The alternative to fear is not lack of emotion

How best to pitch the climate change message?

Posted by David Roberts at 2:38 PM on 15 May 2007

Read more about: climate | politics | environmental movement | messaging | green living

Mike Hulme of the UK's Tyndall Centre says -- yet again -- that the language of "catastrophe" and "disaster" used by climate-change scientists and advocates is having the opposite of its intended effect: it's making people numb and apathetic.

I more or less buy this -- I did, after all, write a five-part series arguing that fear is no friend of greens. But the conclusion Tim Haab draws from it is so spectacularly, diametrically wrong I can only shake my head:

In other words, report the facts without the embellishment. ... Factual representation of the science is more likely to result in acceptance and action.

Baffling. This runs counter not only to common sense and experience but to a huge, growing, and widely publicized body of research. How on earth can anyone still think that unembellished recitations of facts are going to lead to "acceptance and action" on climate change? What more contrary evidence could possibly be required at this point? After all, there's a reason campaigners started ratcheting up the warnings in the first place: "factual representation of the science" wasn't working.

I went on and on about this subject here, so I won't do it again. Instead I'll draw your attention to "How Democrats Should Talk," a new piece by Mike Tomasky in the New York Review of Books. It discusses three new books -- The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina, by Frank Rich; Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear, by Frank Luntz; and The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, by Drew Westen -- all of which, in one way or another, discuss the extraordinarily successful conservative message machine and what the left can do to improve its own messaging.

It's Westen's book that is most directly relevant here. Tomasky quotes from it:

Republicans understand what the philosopher David Hume recognized three centuries ago: that reason is a slave to emotion, not the other way around. With the exception of the Clinton era, Democratic strategists for the last three decades have instead clung tenaciously to the dispassionate view of the mind and to the campaign strategy that logically follows from it, namely one that focuses on facts, figures, policy statements, costs, and benefits, and appeals to intellect and expertise.

This, Westen says, has prevented Dems from presenting their affirmative case in compelling terms and from responding effectively to attacks. In particular, they've responded horribly to the macho swagger and fear mongering:

In a perceptive section on terrorism and the Bush administration's manipulation of fear after September 11, Westen draws on research showing that intimations of mortality shift most people's reactions to the right politically, and he demonstrates how Democrats, in trying to sound as "tough" as Bush, were unwittingly reinforcing Bush's worldview.

This is a crucial point.

Technically, what fear does is move people toward the authoritarian end of the personality spectrum. But as Jonathan Weiler and Marc J. Hetherington argued in their criminally overlooked piece "Authoritarianism and the American Political Divide," as a matter of contingent historical fact, in the last few decades authoritarianism and conservatism have come to overlap almost entirely. Thus ...

... Republicans always benefit from increasing public fears, whether about gays, terrorism, illegal immigration, or anything that activates authoritarianism. It makes people who only have a little authoritarianism share the preferences of those who have a lot.

Or as Kevin Drum puts it: "Fear is the conservative's friend, never the liberal's."

What's this got to do with global warming? I think we can draw two conclusions, one shallow and one somewhat deeper:

Beating the fear drum activates instincts and personality traits that make people more likely to gravitate to the Republican party, which has shown no inclination to do anything about climate change.
More importantly, fear triggers authoritarianism, which according to the National Election Study favors "respect for elders", "obedience", "good manners", and being "well behaved" over "independence", "self-reliance", "curiosity", and "being considerate." Does that sound like a public well-suited to undertake the multi-generational project of adjusting human culture to climate change?

The failure of fear to motivate the public on climate change should not, contra Haab, lead us to conclude that dry, emotionless presentations of facts and statistics will work. What will work is not lack of emotion but appeals to other emotions, emotions more suited to the progressive project: compassion and hope, confidence and curiosity, and above all the yearning in every human heart to create a better life for our children.

For story: The alternative to fear is not lack of emotion
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Glossing over

Glossing over, I'll just say that, YES.

Merely putting the facts out there doesn't cause change to happen.

You have to have emotion and flourish behind it.
And often the only emotions rightwing hawks will listen to is fear.

More or less.

Fear is okay.
But exageration is not okay.

But even more so, the idea is to translate your message into other people's value.

If the only reason they will budge is fear, then thats all you got to work with.

Although luckily, as seen with insurance companies after Katrina, "Fear of Lost Profits" is also a language they understand.

-David Ahlport

by GreyFlcn at 7:52 PM on 15 May 2007

One eye open?

"Republicans always benefit from increasing public fears, whether about gays, terrorism, illegal immigration, or anything that activates authoritarianism. It makes people who only have a little authoritarianism share the preferences of those who have a lot.

Or as Kevin Drum puts it: "Fear is the conservative's friend, never the liberal's."

- Puh-leeze! Scaring retirees about Social Security reforms, riling up the liberal base with inflammatory rhetoric about the reversal of Roe v. Wade, privatizing public services and schools, yammering about greed and the evils of the profit motive and the filthy stinking rich corporations,
opportunistic drum beating for more gun control?
While there are legitimate points at the cores of these statements that need to be discussed and debated,the argument from fear is an inductive fallacy that has no place in reasoned and civil discourse. Has scoring points on the political leaderboard completely replaced any concern for careful and critical reasoning?
To maintain that the Left does not engage in fearmongering is just silly. The liberals (modern American usage) understand Hume just as well as conservatives, it's just that they have not been positioned philosophically in recent years to make as much hay from 9/11 and its aftermath as the authoritarian right. To suggest that advocates for climate change action should travel down more or less the same path that led us to the PATRIOT Act, Gitmo, Iraq, and who knows where risks a dangerous confusion of ends and means. If we become the problems that we see in other people's logic, we have stood Ghandi's maxim on its head.

Melancholy is incompatible with bicycling.

by falsecast at 9:52 PM on 15 May 2007

Sorry

Dave-
Didn't mean to suggest that you were advocating the use of fear. Only that others in the GW debate had, and continue to do so. I think your conclusions illuminate the futility of this approach.

"all of which, in one way or another, discuss the extraordinarily successful conservative message machine and what the left can do to improve its own messaging."

This still sticks though. If the left is going to improve its messaging by aping the machine of the conservatives, will it be very long before the messages become as similar as the machines that deliver them?

Melancholy is incompatible with bicycling.

by falsecast at 10:19 PM on 15 May 2007

Fear and global warming

Fear seems to work best when applied to a clear and present danger. Case in point: I once had a staunch lefty planning professor who insisted that global warming wasn't worthy of much attention because "it wouldn't happen for another century."

It seems easier to engage the fear of vested interests than the general public, e.g., that the Not So Big Three will go bankrupt if substantive fuel efficiency laws are passed. Economic sky-is-falling scenarios play quite well even among those who aren't hard-core Republicans.

All of that said, I do think that fear is a useful tool in advocating for global warming policies. Just-the-facts presentations are the kiss of political death. Some degree of exaggeration is inevitable during policy debates on ANY subject, and are particularly likely on one as abstract as global warming. We don't have to lie or distort the truth to "frame" it in more widely understood ways.

In the end global warming is an ethical issue, much like slavery. If we still have a commitment to democracy, we don't have the right to unilaterally impose great hardships on future generations, less powerful nations and the rest of the biosphere.

We had a revolution a few hundred years ago under the credo of "no taxation without representation." What's the easily understood credo for global warming activists?

by Steven T at 7:30 AM on 16 May 2007

Alternatives to fear

Not all alternatives to fear are nicey-nice, "can't we all just get along" emotions.

"Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are." St Augustine.

by Gar Lipow at 11:55 AM on 16 May 2007

Another good book to pick up.

David should add another unsung classic to his reading list. "Dream: re-imagining progressive politics in an age of fantasy." by Stephen Duncombe. New Press 2007.

Duncombe is merciless in his treatment of the reign of dispassionate reason in left discourse. It is simply one of the most brillant critiques of how the left does business I have ever picked up. If I won the lottery I would order a gross of this book and give it away.

Randy Cunningham

Randy Cunningham

by randino at 2:17 PM on 16 May 2007

Thanks for this one

I was just thinking today that I used to enjoy playing Jerimiah, but no more. So yes, "compassion and hope, confidence and curiosity, and above all the yearning in every human heart to create a better life for our children." Sounds like a good deal.

But that's not the end of it. Also: appeals to citizenship, the real thing this time, and to a sense of our common humanity. And to the stunning realization that we're really in this together. And to cold-eyed adult rising to the occasion kind of responsibility taking. A tragic sense of life, in other words.

There is much more to this than fear.

Tom Athanasiou toma@ecoequity.org

by Tom Athanasiou at 9:29 PM on 17 May 2007

I have always loved the line ...

attributed to one of the Apollo astronauts who reportedly said something along the lines of

"When I looked down at that tiny blue sphere I suddenly realized that

"We are not just passengers on Planet Earth--we're the crew."

If you've ever been part of a ship's crew, you understand what that means: that we all sink or survive together, that there is no "away," that resources are limited, and that it's a bargain to sweat for a year to prevent problems rather than have to spend a few minutes dealing with catastrophic disasters and then a lifetime dealing with the losses.

If I could plant one meme in everyone's head, it would be that one: we're crew, not riders: we all have to pull our weight, not use more than our share, and we have to anticipate and prevent problems for the people who will relieve us, because you can't rest easy if you left the next guy with a bag of worms.

The 5% Project

by JMG at 10:49 PM on 17 May 2007

David Hume; and "Reds"

Good heavens!, Gar throws out a quote from Saint Augustine which I do not recognize! It does not seem quite his mature style, but it might very well belong to his earlier Ciceronian period. In a brief search, nothing comes up beyond the (false?) quote on The Colbert Report, so I am wondering if it is apocryphal. Which is not to say that I would doubt it is his, but it certainly would be necessary to understand his context if he actually wrote those words.

On David Hume, another hero of mine: Hard to see how conservatives of the nowadays sort could embrace him. E.g. his religious skepticism is brilliant.

On liberals' fomenting positive activist emotions: I know it is dangerous to toy with communist connexions, but do you know Warren Beatty's wonderful movie "Reds"? About the first successes of the Bolshevik Revolution? The formula really made sense: Sure, do not deny the fears and the dangers, talk about them a lot in fact, but always make clear your great confidence that together we can vanquish them, and together we can build an assuredly happy replacement.

So, the Revolution itself is a piece of cake. (Well, a piece of my Great Aunt Masha's vodka-laced pungent-mushroom cake; hers was the best in all Novy-Novgorod. Brides-to-be stood in line to place orders.) The trick is, once you do that, you need to be able to move in with a real plan.

And it is way too early to be thinking about making omelettes, and breaking a few eggs ...

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

by caniscandida at 11:04 PM on 17 May 2007

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