Climate Change and the Importance of Creeds-End Fit

The Challenge of Coordination

To deal effectively with climate change, there must be a measure of policy coordination across countries. If the United States adopts a climate law which imposes carbon emissions limits, and production simply migrates to countries with less stringer limits, global emissions will remain unchanged. This is referred to as the problem of leakage. What this means is that even if activists are successful in pushing for a strong climate law in their own country, if other countries do not cooperate, they will fail to solve the global problem of climate change. For this reason, among others, Richard Lazarus has referred to climate change as a "super wicked problem."

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 needful 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

Arnold argues that creeds are “elements common to all social organizations, large and small, whatever their purpose.” 24. The reason for the ubiquity of creeds is that humans require them in order to sustain complex patterns of interaction over time. As he writes, “Society functions like an anthill. If we were compelled to plan each day how to get food into New York City and waste out of it, we would be lost and people would starve.” 26.

Most of his discussion of creeds seems to have the character of an iconoclast loose in the temple. He compares "the Yale Law School" to a Laramie social club, and American political discourse to medieval theological debates about humors.

But Arnold also backs away from his "ant-hill" analogy at various points in the text. He invokes his identity as a lawyer, as opposed to social scientist, and claims he wishes to avoid "the vice of definition." Arnold seems more preoccupied with the ways in which the American creed of capitalism forecloses understanding of how American society actually works and less with the details of how creeds operate.

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. 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.

Ethics and Incentives

An important "creedal" issue for climate change activists is how to frame their message in a way that appeals to and motivates a broad array of audiences. As discussed above, the complexity of climate change requires the cooperation of people in many disciplines and in many countries over a long time period. In the United States, there has been a tendency to shy away from explicit discussion of justice issues with respect to climate change and to focus rather on near-term incentives of interest to Americans. For example, energy security, or clean energy jobs, or avoiding an influx of climate refugees.

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.

However, like Fosdick, we can seek to leverage what agency we can muster to develop creeds that invoke, to borrow a phrase, "the better angels of our nature." Emphasizing an ethical frame that expresses its goal as seeking justice, rather than optimizing incentives, may not be good near-term politics but at least provides a means of motivating action when individual incentives run out.

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. 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. An incentives-based creed will not be to deal with the long, complex, and demanding task of supporting a global approach to climate change.