Are you ready for change?

When a senior politician is charged with adultery today, we expect them to issue a press release, either in self-defence or contrition. Exiled to Corsica on the charge of extra-marital relations with Julia Livilla, sister of the emperor Gaius, the Roman Stoic philosopher and statesman Lucius Annaeus Seneca wrote a letter to his mother, offering philosophical consolation for her grief at being parted from her son. In Stoic style, Seneca emphasises the importance of preparing oneself for change in life, so that one is not unseated by the shock of its arrival. One must be like a sentry on guard, he advises, always ready for sudden attack. For drastic change, like an enemy ambush, “scatters those whom it catches off guard; but those who have prepared in advance for the coming conflict … easily withstand the first onslaught, which is the most violent” (Letter to Helvia, 5).

In my seminars on Philosophy for Change, I’ve found that Seneca’s Stoic approach to change resonates with people of various ages and walks of life. This is not surprising given the times we live in. The global financial crisis has compounded the sense of anxiety that pervades society at the end of a tumultuous decade of terrorism, war and epidemics. When we add to our list of challenges the existential threat of runaway climate change, the future begins to look grim indeed. It is already clear that the Copenhagen talks this month will be full of trade-offs and compromises, but it is imperative that they result in a genuine plan for reducing global net greenhouse gas emissions. The hard work of figuring out how to achieve these changes on the ground will fall on governments and civil societies across the planet. Stalling will only make things more difficult after 2020, when the modest targets must be ramped up to meet the goal of cutting global emissions by 80 per cent or more from 1990 levels. One doesn’t have to be a futurologist to see that there are major social changes on the horizon.

As we prepare for these changes ahead, we’d do well to reflect on the personal challenges of change and whether we are equal to them. We will need wisdom and forbearance as we pass through these difficult times. This would be an ideal time for us to revive Stoic lessons about personal resilience and rational self-control. It is not inconceivable that, in a decade’s time, Stoic philosophy will again be central to our sense of who we are.

One important respect in which we need to learn to think differently about change today concerns our attitude to broad-scale social and economic change. It is time we overcame the technocratic perspective on change that we’ve inherited from the 20th century. Broad-scale social and economic change is something we like to leave to leaders, managers and experts. This reflects a form of organisational culture that grew up, flourished, fragmented, and diminished through the last century, in which institutions are hierarchically structured and power and influence flow from the top down. Through a host of cultural and democratic initiatives, bound up with emerging technologies such as the internet, the late 20th and early 21st centuries challenged this top-down model of organisational culture. But when we think about broad-scale social and economic change, we tend to lapse into a technocratic mindset, unburdening ourselves of personal responsibility while awaiting directions from above. An alternative approach would be to apply the optimistic, entrepreneurial attitude towards change that informs the best of contemporary activist culture to transforming society from the grassroots. New internet-based networking technologies could play a vital role in this process. Wikis, blogs, and social networking sites could give the public a primary role in the struggle against global warming.

Another major impediment to change today is the fact that we live in one of the most heavily indemnified, risk-adverse societies in history. The problem this poses is that it is difficult to convince people to enter into processes of whole systems change, since these processes are fraught with uncertainty and risk. Superficially, post-modern culture is obsessed with change. Business books preach creative destruction, TV ads promote personal change, and politicians make (and ruin) careers by gambling on expensive infrastructural changes. But “change”, for the most part, is a slogan for piecemeal innovation and reform ventured in the context of relatively stable circumstances. US President Franklin D. Roosevelt took a risk in 1934 when he committed the American economy to whole systems change under the New Deal. Confronted with the worst recession since Roosevelt’s time, President Barack Obama, by contrast, has been able to do little more than tinker with the standing free market economic system, despite modelling his Presidency on Roosevelt’s own and campaigning on a ticket of change. Yet Obama’s unwillingness to change the system has less to do with his personal commitment to change than it does the kinds of changes that are deemed responsible and acceptable in today’s society. “Change”, in the vernacular, means incremental change. Change has become a calculated shift from one more-or-less stable position to another.

If we are to meet the challenges of the 21^st century, it is vital that we learn to think differently about change. It is necessary to find ways of making the genuine possibilities of whole systems change apparent. This entails cultivating the courage to look beyond the limits of what exists today, and the resilience to hold to our line of sight against the depreciations of the status quo. We need to devise a new horizon of coordinates to enable us to think differently about the present and to transform our trajectory into the future.

None of this is impossible. The human mind is a plastic medium with a natural facility for change. The Stoics took this to reflect the divine origins of human reason. ‘Heavenly things are by nature always in motion’, Seneca explains from his exile in Corsica. “Look at the planets which light up the world – not one is at rest. … How silly then to imagine that the human mind, which is formed of the same elements as divine beings, objects to movement and change of abode, while the divine nature finds delight and even self-preservation in continual and very rapid change” (Letter to Helvia, 7). Seneca’s submission amounts to simple common sense today, as we struggle with uncertainty and risk. Whatever history records, we would do well to cultivate the spiritual levity of the Stoic sage, and learn to find “delight and even self-preservation” in a world of continual change.

Copenhagen and “anti-globalization”

I always enjoy Madeleine Bunting’s columns in The Guardian. This short piece on the resonance of the so-called “anti-globalization” movement in the context of the Copenhagen talks is one the most interesting articles I’ve read in a long time. No doubt Bunting was inspired by Naomi Klein’s reflections on this issue a month ago.

“For a decade Seattle has been dismissed as illogical, self-indulgent posture politics that, not surprisingly, went nowhere,” writes Bunting. “But it’s crucial if we are to have any understanding of the first decade of the century to grasp how the Seattle agenda was traduced and its promise of a global civil society was dismantled.”

Bunting argues that the progressive social agenda that was promulgated as “anti-globalization” was quashed under the Bush regime and the war on terror. Only now, at the end of the decade, can we see how necessary this agenda actually was.

“[I]n 2009 we are back in Seattle’s agenda: financial regulation, climate change and how to ensure politicians challenge the entrenched power of corporations, whether banks or oil companies.”

Anti-globalization is back. Yet it has returned in an era in which global problems and globalized solutions are more necessary than ever. I expect we’ll see creativity out of this contradiction. The twenty teens will be interesting indeed.

“Coalition of the Willing”

The online publicity campaign for “Coalition of the Willing” has begun! Follow us on Facebook and Twitter:

http://www.coalitionofthewilling.org.uk/

The Danish text

It has come to this. World governments have participated in fifteen climate summits since the nineteen eighties. Meanwhile, the science that tells us that we are on the verge of a major climate catastrophe has become more and more certain, and the evidence more overwhelming.  Climatologists tell us that unless we take urgent action, we will be unable to prevent rapid warming through the twenty first century. And still developed nations, the United States, Australia, and Denmark, try to screw developing nations and risk derailing the talks.

These kinds of corrosive, backroom actions are ultimately in no one’s national interest. So why, at this late and crucial juncture, are they happening? I for one am appalled. Is this what we elect our political leaders for?

It is time that we started asking fundamental questions about politics and democracy. The United States, Australia, and Denmark are nominally free societies. But are we free to save ourselves from global warming? Are our elected representatives capable of the kind of thought and action that is needed to achieve this? Or in one hundred years will it read on our collective epitaph: “They conquered space and mastered nature, but they were prisoners of the system they had constructed and they could not change”?

The Copenhagen explosion

James Hansen is hoping that the Copenhagen talks fail. In an interview with the Guardian this week, Hansen – the scientist responsible for first bringing the threat of global warming to public attention – argued that the set of proposals currently ventured by world governments for dealing with climate change are so deeply flawed it would be better to go back to the drawing board than implement them. Hansen describes market-based cap-and trade systems as a “disaster track” that we should avoid setting out on. In Hansen’s view, “[t]he whole approach is so fundamentally wrong that it is better to reassess the situation.”

Hansen is right that “[w]e don’t have a leader who is able to grasp [the scale of the problem] and say what is really needed. Instead we are trying to continue business as usual.” Yet, given the clear and present danger of runaway climate change, we can scarcely afford to do nothing. Going back to the drawing board would be a disaster in itself were it to result in another decade of stalling and inaction. Instead of downing tools and waiting for political culture to catch-up with a fast-changing reality, we should push ahead in the awareness that carbon trading can be only part of the arsenal that we bring to bear in this struggle.

The Copenhagen conference should seek to facilitate the broadest possible set of approaches to fighting climate change. As Gwyn Prins and Steve Rayner (no relation) argued in 2007 in this article in Nature, we need a portfolio of approaches based on five key elements: targeting the big emitters, letting emissions markets evolve from the bottom up, putting public investment in energy research on a wartime footing, increasing spending on adaptation, and allowing countries to choose policies that suit their circumstances.

The Copenhagen agreement should also include plans to set up a global fund for seeding new approaches to climate change yet to be defined. The best thing that we could hope for out of this conference is the frank admission by all parties that we do not yet have the tools we need to confront this crisis. The strategies and technologies that we need to win the war on global warming have yet to be invented, or are only just being invented. It is time to get creative. Instead of talking up collapse at Copenhagen, we should pray the talks explode in all directions.

Liberals fall apart on climate change

The Australian Liberal Party came apart this week and is currently tearing itself into shreds over the issue of climate change. The Liberals, in opposition, exist in a longstanding coalition with the Australian National Party. In one form or another, the Coalition has dominated Australian politics since its inception in 1922. It lost, however, to the Rudd Labor government in 2007, in part because of Liberal Prime Minister John Howard’s stance on refugees, border protection, and climate change. Now we see the liberals in the party at odds with the conservative right, who are supported by the Nationals, as they deliberate how to respond to the Rudd government’s emissions trading scheme (ETS) bill.

Liberals in the party agree with leader Malcolm Turnbull that a decision to vote against the ETS condemns the Coalition to political irrelevancy. The opposing faction believes that they are making a principled stand against ‘climate extremism’ in defense of Australian jobs. From this perspective, the fracas seems to be a repeat of the pitched political battles between globalizers and protectionists of the 1980s and 1990s. But the similarity here is only skin deep. The struggles between globalizers and protectionists were fundamentally ideological in nature. The war on climate change, by contrast, is not an ideological issue – it is a pragmatic exercise in risk-management. It is high time that climate sceptics in positions of power about the world came to appreciate this simple distinction.

As for the Australian situation, I think that if the conservative faction of the Coalition wants to avoid political extinction, it needs to appreciate that the global political landscape is rapidly changing. In just over two weeks time, representatives of the international community will meet in Copenhagen to determine what set of extraordinary measures will be required to stave off the worst effects of global warming. For people in government today, the issue is not whether climate change is real, or whether the predictions for future warming are as catastrophic as the international scientific community, in the main, says they are. The real issue is how individual nations are to keep up in what is going to be a long, hard period of rapidly evolving political, cultural, and technological change. Start late and chances are your nation will be left behind. Is this a risk that a responsible political leader should take with the future of their nation?

This is the political reality. Kevin Rudd gets it, Malcolm Turnbull gets it, Gordon Brown, Barack Obama, and Hu Jintao get it. Those who don’t get it – I’m sorry, but you are already living in the past.

We are entering an accelerated period of history. We need to open our eyes to the changes taking place about us if we are turn those changes into local opportunities.

The green elephant in the Liberal Party debating room is that the emissions reduction measures that we take this coming decade are only for starters. If we are to stand a chance of avoiding the scenario of runaway warming, where planet earth sets itself on a path to terminal heat exhaustion, the modest targets proposed for 2020 must be ramped up to cut global emissions by 80 per cent or more from 1990 levels. How is Australia, or any nation, to achieve this if it does not start with baby steps? An ETS is only an iteration. It is a step towards the goal.

Innovation after Copenhagen

Things are happening fast in the run-up to Copenhagen. It has become clear that no deal is possible that does not involve technology transfer from the developed to the developing world. Green technology transfer is suddenly a hot topic in policy and business. The G77 has proposed that we need a new global body to facilitate and direct technology transfer after Copenhagen.

We are only starting to realize what an enormous task we are faced with after Copenhagen. Shane Tomlinson from the environment consultancy E3G says: “We know that, to limit global temperature rises to below 2C, we’ll need a step change in global innovation and technology transfer … In the period to 2020, it’s vital we avoid high carbon lock-in. The infrastructure decisions that developing countries are taking today, such as new power stations, are going to determine their emissions pathways for 20-30 years.”

Ambuj Sagar, professor of policy studies at the Indian Institute of Technology – Delhi, says: “The best step would be if we stopped using the term technology transfer and started using something like innovation co-operation … It is not a hand-off from producers of technology to users of technology. We need co-operation instead of a simple reliance on markets to tackle what is an immense challenge.”

The airbag moment

It is Monday morning and you are heading into work, late for an important meeting. Traffic is banked up on the freeway, moving at a snail’s pace, and by the time you hit the city you’re ready to burst. Every muscle in your body is focused on that meeting, five minutes in the future. You are blasting through town like the proverbial maniac. Nothing is going to stop you now.

Until a woman with a baby stroller steps out onto the road in front of you.

You hit the brakes and swerve across the centre line – straight into the path of a bus! Hauling the steering wheel about – it’s too late! You slide to your doom in a chorus of tyres. At the last moment, the bus swerves – CRASH! – you are spinning like a top across the street. You bounce off vehicles, sideswipe the kerb, THUD! The car vaults to forty five degrees before slamming its tyres back on the bitumen.

You’re wedged behind the airbag, staring back up the street. Someone raps on the side window. You burst into tears.

If you’ve experienced a car accident, you’ll know how, in the blink of an eye, your whole sense of being can change. One moment you are homing in on a temporal target – a definite event in the future. The next moment you are alive and that’s the whole story. The shock of the event wakes you up. You find yourself at existential ground zero.

You might call it an airbag moment. Heidegger calls it a moment of vision.

Simple but important things come to mind. You realize that you are someone’s mother, father, sister, brother, husband, wife, daughter, son. You want to call these people and tell them that you love them. You tell yourself that, from now on, you’ll put more effort into these relationships, for they are your most valuable assets in life. And for a brief, all-too-brief moment, you have the sense that all your powers and capacities, all your hopes and dreams and plans and visions, all the possibilities and opportunities and stuff that you take for granted on a daily basis – all of it is a gift. If you’d hit that bus you’d have lost it all and never appreciated the fullness of the gift. But you saw your death coming and lived to tell the tale.

Congratulations! You’ve had a moment of vision.

It happens in an Augenblick, says Heidegger – the blink of an eye. Suddenly, everything has changed. It is not that you are transported out of your concrete situation. On the contrary, you find that you are very much in the situation, but the situation itself has changed. Now it is your situation – the situation of a living individual taking stock of him or herself at a precise moment in life.

Heidegger describes this as an experience of fate. In the moment of vision, we come face to face with the ’simplicity of our fate’.

On green imagery

The film director Werner Herzog is rarely short of something interesting to say. He didn’t disappoint in a recent interview at BFI Southbank, in which he spoke about the importance of creating new images to tackle climate change.

‘Interviewer: You once said that the creation of new images in the world was one of the most central things to sustaining human life on the planet.

Herzog: In a way, yes, because if we don’t start to adapt, through language and through images, to new and unforeseen situations, we will be somehow stunted in our growth. We will not be adaptable to challenges that are coming at us at a very rapid rate. I think it has to do with human ingenuity and human intelligence. And it ultimately translates in our language skills and how we refresh and recreate language day after day after day, and create images that are adequate and are not at a standstill for 50, 60, 70 years. There are certain images that are totally at a standstill and are just without meaning. … [I]t’s a dangerous thing. Without image and language adaptations, we will not really be able to adapt to unforeseen challenges, like global warming, which is just one problem.’

Herzog is the best kind of public philosopher. His reference to global warming got me thinking: what image adaptations do we need to tackle a problem of this order?

One possible answer is that we need more images that represent human beings as a species, as opposed to a bunch of different nationalities and ethnicities. Perhaps images too of the earth from space, evoking the fragility of life on the blue planet and our isolation in the void.

Most of all, we need images of human collaboration. The myriad problems thrown-up by climate change will not be solved by celebrities and reformers. We need new images to remind ourselves of what tremendous things we’ve accomplished through mass collaboration.

I’ve recently worked with Simon Robson on a film about how new Web 2.0 platforms could be used to muster and facilitate grassroots collaboration to tackle global warming. Over several months, I’ve had the opportunity of being able to watch, listen, discuss, and co-create with numerous artists and studios about the world, which has been a fantastic experience. What has blown me away has been the creativity and intelligence on the part of the animators and designers dealing with the visual landscapes of the film. It is as if everyone working on the film realizes that what is really at stake is the opportunity to create a new visual landscape for the war on global warming — new images for the reimagining of the struggle and its possibilities.

Beautiful things: a Stoic cure for consumerism

The Stoic Emperor Marcus Aurelius was used to being surrounded by beautiful things. But all too often, the affairs of the Empire would take him away from Rome, to defend the borders against the Goths, the Parthians, or the Persians. For the greater part of his life, Marcus was forced to endure the rigors of the battlefield, where beauty was rare and brutality the order of the day.

To maintain his composure through these years of hardship and toil, Marcus sought to transform his perception of the objects he desired. Rather than think of beautiful things – clothes, jewelry, food, art and architecture – in the manner that they were commonly perceived, he sought to see them as simple material objects and evaluate them accordingly.

In his notebook, Marcus presented this as a simple technique:

‘When we have meat before us and other food, we must say to ourselves: “This is the dead body of a fish, and this is the dead body of a bird or of a pig, and again, this Falernian [wine] is only a little grape juice, and this purple robe some sheep’s wool died with the blood of a shellfish” … so that we see what kinds of things they are. This is how we should act throughout life: where there are things that seem worthy of great estimation, we ought to lay them bare and look at their worthlessness and strip them of all the words by which they are exalted. For the outward show [of things] is a wonderful perverter of reason, and when we are certain the things we are dealing with are worth the trouble, that is when it cheats us most’ (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 6.13).