![Darmok[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/darmok1.jpg?quality=83)
So, with “eyes wide open”, I thought I’d write about it. In case you don’t know how the episode plays out, it goes like this, borrowing from the Memory Alpha Wikia description:
- The USS Enterprise-D is on a mission to attempt to establish communications between the Federation and the Tamarians after several previous attempts had failed. The Enterprise and the Tamarian vessel make a rendezvous in orbit of El-Adrel IV. The two parties try to communicate but, like the occasions before, neither party can comprehend what the other party is saying.
- Captain Picard is captured by the Tamarians, then trapped on a planet with the Tamarian captain who speaks a metaphorical language incompatible even with the universal translator. They must learn to communicate with each other before the “beast of the planet” (Memory Alpha’s label) overwhelms them.
- They are both thrust onto the planet’s surface, and the Tarmarians send out a particle beam that disrupts transporter functions. The idea is to stage a showdown between the captains, with hope that they can communicate to overcome the common enemy; the mostly invisible, hard to detect, and fleeting “beast of the planet” which manifests itself as some sort of electromagnetic disturbance.
- The Tamarian captain, Dathon, keeps repeating what appears to be nonsense phrases such as “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra”, and “Shaka, when the walls fell”. Even when Picard tries to ask factually probing questions. They bed down for the night, eyeing each other warily, and Picard fails to make a fire, but Dathon, taking pity, tosses Picard a burning stick from his own.
- Meanwhile, back on the Enterprise, they start analyzing the Tamarian language, and counselor Troi notes: “Imagery is everything to the Tamarians. It embodies their emotional states, their very thought processes. It’s how they communicate and it’s how they think.“
- The next day, repeating the same metaphors, the Tamarian captain, Dathon, looks exasperated that Picard can’t seem to “get it”, especially when Dathon offers Picard a knife, saying “Temba, his arms wide”. Picard takes this as a offer to a knife fight.
- Finally when “the beast of the planet” starts growling and making fleeting appearances, Picard takes Dathon up on the knife offer, and they start fighting the beast of the planet together. Unfortunately, knives don’t seem to matter much.
- Dathon is injured by the beast, and at the campfire that night, while dying, Picard and Dathon try once again to communicate. Dathon sticks with metaphors, Picard still asks factual questions, though some level of understanding ensues when Picard finally realizes that the Tamarian method of communications is emotive, based solely on imagery and metaphors.
- Dathon dies, and the next day while Picard starts to bury him, the beast of the planet attacks again, but by this time the Enterprise crew has disabled the transporter disruptor on the Tamarian ship and beams Picard back aboard in the midst of a fierce phaser battle between the ships.
- Picard enters the bridge, opens a channel, and repeats the series of nonsensical phrases that are metaphors (learned from Dathon) only he and the Tamarians can comphrehend. The Tamarians reply angrily but they quickly calm down when Picard addresses them in metaphor. The Tamarian first officer, hearing these familiar metaphors repeated back to him exclaims: “Sokath, his eyes uncovered!”. Meanwhile, the “beast of the planet” is ignored by both sides.
- The battle ends, the Tarmarian exclaims this understanding represents a new story/metaphor, the story of “Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel”, and they depart. Picard tries to make sense of it all, and reflects upon Homeric Hymns in his ready room, explaining to Riker that maybe more familiarity with their own mythology may help them relate to the Tamarians.
This table might be helpful for people whose eyes have already glazed over.
Tamarian Metaphors:
| Cultural Reference | Meaning |
| Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. | Friendship as a result of a fight against a common enemy. |
| Shaka, when the walls fell. | Failure. |
| Sokath, his eyes uncovered (or, his eyes open). | An understanding or realization has been achieved. |
| Kailash, when it rises. | An accident or unavoidable loss (e.g. natural disaster). |
I’m sure readers can see the parallels with climate change debate and its communications problems. One side repeatedly uses metaphors, imagery, and emotional attachments to convey the urgency of fighting the often invisible and fleeting “beast of the planet”, while the other side keeps asking pointed questions, tries to analyze what is being said and the situation, and tries to learn the language of the other side, even though it seems nonsensical. Neither side seems to get much from the other.
The climate change debate has always been mostly about two viewpoints where the players talk past one another without really understanding much of what the other says.
In “Jarmok”, the side using the imagery and metaphor was so desperate to get their story across, they even resorted to kidnapping to force an understanding, and the issue. And, they created new imagery and metaphors in a story to explain the brief moment of understanding. It reminds me of some of the desperate acts we’ve seen from climate advocates, such as Gleick willing to commit a crime, and Bill McKibben making lies in the open to tout the imagery surrounding the delivery of 2 million comments to the State Department just under the deadline, except the boxes were nothing but empty metaphors.
Recently Bob Tisdale wrote on WUWT: It Isn’t How Climate Scientists Communicated their Message; It’s the Message
While he has a point, the “how” still figures into why many people just don’t seem to care much about climate change anymore. Many people simply look at the increasingly wild imagery, metaphors, and claims used by climate change proponents, decide it is nonsensical, and simply stop trying to comprehend it anymore. Climate fatigue sets in.
A good example is John Cook’s “Hiroshima bombs” metaphor, turned into a phone app.
![Widget[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/widget1.jpg?quality=83)
Only the truly faithful pay any attention to this. Anybody with a lick of sense can see the atmosphere today doesn’t look anything like that sort of hellish imagery atomic bombs conjur up, so they chuckle and ignore it. It wasn’t even Cook’s idea, he borrowed it from James Hansen’s TED talk and tried to make it an everyday scare tactic for the science challenged.
Undeterred, Cook and company have moved onto “kitten sneezes“.
“Shaka, when the walls fell.” might very well be an apt metaphor for climate change proponents failure to communicate.
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Post Script: I had tried to visualize a similar meeting on a planet, using climate players from today. I gave up when I realized that it was likely none of the proponents would have the skills to build a fire, and even if they did, they probably wouldn’t share the burning stick like Dathon did.
Can you imagine Steve McIntyre and Michael Mann in those roles?
What we’ve got here is failure to communicate climate change.
While there is definitely a lot of talk about communication, or the lack/failure thereof, in things climate we also know that past a certain psychological point there is literally no further point in attempting to communicate.
The best example I can point to is a paper we discussed here at WUWT a few years ago now”
SOCIAL CONSENSUS THROUGH THE INFLUENCE OF COMMITTED MINORITIES
http://scf.berkeley.edu/~aldous/157/Papers/social_consensus_xie.pdf
“We show how the prevailing majority opinion in a population can be rapidly reversed by a small fraction p of randomly distributed committed agents who consistently proselytize the opposing opinion and are immune to influence. Specifically, we show that when the committed fraction grows beyond a critical value pc ≈ 10%, there is a dramatic decrease in the time Tc taken for the entire population to adopt the committed opinion.
“Human behavior is profoundly affected by the influenceability of individuals and the social networks that link them together. Well before the proliferation of online social networking, offline or interpersonal social networks have been acknowledged as a major factor in determining how societies move toward consensus in the adoption of ideologies, traditions, and attitudes [1,2]. As a result, the dynamics of social influence has been heavily studied in sociological, physics, and computer science literature [3–7]. In the sociological context, work on diffusion of innovations has emphasized how individuals adopt new states in behavior, opinion, or consumption through the influence of their neighbors. Commonly used models for this process include the Threshold model [8] and the Bass model [9]. A key feature in both these models is that once an individual adopts the new state, his state remains unchanged at all subsequent times.”
I tend to think that the last sentence is most relevant to this discussion.
Sorry, you lost me at…’Next Generation Star Trek episode’.
On January 4, 1903, Thomas Edison electrocuted an elephant at Luna Park Zoo on Coney Island to “communicate” his idea (DC) was better than that of Nicola Tesla and George Westinghouse, namely, alternating current (AC).
In 2014 we have a photo courtesy of fanpop.com. of a cute kitten and a message that is equally at odds with facts. So there is some progress in this communicating thing. All that is needed now is the truth.
In the USA that kitten is considered a Mackerel Tabby or a variation thereof:
http://www.catster.com/cats-101/tabby-cat
9 Mar: Holmes Report: Americans Believe Humans Causing Climate Change, Doubt Corporate Claims
More than half (60 percent) of Americans believe that climate change is a result of human action such as deforestation and burning of fossil fuels, among other factors, according to the fifth annual Sense & Sustainability Study from Gibbs & Soell, the business communications firm with expertise in sustainability consulting.
Thirty percent of US adults are skeptical while 10 percent are unsure as to the impact of human activity on significant changes in temperature or precipitation over an extended period of time. Natural weather disasters are cited by more than half (57 percent) of Americans as highly influencing their opinions on climate change…
***“The results speak to the importance of making big issues like climate change more personal and relatable,” says Ron Loch, senior vice president and managing director, sustainability consulting, Gibbs & Soell. “Even for those people not affected by an extreme weather event, news of hurricanes, droughts and blizzards evoke fear, concern and empathy. That’s why storytelling is so important when discussing issues of sustainability and social responsibility. It makes the larger problem more relevant and helps gain the kind of attention that can lead to understanding and meaningful action.”
http://www.holmesreport.com/expertknowledge-info/14673/Americans-Believe-Humans-Causing-Climate-Change-Doubt-Corporate-Claims.aspx
The best metaphor for what the climate alarmists are up to: Prince John’s tax collectors.
Wow!
Kind of profound how what we say says more about us than the subject we address.
I am reminded of a very distinguished man, who in another field of research led the fight in critical battles that defended truth and enabled those who followed him to build healthy structures for his community.
After more than a decade of being at the front of several of those confrontations, he ‘inexplicably’ withdrew and went and formed a small community, dedicated to a positive development of his research and ideas. Many who looked to his leadership were profoundly upset; there were rumors of personal crisis and his betrayal of the cause. He however refused to respond.
In memoirs published many years later he reflected back on that time. I paraphrase his thoughts… “The horn is sounded and you rise up once again to go out and do battle to defend the truth… but there comes a time when you realize, that doing battle has subtly replaced the truth, where joy is not in the triumph of the truth; but in triumph. That is when, for me, I knew I must leave and find another way…”
May you guard your hearts.
“Shaka, when the temps fell.”
Speaking of Cook’s ridiculous four bombs/second app. . . The obvious propaganda angle of trying to relate theoretical heat build-up to nuclear weapons is clear to a 7 year-old. Besides, the facts are that a nuke’s heat output is released as a short pulse and their energy output, in addition to heat, consists of of: blast (over pressure and shock), radiation and an electromagnetic pulse. His comparison to a “Big Ben” full of dynamite is just as transparent. Another pulse of some heat along with blast/shock and destruction.
I suggest a couple of alternative comparisons. One would be to have two graphs. One would be the chart as used in the current graph but overlaid with a second representation of the *total* amount of solar heat falling on Earth during the same time period. The current graph of so called *global warming heat* would disappear into the noise floor.
The other alternative could be a *per square meter chart*. To keep it as simple as possible, illustrate a graph using Christmas tree lights. In other words, a chart that shows the equivalent of current solar radiation in quarter Watt light bulbs and the additional heat of the past 50 years in a different color of bulbs.
Is there a difference between climatology and storytelling?
I just thought of a great caption for the SDA caption contest:
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/caption-contest-5.html#comments-content
I’d better hurry and put in my entry before its too late.
I hugely enjoyed that episode myself.
The many that compare CAGW to religions are nearer to the mark, they are both memeplexes. And emotive language is a major feature of memeplexes.
This was a fun read and I guess I can appreciate the attempt at sort of sanitizing the fanatical efforts of the libcult and their glo-bull warming chic crusade, but two things immediately don’t add up.
First, the idea that you could have a sophisticated tech savy culture/society that communicates primarily through emotive imagery and metaphor is just plain silly. It ain’t gonna happen. Similarly, climate change (aka AGW glo-bull warming) isn’t really science in the sense that it is based on the scientific method and rigorous standards of evidence and an honest appraisal of that evidence, Libcult “science” is steeped in the mythos of the libcult whose accolytes imagine themselves as grand and glorious saviours of the planet and pretty much everything else is manufactured/manicured/mythicological in nature, certainly NOT science.
Second, The entire article seems to be an attempt to understand and forgive those poor souls who are simply emotive in nature and (as I thought it implied) not culpable for their messy but honorable efforts. Nothing could be further from the truth. I believe a large majority of the libcultists involved in the climate change crusade know full well that their claims are not truthful and their “science” is fundamentally unscientific. I also believe they do not care. They are fanatics who are fully invested in their crusade and they wrap their entire personal lives up into that crusade, so they cannot retreat one whit or their view of the world and their place in it is at threat.
Alan Robertson says: “Hansen, when his pants caught fire.”
I think he’s got it! Nice.
Lets say, for arguments sake, that CAGW is a religion. Also, that since it takes the side of lies, that it is a devilish religion. So, one way to understand how the people, that is, the great mass of brainwashed (of a sort) people who blindly follow it, think, is to ask a devil how they got them to think that way (if it can be called thinking). So let us ask our old friend Screwtape how he did it:
It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy’s clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning. But what with the weekly press and other such weapons we have largely altered that. Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily “true” of “false”, but as “academic” or “practical”, “outworn” or “contemporary”, “conventional” or “ruthless”. Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.
The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle onto the Enemy’s own ground. He can argue too; whereas in really practical propaganda of the kind I am suggesting He has been shown for centuries to be greatly the inferior of Our Father Below. By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result?
So, what are “other such weapons” that got people to think like this? One of the biggest is television, and advertisers, who, since they are the ones who pay for the show, want the viewers to have a certain mindset. Examples, a show, the star has a choice between reason or “follow your heart”. You know how this one turns out, and if you think like an advertiser, you will understand why. Do you think an advertiser really wants people to use reason when they make their pitch? Yes, there is a sucker born every minute, but why wait when you can train masses of people to become suckers and to think that they have done the right thing to become so? There have even been entire shows dedicated to this type of training, look up “Oprahfication”, which can be explained as “maybe two plus two equals four, but how do you FEEL about that?”
Has this been successful? Think about car ads, do they usually say “our car is better, here’s why”? No, instead, they try to associate that car with purely emotional images, a car sliding in slow motion sideways through smoke, a car associated with classy British supervilliens, that sort of thing. Once you understand that, you will come to a realization, the age of reason is over. And once you understand that, two things become apparent. One is that many believe in CAGW not because of reason, but because it makes them feel good. They can feel good because they can say “I am saving the planet”, or “I am apposing THEM” (evil corporate greed types, ignorant hillbilly anti science types, and other caricatures). They can also feel like part of a group, the side of right, us versus them, and other slogans (Jargon, not argument, is your best ally).
So what to do? Well, you can use the truth, but in the same way that they do. Associate CAGW with corporate greed types, say, by showing that AlGore is one (it’s better as one word, try it!). Use humor to make fun of them when they screw up (as they usually do), thus making people not want to be associated with something so laughable. Expose lies and greed in emotional ways also works for the same reason. Couch the contest in different ways, the evil large envirobusiness versus the plucky underdog (basically, this site, with it’s nonfunding by big oil, versus the billion dollar a day CAGW funding).
And, of course, lots of images. Images work on the right, emotional side of the brain, which they are used to using. Examples: One could follow AlGore around to one of his speeches, associate it with especially obnoxious religious (of a sort) shysters (which is basically what it is, it uses the exact same tricks), with one corner of the screen showing his two SUV’s and a towncar running their engines for two hours spewing out all that evil CO2 while he tells you in ridiculous ways how evil, that is. And polar bears, lots of cute, cuddly polar bears, too many polar bears since there are now at least 4 or 5 times as many as there used to be (and they may not be as cute and cuddly as you thought close up). How about some dead birds around all those wind farms, or should I say, collection of death towers (make it a nice emotional slogan, which happens to be true), start with birds, nice, singing birds, then go to the towers, now dead birds, lots of them, end with a silent, empty sky.
Basically, you get the idea, associate the “skeptics” with the plucky underdog, with good images, with “stand up to the man” (which happens to be true, since government is so behind CAGW), with protest against injustice, that sort of thing. If 350.org can do it, so can you. One the other hand, associate the CAGW side with bad images and slogans, greed (true!), hypocrisy, lies (one could make some of their lies visual, for instance, like the polar bears, the “ice free” arctic, etc), and all that sort.
In short, realize that the age of reason is over for most people, and act accordingly. Some few can be educated, but for most, jargon, advertising tricks, sloganeering, and other ways to appeal, to emotions will work better.
“I Borg” was my favorite episode. Maybe something like that could happen (let’s pretend).
Let’s say there’s blizzard. An airport is snowed in. A CAGW elitist is among the trapped.
Lets say it’s Michael Mann. At the beginning he goes around introducing himself as a Nobel Prize winner. And everyone hates him.
But over a few weeks Mann learns humility and the concept of individuality. He starts calling himself “Mike”. He says “I” more often instead of “we”.
Life goes on at the besieged airport and Mann becomes more and more decent. Something happens he has never known – people start to like him.
When the blizzard lifts, Mann goes on the to the conference of the BorgCAGW collective. There the new Michael Mann tells them his name is Mike. That they must call him that from then on.
And soon they all do it. Infected with this powerful meme they begin to act like human beings. They give up their elitism, start acting morally, their vision clears, they begin to see their former fake science for what it was, a despotic, elitist delusion.
““Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra””
I think you might have made a major misinterpretation here. This could be a valid call in Star Trek Cluedo.
Alarmist communication is pretty easy to understand. Their collective goal is that each conclusion and each sound bite that they express must terrify the proletariat (faculty-lounge-speak) more than the last. This creates an illusion of communication, or an effort to communicate, for skeptics who see or hear their words, phrases, and images occurring in Alarmist presentations. Do not be deceived, skeptics. Communication with alarmists will become a congenial affair only when all participants speak or write to terrify the proletariat.
You’ve hit upon something that I’ve noticed with left/liberal thinking. If you notice with liberal/progressive protests marches the participants are all about drum circles, puppetry, costumes, and guerrilla street theater. Facts are irrelevant and only used to support their ideological agenda. Hiroshimas per second, coal trains of death, and so on. Emotional content is everything and facts that don’t support those emotions are not only ignored but attacked. If someone could prove categorically that free market capitalism was the only way to stop CAGW, do you really think the alarmists would support it? No, because their belief system is based on anti-capitalism and anti-science. CAGW is just a lever to accomplish their real goals, which some of them can’t even articulate (remember they’re driven by emotion not rationalism).
This is the most original climate-related blog post I have read in years.
Legatus says:
March 9, 2014 at 3:56 pm
In short, realize that the age of reason is over for most people, and act accordingly. Some few can be educated, but for most, jargon, advertising tricks, sloganeering, and other ways to appeal, to emotions will work better.
Legatus, would you please write a book about this (maybe you already have)? This short post is the most cogent, thoughtful and insightful summation of the battle for the mind that is going on I have ever read. Other posters on this blog fondly hope that the warming hiatus, or coming cooling, will convince the warmists. They dream fondly of an idle fantasy. The warmists will just start saying that CO2 causes ice ages and try to reduce Earth’s population in the name of cooling instead. The point is to kill people, to save the planet from humans, not to find truth. I suggest another visual meme – ask the AlGore: how many have to die for your dream to become reality? How many birds, how many people?
Yes, Bruce Ploetz, killing people is the real goal of a lot of “environmentalism.”
The reason the alarmists have not succeeded in scaring all the public as much as they want to is because the facts are strongly against them. And because they are expensive enough to make people want proof.
The reason our side has trouble with them is twofold. One, they make a lot of money from the government’s hopes for new (carbon) tax dollars. And two, people cannot change or improve except in areas where they are more than half right. That gives them the strength to deal with corrections. I estimate the AGW alarmists are about 90% wrong.
One place they are right is the rising CO2 graph. They can count on that–Dr. Keeling was very careful in his measurements. Start there, and they have an anchor to hold on to.
Hilarious, Foolship, when the Ice embraced. Tobacco Son vanished, hiding.
Interesting idea. But. It confers an innocence upon the other party that frankly does not exist in this case. We shouldn’t be dissuaded about this. They are engaging In deliberate deception and the most gracious we can be is with the idea of nobel cause corruption. Plain and simple.
“Shaka, when the walls fell…” is an appropriate metaphor for this post but the rest of the ‘Next Generation – Star Trek analogy fails.
In the Star Trek episode Darmok, the Tamarians risked everything to achieve understanding. Dathon, their emissary, died trying to achieve mutual understanding.
Our opponents (Hansen, mann, Gleik, Cook, Gore, et.al.) are not the Tamarians. They are the Ferengi! They do not seek shared understanding or experience! They will tell any lie, any deceit, any half truth necessary to promote their agenda. They are the worst form of rent and grant seeking parasites, determined at all costs to promote themselves to adjudicators of global resource use. They want to be The Nagus. Don’t be mistaken. These ‘Ferengi’ are not capitalists. They are crony socialists who, as a result of their superior minds and efforts to save the entity Gaia while converting the ignorant masses to their Rules of Environmentalism, will reward themselves quite handsomely for ‘saving the planet’. Who will ultimately be The Grand Nagus remains to be seen….. but mutual understanding is not required. Their position is “The Science Is Settled and The Debate Is Over, you damn Deeniers!” Anything less is analogous to Bush ‘looking into Puti-Putin’s eyes and seeing peace’ before he invaded Georgia or Obama ‘pressing the reset button (mislabeled in russian “overcharge”) only to have Putin invade the Ukraine and threaten to shut off Europe’s natural gas supply.
“Shaka – when the walls fell…” means failure. Mistakenly believing our opponents have any desire for mutual understanding is self delusion… and ends in failure as well.