Food for thought: Why we suck at conceptualizing Climate Change

Food for thought: I think I understand why we're really bad at conceptualizing and fearing Climate Change.

I expanded on this before in my letter to Greta Thunberg (that I have yet to publish on this blog. Oops. I'll do that next). But here is the basic logic I'm working with.

First of all, humans are bad at conceptualizing and thinking about Climate Change because of it's sheer size and scale. It's a huge problem that touches on literally every area of human existence, be it so constrained to our mother Earth. And it's interlinked. The different aspects of it, and the different systems it involves, are far too complicated to explain especially given a world driven by sensationalism and very short, sweet content (looking at you TikTok). It's so large and vast, that to make sufficient documentation to a level that most people with a high school and maybe some kind of college degree would understand would end up producing a documentary that is hundreds of hours long. It's no wonder that the academic world is flooded with this papers, and yet none of them are picked up and explained by news organizations because they're long, because they're complex, even for news people, it no longer seems to be the priority (even though it really is the priority at this point) and it doesn't fit into the style of new media they are trying (and often hilariously failing) to adapt to.

So that's step one.

But now I've figured out the second half as to just why everyone, and more specifically the West, is really bad at understanding and figuring out how to report it.

I've been diving into a pretty fascinating book: Richard E. Nisbett's The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently... and Why?. I'm only about 2 chapters in but it's already been one of the most enlightening books I've ever read. Anyway. Highly recommend. But to boil it down for you, it emphasizes that Western thought, with it's Ancient Greek philosophical traditions, is driven by rhetoric, logic, and abstract thinking, focusing on individual objects and the laws that one can use to influence that object, it's fundamental makeup, often removing it from the context of the world and placing it in an abstract state of mind.

The East, by contrast, along Ancient Chinese philosophical traditions, are more interested in the relationships of objects to the world, or the world in relation to the object. There is no such abstraction, and hence fewer developments in science but better social cohesion. "Where Westerners see an object, Easterners see a substance" is one way it's been put. Another way of saying this, to use a more modern term, is "Network Thinking." (and it may have played a large role in how Asian countries and micro-nations have been able to more successfully combat Coronavirus than the West. Westerners tend to think of the one friend that you visit and how they might get sick whereas Asians think more about who they are connected to and how the sickness may spread.

We live in a Western oriented world. The West is not only dominant and successful (judging by it's own metrics), but the rest of the world is adopting Western traditions of logic and hard science in order to compete with it, case in point China and it's very, very rapid industrialization and modernization. Things are definitely changing, and we'll see where everything goes, but this has serious implications for developments in the modern world.

Such as computing. In responding to one of my lectures I realized that because the world is very Western dominated it's also very logic dominated and logic heavy. It's not something people think about but computing up until now has been heavily based on making machines that extrapolate the rules of  logic to an unbelievable level. Only recently have we got better at social networking and using "big data" to better understand the world from the top down instead of the bottom up (this is something the Chinese are already excelling in now that they've caught up to the West. Another fascinating read is Kai-Fu Lee's AI Superpowers).

The thing about Western and Greek philosophy is that formal logic often breaks down when trying to apply it again to the real world. Because you're focusing on abstractions and making assumptions, you get further and further from the real world. You work from the bottom up, starting with one or two premises or concept and working through to a complex process to a solution, instead of observing an innumerable number of factors and making judgements based on holistic reasoning.

So maybe this is why we're really bad at talking about Climate Change. In the West, we have our heads so far into the clouds with formal logic and abstraction that we can't see and feel the changes and imbalances is nature and can't fathom them because we can't cope with the copious number of parameters involved in Climate Change, hence "XYZ causes Climate Change" being the insidious objective of journalists and philosophers. And perhaps it even contradicts the idea of formal logic and science being the be all end all of human survival and intelligence. Meanwhile the Chinese, who have been far more agriculturally minded for generations are occupied catching up to the West and evolving to the world around them to maintain their stability and harmony with it, causing massive environmental devastating along the way. The difference is that the Chinese tend to have a greater wariness or concept of Climate Change than the West and are much better at scaling up solutions than the highly secular West.

But because we live in a Western-centric world (we'll see how long that lasts) dominated by formal logic, with all it's flaws, Climate Change continues to lack comprehension and urgency, despite it probably having a lot to do with the major events of 2020.

This also kind of relates to a Climate Change denial, because formal logic, secularism and individualism allows people to rationalize things to the point of total delusion, putting themselves in an entirely different universe to that of the real world. Enlightenment movements in Europe (such as the French Revolution) were purges of this kind of delusional thinking as how authorities were able to use and abuse it to affect regular citizens, and of course these kinds of people must of made their way over to the United States to escape those purges, resulting in the current, resilient cult of ignorance and delusion currently plaguing the system. I maintain a belief that most people are indulging in these delusions with ulterior motives, such as economic or community hardship (and have the privilege to do so) or for profit like their predecessors.

Of course the flipside in Asia is that highly networked authorities have the ability to govern the truth if it isn't to their liking, which is likewise very frightening.

Food for thought.