In , at the Sorbonne, in Paris, a protester bursts into the geometry classroom and addresses the students: “How can you stay here, learning this bourgeois science, while the future is decided in the streets!?”. The teacher asks the young man to sit for just three minutes. He goes to the blackboard, writes a few formulas and offers the chalk to the protester saying: “This is the bourgeois demonstration of the Pythagorean Theorem; please write the socialist demonstration.”
This anecdote was told by the young and charismatic geometry professor at Colégio Santa Cruz, Astor, in the early 1970s. I was reminded of it recently when reading an interview with the president of the IPCC —the intergovernmental panel on climate change— in which he states: “It is chemistry and physics that determine that it is necessary to reduce net emissions to zero [de gases de efeito estufa] if we wish to contain global warming; and this is not a political choice.”
Just as the Pythagorean Theorem is not bourgeois, neither is climate science left-wing. There is no political regime capable of altering the physical evidence that the increase in CO concentration2 in the air causes the atmosphere to heat up.
What is surprising is that it is not necessary for the president of the IPCC to state this truism, especially in situations of polarization. What is really shocking is the precariousness of the global debate about the way and pace at which emissions should be reduced.
Worse than that is finding that the subject is becoming “out of fashion”; becoming progressively restricted to a group of “partisans” who are facing increasing difficulties in capturing the attention of the political and economic establishment. The topic becomes unpleasant and socially toxic. A polite person would do better to avoid the subject, to save their interlocutors embarrassment.
It’s no longer just denialism; it is about aversion.
Clear evidence of this evolution is the statement by the global president of Nestlé, in a recent interview with the Financial Times: “If you think about it in retrospect, five or three years ago, in meetings with investors, a lot of questions arose about sustainability. Somehow, in the US, this just fell completely off the agenda. In all the meetings with investors that I have participated in, no one asks — no one, maybe one — about sustainability.”
Perhaps the clearest sign of the trend is the emergence of the neologism “greenshushing” which describes the idea of not attracting opposition from governments and investors.
How can we explain this collective negligence in reacting to a threat whose evidence is increasingly clear?
I have already written on other occasions about the various ways in which the industry and fossil fuel-producing countries systematically sabotage efforts to articulate a global strategy to tackle the problem. I continue to firmly believe this, but the growing evidence of collective disinterest in the subject leads me to think that we should also look for the explanation in ourselves, in our own resistance to recognizing a threat, especially one that requires our reaction.
A college friend once summed up situations like this in a simple and uncomfortable phrase: “boring is not the locked door; boring is the key inside.”
There is an undeniable comfort in forgetting the danger, which is only sustained through collective silence. It is the search to preserve this comfort that leads us to react against those who prevent, or call us to action. The collectively shared lie becomes truth and requires the silencing of warnings, following Bambi’s mother’s recommendation to her son, in the cartoon: “If you don’t have anything nice to say, then don’t say anything at all.”
This behavior, which may seem like just a diffuse psychological attitude, has already produced serious consequences that are difficult to reverse. A few weeks ago, .
They did it in such a way that —in the measure being confirmed by the Supreme Court with a conservative majority— a new president will have great difficulty in recovering this capacity for action. Furthermore —in a gesture that seems designed to humiliate opponents—, they ordered the Department of Defense to begin acquiring coal-generated energy.
This certainly won’t be the first time in history that there has been a deliberate collective blindness, a global “deceive me that I like it”. In the 1930s, in Europe the fanciful belief that the League of Nations would guarantee the permanence of peace remained unshakable, even in the face of glaring evidence of German rearmament. I do not attribute this belief to the naivety of the actors, but rather to their convenience, in that they allowed the luxury of inaction.
An excellent contemporary example was provided by . Faced with global leaders anxious about today’s political and economic turbulence, Carney denounced the accommodation of medium-sized countries (basically all economically relevant ones except the USA, China and Russia) to the illusion of the continuity of a multilateral order based on rules (guaranteed by international bodies such as the WTO, IMF and UN), when this order has already become obsolete and ineffective and is repeatedly disrespected by the most powerful nations.
To illustrate his thesis, Carney borrows an anecdote from the Czech dissident (and later president): every morning, a small shopkeeper hung on his facade a phrase “Workers of the world, unite!”. He didn’t believe it; no one believed anymore. But he continues to display the sign, to avoid problems; and so do all the shopkeepers. In this way the regime persists, through the participation of ordinary people in rituals that they intimately know to be false.
We should think about whether we are behaving like a small shopkeeper.
Global warming is not advancing just because right-wing conservative forces deny reality, nor because short-term economic interests speak louder. It advances because we accept living a convenient lie — and because we learn to call this self-deception prudence.
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