From (male) students in my environmental philosophy courses, I sometimes receive evaluations accusing my teaching of being biased and one-sided. I need to teach “the other side” of climate and environment, I’m told. An other side funded by toxic industries (big ag, big oil, etc), diffused by social media, and emerging through the systematic perpetuation of ignorance (which can be studied through agnotology).
From administrators, I often hear that I am rocking the boat, being polemical, alarmist, or over-assured. How can I be so certain about environmental science. After all, there is room for everyone’s opinion, whether or not it is based on fact. I am told to obfuscate rather than clarify the difference between episteme and doxa, rather than to give students critical tools to examine their received doxa.
Classically, the difference between episteme (knowledge) and doxa (opinion) was incredibly important. It was the difference between what we now call science and ‘alternative facts’. But it is also the difference between people who are scientists, professional or lay, and those who have just enough knowledge to make them dangerous. This is also known as the ‘Dunning-Kruger effect’, the well-documented tendency of internet educations with confirmation-bias sewn in to provide the illusion of wisdom when all they have are a few tenuous cherry-picked facts.
It is understandable that we over-estimate our knowledge. But in a society that has completely missed the distinction between expertise and self-appointed influencers, we have lost the usual built-in safety mechanisms to make sure that headstrong over-assured contrarians don’t end up capsizing what we take to be true as a collective.
While we’re all very aware that misinformation, disinformation, and plain-old mansplaining often times is just an elaborate money-making scheme, either directly or indirectly, what might surprise many is that such tactics haven’t just entered into the government, boardroom, or establishment news, but have also become the bulwark of universities.
When academics address reflexive social science questions, such as the gaslighting of society through propaganda, from the university, we are often told that we don’t want to alienate partners, like Shell Oil, from continuing funding us. Surely, we should applaud their work in algae, or hydrogen, or their greenwashing strategy de jour. Isn’t their research in these new fuels a clear signal that things are shifting, that we can happily take their money because they are on the right side of history.
This isn’t just theoretical. I’ve been told this directly by the president of one of the university’s I’ve worked for.
When we take as given the suffering and plight of oil majors attacked by divestment policies while downplaying or outright ignoring the billions of lives injured and lost due to, say, Shell’s oil drilling around the world, or invoke the name of Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni Nine who as environmental activists in the Niger Delta were murdered by the dictatorial state on Shell’s behalf, we are playing the fair-and-balanced card. We are pretending as if any other population in the world has as much coercive influence over what we think and believe as do corporations with their giant ‘product defense industry’ exoskeleton – armies of lawyers, PR people, marketers, ad-buyers, psychologists, spin-doctors, lobbyists, and other tentacles manipulating what we see and hear and think.
All of these ‘other side’ arguments, which tell us to give fossil fuels and the product defense industry one more chance to prove their good will, so that we can continue receiving their money and sell them social cover with our science, research, and imprimatur of authority and legitimacy, ring hollow. They are ahistorical, purely constructivist, and lack evidence. If we follow evidence-based practice, we might do well with practicing no-saying, and boundary-setting, which does not demonize other people, but does refuse to engage in what Michael Mann has called ‘soft denialism.’
I interpret the goal of teaching climate and environment as finding and exploring plural perspectives without taking seriously insincere contributions to discourse through propaganda, advertising, interest-conflicted science, or other methods of unscrupulous social control and manipulation. Treating seriously things that are not being proffered in seriousness is to commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Evading wasting our time and energy in babying privileged, entitled, and non-responsive actors should be a priority both in teaching and in practice.
There are systemic institutional epistemic and ethical barriers to understanding and acknowledging the inherent problems which drive unsustainability. Questioning basic societal assumptions has never been welcome in institutions of control, but at this point, there is no way to avoid them. The fallacies of growth-based economic systems, which generates predictable political corruption, and societal and ecological melt-down, are simply too glaring to ignore. How do we undo the self-censoring and self-deluding in democratic orders rivaling our one-time totalitarian nemeses?
Being aware of the dangers of ontological, epistemic, and ethical “flattening” – the false equivalency of treating independent versus interest-funded science as equally valid, treating the speech of climate activists and fossil fuel companies as equally sincere, or treating YouTube warriors and climate scientists as presenting multiple angles on the same issue – can help us better differentiate between sincere and insincere speech. Attending to these differences can help us cordon-off certain intentionally false, manipulative, or dominating discourses from acceptable speech in public discourse, rather than pandering to falsehood. Jennifer Jacquet’s Is shame necessary? new uses for an old tool suggests that shaming instrumental speech may be a way forward to more productive philosophical and practical discussions around climate change.
The US once had a media law mandating broadcast corporations to fairly present both sides of controversial issues of public importance. From 1949-1987, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) instituted the fairness doctrine – not to provide every side to an issue, but to discuss various sincere viewpoints. Just like because of the inherent contradiction involved it doesn’t make much sense for anti-government activists to run for government (even though they now make up a sizable amount of many western governments), the fairness doctrine did not require equal time, or every view (however insincere) to be presented. Instead, simply by requiring some news time to be devoted to substance rather than fluff, and each channel to stretch itself to consider a broader range of opinions, it had the effect of preventing polarization in the US. But with the rise of social media, those guardrails, both for the centering and dissemination of false but heavily storied ideas, splintered the collective perspective of a people, and launched demagogic ideologies on multiple sides that truck more in tribal ingroup signaling than substance. Thus, even science has a ‘liberal bias’, but climate science that recommends degrowth doesn’t even fall under the liberal Overton window – it would disrupt the corporate interests driving liberal party sponsorship.
A post-ideological politics doesn’t exist. We all have our biases, our flaws. But pretending like they don’t exist is not going to get us any closer to where we need to go as a society confronting the metacrisis. Ours is a crisis of meaning which trickles down into every aspect of our life. But there is no secret that as a result of the enforced ignorance, the refusal to acknowledge the role industrial civilization plays in metabolizing life into profit with a whole lot of death as the remainder, cannot go on forever and is reaching its geophysical (not to mention mental health and physiological) breaking point. How do we equip the next generation to handle this?
With sweet assurances that businesses know what they are doing, governments have a steady hand on the tiller and will surely steer us out of this mess? Or that universities are like benign uncles who have our best interests at heart?
A systems analysis must squint or go cross-eyed to find any of these paternalistic, immature hopes for a parent figure-like authority to solve things for us, while we just follow the prescribed yellow brick road. Students, left and right, hunger for agency, not just for the mind-numbing comfort social media and entertainment provides. Infuriating as it is, I am willing to suffer the consequences of the occasional troll rather than play a game of make-believe in the classroom. The stakes for our planet, and everything we care about, are simply too high to do otherwise.
