Instead, what he does is confuse people about what policies his government is pursuing. That means that he can cut provincial funding that is designed to deal with flooding, while at the same time looking like he really cares in photo ops. He can also say that Ontario is doing a great job in reducing carbon emissions but without pointing out that he rode to power by smearing the Liberal electricity policy. (You know, the policy that actually allowed Ontario to become the first major jurisdiction in North America to eliminate their coal-fired generators.) He also ignores the fact that he has eliminated Ontario's participation in the cap-and-trade system designed to further cut emissions.
This is an interesting development because it's an example of something sociologist Keith Kahn-Harris calls "post-denialism".
You may have heard the famous quote that says "Hypocrisy is the compliment that vice pays to virtue". This means that one only feels the need to be a hypocrite if one feels ashamed---or at least believes that one is expected to feel ashamed---to do a particular bad thing. For Kahn-Harris, he would paraphrase that quote from Francois de La Rochefoucauld as "denialism is the homage people pay to whatever they are denying".
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| Keith Kahn-Harris, image from his Twitter Feed. Used under the "Fair-Use" copyright provision. |
As Kahn-Harris says, the key to understanding something like Holocaust denial is that the person doesn't really believe that the mass murder of Jews never happened. What he really wants to say is that their murder was a good thing and that the Third Reich was a great idea. The denier doesn't say this, however, because that is a profoundly unpopular point of view. So instead, he creates some sort of convoluted and lame argument that the Holocaust never happened. This creates a semblance of intellectual legitimacy that he and his fellow apologists for the NAZIs can hide behind.
In much the same way, people have traditionally attempted to deny the reality of the climate emergency because they had to "pay homage" to the fact that most people would admit that runaway climate change would be a very bad thing. But Doug Ford seems to have gotten to the point where he can admit that climate change exists and is "a thing"---but he just doesn't care. If he was alone in this, I wouldn't really care all that much. But he is surrounded by a political party filled with "enablers" who allow him to continue with his policies. And beneath them, there are lots of voters who supported him and gave him a majority government. What's going on here? Don't these people actually care about their children's future?
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I found out something this week. It turns out that you don't have to go through Patreon in order to make a monthly payment to "The Guelph-Back-Grounder", instead you can also do it directly through PayPal. (Thanks to Kathleen for not only being so awesome, but finding a new way to do it!) This means that you can pay directly in Canadian currency. Whatever way you choose to subscribe, however, it is much appreciated.
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The important thing to understand is that morality---what we call "right" or "wrong"---is an enormously complex issue. Unfortunately, you wouldn't know this if your only experience with moral decision-making was based on the institutions that govern our lives. Let me illustrate with an example.
Our criminal justice system is based on the notion that each individual goes through life freely choosing all their behaviours using a totally dispassionate cost-benefit analysis. Everyone---no matter what their personal history or genetic make-up---has exactly the same ability to rationally do a cost-benefit analysis of all their actions, all the time. This means that if someone does a criminal act, they do so fully aware of the consequences of being caught and freely chooses to do it. That means, that if someone chooses to break the law they can be deterred from doing so in future by punishing them with a jail term. And after they have received that sentence, they will realize that the price of getting caught and punished outweighs the benefit of committing the crime. This means that everyone who is caught and punished never commits a crime ever again.
Of course, the reality is totally different. But why?
To understand that, I'd suggest that people look at the history of criminal justice in our culture. Let's start with the gladiatorial combats in the Roman Arena. Most of the people who fought and died there were convicted criminals or prisoners of war. And the most common sorts of fights were ritual reenactments of early battles between the Romans and other cultures. As such, they were theatrical attempts to get the audience to feel what it means to be a member of Roman society. Because people are actually fighting for their lives, and, participants are going to actually die, it was very easy to become emotionally engaged with the spectacle. (Incidentally, this is why popular movies have lots of sex and violence---it's a short cut for directors to get audiences to pay attention.)
In much the same way, Anglo-Saxon "jurisprudence" often consisted of trial by combat or ordeal. The former consisted of a ritual duel where combatants representing two different sides would fight using a variety of weapons in a specified way. The idea was that "God" would reveal who was right according to who won. A trial by ordeal involved one person choosing to do some specifically painful act---such as grasping a hot piece of metal. The idea would be God would reveal guilt or innocence by whether or not the man could perform the task or would survive the consequences.
In both of these cases, the important issue is that a "combat" has been done and it was done theatrically to appeal to the emotions of an audience. We still have such a thing in our modern system. Instead of having two people going after each other with swords or pole axes, we have lawyers jousting with words. And instead of asking people to grab red hot metal bars, we expect them to dump all their wealth on the balance in the form of lawyer's fees and submit to years of litigation. If they have the "guts" and "stamina" to handle this ordeal, they may have been proved to be in-the-right.
In the past people enjoyed the theatrical event of executions. In our more modern era people are restricted to purging their emotions through dramatic recreations---witness the enormous number of crime-based television shows. In addition, our politicians use the punishment of the guilty to "whip" their followers into a frenzy of support, and, the media use the same spectacle to get maximum "clicks". (Check out this example of the Conservatives and CBC doing a ritual dance around the corpse of a little girl.)
In effect, our criminal justice system is not primarily about either morality or even changing human behaviour. Instead, it is a type of theatre designed primarily to arouse and channel people's emotions in ways that strengthen ordinary citizen's support for the various institutions of the state: the police, the government, political parties, and, the media. Criminals and victims are pretty much not more than sock puppets that these different "powers and principalities" manipulate to create the "passion-play" that keeps our society working.
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What has this got to do with the climate emergency? Well, I'd argue that whether or not we destroy the planet is a moral issue. Depending on how you construct your ethical worldview, it is either a crime against future human beings, or, it is a crime against the entire ecosystem. Either way, it is a very, very, bad thing to do. And yet, lots of people seem to be treating the whole issue as just another "ho hum" event. Why?
I'd suggest that it's because morality only "works" for most people if they can channel their emotions into it. And the way our society codifies and controls these emotions is through creating elaborate "passion plays"---just like our criminal justice system. And for many people, their emotions have already been "captured" by other things. It's like a type of love. We don't just love everyone, instead most of us have to love a specific person or persons: our partners, our children, our extended family. If we really stretch it, we can love an institution---like the church or the military, or, something more tribal, like our ethnic identity or country. But very few people can love everyone and everything. That sort of thing we may pay lip service to, but in practice it's reserved for "saints".
In our society I'd suggest that a lot of people who are interested in the conservative way of looking at the world have had their emotional attention "caught" by a specific definition of "freedom". This can be small "boutique" freedoms like the "right to bear arms", or, a strange type of religious freedom that involves inflicting your views on others. But more commonly, it boils down to an emotional attachment to "the free market" or a personal identification as "someone who pays their own way".
My experience with a lot of business people is that they often see what they are doing as some sort of "greater calling" that makes them feel like they are participating in something noble and good. I believe that this is related to why so many young people are so attached to the writings of Ayn Rand. As teenagers we are genetically programmed to separate ourselves from our parents and develop our own personalities and worldview. (Just like when kittens are weaned they go through a stage where they are programmed to wander great distances in order to find their own "territory".) For adolescents going through this phase, many of us feel that we are like the characters of her novels---great men and women who are working to create something good and noble by pursuing our own particular drives and ambitions, but who are thwarted by a society that keeps trying to keep them from doing what they want. Unfortunately, a significant fraction of the population never grows out of this adolescent phase and doesn't develop any sort of personal sense of responsibility towards others and the common good.
If you want to understand how these people view themselves and their ideals, take a look at the following YouTube clip from "The Fountain Head". If you think, as I do, that the dialogue sounds pretty lame, just remember that when I was younger I thought it was profound. And generations of idealistic young people have gone through a "phase" of also thinking that it's profound. (Heck, the "prog-rock" band Rush built a huge following with their albums praising Ayn Rand.)
If you have really bought into this ideal of total freedom divorced from any responsibility to other people, then the climate crisis sounds like an insane fever dream. Any program that involves everyone pulling together to learn to live more lightly on the earth sounds like a totalitarian nightmare that should be fought tooth and nail---no matter what the cost.
Another conservative "passion play" involves the glorification of self-reliance. This is the pride that right-wing conservatives feel when they are able to "get the job done" even though it is hard. Take a look at this truck advertisement and see how it glorifies the stoicism of "hard working American men" (I hadn't remembered the guy with the bandaged eye or the fellow in a wheelchair lifting himself up with a block and tackle before I looked at it again.)
If you've been raised to glorify self-reliance and stoic acceptance of "the way it is", then any attempt to suggest that society should give the disadvantaged "a leg up" or that there should be some attempt to right past wrongs, is just "queue jumping". And adding environmental protection to the "design criteria" is just "making things needlessly harder". Both of these things are the ultimate sins in the stoic, self-reliant worldview.
From what I can see, people like Doug Ford and his supporters have their own set of morality that is "clogging" their ability to understand the moral imperative that we need to collectively do something about the climate emergency. That is what has fueled climate denialism for decades. That's why Ford can stand in the midst of terrible flooding, admit that it is probably the result of climate change, and, still work to sabotage any attempt to prevent future disasters. It's simply that he thinks it would be immoral (ie: opposed to Ayn Rand's understanding of "freedom" or a Chevvy truck commercial's vision of "self-reliance") to do so.
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I would suggest that this is the real backdrop to climate denialism, just as support for the NAZI agenda is what really motivates Holocaust denial. And Dr. Kahn-Harris would argue that both groups have increasingly dropped denialism because they believe that the recent world-wide success of right-wing populism--Donald Trump in the USA, Brexit in the UK, and, Ford in Ontario---has destroyed the last vestiges of the post-WWII consensus about what is "decent and proper" in public discourse. This allows people to come out of the woodwork to declare that "the Jews will not replace us" and "climate change is causing flooding and forest fires---but we're not going to do anything to stop it because that would interfere with the free market". That's what Kahn-Harris means when he says we are entering into the period of "post-denialism".
Oddly enough, Dr. Kahn-Harris thinks that post-denialism is a good thing. In his opinion once people really understand what is going on, a lot of "enablers" will gag and quickly drop their support. (After all, the moral universe of radical freedom and stoic self-reliance is pretty lame if you put even casual thought into them.) They want their children to actually have decent lives and for the climate not to go totally berzerk. Popular opinion in Ontario would seem to support this hypothesis. According to the latest poll numbers I see:
Among decided and leaning voters, the Liberals were at 39.9% support, the NDP at 24.2%, the PCs at 22.4% and the Greens at 12%.I can only hope that this trend continues and that the entire political class learns a lesson from it.
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Furthermore, I say to you---climate change must be dealt with!
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