If you haven’t yet read Andy West’s book “The Grip of Culture” about the sociology of climate catastrophism, please do. You can download it free here
or buy the print edition

 It’s billed as a summary of the articles he contributed at Climate Etc. on the research he conducted on international opinion surveys about attitudes to climate change, but it’s much more than that.
 
Very briefly, and at the risk of distorting his message, what I take Andy to be saying is this:
Climate catastrophism is a culture, understood in the specialised sense used by a growing number of academics in the fields of anthropology, psychology, & cultural history, i.e. an irrational belief system that performs important social functions. Others have had this insight, but Andy proves it.
 
What makes Andy’s book important is that he provides the kind of evidence that social scientists respect, in the form of strong correlations between strength of religious belief in dozens of countries and belief in dangerous global warming. What’s groundbreaking is the finding that the correlation turns out to be strongly positive or negative, depending on how you formulate the question: if you ask people to rate a list of different global threats, you get a positive correlation with national religiosity, while if you ask people to name a threat, you get a negative one. 
 
A possible explanation (for which Andy is not responsible) is that people in countries with a stronger religious ethos may tend to believe in catastrophic climate change because they recognise it as being like a religion, something they’re happy with. People in non-religious societies, on the other hand, may believe because it replaces the religion they’ve lost, or never had. In the first case you’re merely acknowledging that a belief in global warming exists, and is something of which you approve. Only in the second case is belief likely to turn into religious zealotry. If you’ve already got a religion, you’ll like climate catastrophe because it’s familiar; if you haven’t, you’ll go for it because you need something to believe in. Either way, Andy’s meta-analysis of dozens of surveys demonstrates a high correlation of belief in catastrophic climate change with both religious belief and non-belief in society, depending how you measure climate belief. It’s difficult to imagine a more convincing demonstration that belief in catastrophic climate change is fundamentally irrational. 
 
The point about identifying climate catastrophe belief as a culture, (or “cultural narrative,” a term I prefer, since it avoids many misunderstandings) is that it’s a wider term than religion, embracing a variety of ideologies. Andy makes a number of observations based on the research in this wide, though ill-defined field, the most interesting one being that a culture (in this sense) is necessarily irrational. It won’t do its job (of inculcating a sense of social cohesion etc.) if it’s based on rational grounds.
 
This has huge implications. What’s the point of opposing a belief with rational argument if the whole point of it is that it must necessarily be irrational?
 
We can all agree that ideologies that we don’t agree with are irrational. But what about your own ideology, be it religious, political, or simply a deeply held belief? If Andy West is right, we are all prey to irrational beliefs. 
 
I tried to test this claim by conducting an honest introspective examination of a belief of my own, namely socialism, and I assure you the results were enlightening – and disturbing.
 
–  What’s Socialism ever done for us?
–  Well, it brought us one man one vote, equal rights for women, and before that, free street lighting and piped water. Then free education, the National Health Service, an end to colonialism..
-Yes, but apart from that…
 
You know the sketch.
 
Of course, I had no difficulty identifying things in the history of socialism that I reject, from the Bolshevik revolution onwards. Orwell & thousands of others have already trodden that path. More seriously, in playing this game of introspection, I came to admit are features of any imaginable modern attempt at socialism (say, the policies that might have been enacted by a putative Corbyn government) which I can see would cause problems that would almost inevitably lead to disaster, and to which I have no solution. It’s only a mental game after all, but however I play it, I come to the same conclusion: to overcome the difficulties and resolve the problems I encounter, I would need to take charge of everything. 
 
And I’m not Stalin, even when playing mind games. I don’t have his talent.
 
Anyone with a minimum of historical knowledge can make an impressive list of the failings of socialism. (And I’m not talking about extreme claims, like that once made by Jordan Peterson, that Marx was responsible for the deaths of 40 million people.) And any socialist will have as stock of replies to these claims. The truth is, they may be partially or even largely true. But they don’t work, at least not always. And the more you try to make them work, the more you’re forced to admit that they can’t work. You can’t make them work without positing a situation of total omniscience and ultimately total control. This is the sense of 1984, I think. It’s not so much a prediction as a pursuit of an idea (an ideal) to its logical conclusion. Anyone with a smattering of knowledge of modern science or mathematics will appreciate the quandary. It’s like being faced with a theorem that can’t be proved, or a system that is inherently chaotic, or a logic that can never be both complete and internally consistent. 
 
This doesn’t stop me from being a socialist, but it does make me more reticent about any claims I make. Try it with your own deeply held beliefs. I promise you it will make you think.
 
Of course, my introspective musings concern no-one but myself, but they have convinced me that Andy is on to something important with his insistence that belief in catastrophic climate change is not just a sum of mistaken beliefs, like thinking that average global temperatures can be measured to a hundredth of a degree and that installing heat pumps will save the planet. The idea that cultural narratives are a driving force in societies seems to me to be one of the most useful and interesting ideas of recent years. 
 
*******   
 
There are signs that the climate catastrophe narrative may be dying, or at least declining. Greens were in retreat in the recent European elections, and even here in France, where they are still treated with the deference formerly reserved for philosophers and religious leaders, there is a noticeable change in emphasis in the Green agenda for the coming election, with talk of climate catastrophe and electric cars giving way to more mundane subjects like banning pesticides and stopping unnecessary motorway building. 
 
The Greens themselves, like all ideological believers, are largely unaware of the radical cultural narrative they are enacting. To reduce global temperatures by 0.01°C per year requires a world government with powers to regulate every aspect of your life, while keeping pesticides out of your breakfast cereal merely entails passing a law, changing a molecule or two, maybe hiring a few more busybody inspectors – something that any healthy democracy should be able to manage. To remain acceptable (and get elected) Greens are forced to become more realist, which of course makes them less interesting. 
 
Anyone can martyr themselves to save the planet, if they’re persuaded that it’s a matter of life and death. Few are willing to devote their lives to making your fly spray less toxic.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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16 Comments

  1. Great respect for Andy West, his work and engagement in the climatism issue. I would add, with a nod to Jordan Peterson, that posing belief as “irrational” is simplistic and misleading. An example from Maps of Meaning.

    The world can be validly construed as a forum for action, as well as a place of things. We describe the world as a place of things, using the formal methods of science. The techniques of narrative, however—myth, literature and drama—portray the world as a forum for action. The two forms of representation have been unnecessarily set at odds, because we have not yet formed a clear picture of their respective domains. The domain of the former is the objective world—what is, from the perspective of intersubjective perception. The domain of the latter is the world of value—what is and what should be, from the perspective of emotion and action.

    The former manner of interpretation-more primordial, and less clearly understood-finds its expression in the arts or humanities, in ritual, drama, literature and mythology. The world as forum for action is a place of value, a place where all things have meaning. This meaning, which is shaped as a consequence of social interaction, is implication for action, or-at a higher level of analysis-implication for the configuration of the interpretive schema that produces or guides action.

    The latter manner of interpretation-the world as place of things-finds its formal expression in the methods and theories of science. Science allows for increasingly precise determination of the consensually validatable properties of things, and for efficient utilization of precisely determined things as tools (once the direction such use is to take has been determined, through application of more fundamental narrative processes).

    No complete world-picture can be generated without use of both modes of construal. The fact that one mode is generally set at odds with the other means only that the nature of their respective domains remains insufficiently discriminated. Adherents of the mythological worldview tend to regard the statements of their creeds as indistinguishable from empirical “fact,” even though such statements were generally formulated long before the notion of objective reality emerged. Those who, by contrast, accept the scientific perspective—who assume that it is, or might become, complete—forget that an impassable gulf currently divides what is from what should be.

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  3. I read Maps of Meaning with a mixture of excitement and irritation. Peterson’s remarks on mythology are interesting and largely derived from Jung and Joseph Campbell. He does go on about dragons though.

    In the last paragraph you quote Peterson says: “Adherents of the mythological worldview tend to regard the statements of their creeds as indistinguishable from empirical ‘fact,’ ..” which suggests that he realises that myths, however necessary and “valid” (in some sense) are simply not true.

    “..posing belief as “irrational” is simplistic and misleading.”

    Andy is talking about beliefs in cultural narratives. He makes some exceptions for the “narratives” of democracy, law and science. Like most people, those are three narratives I “believe” in, but I’m not sure what his justification is for that.

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  4. Thanks Geoff. That word “true’ incorporates the dichotomy. Another quote:

    The “natural,” pre-experimental, or mythical mind is in fact primarily concerned with meaning—which is essentially implication for action—and not with “objective” nature. . .And, in truth—in real life—to know what something is still means to know two things about it: its motivational relevance, and the specific nature of its sensory qualities. The two forms of knowing are not identical; furthermore, experience and registration of the former necessarily precedes development of the latter. Something must have emotional impact before it will attract enough attention to be explored and mapped in accordance with its sensory properties.

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  6. All very interesting, but for me the key paragraph is this one:

    The Greens themselves, like all ideological believers, are largely unaware of the radical cultural narrative they are enacting. To reduce global temperatures by 0.01°C per year requires a world government with powers to regulate every aspect of your life, while keeping pesticides out of your breakfast cereal merely entails passing a law, changing a molecule or two, maybe hiring a few more busybody inspectors – something that any healthy democracy should be able to manage. To remain acceptable (and get elected) Greens are forced to become more realist, which of course makes them less interesting. 

    The tension between states’ rights and democracy on the one hand and the “need” for action at an international level runs through the whole climate crisis narrative. That’s why it’s so important that the European Court of Human Rights has recently ordered the Swiss government to take more action to “deal with” climate change while the Swiss government has responded by refusing to comply and criticising the Court for judicial activism and overreach. That’s why every year there’s an international jamboree called a conference of the parties, that seeks to tell everyone in the world what to do, while the end product is always watered down to the point of being meaningless, by states who don’t want to comply with the internationalist demands (while pretending that they do). And so on.

    The climate catastrophists know that only global action can meet their concerns. Deep down they may even understand that it isn’t going to happen (good luck with China, Russia, Iran, etc etc). Yet they still bray and scream about the slightest hint of a step back from the agenda by national politicians. Only the truly irrational, steeped in a cultural narrative” could demand, say, that the UK doubles down on net zero in order to “save the planet” while turning a blind eye to what is and is not happening in the rest of the world.

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  7. Yes, climate catastrophism is a full blown culture, or cultural narrative, if you like. It didn’t just come into being though. It grew and developed, over many years, from a tiny seed into a vast spreading arboreal canopy bearing many poisonous fruits. It has flourished so well in recent times because the (social) climate has become so conducive to its growth. The social climate is itself partly engineered by the political climate. The political climate has been planned and engineered by politicians and their financial backers over many years.

    The tiny seed from which the climate catastrophism culture sprang was the very simple scientific conjecture that increasing concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide result in a generalised warming of the entire planet. The ‘science’ became more complex and convoluted thereafter, yet ironically more ‘settled’. Culture first began to intrude in the form of active censorship of those questioning the data and dissenting from the ‘settled Science’. Then the militant millenarian wing really got going and the whole thing developed into a fully formed cultural narrative, loosely based on ‘science’.

    The militant millenarian wing (Extinction Rebellion) was encouraged and entertained by the politicians and then the ‘scientists’ and their respective institutions. Cultural imperatives became mixed up with political motives and imperatives. The whole thing now is a heaving, festering mess and no, it will not easily succumb to rational intervention. But it will succumb to rapid (social) climate change and that is now happening. Reality is catching up with the propaganda, the lies and the fantasies. Real science and hard data is catching up. These things are promoting and gestating the formation of a counter cultural narrative. As light dissolves the darkness, the new culture will dispel the shadows of the old. People like us, we’re just here to give the new culture a push in the right direction by focusing on our own particular areas of experience and aptitude.

    A Labour government will be the last shout out of the old culture. How loudly they shout and how many people will pay attention is yet to be decided. But what is not in doubt is that a climate change obsessed Labour government WILL drive some further nails into the coffin of GB PLC and the new culture will inherit a sadly depleted social, industrial and economic wasteland when eventually they’re done doing their worst.

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  9. Ron, I agree with Jordon that myth and rationality are both present in society (and in fact compete). A better way of saying this is that cultural entities (ideologies, religions, cults) constantly undermine ‘Rationality at Scale’, while RaS constantly limits cultural entities (which all work the same way), the two both being group phenomena (of very different kinds) that are in a back-and-forth forever war.

    But as Geoff mentions above, cultural entities are *necessarily* false to achieve their purpose as bequeathed by our evolutionary past (see Chapter 3 in my book for this), and they convince emotively, so *not* rationally, and hence they are indeed *irrational*.

    Jordan makes it too complicated; social data shows that attitudes aligning to cultural narratives are not rational. And this is true whatever their main narrative is about (and indeed their different narratives cover a big range).

    However, this does not mean they are all bad by any means. The reason we act this way is that it was once a huge evolutionary *advantage*, and benign religious moral frameworks along with their good works are an example of this. Geoff cites the similar case of good and bad in socialism. But in modern times there are more cultures in competition for our support, which can rise more swiftly in an interconnected world (so reducing the effect of plodding realism catching up), and due to the huge technical power of humans now, the risks are enormously higher when things tilt to the bad. I doubt anyone has any idea whether cultural entities are still net good, but for sure they can have extremely negative phases, and also it’s hard to think of *any* upsides to some of them (climate catastrophism being one, extreme-trans rights being another).

    The reason they can be so bad is that they are fundamentally irrational at heart, so indeed their good works too are ultimately a function of the same emotive, so irrational, commitment. Again as Geoff notes, we all have to try and temper or step back from our ideological inspirations, as the only way to see what they achieve that is bad, as well as good. We are not all Vulcans so can’t step back completely, nor perhaps would we want to go that far, but the world right now is stuffed full of very convincing examples of tribalism of every sort making big gains against Rationality at Scale.

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  10. Geoff:

    Andy is talking about beliefs in cultural narratives.

    Yep.

    He makes some exceptions for the “narratives” of democracy, law and science. Like most people, those are three narratives I “believe” in, but I’m not sure what his justification is for that.

    Cultural narratives are emergent, necessarily false, emotive, and have an existential angle of some kind. If there’s enough social data, we can detect the emotive attitudes of publics to them, which indeed will be illogical via the systemic difference between unconstrained and reality-constrained responses.

    These narratives cause such strong reactions that they are far-and-away the best co-ordination mechanisms for humans, even in practice uniting over a billion individuals to the same narrative, and in theory with no upper limit. And this extremely strong coordination behaviour is ultimately subconscious, and in ardent believers will make intelligence its slave (so intelligence is no defence against cultural belief).

    Outputs of Rationality at Scale, democracy, science, and the law, are in pure form not arrived at via a process that uses selection of the most emotive and capturing narrative variants, but are tied to evidence (science & the law) and what people want (rather than what cultural narratives say they should want).

    This doesn’t mean we should believe blindly in the supposed outputs of RaS any more than we should for cultural narratives. Because they are rarely pure due to the constant attempts by cultural entities to subvert RaS. Seeing which are corrupted or at lest tainted and which are not isn’t easy, but underlying principle of Ras working are free speech and complete transparency, and so how much these seem present or absent in the production of specific RaS outputs, is indicative of their likely provenance.

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  11. Ron:

    The “natural,” pre-experimental, or mythical mind is in fact primarily concerned with meaning—which is essentially implication for action—and not with “objective” nature. . .And, in truth—in real life—to know what something is still means to know two things about it: its motivational relevance, and the specific nature of its sensory qualities. The two forms of knowing are not identical; furthermore, experience and registration of the former necessarily precedes development of the latter. Something must have emotional impact before it will attract enough attention to be explored and mapped in accordance with its sensory properties.

    The bit in bold is not true, it’s an illusion. The job of cultural entities is to glue people together in such an unconditionally tight way that they’ll serve the entity at all times, for the ardent even to to the extent of giving their life for the cultural group.

    The way this is achieved is through huge emotive commitment, and the narratives that best do this are emergent and arbitrary. They inculcate a sense of meaning and so appear to satisfy a desire for such, but through long gene-culture co-evolution and cultural group selection, this very desire is a part of the system, and does not relate to any real meaning at all, as we ought to know from the main narrative themes of all cultural entities, e.g. “capitalism is evil” or “a superior race”.

    While its a big exaggeration to tie all rational investigation to strong cultural inspiration, it is indeed a paradox that cultural membership and its motivations have inspired many such investigations. However, this does not in any way make the cultural belief any kind of ‘form of knowing’; for good or for bad (and indeed both occur), they are still just arbitrary stories that arose through emotive selection and group dynamics, and they are always false.

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  12. Granted Andy. Yet isn’t it true that the way cultures bind people together tightly is by providing meaningful narrative, which makes living and acting out meaningful to those in its grasp. With climate change, we skeptics engage all the time with climatists, including credentialed scientists displaying motivated reasoning, and incapable of considering alternative evidence or conclusions.

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  13. Ron,

    Yet isn’t it true that the way cultures bind people together tightly is by providing meaningful narrative, which makes living and acting out meaningful to those in its grasp.

    Not unless we consider the word ‘meaningful’ as completely arbitrary, because the emergent narratives are themselves completely arbitrary, excepting that they must be false, highly emotive and with an existential angle. I don’t think we can call ‘meaningful’ meaningful if it is a) always false and so b) does not relate to anything real whatsoever. I think Peterson is implying some meaning that is not a completely arbitrary fictional tale, and he is almost certainly not taking into account that they all must be false too.

    With climate change, we skeptics engage all the time with climatists, including credentialed scientists displaying motivated reasoning, and incapable of considering alternative evidence or conclusions.

    Social psychology can’t say anything about individuals, only large groups, and credentialed climate scientists are far too small and under-explored a demographic on which to have reasonable social data.

    But speaking generally about those kind of behaviours, they do indeed seem to match expectations from cultural belief. And indeed heavy bias or motivated belief that is blind to evidence, and demonizes those who try to present it, emphasizes the grip of the fictional on believers, and so their avoidance of true meaning.

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  14. Jaime,

    Reality is catching up with the propaganda, the lies and the fantasies. Real science and hard data is catching up. These things are promoting and gestating the formation of a counter cultural narrative.

    Hopefully. The two things that can realistically fight the growth or dominance of a culture on a shortish timescale (i.e. maybe 1 or 2, not lots of, generations) are harsh reality, and another competitive cultural entity (which may be just as bad).

    The harsh realities of implementing Net Zero, coupled with the Ukraine war and other international realities, does seem to be having an effect. But whether it’ll undergo a near term defeat is another matter; Net Zero and ‘sustainability’ are still the dominant policy in the West and beyond, with concessions so far being just that, rather than outright defeats. Another problem is that cultures very rarely roll over and die; they morph into something different, effectively adapting to hostile circumstances. What it will morph to I don’t know, but the increasing hook-ups of climate catastrophism to world health mandates and food plus food supply issues globally, are of particular concern.

    And while a counter culture narrative driven from the grass roots is absolutely fine, and indeed necessary to make an impact, it has to stay mainly rational; what we don’t want is a counter culture that gets too emotive and rampant in victory, ending up as an actual cultural entity or belief-system in its own right, because one day, in very different ways, it’ll be just a s bad 0:

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  16. The counter culture looks fairly healthy to me at this stage, comprising a growing number of people who have become acutely aware of the tactics of alarmists (which are becoming ever more desperate and transparent) and are kicking back very strongly at attempts to censor and dismiss them – be it on ‘the science’ or Net Zero. Here is a good example:

    https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/06/13/skeptical-science-gets-comeuppance-on-social-media/?amp;utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=skeptical-science-gets-comeuppance-on-social-media

    Another fine example is the huge public cynicism generated by the Met Office announcement of the warmest Spring ever. It caught Met Office staff and BBC weather presenters off guard. Perhaps the response was not entirely rational but it was a cultural phenomenon rooted in a shared experience of the actual weather during spring combined with a growing public awareness that the Met Office has a political agenda – which is to spin a warming narrative.

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