Climate activists who still believe the problem is ‘raising awareness of the science’ are fighting the wrong war with the wrong weapons. Helping the inactive become active does need familiarity with facts, but also an understanding of faith.

This article sifts the tangled history of religion and science for lessons on effective climate action.

Different Premises

Neighbours scream at each other, gripping their respective balconies on opposite sides of a narrow street with white knuckles, close enough to spray each other with their vituperation. 

‘Those two will never agree’, observes a witty witness, ‘for they are arguing from different premises’. 

This anecdote is so good, it’s been attributed to multiple great wits, from Sydney Smith to Dr. Johnson. 

The ‘premises’ gag endures not just because it’s a great pun, but because humanity provides so many good opportunities to deploy it.

Especially today, with the ‘climate wars’ in full swing. 

When future alien historians scratch their heads with their tentacles to come up with good title for their account of Homo sapiens’ brief domination of Planet Trash, ‘Arguing From Different Premises’ would be a good title, along with Science vs Profit, or Unfair Competition: When Reason Met Emotion. 

All wars a messy. In the climate wars, the combatants can’t even agree what to call each other. 

Freedom Fighters vs Terrorists

It’s rare for bitter rivals to refer to each other by the same names. Name-calling is Step One of controlling the narrative, which all victors strive for.

Convince the non-combatant majority to adopt your terminology, and you’re already winning  without firing a shot. 

Consider the different words for ‘climate activist’:

• Big Oil’s PR shills bribe the powerful to brand those who threaten their profits as ‘eco-terrorists’, ‘loony left tree-huggers’, or ‘climate hoaxers’. 
• The 89% of the world’s population who think governments should do more about human-induced climate change probably place climate activists on a semantic spectrum that ranges from ‘do-gooders’ to ‘green activists’. 
• Those trying to wean humanity from our fossil fuel addiction see themselves as ‘sustainability advocates’, ‘guardians of our grandchildren’ or ‘saving the planet’. 

What we call ‘the enemy’ matters in wars. Controlling the narrative is central to what generals know is the real battle, winning ‘hearts and minds’.

But the climate wars are not just being fought between the vested interests of Big Oil and the Little People – if only it were that simple.

They’re largely an internal civil war within each of us. 

Between our hearts and our minds.

Ad hominem, ad rem and ad nauseam

The fact that we’re more familiar with the Latin phrase ad hominen than ad rem is evidence of our preference for emotion over reason. 

• Ad hominem (to the person) attacks the messenger
• Ad rem (to the matter) addresses the message

Humans were quite happy to target people rather than ideas well before the invention of social media, but when success is measured in eyeballs, argument is good for business. 

Online, ad hominem + ad nauseam = ad revenue.

Social  media’s ‘Reply’ button, combined with the disinhibiting effects of not having to look your online adversary in the eye, are facilitating our untimely regression to unreason.

The timing is unfortunate. Now is when we need to listen to the scientists more than any other time in human history.  

But it is not the biggest battle.

Blaming our Silicon Valley Overlords for all our ills is a handy justification for inaction. When the default is burning more fossil fuels, inaction is our enemy.

Blame games might make us feel better about ourselves, but inhibit effective climate action.

Blaming others doesn’t absolve us of any responsibility for taking action, and obscures the real conflict that may end human civilization – our own internal battle between our hearts and our brains. 

We all like to think of ourselves as driven by reason, evidence and logic. This is the declension of self-delusion:

• I’m rational.
• You’re emotional.
• They’re liars. 

It’s statistically impossible for us all to be right.

Social media tech has simply found a new way of exploiting a human characteristic that’s as old as humanity.

Emotion and irrationality is literally in our DNA.

In the blood

In his introduction to In The Blood: God, Genes and Destiny (1996), geneticist Steve Jones warms his readers up with a reflection on why we believe things to be true, especially regarding ourselves and what makes us ‘human’.

The book addresses the vexed question of where scientific advances in the unravelling and decoding of the human genome have left our self-image. 

Jones notes that ‘to some, all this threatens human autonomy. If everything is coded into DNA, what is left for free will?.

True to his subtitle, Jones takes on the science vs religion debate, but with a critical nuance and self-awareness much more profound than charming self-deprecation.

There have always been disputes between science and religion. Usually, it must be said, they are started by students of the latter (who tend to find science more interesting than scientists do theology). The war between the two is best seen as a battle between a shark and a tiger. On its own territory, each is invincible: but stray into the opponent’s kingdom and the enemy is bound to prevail. Both tiger and shark, though, dominate their environment in a way that must make perfect sense to each. 

What science has in common with religion – people

Jones defuses the usual Science vs Religion ding-dong by ruminating not on their differences, but on their similarities.

He notes the remarkable rapidity with which Darwin and Wallace’s 1858 co-presentation of their theory of natural selection (later termed ‘evolution’) moved from bombshell to canon. 

What does the fact that religion adapted so quickly to Darwinism tell us about the human condition, and what lessons might it hold today for climate activists?

Within a generation, the Church of England ceded certain territorial battles, without surrendering the moral war. 

Re-framing the Book of Genesis as ‘allegory’ rather than revealed truth changed nothing substantial. The church retained the high ground of its monopoly over determining how we ‘should’ act on everything from gender to the environment. The shark ocean got a bit smaller.

But in Tiger-land, those who saw themselves as on the side of reason and science also demonstrated their ability to adapt new facts and evidence to suit their own faiths, beliefs and prejudices. 

Over the next few decades, some scientists applied natural selection to human races. ‘Social Darwinism’ became their irrefutable evidence for eugenics. What started as harmless phrenology soon escalated to Naziism, segregation, The Bell Curve and other apparently ‘scientific’ justifications for racism.

It has long been known that genetically, the differences among all European nationals are less than those between adjacent African tribes. Racism still thrives. So much for science. But Jones makes a broader point.

Those who fear biology and those who see it as salvation are united in certainty of its power to confirm or to deny ideas about the human condition. Science, though, has no ambition or competence to do so.

Before getting lost in the bogs of moral relativism, where everyone has a point and no one is right, Jones offers this critical insight.

Science… differentiates it[self] absolutely from beliefs that depend on faith: there is no limit to its enquiries, and no explanation is ever complete. Science differs from religion in that referring to authority, however eminent, is simply not enough.’

First word, last word

A few years after In The Blood, Jones published Y: The Descent Of Men. 

It was his homage to the sequel his hero, Charles Darwin, wrote in the aftermath of the maelstrom created by Origin of Species. 

Y: The Descent Of Men focused on the peculiar natural history of the Y chromosome and the human male. 

Jones muses, amongst many other things, on the consequences of humans ending up with two sexes (our shared ancestor the slime mould, for example, has thirteen sexes, only one of which is male).

Y: The Descent of Men is a brilliant exploration of sex and gender, which stands up pretty well. Current agonising about the role of men in modern society doesn’t contradict his conclusions, but is explained by them.

Right at the start, Jones quotes the man who probably did more to change our view of who we are and why we act the way we do, than any other human in history. 

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.

Charles Darwin

The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871)

Climate activists might be more effective at moving squidgy, sweaty, imperfect fellow-humans from climate inaction to climate action, if they heeded Darwin’s observation.

Focusing more on what makes us ‘confident’ in our beliefs, rather than trying to attack, denigrate, demolish or otherwise change those beliefs, might be more effective.

Pick your battles, win the war

There’s a place, and a need, for full-frontal assaults on unreason. 

Greta Thunberg, and others leading the ‘just listen to the scientists!’ cavalry charge, play the same vanguard role as ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’ Thomas Huxley. 

They proudly bear the standards and banners of evidence-based policy against the outraged Establishment, who can’t handle the truth.

But if science is to prevail in the climate wars, its combatants will need more than attack dogs or heavy artillery.  

Generals, priests and advertisers all know wars are also won by less obvious, but equally effective subterfuges.  

Since The Art of War compiled Chinese military strategy two and a half millennia ago, successful strategists of all kinds have known not just that victory depends on shifting ‘hearts and minds’, but that it’s best done subtly.

• Avoid fights you can’t win.
• Identify likely allies as well as certain enemies.
• Show your allies and confederates you understand their concerns and share their goals.
• Let them take credit for adopting the very strategies you suggest to them.
• Focus on outcomes, not motivations, and we might move on from ‘raising awareness’ to ‘taking action’.

Want to take action yourself?

For more on the See Through Network’s ‘Transparent Trojan Horseplay’ approach to its Goal of Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping the Inactive Become Active’, visit www.seethroughtogether.org.