A few years ago, I spent an awkward half-hour at a party trying to make conversation with a gentleman who had set up a business repairing Porsches. This man knew a great deal about Porsches, and cars in general, and he was devoted to his work. No doubt anyone with any real curiosity about cars would have found many questions for him. However, while I long ago used to read Car and Driver magazine cover-to-cover every month, with pure delight, I lost all interest in cars around the time I started taking an interest in girls. As a result, my feeble efforts to ask the Porsche man relevant questions and understand the answers only made my ignorance and disinterest painfully obvious.
I write this without any scorn towards my interlocutor: Porsches truly are interesting to those who understand them. Indeed, I’m an academic, and, like most academics, can get deeply interested in the minutiae of an abstruse topic that would bore to tears anyone outside my field, and many within it. I can for instance write or speak at length about whether one adverb in a Latin text needs to be corrected to another, or whether medieval manuscript B is a copy of medieval manuscript A. And I hope I can keep students who have chosen to study such matters with me interested in them. But I neither expect these subjects to be interesting to the world at large, nor consider that world to be wicked or stupid for not wishing to hear me out on Latin adverbs or manuscripts A and B.
Imagine, however, a world where every citizen was constantly exhorted by politicians, governments, institutions, schools, universities, celebrities, clerics, commentators and so forth, to care very deeply about Porsches, or about manuscripts A and B. Imagine a world where we were all told not only that we must care about these Porsches or manuscripts, but that our failure to do so would both mark us out as ignorant and cruel, and put humanity as a whole in peril. Imagine, in short, a world where not caring about a topic that is, by its very nature, boring to all but a select few, was among the gravest of thoughtcrimes.
That world is our own, and the topic is climate change.
I do not care about climate change, and the primary reason I do not care about it is not because I fundamentally reject the scientific narrative about its causes or extent, nor because I find unacceptable all the changes I’m told societies need to make to counter climate change, nor again because so much climate change activism is shrill and puerile. I do not care about climate change because it is boring. Indeed, I have no strong view about the extent to which the climate is changing, the degree to which we can or do know that such change is anthropogenic, or the probable success of the various remedial measures proposed. To take strong views on these topics, I would have to look into them in depth, and I do not want to, because they are boring. If I had to choose, I would rather educate myself about Porsches.
I do not care about climate change, and the primary reason I do not care about it is not because I fundamentally reject the scientific narrative about its causes or extent, nor again because so much climate change activism is shrill and puerile. I do not care about climate change because it is boring.
I am being flippant, because I wish to illustrate how, on this topic, flippancy is a greater crime of lèse-majesté than even “climate change denial”, than presenting alternative facts, figures and models to show that the climate is not changing significantly, or that, if it is, the change is not caused by human action. The denialists, at least, are implicitly agreeing that the topic is of great importance. At least they care, whereas I do not.
There is, however, a serious argument behind my flippancy. Past a certain point, any technical subject is intrinsically boring to those who have not learnt the relevant material and techniques, because the subject, beyond its rudiments, is not comprehensible without that technical knowledge, and we cannot engage deeply with what we do not understand. In this regard, Porsches, manuscript transmission, and climate change are all the same. There is also the question of whether or in what ways a subject is worthy of the developing of such technical knowledge, in other words of whether the outsider can grasp why the insider is interested in the topic, and whether the outsider approves of the insider’s interest. This is ultimately a philosophical question: is there a measure, other than personal taste, of what is more or less worthy of attention, and if so, what is that measure?
On this, there can hardly be consensus. “The proper study of mankind is man” is, for instance, one answer, but hardly the only one. For my part, I consider questions of natural history to be serious and worthy, even though my personal attraction to them has rarely been more than moderate. I do not however consider these questions to be the most serious questions, and I also believe they have become distasteful because their contemporary investigators are largely prone to a dull-minded positivism—a lack of curiosity about why and how they are carrying out their investigations, and how these two matters relate. Science sans conscience—and let us add sans conscience de soi (self-consciousness)—n’est que ruine de l’âme.
Accordingly, I am not in truth arguing that the question of climate change is intrinsically dull. “How does the earth’s weather work over time?” is a perfectly solid topic for natural history. Rather, I am arguing firstly that this matter is dull to outsiders because it is highly technical and complex; secondly that it is, by its very nature as a question of natural history, not a primordial question for men and women; and thirdly that it has been rendered tiresome by its practitioners’ failures to practice or welcome criticism of their paradigm.
Of course, none of this would much matter if the study of climate change were just another scientific discipline, chugging away in university departments and research laboratories. Those uninterested in it could simply ignore it. But climate change has become the diametrical opposite of a hermetically sealed academic discipline: it is now a political and moral project that claims absolute sovereignty over our lives. In this paradigm, I have a civic and moral duty to overcome my disinterest, unless I can falsify the doom-laden models of The Science.
But climate change has become the diametrical opposite of a hermetically sealed academic discipline: it is now a political and moral project that claims absolute sovereignty over our lives.
Those models are obscure, but the doom they predict is not: we are fed a constant diet of easily understood, and potentially exciting, scenarios of mass societal destruction: sinking cities, parched countrysides, impoverished wild-eyed hordes. This is the stuff of Biblical prophecy. It is lively indeed, until we realize that the prophets are not calling us to repent and cleanse our souls, to seek the face of God, to love our neighbour even unto death, but rather to make and to campaign for petty lifestyle adjustments, in order to alter the numbers fed into their predictive models. It is thus a dreary and arid vision of man’s higher purpose, incapable of begetting nobility or beauty.
It is then not just our right, but our duty, to refuse on these grounds to throw our souls into the “climate emergency”. It is not a fitting avocation for a soul. This refusal will not—although we will be told otherwise—lead for a disaster to mankind. On the contrary, it is the best hope for compelling those who study climate change to do so with the humility, self-criticism, and awareness of the wider world beyond their discipline, that we must require of any scientists seeking to transform their knowledge into power over our lives.
