How runaway cultural change can meet runaway climate change
Stories are the fast sinews of culture
Hi, I’m Loukas. Born in London, live in Stockholm and thinks a lot about climate change and culture. I’ve been doing journalism for a quarter of a century, have a history degree, a masters in media and culture and I’m currently training as a teacher.
This is your weekend reading – about ways forward in the climate crisis based on culture and stories.
I’ll start with a question
How do things change? How can things change fast enough for us to survive the climate emergency? Since I’m not an engineer or a politician, my choice of action is to focus on how culture can change and how that can allow us to change our physical world – in order to emit staggeringly less carbon.
Reading one of my teacher training textbooks I was struck by a passage that described research on how different families coped with losing income. The study suggested that the children in the family would feel much better or much worse depending on how their parents described what was happening, and how they talked about it. I think there’s a parallel here, since we ourselves accustomed to living in the fossil carbon age may soon be about to feel ‘poor.’
Surviving the climate crisis does mean certain things we are used to will be limited, at least for a time. For example jet plane travel and driving cars in cities. So in this situation stories can play three roles. 1. They allow us to see our changed and difficult situation in a positive and powerful way and to avoid us falling into depression. 2. They also allow us to legitimise new action, that makes our changed lives more bearable; and 3. they also direct us towards making the changes that cut emissions fastest.
For example, imagine that in two years a panicked government of a major country pulls an emergency brake and declares a “carbon lockdown”. We would need to react with these three kinds of stories I mentioned above. For example:
1. Stories that help us understand and cope with being in this strange limited state, and which make us feel like participants rather than simply feeling a huge mourning for our old lives and desperation to set the clock back.
2. We would also need stories that describe what kinds of lives we demand from the panicked politicians in order to make sure we would have a good carbon lockdown – maybe vastly more ships should be diverted to passenger duty to allow people to keep travelling to see family, for example.
3. And we would also need stories that told us which actions were really useful, like hooking everyone up with clean electricity, and which measures were just for show, the climate equivalents of banning plastic straws.
I’m not an expert on what things are really effective at cutting carbon. Ask someone like Professor Kimberly Nicholas for that. There’s already a lot of research into what measures are needed to minimise the harmful effects of this climate crisis. There’s scientists and engineers working on how the energy system could be changed, there are social scientists analysing what kinds of societies can survive climate change best. So that is not what I want to talk about here, because I’d probably not say anything new and I might be wrong. Rather I want to talk about how we can already start making the stories that will shape our lives into better directions that fit with the planetary crisis.
Seeing with fresh eyes
So to return to my first question, ‘how do things change?’ one way is that things change by people seeing what is already around themselves but they understand and use the things differently. To take an example from military history, the bow and the spear were known of as weapons for hundreds of years, but it was only when they started being seen as truly game-changing systems that they could be used to win the English victories of Crécy and Agincourt against the French or make the Swiss pike units into the terrors of Europe. Likewise the principle of the steam engine was known in ancient times, but not used for anything much other than toys. I suspect that all the technological and social solutions we really need are already here in the world with us, and just need to become used on a massively wider scale. So I propose that what is needed is for us to collectively have a different attitude to them, and that means a change in culture.
This collective way we see things, how we might think of the bow as something just for peasants to hunt with, instead of something that can destroy an army of brightly shining knights, is part of our culture. Given that we have only around 100 months to dramatically reduce carbon emissions, how can our culture change fast enough? And given that the effects of climate change will be felt for hundreds of years even if we stop emitting today, how can our culture respond fast enough?
The theory of fast interests versus slow ones is something that Alex Steffen talks about in his letters, which I encourage you to follow. He points out that above all we need to move fast (and break things). How this can happen right now is something I think about a lot. My own theme, as you know, is stories, and I think it is in storytelling that we can find an answer to how culture can change rapidly and so it is in storytelling that fast interests can find cultural leverage.
Stories reflect wider culture but they can also effect change on culture. As we see with memes, elements of storytelling can be replicated and have a ripple effect on others and hence shape the general perspective for how we see a certain event or situation that already exists. A given story can take what a lot of people are already feeling and put it into a few words; and then, by being shared by even more people, it can create a funnel-effect whereby the general attitude to that situation has to relate to the story which has become the dominant interpretation of what is going on.
Stories are fast and wide
How I describe the fast power of stories over culture is that ‘stories are the sinews of culture.’ Culture may be massive and made of heavy and deeply-established structures, but stories are the thin, flexible and incredibly strong tendons that hold it all together, and when a sinew pulls, culture moves. We reproduce our culture constantly by telling and re-telling stories, and likewise if we start to tell different stories these can start to tug on our cultural fundaments and move our heavy civilizational limbs. Stories are therefore fast culture, and so this is where I think the fast cultural change we need can start. A lot of the time you are born into a culture, or it surrounds you. You copy and follow it without ever really stating what you are doing, because your everyday life is made up of a million small actions motivated by your culture and limited by your culture and defined by your culture. But stories, on the other hand, are the explicit and open and obvious parts of culture. They are the bits that we need to say out loud, because it is only by being spoken that a story ever exists. So they are also the more rational and organised aspects, which can be tinkered with by telling them differently.
To come back to the ongoing theme of my letters from the start, stories are powerful and they are a power that lies available to all of us. They are hence profoundly democratic as forms of power. Anyone can write a story and anyone can tell a story, and it is only by being accepted and re-told that a story can have any power. The entire history of the modern state could be seen as an attempt to try to get all its citizens to believe and follow the same stories. The fact that modern societies are instead fracturing along lines made up of rival stories shows what a difficult process it is to get complex human brains to all believe and tell the same stories.
Making the future from a box of scraps
Turning now to where the stories can come from. Given that we need to be fast, and set in motion these new stories, I think rather than us creating some shining neo-religion that worships ecology, or some ideology of zero-carbon industry, I think what we will end up doing is pick up existing stories and re-tell them for new times. We already know that old myths can become new systems under social pressure. The Asa faith of the Norse peoples became more systematic and written when it collided with Christianity, as did the Vedic gods that became organised into Hinduism when they responded to the Buddhist revolution. I think there already exist the stories around us that we will – and are – re-telling with a new underpinning climate sensibility.
So we both need to re-purpose existing social and technological means to create a low-carbon world, and we also need to re-purpose existing stories to make a culture that can carry out this task. For example, we can use established understanding of what was needed during previous war times or pandemic times to articulate why we need massive activity. Without taking sides in the debates about the Covid-19 measures, it’s clear that all the various measure have shown that great changes in our everyday lives are possible if we see enough of a threat, that rapid technological development is possible as with the vaccines, and also that existing systems such as digital communication, can be stepped up on a massive scale.
Basically we’re going to need to take whatever stories are lying around and jury-rig them into the raft of culture that is good enough to float us through this era of crisis. The good news is that culture and stories are very flexible but also solid things. While the fact that we live in a “post-truth era” is often presented as a bad thing, it carries a very hopeful lesson inside it. People can care more about their stories than they do about material reality. People will vote for economic chaos because of English nationalism, people will refuse the vaccine because they think it is associated with liberalism. I think this is simply a modern version of the fact that humans have always lived swimming in culture ever since our huge brains became devoted to language and communication. Palaeolithic patterns of food gathering have been explained by scientists as based more on what relationship people culturally had to their food sources – plants and animals – than based on a desire to simply maximise the most food from these sources. In many basic ways we are still the same animals as we were 50,000 years ago, and act out the same kinds of behaviour, where our culture is dominant, in this new context.
So the seed of hope that I find in these chaotic post-truth times is that human life is as shapeable as our culture is. We can mould the clay of culture based on what kinds of outcomes we want to have. While the carbon budget may not care about our feelings, it is yet our feelings about carbon, codified and organised by cultural stories, that will affect how the climate actually changes, and what kinds of civilizations we build in response to the changes.
I’ve thrown a lot of ideas into this letter, and I wrote in a bit of a rush because it’s my birthday tomorrow and I’m preparing a party. I might need to follow the ideas up separately. If anything in particular was interesting or confusing to you I’d appreciate you letting me know.
Loukas
p.s. I an indebted to conversations with Dr Catherine Heinemeyer for helping me develop
insights that I have used in this letter.