Part 1:
In one of the essays for my book, “Price of History,” I asked the question: What does it take for a society to change? How difficult is it to get an entire society to change their behavior, especially when those behaviors are deeply embedded into cultural norms and expectations?
I have been thinking about these questions when it comes to America and the worsening climate crisis. Obviously, the United States is not the only contributor to the climate crisis, and the changing climate poses an existential threat to all of humanity. With that being said, however, I do believe that the US faces a unique challenge when it comes to reducing our carbon footprint. America has a culture built around conspicuous consumption, excess, and wastefulness. The stereotypical dream that the average person or family should live in a large house in the suburbs with 2 or 3 four-thousand-pound cars sitting in the driveway and spend their weekends constantly shopping for new things has been an image that has shaped the hopes, aspirations, and behavior of Americans for decades. But how sustainable is this dream? Can this level of consumption continue to be justified, even in the face of worsening climate change? How difficult is it for America to change our entire culture of wastefulness? In my opinion, there are 3 major obstacles to meaningful change. The first is what I call “the inertia of tradition,” the second is infrastructure, and the third is vested interest. I will explain all of these in a nutshell below.
Part 2:
What do I mean by the phrase “inertia of tradition?” Basically, when a culture develops certain patterns of behavior, there is always conservative resistance to changing those patterns of behavior. There are many people who take solace and comfort in tradition. They think that if they stubbornly maintain tradition that they can bring some semblance of order to the random chaos of life. It’s a false hope, but it’s a hope that is desirable enough to many people that change will have to overcome the inertia of tradition.
The second major obstacle I mentioned is an extension of the inertia of tradition, and that’s infrastructure. A perfect example of this challenge in America is exemplified by cars and car culture. I was listening to an interview on the Tides of History podcast with Professor Shane Miller, and he explained the problem in a fantastic way. Professor Miller studies pre-history and he used the example of a pre-historic culture that specialized in a certain crop as their main food source. When a culture focuses so much on one crop, they can become very good at growing it. But what happens if there is a drought, or an insect or fungal plague destroys the harvest? Now this cultural specialization and dependency is a liability rather than an asset. Cars are similar in the United States. Look at how much our lives revolve around cars. Our cities are massive and spread far apart to accommodate all the space needed for the roads and the parking needed to accommodate everyone having a car. Public transportation is virtually non-existent in many parts of the country, and car ownership is often a requirement for anyone wanting to hold down a job. When so much of our infrastructure and society is built around and for one thing, it puts blinders on us. We can’t even imagine an America in which cars do not dominate our lives and our landscape.
The third major obstacle I see to the US changing its casual wastefulness is anyone with a vested interest in the current status quo. This isn’t unique to climate change or to the United States, this behavior is as old as humanity. Anyone whose fortune, influence, or power are tied to the way things are will always be the most resistant to change. The best example of this right now is fossil fuel companies. When your entire business model is built around extracting and refining fossil fuels, how likely are you to embrace a zero-emission future? But how can you swim against the tide of necessity? Well, you could work to undermine people’s conviction that change is actually necessary. Or you could engineer a propaganda campaign telling ordinary people that it’s their responsibility to fix climate change and move the conversation away from the parochial and greedy practices of fossil fuel companies.
Part 3:
I want to address this issue of culpability and responsibility. It’s pretty clear that fossil fuel corporations have known about the effects of climate change for at least half a century, and their industry’s massive contribution to it. It’s also clear that fossil fuel corporations tried to shift the responsibility to ordinary people and campaigned hard for practices such as individual recycling, so that they could continue to pollute the planet. This is obviously incredibly short-sighted and greedy, but I also want to caution people against using this as an excuse. Yes, fossil fuel companies need to be held accountable for the damage they have done to the planet. But this does not absolve the rest of us of our responsibility to the environment. If the discussion of what should be done to avert climate disaster devolves to solely blaming fossil fuel companies, that could engender a dangerous apathy among people. People might start to think that there is nothing that they can do, or maybe even more dangerously, that there is nothing that they should be expected to do to change our culture of wastefulness.
This idea reminds me of a concept in moral philosophy put forward by Immanuel Kant called the Categorical Imperative. To make a very complex idea very simple, the Categorical Imperative says that if society would fall apart if everyone engaged in a behavior, that means that you shouldn’t engage in that behavior. To give an example, imagine you are in a small family-owned shop. There are several things that you want to buy, but you don’t have the money to afford them all. You decide to steal a few of the items that you want, and you justify the theft by saying to yourself, “What’s the big deal its just a few things, they can afford that.” But what if everyone who went to that store did the exact same thing? If everyone was stealing a few items at a time, then there is no way that shop could stay in business. The Categorical Imperative is a way for people to assess and then improve their behavior.
There are so many ways in which the Categorical Imperative could help Americans reshape our attitudes about the environment and our casual wastefulness. How many millions of people litter every day and justify it by saying that just one person littering isn’t a big deal. How many Americans buy yet another massive and wasteful car and say that it’s someone else’s responsibility to change. How much microplastic poisoning in all of our bloodstreams is finally enough for us to realize that we need to change our culture?
Some might think that the Categorical Imperative is not applicable to climate change, that it should only apply to moral issues. But I disagree, because I think our worsening climate and our contribution to it is a moral issue. Are we really so selfish and short-sighted that we would doom our descendants to a ruined planet? Don’t we have a moral duty to leave the planet not only habitable, but beautiful for the future?
Something I read recently in Duke University Press’ book Guatemala Reader: History, Culture, & Politics really resonated with me as I was planning out this blog post. The passage below was from an interview with Yolanda Colom, who fought as a revolutionary during the Guatemalan Civil War and post war became a groundskeeper at a school. In this passage she is answering a question about her first impressions of the school. Now obviously she is speaking about Guatemala, but as you will see I think the quote could apply just as well, maybe even better to the United States.
“Well, like any other, this educational institution does not escape the more general social situation. The school has been a microcosm of a system of thinking and of organization with roots in the history of our country, in a ton of factors. Like all others, this institution has personified consumerism, the production of waste, the tendency to never recycle, or repair or search for creative means of giving more life-or many lives-to material resources…It’s classic Western Civilization and Capitalist Production. [emphasis added]”