The Gutter and the Stars

Last Saturday I watched two events unfold online showing two very different sides of humanity. In one, a rocket successfully blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It marked the first time a crewed mission had left Earth using a US-built spacecraft since 2011. I found it awe-inspiring to watch and spent a long time afterwards thinking about what it represented. Belief, imagination and dedication. Unity between thousands people working in pursuit of a common goal. Courage, not least by the two astronauts sitting in an explosive tube called ‘Demo-2’ as it hurtled into space. I couldn’t feel anything other than pride and love at our ability, as humans, to achieve such a feat.

In another event, also in the US, everyday people exercising their right to protest were fired on with tear gas and rubber bullets, beaten to the ground, arrested. Three unlucky souls — a man in Omaha, one in St. Louis and another in Oakland — were killed. Fires were set. Property was destroyed. Violence was compounded by more violence. Rolling coverage showed hatred and fear and powerlessness and aggression without respite.

On the one hand the gutter, on the other the stars.

I find it difficult to accept that we are capable of putting human beings into space, yet many of us are still incapable of giving human beings space to coexist. I don’t want to talk about fringe groups or politicians or fundamentalists here; I want to focus on us. The good old everyday kind of folk. The ones who watch the news and shake their heads and change their Facebook profile photo to a black box. The ones who don’t believe themselves to be party to any deeper, more systemic societal problem because, well, they don’t think one exists.

The problem with systemic (or institutional) discrimination is that — by its very definition — it takes much more subtle forms than, say, a white man leaning on a black man’s neck until he dies. It is everywhere, permeating everything, but if we aren’t the ones being discriminated against then we don’t see it.

Thankfully, there is one institution we can turn to in order to observe it: that of language. In conversation, our tendencies toward systemic discrimination occasionally bubble to the fore. It’s in the jokes we make about persons less physically or mentally able than we are. It’s in the deliberately edgy use of racial, homophobic or misogynist slurs in conversations behind closed doors (common among groups of heterosexual males). It’s in the preference for a word like ‘migrant’ over ‘refugee’. It’s in passing remarks about body types, clothing, appearances. It’s in memes and posts published on social media. It’s in xenophobic rants disguised in the form of moral outrage.

I have experienced all of these examples from people I know — family, friends, acquaintances — in the past few weeks alone. I have been guilty of many myself at one time or another. Why? Because it’s easy to do it. It’s a cheap laugh, a way to draw attention, a chance to be contrarian. It’s something we barely think about (if at all). We don’t consider it part of a wider issue, and we certainly don’t connect it with more obvious examples of social persecution on show in the world. Best of all, if somebody takes offence, we can brush it off with ‘it was just a joke’. But in trivialising the remark we made, we trivialise the person(s) against whom we directed it. It works to reinforce the foundations of hatred and negativity, weaves this mistrust of the Other (whether genuine or played for laughs) into the fabric of who we are.

After the rocket launch I watched an episode of Deadwood and I realised something: though they lived nearly 150 years before us in extremely different, much more primitive physical conditions, those frontier settlers held the exact same spiritual-intellectual perspectives as we do today. Theirs was a world governed by fear, selfish gain, mistrust and hatred of the Other. So, it turns out, is ours. Despite our technological advances, our improvements in living standards, our progress in providing different groups with fundamental human rights, our exploration of world cultures and peoples, and our access to information, we have the same primitive mindsets as we did when life was much more insular. We’re still mean, suspicious, defensive and judgemental.

I would say that makes it about time for us to grow up. What we need is a revolution of the mind.

This starts and ends with ourselves as individuals. No matter how much we may want to change another person’s beliefs to fit our own, we cannot; what we can do, however, is make our views as well-informed, well-rounded and socially sensitive as possible. In many cases, this means stepping outside our echo chamber and grappling with some uncomfortable realities (such as accepting the existence of systemic discrimination). Of course, the experience may serve purely to cement our original convictions, in which case we can reasonably feel we are on the right path. Alternatively, we may find the beliefs that were once so important to us have lost their lustre or become unpalatable. We may even learn the skill so few people possess: admitting we were wrong.

In a related vein, no matter how much we may wish to help others, we can ultimately only help ourselves. This is not help in a material sense — wealth, possessions, climbing the social ladder, etc. Nor is it about the passive consumption of news and entertainment online. It is about actively nourishing the mind, engaging our imaginations, trying to recognise and understand and evolve every part of our being. That means talking to others on a level that goes beyond the superficial, reading as widely as possible, retaining knowledge rather than relying on the Internet to fill in the blanks, turning away from the vainglorious side of social media and the endless negative cycle of the mass media (the more we’re told the situation is bleak, the less inclined we are to push against it). It also means thinking twice before making a destructive remark or joke, or using certain words. I wouldn’t call this self-censorship. More like self-contemplation.

If we can help ourselves, we may have a chance at collectively lifting ourselves from the gutter.

I don’t meant this to sound like a liberal agenda or manifesto; the current battles fought between partisan political and moral philosophies are a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. This is about the highest, most enlightened form we can achieve as modern humans — a primordial compulsion that has driven us from the swamps to the trees to the cities to the Moon. This is our ultimate purpose, yet by and large we still gaze in any direction other than the one to which we should be aspiring.

In her 1974 novel The Dispossessed, Ursula LeGuinn wrote, “You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere”. To bring about our Revolution — one in which life is characterised by love over fear, familiarity instead of Other, common ground rather than entrenchment — we absolutely have to start being better. For inspiration, we can always look up to the stars.

pure bands of light inside us all.

We need to use apocalyptic language for apocalyptic times

As Aldous Huxley wrote in Brave New World, “Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly. They’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.” Despite living in the age of Netflix, YouTube, six-second ads and 1.8 billion images uploaded to the Internet every single day, the written word hasn’t yet lost its power to captivate, compel or cause foundations to come crumbling down. More self-published books are being released than ever before, the blog publishing platform Medium is in the top 200 most-visited websites worldwide, and text still accounts for one-third of all content online. For the time being, at least, our thirst for the written word remains unquenchable.

Although we live in an era characterised by misinformation, spurious data and ‘facts’ made up to fit the story, we tend to believe what we read, too. As Leetaru points out in Forbes, “Citizens are taught from an early age to accept information provided by elites, from the government to the mainstream media to academia, on face value without question.” Having dived head first into, and then proceeding to swim through, the rivers of data that accompany the Information Age, this idea of the ‘elite’ has now expanded to include anybody who sounds remotely like an authority, people who shout louder than others, and contrarians who adopt controversial positions to entertain and enrage. Even more worryingly, the (fairly) recent erosion of trust in government bodies and the media in particular has caused us to turn to populist rhetoric as a means of shaping our understanding of the world. Instead of relying on—for the most part—rigorously checked facts, figures and accounts, we cherry-pick from a smorgasbord of headlines and soundbites that have been assembled purely to attract attention and push up the click rate.

This is obviously dangerous in many respects.  One person might read an article spearheaded by a quote stating that migration flows to Europe are “hopelessly out of control” (even though, as Patrick Kingsley notes in The New Odyssey, migration accounts for just 0.2% of the continent’s population). That person then demands that the borders be closed, loses faith in the current government and gradually turns to more extreme alternatives to stem the tide. The result: political parties such as Alternative für Deutschland in Germany or Rassemblement national in France get a foot in the door of parliament. Another person’s attention might be drawn to a piece warning about how vegan diets “end up in disaster”. With phrases as doom-laden as this littered throughout the article, the person dismisses veganism outright, even though the claim on which the piece is based—that veganism is a diet rather than a movement and a philosophy—is utterly false.

But…what if we could harness this sensationalist approach to information for good? What if the loudest headlines were the ones on top of articles that weren’t attempting to misinform, spread hatred or denigrate heartfelt beliefs, but which sought to educate us, bring us together, perhaps even scare us into action? What if we dismantled the mental barriers that are currently holding us back using the very tools that built them in the first place?

This brings me to the language we use to talk about climate change. Until recently, the words we relied on to describe the anthropogenic impact on the environment were, by all standards, pretty benign. ‘Change’, for example, suggests a gradual, not unpleasant slide into a new situation that we might be able to harness for our benefit – like, say, if we were to switch jobs. What it doesn’t suggest is that we are currently ankle-deep in a sixth mass extinction event. There is no urgency when we say ‘climate change’, nothing that suggests we need to do anything on a personal level to arrest it. ‘Global warming’ is another term that lacks bite. Popularised by a NASA scientist who presented findings to the US Congress in the 1980s linking greenhouse gases to the heating of the planet, it is a phrase that suggests long summers, brief winters and a slight temperature rise for everybody. It is this kind of language that has confused people to the extent that on days where the mercury plunges, naysayers are quick to trot out the line “Where’s your precious global warming now?”, as if the entire matter boils down to it being sunny or not.

Thankfully, we are starting to see a switch to stronger terms. The Guardian, for example, has changed its house style guide to recommend the use of terms such as ‘climate crisis’ and ‘global heating’. This is a step in the right direction. Heating is not the same as warming. Heat, after a point, becomes uncomfortable. If the entire world is heating up, we aren’t imagining that we’ll simply wear less and stock up on sun tan; it is aligned much more with images of melting ice caps, rising sea levels, vast dust bowls and bleached skeletons in the middle of the desert. A crisis, meanwhile, captures the public imagination. The Financial Crisis. The Cuban Missile Crisis. The Crisis in Venezuela. The Oxford Dictionary’s definition of crisis is “A time of intense difficulty or danger.” This is the time we are in, though we may not have realised it quite yet given that we’re still surrounded by the bubble we’ve blown for ourselves. Even so, the more we read that this is a Crisis Era and the more we hear it being shouted from the rafters, the more we may begin to believe it.

The United Kingdom has gone one step further on the terminology front. On 1 May—during a break from the slapstick routine it has been performing on the international stage since mid-2016—the British government declared that humanity is in the midst of a climate emergency. It grabbed the headlines. It made people stop and think, at least for a moment. An emergency is immediate, an unwanted, potentially dangerous situation requiring action right now. The British government’s announcement was followed by a climate and biodiversity emergency declaration from the Republic of Ireland on 10 May, Canada on 17 June, New York City on 26 June and Sydney on 1 July. With town and city councils all over Europe, North America and Australia indicating their support for this type of declaration, more national governments are surely set to follow.

Other outlets are employing language designed to challenge and provoke in the environmental arena, too. Looking through a recent Extinction Rebellion newsletter reveals the use of highly charged words and phrases such as ‘ecological collapse’, ‘genocidal impact’, and ‘act now with love and rage’. Similarly, the website thinkprogress.org doesn’t shy away from speaking about ‘catastrophic collapse’ and ‘terrible human suffering’, and describes the Hothouse Earth scenario as being akin to triggering a rockslide or avalanche where total destruction is unavoidable. These are the kind of X-ray words that Huxley was talking about, the ones that pierce us to the very core, galvanise our imaginations, cause cold beads of sweat to roll down our backs.

We need this kind of incendiary language to be applied across all relevant articles and content. If discord, vitriol and pithy summations work so well to whip up fear and anger among certain sections of society, why shouldn’t they have the same effect on society’s discourse about the climate crisis? The time for sober discussion, impartial reports and articles quoting scientists as being “concerned” about the evolution of the anthropocene is over. Now is when we have to use every weapon we have in our arsenal to pierce the minds of as many people around the world as possible—even if those weapons include ramping up our language choices to blockbuster levels. Genocide, annihilation, extinction, devastation, conflagration, perdition, death, suffering, starvation. Use them all. We have to catch the eye, appeal to selfish outlooks, elicit fear, shame people, dismantle mental blocks. We need to push back against terms intended to downplay the crisis, like the dystopian ‘molecules of freedom’ recently dreamt up by the Trump administration’s Ministry of Truth. We have to make others believe that human-made genocide truly is just around the corner, and get people to act and vote and change because of it. We have to do everything and anything to stop the sleepwalker—humanity—from stepping off the cliff. Because if we fall, there’s nothing at the bottom to catch us. Terry Pratchett once said that “Before you can kill the monster you have to say its name.” Let’s start calling the monster of climate cataclysm for what it is. Then we might just have a chance at going about killing it.

rising.