The project
On Feb 3rd, 2022, the lead article of the New York Times Arts section was “Apocalypse When? Global Warming’s Endless Scroll”. The article chronicles the fatigue and indifference people feel in the face of the impending ecological disaster. It bemoans climate ‘denial’, asking what it will take to get everyone (or at least the majority) to recognize the science and be motivated to act appropriately in response. It claims that the problem may just be too big and too abstruse for our cognitive capabilities.
It's a good question. Why, when we are all going to die because of our behaviors, don’t we change what we are doing?
The rational response to an avoidable, impending catastrophe would be to take the steps needed to avoid it. The human strategy, however, for dealing with existential and other crises is to deviate from a rational stance with respect to themselves, the world, or others. Under stress, we are ‘irrational’. Contemporary psychology has neatly packaged these up into a set of behaviors called “cognitive biases”. These biases are cast as evolutionary - adaptive and developmental - serving some positive purpose. They help an individual make decisions, act, or function where in the absence of the bias, they would struggle to do so. The implication is that we avoid, deny and ignore in order to survive – even when the thing we are ignoring and avoiding threatens our very existence.
Human denial of human caused catastrophe and atrocity is neither new nor unique to climate change. To use software parlance: it’s a feature, not a bug. Humans – alone among all living things on planet earth – can deny, ignore and forget not only traumas that exceed human comprehension but those that they see and perpetrate directly. Ironically, the more real the horror, the more effective the erasure. Human consciousness, when functioning as designed, erases the memories of its own deeds and blinds itself to looming disaster.
This would seem to point to a defect in our reasoning that needs to be corrected. Theories of human behavior explicitly or implicitly attempt to do this. Philosophy, economics, and political science all provide rational models of human action. They try to get us to see ourselves as rational agents with control, consciously deliberating options open to us and acting in our own self-interest. This is optimistic and clearly normative. Why do we continue to take appeals to reason seriously in the face of thousands of years of evidence demonstrating that reason is not the panacea to human irrationality, denial, forgetfulness, and ignorance?
We should act rationally to avoid catastrophe and we don’t. Acting irrationally, we are told, is a normal human survival response. We need to overcome the irrational part of our consciousness – the coping mechanism – to act in a way that will truly ensure our continued existence. But we can’t. Why?
Because reason and irrationality (emotion, passion, adaptive response) are not opposed and conflicting constituents of human consciousness. Reason is not a privileged force that can tame or overcome the destructive forces of irrationality. Reason is not a cure for self-deception, it is its source.
Individuals and collectives act in horrifying and terrible ways not because their reason has been overcome or out of a survival instinct. Psychological explanations can provide insight into the mental states of perpetrators but don’t touch on the mechanisms which enable these actions. This project is an attempt to expose and implicate reason as what makes humans capable of unimaginable destruction to the point of self-annihilation. By understanding the mechanism, I hope to be able to suggest both how suggested responses fail and how we might succeed in countering the effects of our unfortunate evolution.