Essay by Eric Worrall
“How do we return to that common conversation?” asked President Obama. But for team Obama, there never seems to be an effort to turn that attempt at introspection on themselves.
In 2023 President Obama complained it was impossible for people to have a conversation about issues like climate change with people who didn’t share a common set of facts. But I believe the malaise goes much deeper.
… “Today what I’m most concerned about is the fact that, because of the splintering of the media we almost occupy different realities, right? If something happens that, you know, in the past everybody could say, ‘All right, we may disagree on how to solve it, but at least we all agree that, yeah, that’s an issue.’ Now people will say, ‘Well, that didn’t happen,’ or, ‘I don’t believe that,’ or, ‘I don’t care about the science,’ or, ‘I’m not concerned about these experts, you know, ’cause they’re just all liberals’ or, you know, ‘That’s just conservative propaganda.'”
“And one of, I think, the goals of the Obama Foundation and one of the goals of my post-presidency is: How do we return to that common conversation? How can we have a common set of facts?” …
Read more: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/obama-grapples-americas-different-realities-how-can-we-have-a-common-set-of-facts/
I used to have a socialist friend, who I met in secondary school. Despite our different views on politics, which produced friendly but animated discussions about society’s settlement, about capitalism and workers rights, we hung out a lot. We swapped Larry Niven books, talked about mankind’s glorious future, about artificial intelligence and the possibility of visiting another planet in our lifetimes.
I used to visit Skeptics Society events with my friend. I never joined – whenever I was asked I joked “I’m too skeptical”. Our team of four did really well, frequently winning prizes in the trivia contests. Skeptics trivia contests are nerd events for nerds, where a bunch of university professors and students are challenged to recall the most weird historical and scientific facts you can imagine. I usually answered the really unusual questions, like “what sex was the first computer?”. The question “What did Hitler eat for breakfast?” – the comedian who answered “Eva Braun” got a bonus point.
Then the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. My friend was deeply shocked – despite the Soviet Union’s annual grain shortages thanks to their broken farming system, generously topped up by large US financed and supplied grain imports, my friend believed the Soviet economy genuinely rivalled the US economy, that Soviet socialism was a viable alternative to capitalism.
For a few years after the Soviet collapse he was lost – he didn’t really want to hang out, he lost interest in reading science fiction, there was something missing.
In 1994 that all changed. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last dictator of the Soviet Union, launched a new environmental movement.
… In 1994, Maurice Strong (Secretary-General of the Rio Earth Summit) and Mikhail Gorbachev, working through organizations they each founded (Earth Council and Green Cross International respectively), launched an initiative (with the support from the Dutch Government) to develop an Earth Charter as a civil society initiative. The initial drafting and consultation process drew on hundreds of international documents.
An independent Earth Charter Commission was formed in 1997 to oversee the development of the text, analyze the outcomes of a world-wide consultation process and to come to an agreement on a global consensus document. …
Read more: https://earthcharter.org/about-the-earth-charter/history/
My friend was re-invigorated. But he was different. He turned his back on his former techno-optimism, claiming that we were doing terrible damage to the planet, that we had to ration and cut back on our industrial footprint. He suggested I was a climate criminal for not caring about CO2 emissions. When I pointed out the Earth had been much warmer in the past, he replied “yes, but not in the last 200,000 years when humans walked the Earth”. He also developed an interest in S&M, and started talking about how the age of consent should be lowered, and defended late term abortions. I persisted for a while, I really wanted to understand what had gone wrong with my friend and help him find his way back, but it became impossible to pretend there was anything left of our once close friendship.
Underneath his environmentalism he was still a socialist, but his views on socialism had become more radical. Rather than simply advocating for stronger workers rights, he now believed capitalism was a blight on the planet, that the greedy chaotic excesses of our unregulated consumerist society was on the brink of destroying the world. He blamed unregulated capitalism for destroying the Soviet Union, by seducing the Soviet people away from communism with the lure of useless consumerist trinkets. I pointed out there was no shortage of these “useless trinkets” in his home, which seemed to make him angrier.
The Skeptics Society also changed. From a lighthearted place where even the most outrageous comments were treated as a hilarious diversion and an excuse for an animated debate, they became an ugly place where only some forms of dissent are tolerated.
When James Randi, the famous stage magician who spent much of his career exposing fake TV psychics, suggested it was reasonable to question climate claims, members of the Skeptics society reacted with fury. Randi had to defend his right to question scientific claims against people who called themselves skeptics. Overnight, for many people, Randi went from a celebrated champion of skepticism to being a traitor who had sided with the deniers. Randi also pointed out elsewhere in the response partially quoted below that some comments were kinder – but why fling such accusations in the first place?
James Randi Educational Foundation
JREF Swift Blog
I AM NOT “DENYING” ANYTHING
DetailsWritten by James Randi Published: 17 December 2009
Well, my piece on AGW — Anthropogenic Global Warming — has elicited a huge response, both positive and negative. The subject, dealing with the influence of our species on the observed increase in overall temperatures around the globe — said to be about 0.7º Celsius — is apparently a matter of great contention, and I almost regret having entered into it. Almost…
I must say that much of the commentary I see refers to “about one degree” without specifying Celsius or Fahrenheit scales. I’m so old-fashioned and fuddy-duddy that I sometimes refer to the Celsius scale as Centigrade, though it was Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius — almost two centuries ago — who came up with the plan to divide the span between the temperature at which water ice melted, and water boiled, into 100 parts. Only at -40º do the Fahrenheit and Celsius thermometers agree, but life is complicated, and we have to deal with such facts. Since about 1980, Celsius has become fashionable. For some perverse reason, and at risk of another storm of comments, I rather think that the USA should drop Fahrenheit — a German/Dutch scientist even more dead than Celsius — along with inches, pounds, quarts, miles, yards, furlongs, and other cute but incompatible units we inherited from the UK. But then, I’m a confirmed fuddy-duddy, as you know.
Back to business. Somehow, my AGW commentary was seriously misunderstood by some. Part of the reason for that is probably due to the fact that I took a much longer, 5,000-word piece, and cut it down to about 1,400 words to better fit Swift‘s needs. Along the way, some clarity was lost. For that, I apologize. But here are a couple of the typical negative comments I received, which are unfounded:
“Randi just came out against the science that indicates that Global Warming is happening, that it is man made, and that it will harm our biosphere (and is currently doing so).”
“I was also saddened by Randi siding with the GW denialists. He seems to have fallen for a number of logical fallacies, and apparently prefers self-deception and ignorance when it comes to this issue. Very, very sad.”
…
Read more: https://archive.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/806-i-am-not-qdenyingq-anything.html
I’m not the only person who has noted changes to the skeptics society. Judith Curry wrote a long article about the strange transformation of the skeptics society in 2015, if you are interested in delving deeper.
Fast forward to today, the climate movement is in retreat, with even the likes of Michael Mann admitting his original doomsday timeframe was pessimistic by 50 years. You’d think this grudging admission of error might provide a chance for the dust to settle, for people to regain a sense of proportion and balance.
But that rebalancing of society at best is happening really slowly. The hate and intolerance which grew during the dark days of apocalyptic environmentalism is still there, seeking a new target, a new way to inflict its perversity on others.
Some people in the green movement have found a new survival strategy, pivoting into becoming a less well defined anti-technology movement, focussing their hate on President Trump’s re-industrialisation programme and the rise of Artificial Intelligence.
The most puzzling part of all this, I still don’t truly understand how we got to this point. Was there a secret group sitting in the background, orchestrating everything all along? Did the fall of the Soviet Union cause the left to collectively lose their minds? Is today’s chaos Gorbachev’s parting gift to a world which rejected his beloved Soviet Communism? Was this hate always sitting there in potential, like some kind of vicious prion disease, waiting for ideas to be folded in a specific way which triggered a catastrophic transformation of outlook and beliefs?
If any of you know what went wrong and how to make it right, I’d really like to know. I miss the old days, when people of all political persuasions knew how to laugh, where you could literally say anything and simply face mirth and demands you prove your outrageous claims. Where socialists and capitalists could hang out in the same room and drink beer and be friends and have long debates into the night about what was best for society.
While I think we’ve made progress, picking away at the most absurd climate claims, helping to convince the public they’ve been lied to, I feel like the battle is far from over. I can’t help thinking that somehow we’re only treating the symptoms, that some underlying sickness is still eating away at our society, constantly evolving into new, more virulent strains as old masks are exposed and discarded. Treating the symptoms might be keeping society on life support, but I fear that if we don’t find a way to identify and correct the underlying wrongness, it could still claim us all.
I agree with President Obama to an extent, we need to find a way back to the point we can all sit in the same room and have a civilised conversation, if such a conversation is possible with people who have expressed some of the vile views we’ve seen and heard. But Obama is dead wrong in thinking that people who disagree with Obama have to do all the changing.
