We go to battle every day, spewing more carbon into the atmosphere, allowing more heat to be trapped. Unlike the Cold War, with its threat of instant annihilation from nuclear weapons, climate change is war on a much longer time scale, taking centuries (maybe only decades), to wreak similar amounts of havoc upon the world. Politically, few of the ruling elite want to make any concessions that they feel would place them in a short-term disadvantage. We have dug ourselves into trenches of apathy, not willing to take an offensive, unaware of the reeking stench of death from within.

Shortly before the U.S. Department of Energy reported the most recent carbon dioxide emissions figures, which “jumped by the biggest amount on record” to a level higher than the worst-case scenario anticipated by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). That came as no surprise to many scientists, including the MIT program on climate change, which for years has warned that the IPCC predictions are too conservative.

Such critics of the IPCC predictions receive virtually no public attention, unlike the fringe of denialists who are supported by the corporate sector, along with huge propaganda campaigns that have driven Americans off the international spectrum in dismissal of the threats. Business support also translates directly to political power. Denialism is part of the catechism that must be intoned by Republican candidates in the farcical election campaign now in progress, and in Congress they are powerful enough to abort even efforts to inquire into the effects of global warming, let alone do anything serious about it. (Noam Chomsky)

An indirect result of a perceived external threat is that a crackdown happens internally before any action is taken against the real threat. Thus, the perception that climate change is an external threat becomes one of the primary reasons why action is lacking, even though no specific target exists. It’s difficult for the U.S. to acknowledge a threat if it can’t explicitly point to something such as communists or Islamic terrorists. And, like the war on terror, actions against climate change become mostly theater in order to make us feel as if we’re doing something to protect us against a ambiguous threat.

As witnessed during Hurricane Katrina, the poor caught the brunt of the effects of problems that were systemic, revealing larger symptoms of decline and neglect at home. While billions were quickly poured into the war against Iraq, such attention and expediency lacked in the response to Hurricane Katrina. The poor ultimately become part of the threat posed by climate change because they suffer the consequences, revealing our nation’s increasing inequality and our lack of willingness to address it.

High Noon (1952)

And, again much like the Cold War, attacks are leveled internally at the scientists who are doing the research and work on how and why our climate is changing so rapidly. Anti-intellectualism and attacks against science have been allowed to persist since the quick popular reversal against many atomic scientists after World War II, most notably the revoking of Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance after he questioned the tactics of McCarthyism. In today’s media, the attacks against climate scientists are presented as balanced reporting. At its core, it’s the same as the red baiting that took place after World War II.

In the early days of the Cold War, every demand for equal treatment became tainted with the prospect of Communism. Today, every demand for action against climate change is perceived as an equal threat against the nation’s economy. Addressing climate change is usually couched in terms that place boosting the economy first and foremost. To be for preserving the possibility of continued human existence is to be against the profits of corporations. And without corporations making profits, it seems, we would be doomed to an unthinkable existence. Or, as seen on the bumper of an SUV, “He who dies with the most toys wins.”

“Even if the worst auguries of the immediate postwar era were not realized, the domestic consequences of the Cold War were bad enough. It was a mitigated disaster….While democracy in the abstract was exalted and ‘the West’ was elaborately defended, particular rights were enfeebled or ignored, with the acquiescence of the Eisenhower administration.” (Whitfield, p. 233)

As a public body, Americans seem willing to give up personal freedom when faced with an enemy such as communism or Islamic terrorists. When confronted by a more existential threat such as climate change, however, giving up anything that constitutes our comfortable existence is a choice few are willing to make. What good is freedom, however limited, if you can’t see it displayed on a large, flat-screen TV? Freedom, then, is only the freedom to make purchases.

The same successful post-war U.S. society took on some of the traits of those whom it both fought against and feared the most. While valuing freedom in words, the U.S. restricted it for much of the population in the aftermath of the World War II. Loyalty oaths, purges, and other actions usually connected with totalitarian regimes became common in the post-war U.S. To get a feeling for the era, one only need to dig up a few Hollywood films from that era for a glimpse into the madness.

“According to the Cogley Report on Blacklisting, the number of movies concerning other social issues decreased drastically between 1947 and 1954, although more than fifty anti-Communist films were produced. Most were shot on low budgets with non-stars–indicating that the studios did not expect them to earn well. Apparently, the producers hoped to satisfy their right-wing critics without losing money; films that evoked any kind of ideology were usually unpopular…. Perhaps in no other period have such dismal creations been launched as a form of public relations.” (Sayre, p. 80)

Viewing it a half century after it was released, the film My Son John, written and directed by Leo McCarey, seems to convey the opposite message of its original intention. Rather than warning about the threat of an insidious ideology from the outside, the story of the film could be the difficulties faced by an adult whose elderly parents have bought into the Tea Party ideology. With a few minor edits, the film could easily be re-released as a current warning against letting religious and patriotic zealotry get in the way of social progress. Although I imagine its message would still be on target for the viewer groomed on Fox News.

My Son John (1952)

Even is its own day, My Son John was seen as too over the top by most critics. Audiences weren’t flocking to see films that so adamantly stuffed a message down their throats. But an established director such as McCarey felt it necessary, at least personally, to make such a film to prove himself a true American.

One also can’t help think of climate scientists such as Michael Mann when watching My Son John. The writings and antics of those described as global warming skeptics or deniers are like the parents of the supposed communist John. Just as the beliefs and actions of the parents (played by Helen Hays and Dean Jagger) seem outrageous in hindsight, the attacks against climate scientists will (one hopes) look as spectacularly crazy to the average person in a few years as most intelligent people view HUAC and McCarthyism today. In another half century, however, there may be few artifacts documenting that a sizable portion of the U.S. population let a handful of loudmouths backed by corporate interests prevent taking action that would have protected humanity.

While the campaign against climate change comes primarily from the same lineage as the attacks against Communists in the post-war era, what the denialists lack in House Committees, they make up with think tanks and paid influence. They use their money and media connections to harass climate scientists and cast doubt on their work. While the tactics are different, the intent is the same. Find people who are doing good work and tarnish their image while making their lives miserable through lawsuits or campaigns to get them fired.

The Red Scare looked to prove individuals guilty by association. Behind the assaults by climate change deniers on various climate scientists, there lies an underlying Red Scare mentality that these scientists are anti-American, that they are against companies making a profit. A common refrain from some of the deniers, including candidates for the Republican nomination, is that climate change is a tactic to control people’s lives.

“As the capacity for mutual destruction became more and more assured, the two superpowers were in danger of becoming a pair of Goliaths, hampered by the very formidability of their weaponry. Paradoxically helpless, they were as unable to use atomic warheads as to do without them.

Such a situation, transmuting unimaginable power into its opposite at the wave of a wand, was without historical precedent. Yet it occurred in a world where nuclear proliferation remained both a possibility and a reality.” (McNeil, p. 374)

Unlike My Son John, High Noon was a discreet attempt to fight back at the damage that the Red Scare, and HUAC in particular, was having on Hollywood. The director, Fred Zinnemann, wasn’t sure that he would be able to complete the film under the circumstances of rampant anti-communist sentiment in Hollywood.

Similar to My Son John, High Noon could easily be viewed as its opposite fifty years later. High Noon is yet another story where an individual has to fight against an enemy because others are too afraid or apathetic to help. It trumpets the lone fighter against the bad guys. Even the protagonist, Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper), is betrayed by his own wife, the marriage itself only hours old.

Watching High Noon and My Son John together, one feels their protagonists are suffering from the same thing, at least until the final few minutes of each film. While both films focus on an individual under attack, the resolution of each individual’s challenge eventually provides for the safety and security of the community. While John dies knowing he did the right thing by renouncing his past, Marshal Kane lives and renounces the future (the town he saved).

Unlike the films, as individuals we lack any power to provide for the safety and security of the larger community against the effects of climate change. We must renounce both the past and future if we are to survive. Just as the U.S. built the ultimate weapon to end war (all wars) but found they were so powerful that their use was prohibitive, it allowed war to continue unabated. Likewise, we have transmuted the unimaginable power of converting sequestered carbon into energy to improve our lives into its opposite. We now face a future undermined by our success. Some will renounce the past, while others renounce the future.

Much like the paths taken by two different German boys in Rotation and Germany Year Zero at a moment of intense abjection, one chose to renounce the past while the other renounced the future. Yet neither provided a solution to the problem facing post-war Germany. What is the collective next step and how do we break through the indecision about what we can and can’t do? Must the world suffer years of natural disaster, drought, and famine in order to chart a new course?

The solution to climate change won’t come from an individual fighting against the grain but from a collective response that turns the power of the forces driving climate change into its opposite. As a first step, just as the anti-communist hysteria abated and McCarthy himself flamed out, the climate change denial movement can and will be obliterated, its spokespeople and financial backers should held responsible for their crimes against humanity. From there, we can renounce both past and future, concentrating on a present where we honestly address solutions.

“…we have a status quo bias so intense that it simply filters out and marginalizes any news that would require fundamental change. It’s not just the fraudulent work of partisan think tanks, not just the right-wing media or a few unhinged Senators. It’s all of the above, creating a white-noise roar of such volume that it only allows messages that reinforce the status quo to rise above it.”
posted by gompa on Metafilter at 10:03 AM on February 15, 2012

References:

• The Culture of the Cold War, Stephen J. Whitfield, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991
• Running Time: Films of the Cold War, Nora Sayre, The Dial Press, 1982
• The Pursuit of Power, William H. McNeil, University of Chicago Press, 1984

Elsewhere, cities were rebuilt, trials were held, and monuments were erected to the fallen. Humanity not only survived, but by many accounts, truly began to prosper after the second world war. Technological innovation exploded. Space exploration, computing technology, and medical advances all boosted the health and economies of the nations of the industrialized capitalist world for the most part.

Firestorm (documentary)

Equality, however, would take a while longer to gain renewed attention in the post-war U.S. As a country, the U.S. did not live up to the ideals of what it had supposedly fought for in the war. The political focus was on external threats to freedom, even while internal checks against equality continued to hold strong. Like the Athenians who built a wall around their city to protect it from outside threats only to suffer an outbreak of plague from within, the U.S. would eventually realize its own internal outbreak of people demanding equal access to opportunity.

A half a century later, we are now facing a different power that is a by-product of our supposed success. Not only are we afraid to acknowledge its existence, for fear of staining our identity, but we are also unable to develop a strategy for dealing with it because tied to our notion of success is the fantasy of continual progress. For the United States, we can’t truly address climate change because the elements causing climate change are what keep our economic engine running.

Just as ordinary Germans could do nothing, even if they had desired, to deter the Nazi Party once they rose to power, we cannot do anything to drastically change the momentum of a highly carbon dependent society. Collectively, we have the ability to act, but we are hindered by, among other things, control of the media by a handful of companies and a lack of organization. But, most importantly, we lack the impetus that would necessitate our willingness to create and maintain fundamental changes to our everyday lives. These sorts of changes, in time, will be forced upon us instead. Is there anything that would force us to act?

But devastation of such proportions not only destroys the very mechanisms capable of measuring its scale, it annihilates the ability to imagine it. It must therefore be reduced to a more manageable size and more conventional nature, so that the mind can take it in rather than totally blot it out. Paradoxically, those who want to keep the memory of atrocity and those who wish to deny it are both engaged in a similar attempt to force the event into an acceptable imaginary mold. If their goals are radically opposed to each other, their means are much less so: for both denial and remembrance begin by diminishing the event. Denial starts off by casting doubt on the minutiae of destruction, undermining thereby our acceptance of the whole; reconstruction similarly begins from the details, because the scale of the enormity is so vast that it denies its own existence and vanishes from the mind. Having created a reality beyond its wildest fantasies, humanity cannot imagine what it created. In this context human agency remains tenuous, the disaster being ascribed either to insane genius or to anonymous forces. Language, too, disintegrates; hence the resort, either to medieval imagery of hell and metaphysical speculation or to radical skepticism about reality and a perception of the world as text—complex and elusive but purged of the inarticulate screams of the millions, inscribed into every word pronounced since the Holocaust.
(Bartov, p. 124)

To be clear, this is not a comparison between World War II (or war in general) and climate change. World War II was not a singular event with a set of repercussions that lasted until the next major event happened. It is part of a continuum of a human-caused destruction cycle. Since the Industrial Revolution (although the mythology extends much earlier), we’ve pushed forward along a path of continual progress, not stopping whenever an event casts doubt on our linear path of progress. How individual humans understand and react to challenges and crises falls short of our collective ability to engage the lessons of the past in ways that do not disintegrate into mere forms of entertainment. We like to look back and think we knew what we were doing in the mythology of stories and films.

Not only is there is a lag time between the human ability to understand when a situation becomes critical, but there is also a failure to comprehend what needs to happen next. The scale of the problem becomes so large that it is impossible for most individuals to react, so they continue to act as they have before, accumulating these acts in a large-scale process that perpetuates the problem. War provides an excellent look into human behavior during a crisis because it is a time-constrained event containing multitudes of human action and/or inaction. War, in this sense, is the same type of event as climate change, only on a different time scale. The reasons for war are the same as the reasons for climate change. The easiest way to keep producing is to destroy something else.

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;

To put it another way, we cannot see the big picture (the play) because we are too busy acting in it. The stage and set are complex and striking. We catch flashes of it from time to time but are usually too focused on our bit part to take it all in. We feel that if we, as an individual, stop to take a look, the whole play will be ruined. We’ve been told that the show must go on regardless of what else happens. It’s all about maintaining the play.

The solution isn’t that we need to create a different play or rearrange the set design. It may then seem the only way to solve the problem is to become the audience. If we can sit down and try to imagine what we have created, maybe we can move beyond the crisis. Retreating to the seats and staring at a blank stage might allow us to realize that the stage is the source of our power. The play merely maintains the illusion of power.

The play demands continual repetition; the stage continual maintenance. If, as actors, however small time we may be, we retreat to the audience, it may be not as a passive act of resistance but as a restructuring of how we understand the problem. To relate it back to war, and as many anti-war writers have pointed out, war would simply not exist without soldiers willing to fight. But can we make the same grandiose claim for global warming, that it would not exist without people willing to contribute to it?

There are already a handful of critics in the audience who are pointing out the increasing dangers to life on the planet caused by a changing climate. For the most part, they are still a quiet voice, drowned out by the exciting news reports of the latest elements of the play: floods, wild fires, droughts, tornadoes, extreme storms, and scorching heat. Special effects trump information every time.

If war and climate change are along the same continuum of human-caused destruction tools, we should be able to unpack their components in a way that clarifies how they are similar or different as part of the human-caused destructive cycle. War is a battle between competing nations or groups involving soldiers from each side using weapons to defeat the other. A winner is usually the side that kills/destroys more than the other.

Like war, climate change will undoubtedly kill and destroy some more than others. Although there won’t always be clear divisions regarding nationality among the people most affected (with some notable exceptions such as island nations), the poorer nations will have the most difficult time. Just as the poor make up the vast numbers of soldiers who die in war, they will also be the ones who die due to climate change. And as we have seen with the various climate meetings and talks, most recently in Durban, nations are competing against one another to preserve their positions without conceding much of their national interest in economic advantage. The winner will be the ones who can physically survive by whatever means necessary, using their resources to stave off (adapt to) the effects of climate change.

Having moved from World War II to the war on the world, too, the enemy will be everywhere. The world will become a stage in which the unfolding play becomes so tragic, we will keep our acting our parts out of fear alone. Prior to climate change, this notion of keeping up appearances in the face of fear was a way of life in the Cold War. The fear of annihilation during the Cold War kept us adhering to the ideas behind its insanity. Unlike climate change, however, the ability to imagine the ultimate end of the destructive powers of nuclear war was just what Hollywood was capable of doing. The imagining of this most horrific creation became merely another form of entertainment, entertainment that kept us in our seats, even as we gasped in horror.

But, as audience members, how do we avoid remaining passive spectators of the ongoing destruction wrought by climate change? Is there any image that can shake us out of our seats? Unfortunately, no blockbuster film or no endlessly rerun video of a natural disaster will have any effect on our readiness to take action. Since the effects of climate change happen in slow-motion compared to the destruction of war, it’s much easier to remain comfortable. We can no longer even profess to the illusion that we would do what was necessary to ensure our survival.

Did the doom and gloom films during the Cold War provide any sort of stimulus for people to change their behavior, or did they provide an outlet for our fears? I tend to think the latter but will explore that idea more over the next few weeks. Compared to the number of films about nuclear annihilation, there have been very few about climate change destruction.

Joplin, MO (AP photo)

Germany Year Zero (1948)

We only have to go back as far as World War II for some answers. It marked a turning point in human history when our ability to destroy each other became absolute. In a matter of hours, we could undo billions of years of biological life striving to adapt to an ideal planetary environment. The stage was set; we were just waiting for the play to begin.

Our lack of action or acknowledgement during the beginning and continuation of any such devastation results in our inability to properly deal with the consequences. Inaction during a crisis leads to powerlessness. Germany during World War II provides a perfect example. Once the juggernaut of the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazi Party) took control, those who merely stayed out of the way in order to pursue their own livelihoods soon found themselves struggling to eek out a daily existence.

Two films released shortly after the war handle the struggles of German people from a pre- and post-war angle. Both films focus on a single family dealing with the crisis of being trapped by powers out of their control. In Rotation (1949), directed by Wolfgang Staudte, a young family strives to build a decent life for themselves before the war, while in Germany Year Zero (1948), directed by Roberto Rossellini, a family tries to stay together in the aftermath of the war’s devastation.

The German writer W.G Sebald, during a series of lectures that were published under the title On the Natural History of Destruction, explored why, in the aftermath of World War II, German writers failed to acknowledge the massive destruction of their cities and people during the war. Even many of the personal recollections that Sebald read did not adequately address the horrors of what happened or what the survivors endured.

People’s ability to forget what they do not want to know, to overlook what is before their eyes, was seldom put to the test better than in Germany at that time [World War II]. The population decided–out of sheer panic at first–to carry on as if nothing had happened…”One day we came to a suburb that had not suffered at all. People were sitting out on their balconies drinking coffee. It was like watching a film; it was down-right impossible.” (Sebald, p. 41)

Sebald does not portray the Germans as victims but as a people unwilling to ultimately face the consequences of their actions (or inaction). Inaction is also the primary theme of the film Rotation . The film’s protagonist, Hans, and his young family struggle to make ends meet when Germany was still reeling from the aftermath of the first world war. As the Nazi Party rises to power, they disdain its politics and tactics but also do not actively do anything to prevent its ascent. Hans’s brother-in-law Kurt, however, does actively resist and has to go underground to avoid imprisonment.

In the following scene from Rotation, Hans cleverly avoids offending the visiting Nazi group leader in order to maintain his position within society.

Hans, in order to continue providing for his family, eventually gives in to pressure and joins the party to appease his boss. Although Hans has no admiration for or loyalty to the party, his son Helmut joins the Hitler Youth and becomes fully indoctrinated by Nazi ideology. Hans is troubled by his own son’s beliefs but does nothing to confront him.

The disturbances of the family idyll become a cataclysm in the third segment when the Nazi war regime uses its power overtly to subordinate the family to its political goal of domination. Whereas in the first two segments Kurt represented the antagonist–the nagging conscious of political responsibility to whom Hans turned a deaf ear–and his son Helmut justified the personal compromises necessary for a stable family life, the last segment reverses the equation’s terms. The reversal is underscored by the juxtaposition of a series of scenes alternating between Helmut’s Hitler Youth training and his growing susceptibility to Nazi ideology with Kurt’s resistance activities. Han’s descision to help him repair a printing press for anti-Nazi pamphlets is motivated less by political conviction than by emotional commitment. Helmut, however, turns in the illegal leaflets he finds at home out of political conviction (i.e., ideological indoctrination), which results in Kurt’s execution. That betrayal becomes the first step toward the complete disintegration of the family unit and Hans’s insight into his social responsibility. (Silberman, p. 108)

With the family broken apart, they become physically separated at the end of the war. Hans is imprisoned, his wife killed, and Helmut taken prisoner. Helmut eventually returns to his father, who forgives him.

At the end of Rotation, Helmut relives the past, meeting his girlfriend at the same spot where his father met Helmut’s mother before the war. Helmut tells his girlfriend about the meeting of his parents at the same spot. She says that history has a way of repeating itself. Helmut insists that they can make sure that it doesn’t, although they continue lounging around in the sun, just as Helmut’s parents had done years before. It doesn’t provide a reassuring message that, once the young are comfortable, they would do anything to prevent another catastrophe. Staudte himself became jaded as he witnessed Germany settle back into familiar patterns during the post-war years.

Similarly, Sebald, who admits that while he was only a year old when the war ended and that his family was not directly affected by any bombing raids, always felt that the devastation of Germany hung over him. As a child, he played in areas that were still in ruins, yet while growing up, he could not find any deep explanations for the destruction in the books he read. It was as if people were unable to speak about the experience. In Sebald’s words, “…they cast some light on the way in which memory (individual, collective, and cultural) deals with experiences exceeding what is tolerable.”

In Roberto Rosselini’s Germany, Year Zero, released a year earlier than Rotation, the theme is precisely how one family attempts to deal with an intolerable experience. The film takes place directly after the war and focuses on a family trying to survive amidst food shortages, power outages, distrust among neighbors, and lack of health care. The youngest, a boy named Edmund, does all he can to provide for his family, which consists of an ailing father and an older brother and sister. Unlike Helmut in Rotation, Edmund was not a member of the Hitler Youth, although his older brother, Karl-Heinz, “did his duty” and fought in the war. Karl-Heinz refuses to apply for a ration card, afraid that he will be imprisoned for having been a faithful Nazi soldier. He merely sulks around the apartment, contributing nothing but anger over his personal loss of purpose.

Edmund wanders the city alone

Edmund’s lack of ideological brainwashing doesn’t, however, keep him from getting bad advice from a former member of the Nazi party (and obvious pedophile). When Edmund decides to take matters into his own hands and do what he thinks will help his family based on that advice, it all backfires on him, leavng him isolated from his family. For Edmund, his world has been turned upside down and he doesn’t know how to set it right. He is constantly reacting to events around him, bouncing around in a game he fails to understand. Whereas Helmut understood his mistakes and vows to prevent them from happening again, Edmund decides there is no future worth striving for anymore.

“Is the destruction not, rather, irrefutable proof that the catastrophes which develop, so to speak, in our hands and seem to break out suddenly are a kind of experiment, anticipating the point at which we shall drop out of what we will have thought for so long to be our autonomous history and back into the history of nature?”
(Sebald, p. 66)

Unlike war, climate change is a much slower process and causes destruction that often slowly builds from year to year. Contrary to the route that Edmund took in Germany Year Zero, the other children adapted to life among the rubble and did whatever was necessary to get by. It is a well-worn cliche that children will adapt to anything.

In the United States, a significant percentage of the population either don’t believe climate change is happening or they choose to not let it bother them. For many people who are struggling to get by on a day-to-day basis, they, like Hans in Rotation, don’t have the time nor the energy to do anything about it. Even if they did recognize climate change as a threat to life on the planet, they may feel inadequate to effect any sort of change, but the poor will be those who will be most affected by rising food and energy prices, as well as those who might be directly affected by more extreme weather events.

The recent decline in the amount of media attention devoted to climate change and the continued denial of the science by a large percentage of the population in the U.S. indicates that we are treading the same path as the many Germans who put aside their worries about the threat of danger in order to maintain their way of life. Are we as powerless against the machinations of climate change as the individual Germans civilians were against the Allied air attacks? We have already let loose a force that is beyond our control. Now we must sit back and watch the skies, hoping that the next bomb misses us.

Maybe a hundred years down the line, nobody will look back at climate change as the most important issue of the early 21st century, because the damage will have been done, and the idea that it might have been prevented will seem absurd. Maybe the idea that Mali and Burkina Faso were once inhabited countries rather than empty deserts will seem queer, and the immiseration of huge numbers of stateless refugees thronging against the borders of the rich northern countries will be taken for granted. The absence of the polar ice cap and the submersion of Venice will have been normalised; nobody will think of these as live issues, no one will spend their time reproaching their forefathers, there’ll be no moral dimension at all. We will have wrecked the planet, but our great-grandchildren won’t care much, because they’ll have been born into a planet already wrecked.
The Economist (Dec. 12, 2011)

References:

• On the Natural History of Destruction, W.G. Sebald, Modern Library, 2004
• German Cinema: Texts in Context, Marc Silberman, Wayne State University, 1995