was among the highest in the developing world. Anger, resentment, and humiliation spurred young Arabs to search for dramatic remedies.

Martyrdom promised such young men an ideal alternative to a life that was so sparing in its rewards. A glorious death beckoned to the sinner, who would be forgiven, it is said, with the first spurt of blood, and he would behold his place in Paradise even before his death. Seventy members of his household might be spared the fires of hell because of his sacrifice. The martyr who is poor will be crowned in heaven with a jewel more valuable than the earth itself. And for those young men who came from cultures where women are shuttered away and rendered unattainable for someone without prospects, martyrdom offered the conjugal pleasures of seventy-two virgins—”the dark-eyed houris,” as the Quran describes them, “chaste as hidden pearls.” They awaited the martyr with feasts of meat and cups of the purest wine.

The pageant of martyrdom that [Abdullah] Azzam limned before his worldwide audience created the death cult that would one day form the core of al-Qaeda. For the journalists covering the war, the Arab Afghans were a curious sideshow to the real fighting, set apart by their obsession with dying. When a fighter fell, his comrades would congratulate him and weep because they were not also slain in battle. These scenes struck other Muslims as bizarre. The Afghans were fighting for their country, not Paradise or an idealized Islamic community. For them, martyrdom was not such a high priority.

Rahimullah Yusufzai, the Peshawar bureau chief for the News, a Pakistani daily, observed a camp of Arab Afghans that was under attack in Jalalabad. The Arabs had pitched white tents on the front lines, where they were easy marks for Soviet bombers. “Why?” the reporter asked incredulously. “We want them to bomb us!” the men told him. “We want to die!” They believed that they were answering God’s call. If they were truly blessed, God would reward them with a martyr’s death. “I wish I could raid and be slain, and then raid and be slain, and then raid and be slain,” bin Laden later declared, quoting the Prophet.

Wright, Lawrence. The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Vintage Books, 2007. p. 123-4

Insomnia and activist burnout

The most common physical health symptom described by the participants was chronic insomnia. Heidi explained: ‘One of the first indicators for me is insomnia. . . . I’m waking up in the middle of the night thinking about how I need to do this or bring this in or what time I am meeting with these parents, and that starts repeating itself.’ The insomnia became more serious for Cathy: ‘I would not be able to sleep unless I took sleeping pills.”

…

They described, not just brief periods of weariness, but chronic, debilitating stress, anxiety, and depression that drove them away from their activism at least temporarily. Christopher, for example, felt ‘frayed all over’. Evelyn described feeling ’emotionally devastated’.

Chen, Cher Weixia and Paul C. Gorski. “Burnout in Social Justice and Human Rights Activists: Symptoms, Causes and Implications.” Journal of Human Rights Practice, Volume 7, Issue 3, November 2015