“Don’t talk of stars, burning above, If you’re in love, show me!” My Fair Lady, 1956
“Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish” Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 1976
In this post, I am going to return unapologetically to the theme of individual action. The Western way of life is not sustainable if everyone tries to lead it; and on current trends it is a matter of when, rather than if, climate change and natural depletion lead to global disaster, at least for humans. In the presentation posted in February, I indicated that individual action was important and summarised some fundamental actions that each of us can take. Since which time, I have received a few sceptical responses suggesting that it is more important to get governments to act.
Now I am no expert, but then the whole point of individual action is that we cannot leave everything to experts. In my non-expert judgement, I reckon that there is an allure to the pyschology of disavowal. When we tell ourselves that we are insignificant (or non-experts), we free ourselves from a sense of responsibility. We can do what we want, within the law, without worrying that we are doing any harm. With respect to the environment, big companies and government are responsible; and it is up to the latter, with due cooperation from the former, to take the necessary action to protect it on our behalf. After all, that is the basis of parliamentary democracy, is it not?
The trouble is that governments do not act. They are keen to be popular, and hence do what they think we want. If we take no action in our own lives to reduce, say, our carbon footprint, then why would the government think it is important to us? On the contrary, our preoccupation with material consumption and travel reinforce the idea that national expenditure really is the best measure of happiness. We might campaign and sign petitions in support of decarbonisation, non-intensive farming, the reduction of waste and so forth, but if that activity (albeit important) is not backed up by action in our daily lives, the government may be forgiven for questioning our sincerity.
Leverage
But hang on. Surely it is all very well to pontificate that we should take individual action, but in reality life gets in the way. Perhaps school or work is a car trip away; groceries are hard to manage on public transport; your manager has asked you to fly on business; your partner feels cold unless the house is well heated; you have put in double glazing and loft insulation and frankly there is little more you can do to make the existing home more energy efficient.
There is no denying that it is difficult for many people to make the improvements that they would like. In the face of practical difficulties, it becomes all too easy and tempting to conflate little impact with no impact. We can all think of at least something that would help to reduce our climate footprint – from choice of holiday destination to a decision about a new car or the food we eat – but why bother given how puny we are in the scheme of things, not to mention how hopelessly far removed a sustainable lifestyle seems from our current one?
This is where leverage comes in. It may indeed be that personal circumstances make it hard for many of us to meet an individual budget of, say, 2tCO2e per annum when our current way of life equates to say 10tCO2e. But by taking what action we can, we send a message, with a more convincing show of integrity than a campaign or march, to those around us: to neighbours and friends, to our local MP, to our manager and colleagues at work. Ultimately, the message goes to people with real power: company leaders and government. And then, with a newly dawned realization that maybe the environment does matter to people after all, those people in power will finally choose to act. Home renovations and rebuilding will be properly funded, electricity will be decarbonised, transport mega-projects will be shelved, electric vehicles will be subsidised, the most damaging industry and trade will be discouraged, a (predominantly) vegetarian lifestyle will be encouraged.
As it is, by not acting individually in a way that shows concern for global issues, most of us are complicit in the prevailing beggar-thy-neighbour politics. Within our intimate circles, we may be loving and magnanimous; we may love our city or even our country; but without showing the same qualities on a wider scale, a mean-spirited nationalism prevails; and matters that affect all human beings, including the global environment, are given short shrift. As Tolstoy would have said, our political leaders simply reflect ostensible national attitudes – and the only way to change them and our direction of travel is to display a different set of values in our individual lives, however seemingly inconspicuous they may be. We need to show our leaders that we care about the world at large; only then will they use the power we have given them to care on our behalf.
Unfortunately, in Britain we have a legacy of cynicism in economics and politics that puts little value on individual efforts to do the right thing. In economics, we are still strongly influenced by Adam Smith, the so-called father of capitalism, who espoused the view that by acting selfishly for personal gain in narrow specialisms, we invoke the ‘invisible hand’ of unintended social benefits at large. (Ironically, Smith seems to have had genuine concerns about the effects of extreme inequality, concerns largely forgotten in the context of his legacy of defining and legitimizing free market capitalism.) In politics, we similarly place faith in self-seeking competition between nations – within some well-defined set of rules of course – to achieve overall prosperity. We are highly suspicious of overt attempts to act ethically, as opposed to just legally; so we scoff at David Cameron’s Big Society, to quote a relatively recent example, preferring to concentrate on the apparent hypocrisy of the privileged individual who proposed it, than whether or not the proposal itself has intrinsic merit.
Our modern scientific view of ourselves has been influenced by Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, who has appeared to legitimize selfish behaviour as biologically explicable and even inevitable. Again this is somewhat of a misinterpretation of the views of the man himself – a misinterpretation compounded by his unfortunate choice of title – whose subsequent clarifications that we should be trying to rise above our primitive instincts have largely fallen on blind eyes and deaf ears. Once a person has been labelled, it is difficult to change the way they are interpreted.
And so the majority of us – with honourable exceptions – muddle along, making choices that seem likely to benefit us (and our nearest and dearest) materially in accordance with Adam Smith and his invisible hand, and our selfish genes, and behaving responsibly in a wider context only insofar as we are not breaking any law. And we have a government that matches this timidity of moral ambition.
There is an Irish fable that in each of us there are two wolves fighting. One wolf represents our narrow interests and fearful self-protection. The other wolf represents generosity, altruism, love of our fellow creatures. Which of these wolves wins the fight to determine who we are? The one that we feed.