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Climate Change and the Importance of Creeds-End Fit
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| | Sentences 1 and 2 do not seem significantly different to me.
For this reason, among others, Richard Lazarus has referred to climate change as a "super wicked problem." I don't understand how this reference furthers your argument. |
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Fair point! Feel free to omit sentence 2 or 1 as you like.
"super wicked problem" is a term of art referring to problems that are very difficult solve. It's just an expression, basically.
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| | Thurman Arnold writes that successful organizations have creeds that provide a sense of cohesion to members and coordinate their actions. An important challenge with respect to climate change is organizing people to press for needfulneeded/necessary? I understand needful is a word, but it seems odd to me. changes to climate policies in a broad range of countries. In seeking to develop such a coordinated movement, attention to the organizational implications of the creeds used to support the movement is essential. Put another way, there needs to be an assessment of creeds-end fit, and creeds which do not help sustain the type of internationally coordinated work described above should be de-emphasized.
Arnold's Theory of Organizational Psychology |
| | You're deploying Arnold as a way to think about creeds in a movement. I don't think it's necessary to spend so much time characterizing his argumentation in a paper of this length. Why not just pull out what you think is useful and move on? |
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> | Part of my project here is to help correct what I think is an incorrect interpretation of Arnold. Arnold is often characterized as as someone with an overly deterministic view of how institutions think. I'm trying to complicate that view and to defend my more (I think) subtle take on his argument. But, if you think it's a distraction from the central argument, feel to excise. |
| | However, at one point, he discusses creeds in a light indicating a certain recognition of human capability for self-reflexivity and agency. He writes of Riverside Church's famous former pastor:
With the recognition of the fact that church creeds are not searches for universal truth, we can understand better the function of churches in society. Preachers like Harry Emerson Fosdick preach realistically and effectively about the place that the Church can and should take in the community. Fosdick realizes that the creed is important only as a symbol of unity - and that the effectiveness of the Church must be judged by different standards from those of its theology.
This passage points to an interesting way of thinking about the usefulness of creeds in organizing for justice work. I guess justice work includes climate change, but why not just say climate change since that's the focus of this paper. Creeds here are things that can be reflected on and "preached" in ways that unify, but avoid becoming totalizing ideologies that disconnect from the factual world. |
| | I'm confused. Who are the creeds for? For the activists or to recruit more to the cause? I feel like most people significantly involved in movements like this already base their commitment around notions of "justice." Are there really environmental activists whose creeds are limited to the short term? I feel like you are equivocating the creeds of the movement with the rhetoric that surrounds environmental policy change. One is the organizing principle of the movement and the other is what the movement projects out in order to achieve its ends. Have I misunderstood? |
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> | This could usefully be clarified. The creeds are for both activists and new recruits. Part of my point is that people end up absorbing ideologies, even if they think they are only using them for short term political purposes. We become our political poses. Part of my argument is that a justice creed will help everyone keep their eye on the ball and will appeal to people as recruits as well. |
| | Such an incentives-based creed is perhaps good politics in the short term, but assessed as a creed capable of undergirding a social movement seeking global change, it falls short. For the end of dealing effectively with climate change, it is a poor fit. Many countries will suffer much more from climate change than the United States, and in different ways, and the United States will become reluctant to pay to help them. Energy security is not a panacea because America is the Saudia Arabia of coal. Effective action will require sacrifice now for the benefits of people later, whose interests rarely factor into contemporary calculations.
It may seem a truism that good politics is not good policy. But one thing Arnold can teach us here is that since we are not all fully rational Thinking Persons, we are all prey to the allure of creeds. They are comforting because they simplify a complex and anxious modernity, and for that reason they are seductive. We do not always rationally select our political tactics to serve our policy goals. Creeds sometimes choose people, not the reverse. Once creeds gel into an organizational psychology, they become difficult to change, even in the face of persistent facts. |
| | Why presume short-term incentives will run out? In the end, isn't this just political rhetoric crafted to drum up support for initiatives that we hope will have broader impact. Indeed, isn't that why these things always come down to factual contests between those opposed and those for? I don't see why we can't just keep inventing short-term goals until all the initiatives we want to pass have passed. |
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> | I think they will run out, and they arguably already have. When push comes to shove, there will need to be hard sacrifices and hard work done. A catch-phrase like energy independence is not going to be able to generate political support for the scale of work that has to be done. |
| | According to contemporary economists, people do not act in ways that do not maximize their utility. But history offer examples of people who have dedicated themselves to working for justice. In American history, John Brown and Martin Luther King Jr. come to mind. Another interesting example is Richard Stallman, who has steadfastly resisted the replacement of the free software movement's justice creed with the incentives creed of open source. These types of examples, of humans struggling for justice rather than for their own gain, can serve as the basis of a justice-based creed to organize a climate movement.
Right. Heroes are cut from a different mold and such movements build up around achieving larger goals. Is it any different with the movement we're discussing at present? |
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> | I'm not totally sure what this comment means. |
| | An incentives-based creed will not be to deal with the long, complex, and demanding task of supporting a global approach to climate change.
Devin, |
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< | As you know climate change is not a hot topic for me, so I come to this with little knowledge of the shape of the movement. Against that backdrop, I raise the following three points: |
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> | As you know climate change is not a hot topic for me [no pun intended I'm sure], so I come to this with little knowledge of the shape of the movement. Against that backdrop, I raise the following three points: |
| | 1) I had trouble following your argument the first time around. Your transitions, both paragraph-to-paragraph and sentence-to-sentence, are choppy, so the argument meanders rather than flows naturally from one point to the next. |
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> | [Please feel free to edit any spots that scream out to you on this front] |
| | 2) Again, the lens of your analysis is squarely on the movement itself, but I really question if that's where it should be. I feel like the argument speaks more to the problem of coordinating policy change in countries where accepted policy rationales differ. In other words, isn't it just the rhetoric of policy reform that differs country to country rather than the motives of the movement as a whole? I thought the overall goal of the movement was "save the planet"--not "we're running out of coal/oil/whatever." |
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> | [My overall argument is that for the movement in the US to sustain itself and make progress on the issue, the justice frame is important - so it is about the planet, not about dwindling coal, or peak oil, etc. I don't really see justice and incentives as interchangeable rationales for identical policies. I think they're almost different worldviews that lead to different policies and differing levels of commitment to achieve those policies against fierce opposition.] |
| | 3) Also consider that the timeline on which capitalism approaches problems is necessarily shorter than that of other organizing principles. Because America and many other countries are capitalist, doesn’t that mean that the public will (and by extension, power) in those countries can only be swayed by arguments that discuss problems in terms of their short-term consequences? In that case, perhaps the only way of passing needed regulations at all is by coaching policy rationale in short-term incentives. If it’s this or nothing, won't changing it work against the larger goal? Ultimately, I find the argument unpersuasive because I assume that environmental initiatives won't be ratified AT ALL unless we appeal to short-term incentives. I guess I don't see why we'd be better off trying to get capitalism to recognize a kind of logic that doesn't speak to what capitalism wants. |
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> | [The question of capitalism is a big one. It may be that this ordering principle is inherently antithetical to dealing with long-term externalities problems like climate change. However, I think it's not necessarily incompatible.
The argument from political pragmatism does have appeal. The old saying is that half a loaf is better than no loaf. The problem I am raising with it here is that with this issue, the quarter of a loaf we can get from an incentives creed tailored for maximum political appeal will literally do nothing to solve the problem. It is as bad as no loaf, and worse, because it wastes energy (no pun intended) that could be spent on the kinds of things that might actually be helpful, though they are unlikely.] |
| | Leakage is a hole in the strategy, but does it utterly cause you lose the war? Why can't we have the same policy objectives and just tailor the rationale to what will appeal to the largest political base country to country? Is there still a coordination problem that way? I feel like countries inevitably adopt environmental policy at different rates, so you can't get away from leakage--you're left just dealing with it the best you can. That becomes Phase 2, if you will. |
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> | [Leakage will cause the loss of this war. There's not time for Phase 2. Also there's a prisoner's dilemma - no one wants to be the first to act because everyone's afraid of everyone else free riding and everyone knows that unless everyone acts soon there is no point to anyone acting.] |
| | Still, I think the strategy/coordination/creed issue has broad implications for other global initiatives. I look forward to see how you develop it further. |
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> | [If you want to take a crack at rewrite, for clarity and structure (don't do any research, obviously), I'd be interested to see what you do.] |
| | Shawn
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