a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

I wrote in my last post about groups and programs or proposed policies that get organized around delusions, and contrasted these to groups and proposals that are self-defeating because they carry conflicts in them,  including histories of guilt for past failures and abandonments of principles. I considered the idea that you can give super-wealthy people a tax cut, thereby cementing inequality into place and losing huge amounts of tax revenue,  and still pretend that no debt will build and no social fabric rend. Lots of people agree with this judgment. Exit polls at the mid-term elections showed only 40% of voters approved the Bush era tax cuts.  But the word “delusion” will get us nowhere unless it can be shown to be illuminating in a politically helpful way,  or unless it can guide a therapeutic approach to a big problem.  “Delusion” should not be a leftist sound-bite thrown at a rightist “limited government” sound-bite.

To take my reflection on delusions in the political arena a step further, I’m going to write today about one of the great  amazements of the present American historical moment.  Here is an introductory fact: close to 100% of the scientists who study global warming agree that it is happening, that it is producing climate change,  and that human enterprises –including high use of fossil fuels—contribute significantly to it. Global warming is an anthropogenic disease of the planet.  Of every 100 scientists who study the warming phenomena, 98 concur with the conclusions arrived at by the internationally coordinated research endeavor of the UN’s IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), the group that shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, who so influentially sounded the alarm about the “inconvenient truth” of global warming.

Nonetheless, there are “global warming deniers” and “climate change science skeptics”  across the American political landscape (mostly on the far right, but not entirely). Of the in-coming Republican victors in the recent mid-term elections,  50% deserve one or both of those labels. This count is from the excellent Climate Progress blog produced by Joseph Raum, who has recently offered a digest of scientific reports from 2010 that range over all the consequences of global warming, from ocean acidification to arctic melting, from reduced biodiversity to draughts and floods interfering with  food production.  The year’s reports make it quite clear that the environmental catastrophe  bearing down upon us is traveling at a faster pace than had been thought possible even a few years ago.

If we look into the conditions supporting skepticism about or denial of the “inconvenient truth,” the first thing that appears on the horizon is corporate sponsorship for the 2 out of 100 scientists who are producing “science” disproving global warming.  All the non-scientist citizens who argue that global warming and climate change do not exist make appeal to science purporting to show that the sun, not humans, is responsible for any global warming  and that so-called climate change only reflects normal, temporary temperature fluctuations. There is no disease process in Mother Earth, just some symptoms that will pass. She is fine.

I will write next time about a new book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, titled Merchants of Doubt, which exposes an often-used corporate strategy for funding science that will  deflect corporate responsibility for damage to people and the environment.  This profit protection strategy was first developed  to shield tobacco industries from the charge that they were manufacturing carcinogenic products and were thus liable for the health damage resulting from using the products..  Corporate funded “Tobacco Strategy” scientists studied dozens of “causes of death” other than smoke that could be involved in smokers’ deaths, and supplied expert witnesses to present their investigations in courts, thwarting liability suits.  The authors show in detail that the very same scientists employed in the Tobacco Strategy two decades ago are doing their job again for corporate polluters and fossil fuel producers.

So, when corporate financed science exists,  non-scientists feed on it for their purposes,  which may resemble the corporations’ purposes, but which are usually more personal and more delusional. Less about greed and more about aggressively regaining control they feel they have lost.  What makes me think this?  What are the main claims of the science skeptics and the global warming deniers who are not scientists and not corporate leaders?  The November 15 issue of Scientific American reports that a sociologist at the University of Michigan, Andrew Hoffman, argues  that liberals and leftists will never  really know their opponents’ claims unless they learn to listen to what  citizens over on the far right are actually saying.  He suggests that the “cultural dimensions of both defining the problem and determining the solutions” of global warming should be taken into account on the left, so that common ground with the skeptics and deniers can be found –a strategy many have recommended for the abortion debate as well.  It is useless, Hoffman claims, to present the scientific consensus and expect people who doubt it to have an “aha! moment” and be converted. And it is just as useless to tell skeptics and deniers that they are stupid or illogical and then expect them to sign up for the solutions proposed by the very self-designated “experts” whom they accuse of  inventing a problem where there is none.

I do not agree with Hoffman that there is common ground to be found with this “other” culture, whose ideas can be somehow (he does not say how)“worked with.“ It is not a good plan, I think,  to get involved  in “working with” delusions; you can only stay sane yourself  if you work therapeutically and educationally to free delusional people of their delusions. Obama understood this when he addressed the nation in 2008 on the topic of racism, but he has not taken the therapist/educator role on global warming,  which could be described as prejudice against the earth and against those (our children and grandchildren) who will inherit a diseased, damaged  earth as their habitat. But to argue for this approach, let me convey what the sociologists in Hoffman’s research unit heard at a conservative conference on climate change last May.

In the researchers’ general description,  the conference attendees were: “middle-aged white males who resent government,  are suspicious of scientists and their peer-reviewed protocols, and believe that global warming [has been] made up to hit them in the wallet.” The “palpable anger” of the attendees was directed at “warmists, alarmists, lefties, Obama-ites, and communists.” They hailed as “heroes” scientists who don’t “believe in” climate change and who bravely tell the real truth.  A member of the Competitive Enterprise Institute opined that: “The environmental agenda seeks to use the state to create scarcity as a means to exert their will, and the state’s authority, over your lives.” (That is, big government will spend your money to create a scarcity economy, then, when you are weakened,  take you over.)  Realizing that the sociologists at the conference were studying his opinions and those of the other attendees, this man reacted with: “they pretend to play Jane Goodall peering in on this strange culture standing in their way…”

Several things are immediately obvious. This was a conference of paranoid conspiracy theorists; their anger was directed at a conspiracy trying to infiltrate their country,  get control over their lives,  over their capacity to compete, and over their money.  They feel that their enemies are Jane Goodall-like (that is, female) scientists claiming to be more advanced and condescendingly viewing   them as a “strange culture” (like a less-than-human gorilla culture) to be peered in on.  Science is about power and domination.  They and their own scientists are heroes who will not be dominated,  who will resist, who will win the Battle of the Scientists, and expose the dominative enemy scientists as the shills for communism and the voyeuristic female perverts that they are.

As I noted in my last post, if you want to know what is inside a blamer,  examine the content of the blame –it is the inside turned outside.  If you listen with a clinical “third ear” to the conference attendees, what you hear is not adequately covered by the word (and the defense mechanism) “denial.” Yes, global warming science is being denied.  But what does this mean? Try imagining the attendees as small boys who experience their mothers (and their society that should nourish them, and their Mother Earth) as suffering, in pain, depressed, crazy, being hurt by unthinking and violent  human beings.  Imagine them, further, experiencing her as lashing out,  eruptive,  taking out her pain and grievance on them by making them feel powerless,  taking away their ability to compete,  treating them like lesser beings, invading their privacy, peering in on them.  They respond by denying, in the simple sense of turning away from an awful picture of their mother.  But what they want to say is: The Mother is not as these awful scientists say, not broken down and in pain.  She is fine.  Then they go further, trying to rescue her from the bad guy scientists; thanks to them, she is perfectly fine, as they have rescued her.  She is not a sadist; they are heroes. And to her attacks upon them,  her good children,  her sadistic lashing out with apocalyptic fire and floods, they respond with another assertion of their own power. They refuse to be infiltrated, invaded,  undermined by her or her bad guy scientific knights. They have a power-fantasy of ultimate control and victory.  A future in which they will be  the sadists and bullies. They will band together with others who feel overwhelmed  and hurt, and, with power in numbers, they will triumph –or die trying. That is, the global warming deniers are denying that Mother Earth is suffering and wielding “climate change” to hurt human beings; but, much more extensively and delusionally, they turn the whole dreadful scenario of catastrophe, which they are quite conscious of and feel overwhelmed  by, into a scenario of their power,  over her and over her elitist peer-reviewing  black knights (who like to disguise themselves as the good guys).

Wow, you might think, psychoanalysts must read science fiction between clients. Well, it would  probably be a good idea if we did,  as science fiction, too, is often about omnipotence fantasies, about not being vulnerable  or without control.  There is a lot to be learned form science fiction utopias about frightened, overwhelmed  people’s omnipotent wishes for the future. And a lot to be learned, as well,  from the science fiction writers who see clearly the omnipotent wishes of  people who would like to have science fiction powers (as does, for example,  that shrewd lefty Canadian Margaret Atwood,  who lives around the corner from me).  Next week, I will take up the ways in which  the interpretation (and the type of listening) I have offered here can translate into a political position; how analysis of  anti-science “science” and its uses can underpin educational,  persuasive opposition to it.  The “global warming deniers” are in possession of  in a myth that empowers them. We do not need to share the myth, but to offer a vision of a society in which  such a myth is not needed.

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