Caroline Lucas and Rupert Read have just published an article in the New Statesman entitled ‘It’s time for climate populism (as politics turns against net zero, we need to mobilise a genuine mass movement against ecological catastrophe)’.
The basic idea is sound: rather than try to mobilise people to action around ‘an invisible gas that needs to be eliminated by some future date’, talk instead about ‘direct experience, and quality of life’. In turn this implies a focus on adaptation to the effects of climate change rather than putting all our eggs in the mitigation basket - trying to get emissions down.
The shift to the ‘here and now’ advantages of climate action sounds like a very good idea, but the challenge remains as to how to make all this ‘cut through’, and in circumstances in which the rules of engagement are completely different to what they used to be.
I read the piece in conjunction with Chris Hayes’ Long Read in the Guardian, entitled ‘The loudest megaphone: how Trump mastered our new attention age’, and whose strapline is ‘The old model of political debate is over, and spectacle beats argument every time.’
Hayes has written a challenging explanation/exposition of the situation in which campaigners find themselves, and for which we are very ill-prepared. We’ve spent most of our lives thinking that the force of the better argument will prevail, and that the best way of making our case stick is by providing people with data and information. So, says Hayes, most of us ‘retain an outdated model of how public conversation happens. We are still thinking in terms of “debate” – a back-and-forth, or a conversation, or discussion.’
His point is that the era of persuasion-via-information is over; now it’s all about attention - and attention will be granted to those who shout loudest and create the most watchable spectacle.
He refers to George Saunders’ thought experiment to illustrate the new world we inhabit:
‘Imagine, Saunders says, being at a cocktail party, with the normal give-and-take of conversation between generally genial, informed people. And then “a guy walks in with a megaphone. He’s not the smartest person at the party, or the most experienced, or the most articulate. But he’s got that megaphone.” The man begins to offer his opinions and soon creates his own conversational gravity: everyone is reacting to whatever he’s saying. This, Saunders contends, quickly ruins the party. And if you have a particularly empty-minded Megaphone Guy, you get a discourse that’s not just stupid but that makes everyone in the room stupider as well.
Let’s say he hasn’t carefully considered the things he’s saying. He’s basically just blurting things out. And even with the megaphone, he has to shout a little to be heard, which limits the complexity of what he can say. Because he feels he has to be entertaining, he jumps from topic to topic …’
Any Trump-sounding bells ringing?
In this new economy of attention Trump succeeds because he makes the most noise and creates the most compelling spectacles: ‘Trump’s approach to politics ever since the summer of 2015, when he entered the presidential race, is the equivalent of running naked through the neighbourhood: repellent but transfixing.’ Yuck, but true.
(The fact that we’ve all got megaphones now [smartphones] doesn’t help, especially when the richest man in the world has the loudest megaphone and is prepared to hand it over to the man most needful of attention).
So how does climate change campaigning fare in this new world in which ‘amusement will outcompete information, and spectacle will outcompete arguments’? Not at all well, according to Hayes:
‘Nowhere is the problem of attention more obvious and urgent than when it comes to climate change. According to our best estimates, it’s probably the hottest it’s been on the planet in 150,000 years. The effects of climate change are visible, sometimes spectacularly so, but climate change itself – the slow, steady, invisible accretion of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere – is literally imperceptible to human faculties. It is almost the opposite of a siren. It evades our attention rather than compelling it. None of our five senses can detect it.’
Just when we want to be at a party with a megaphone we’re talking to ourselves in a soundproofed room.
(The other problem with climate change is that it’s quite complicated, or we have presented it as such, and as Hayes says, ‘in competitive attention markets, the more easily something attracts our attention, the lower its cognitive load, the less friction there is for us to be drawn to it.’)
So, as Lenin once asked, what is to be done?
Well all this leads Hayes to give two cheers to the Just Stop Oil (JSO) protestors and their actions because:
‘These disruptions are designed to make the same kind of trade that Trump pulled off so successfully. What good is persuasion if no one’s paying attention? Who cares if people have a negative reaction so long as they have some reaction? You can be polite and civil and ignored, or you can fuck shit up and make people pay attention. Those are the choices in the Hobbesian war of all against all in the attention age, and it’s very hard for me to blame these people for choosing the latter.’
Did JSO work? Or maybe the question should be, is JSO working?, because it’s just possibly too early to tell. It’s certainly getting attention …
In any case Hayes’ concern might be that Climate Popularism (which is what the initiative is to be called, according to Lucas and Read), being ‘polite and civil’, will be ignored. I have no idea what ‘fucking shit up to make people pay attention’ might look like in this context, but I do believe that Lucas and Read should bear Hayes in mind as the project develops.
(The really frustrating thing is that UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has an extraordinary opportunity to ‘do a Trump’, or a Thatcher, and simply bulldoze a raft of progressive measures through. But he’s doing exactly the opposite).