Cabbage does not exist and here is the proof.

I do not like cabbage. Therefore, I have decided that cabbage does not exist.

The claims of scientists that cabbage does exist are merely unproven hypotheses.

The evidence offered for the existence of cabbage is either flawed, or the science has been done improperly; as it posits the existence of a nonexistent thing, it must therefore be based on error.

It makes no difference to my conclusion how many other people say that cabbage does exist, or how expert they are on the subject; they are simply jumping on the cabbage bandwagon; they are in it for the money, and no consensus on the existence of cabbage will be meaningful while there are still a few, honest people like me who continue to challenge this claim.

On occasions, someone has pointed to a green, roughly spherical object and said; ‘Look, a cabbage.’ I am willing to accept that there may be some circumstances under which cabbage-like objects may exist, but this is not definitive proof, as the object is just as likely to be a papier mache model, and everyone knows how unlike real life models are. Anyone who believes, from the output of models, that cabbage is clearly present, is simply mistaken. The resemblance to a cabbage is coincidental.

As I do not accept the existence of cabbage, I am not afraid of bing fed cabbage, or of the consequences of being fed cabbage.

I have a suspicion that the claims of the existence of cabbage may be motivated by a conspiracy of governments who want us to change our meat-eating habits, restrain our traditional freedoms and/or find an excuse to take more of our wealth in the form of tax.

Thirty years ago, they said that  we were entering a cabbage-free world; why should I listen know if they start telling me the opposite?

My stance on cabbage is self-evidently rational and scientific, so anyone who contradicts it is ipso facto either an idiot or a gullible fool, or both.

I am not a member of the House of Lords.

Strangely (,) like a hobbit: is this B.A.D.?

This is for Blog Action Day.

We are like them, perhaps; we know we wish to ’save the Shire’,  to conserve or preserve that which we hold valuable in our homeland. We know without thought, given the choice between the industrial and the bucolic, between keeping or losing that which around us is of Nature, that we prefer to keep, to protect, to preserve for others into the future.

This is a real transformation in the nature of  our thought, and has steadily seeped into our consciousness for the past few decades, until now it can be said that, for many people in the developed world, the quality of civilised life is intimately tied with a sense of connection to that which is yet untouched by civilisation.

This does not mean that we are thus obdurately pastoral or romantic about this other part of the world which remains outside our city walls, but suggests that a respect for the otherwise-than-possessed  (that which is not acquired, worked or transformed by us, for us) is now a reality.

But against this hopeful picture we must place that other picture of our relationship exemplified by the servants of the ‘Dark Lord’. The desire for power, the lust for possession and control, the eagerness to rule, or to share in power, which places us as privileged in competition with other humans. We may feel as if we care for Nature, that Nature matters to us and for us, and yet we are still ‘citizens’, members of a human community which is defined by the construction of its cities, its walls and fences, farms and ‘land improvements’.

And so we live uneasy, many of us in  the social, sub-urban, sanitised greenness of a compromised rural idyll somewhere between the Big City and the Wilderness, enjoying the benefits of our civilisation yet dreaming of being liberated from civilisation’s constraints, whilst outside our privileged places in the developed and technologically sophisticated parts of the world, we know there are millions for whom this is a meaningless triviality, for whom the lack of development is a challenge to survival and comfort which remains to be resolved.

And so we face a challenge ourselves. We have a standard of what ‘good living’ is which allows us, through wealth and complex social support mechanisms, to want to save the environment, and yet we also have a standard which persists in telling us that the preservation and protection of our human lives is also a ‘good’, demanding that we prevent, if we can, the unnecessary human suffering which we know of without ourselves being victims.

Somehow, we must find a way to help others in the world attain that standard of ‘good living’ which we now take for granted, without doing what we did (as societies) in order to reach that standard ourselves; without appropriating the wilderness, without cutting down the forests and planting crops, without building power plants or burying the land beneath a layer of concrete and pesticides.

And so we look at what is already in the world, what exists as resources ready-to-hand, what  the sum of human property and wealth is, and measure it against the sum of need. And we find…we find that, whilst constrained by logistics and location, there is already enough to go around, enough for all to share the standard which is our ‘good life’. So why do those others go hungry, why do they still need to ‘develop’ where once was nature? In part, it is a product of those logistics; the goods needed for good living must be within reach. In part it is a product of imbalances in some places, where the capacity of the land to sustain the population and survive itself has been compromised and we find ourselves compelled to push further along the path of destruction because it is too late to go back.

So what makes us like hobbits? Without getting into arguments about the cultural or ethical assumptions embedded in Tolkein’s work, there is a model in there of what Tolkein and his friends saw as the  ‘way of goodness’ in us ordinary mortals. We are placed in a world of forces much greater than ourselves, where individuals and institutions have huge and seemingly unassailable potency, compared to us.

And yet there is a task for each of us, a job to do, which we can choose to accept or not (to a void issues of determinism, we can also choose to define, first). We know it entails a burden, a self-sacrifice, an effort at the limit of our capacity to attain, a determination in the face of adversity, a trust in each other and a faith that there is in the world something which is worth preserving, worth giving up everything to save.

And here, as people who have chosen to care for our environment and the lives of the people within it, ‘our people’, ‘our homeland’, we have become, strangely, like a hobbit. Not for us the magic swords of power, or the imagined glory of the battlefield. Not for us the face-to-face encounter with an embodied representative of darkness, an epic heroic stand. We must walk, one step at a time, with those around us with whom we share a trust in mutual goodness and goodwill, an undistinguished path, to an uncertain future, without expectation of reward, beyond the knowledge that we are doing what little we can, giving what little effort we have, to save what is for us both greater and more important than ourselves; our world and all the goodness in it.

Gracious!

Turning the volume knob down on the tomorrow machine

Perhaps a part of our attitude to climate change is dependent on our attitude to the future. The science of climate change is, after all, at times a kind of futurology; an attempt to at least ascribe a probability to things yet to be. This is what the IPCC was created for, in a sense; to seek an understanding of the causal connections between present and future ‘events’ and thereby provide a ‘picture’ of what tomorrow might bring, under a given range of varied circumstances.

Even before  the issue of how well it does this is addressed, there must be a primary matter, of our attitudes to such a project in the first place. We have a long history of seeking guidance from augury, and a long history of acting in the present in an anticipation of a set of circumstances in the future which are not guaranteed, but seem likely. Is the project of climate science any different? After all, the argument about mitigation is in the end an argument both about whether we can act now to transform the future, and whether we should act.

But many people feel reluctant to allow the possibility that the future is at all ‘knowable’, or that people, as individuals or collectively, can influence future events, either because they are fatalists (often without realising it), or because they believe that the weight/inertia of the global chain of determinism is so great that it is effectively inexorable, which in turn promotes a resignation.

This is a difficult problem because our attitudes to determinism, free will, existence, fate, destiny, human potency or societal inevitability, are often formed at a very deep level, and are intimately tied in to our sense of who we are and what our place is in the world. In particular, these issues force us to address a central neurosis/challenge in our sense of identity, the question of control or power over our own lives and  the impositions on this from outside.

A large scale scientific activity which brings into the open our uncertainties about personal determinism, about freedom, about the satisfaction or thwarting of deep drives like desires, needs, guilt and shame, is therefore a threat. It is not just a threat in that what is anticipated is potentially dangerous, the very activity itself is threatening; the possibility of its existence may force upon us the requirement to decide whether we can see the world and our influence in it in a new, different way.

And this may be why some people resist. A response to ‘this will happen’, or ‘given x, y will probably happen’ is often going to be negative, simply because it contains within its construction a series of implications about how the world functions and, in particular, the role we play in shaping the future, which are potentially unpleasant to us.

If this is right, I suspect that it, too, is based on a series of misunderstandings and misapprehensions about both what climate projections involve and what they logically imply about the relationship between the present and the future, and the role of humans in it. It is also probably often based on  a very simplified, unformed sense of how the world works, rather than a serious attempt to rationalise such a complex matter.

But perhaps this might explain why communication so often breaks down, why it is so difficult to  get action from people. The very process of climate science when it is engaged in projection, in futurology, strikes at deeply embedded neuroses and unarticulated fears which force upon the person a ‘fight or flight’ response; denial to preserve the sense of self-determination in the world, or resistance to fortify the sense of personal potency, of agency, in a world which otherwise might just possibly be too big and too out of control to handle. In other words, for some people, coming to terms with the idea of climate science may require first a coming to terms with their own existential being. Its a lot to ask of an everyday person-in-the-street.

I was going to write about whether  it makes sense to think in terms of ‘prediction’, when so much of our histories are about how the unpredicted came about, or are, alternatively, about hindsight and the juggernaut that is historical inevitability (its probably an illusion).

We are engaged in a task the like of which has never been attempted before, to rewrite the future before it comes to pass, with a greater price to pay for failure than has ever been at stake before; the persistence of a world, an environment, which is still beautiful, rich, varied and valuable to our descendants. And this will require all our best attributes; courage, determination, refusal to give up, fighting against difficult odds, resolving our weaknesses and making of them strength. If we want to turn down the volume knob on the tomorrow machine, we will have to be heroes. A bit.