Hiding in Horror: Feeling and Believing Climate Science
By Donovan Schaefer
We’ve all heard someone accused of “only believing what they want to believe.”
It seems so obvious it’s trivial. But looking at it more closely, we can see that
this simple sentiment flips the tables on common sense. Why would anyone
want to believe something? Why—and how—does the way a piece of
information feels shape our intellectual assent to its propositional content?
What’s the relationship between thinking and feeling?
In my book Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism after Darwin, I
argue that understanding belief requires attention not just to the propositional
content of our ideas, but the field of feeling—desire, fear, sorrow, excitement,
and everything else—that enfolds those ideas. Information is always received in
a mood. And the way information feels to us shapes the horizon of what we
accept or reject as fact.
This doesn’t mean that we can’t learn about the world and come to understand
it in better ways. Far from being solipsistically encased in our feelings, feelings
are what make it possible for us to explore, study, and discern. Every
scholar—from the mathematician clicking away at their blackboard to the
manuscript specialist lost in study deep in a library basement—knows the
pleasure and exhilaration of discovery, of confidently making a new connection,
of everything falling into place.
Conventional epistemologies tend to be cognitivist—they see both the
successes and mistakes of science as always being a matter of information
transfer, with “feeling” an unlawful incursion that invariably corrupts good
knowledge. I suggest that we redraw this frame, seeing feeling as the driver of
both the successes and failures of not only science, but all the ways we come
to know the world. Science may be most notable for the way that it actively
brings feelings on stage—simultaneously drilling down on the thrill of discovery
but also subjecting new ideas to methodical scrutiny (conference presentations,
peer review, critical rejoinders in print) that seldom feels good (bad feelings are
just as important for science as good ones), but often help to sculpt and refine
our ideas. As Darwin once said, “speculative men, with a curb on, make far the
best observers.”
This deep interlinking of thinking and feeling has significant implications for our
global response to the climate crisis. Many authors—rightly—have focused on
the vastness of climate change—the way it operates at scales that are so far
removed from our ordinary experience that we have difficulty grasping what’s
happening. It’s hard for us to track global temperature rise in our everyday
sphere of experience, harder still to firmly cement the connections between
climate change and the complex layers of human action—cheeseburgers to
Supreme Court decisions to international warfare—that coalesce to drive it
forward.
This is a vital insight for understanding the cognitive constraints that make it
difficult for humans to collectively accept and confront the scientific reality of
anthropogenic climate change. But analyses like this also miss out on the
emotional dimensions of how we think—or fail to think—about climate change.
For one thing, it is now abundantly clear that “science” has never been a
universal language that speaks on behalf of the entire human race. Sometimes
this is due to limitations or oversights within science itself; but just as often, it’s
the result of the profound factionalization that surrounds science.
Although this sometimes correlates with contention around religious doctrine, it
would be a mistake to boil this down to a naïve science/religion conflict thesis.
As scholars like Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway have shown, much of the
orchestrated skepticism directed toward science in the 20th and 21st centuries
has been driven by corporate interests trying to protect their bottom lines in
nicotine, fossil fuels, and atmospheric pollutants. Significant cover for these
campaigns has also been offered by secular libertarian ideologies that saw
sabotaging trust in scientific consensus as a means to combat communism.
Regardless of the point of origin, the end result has been a landscape in which
what counts as good science is defined by identity—and
community—affiliations. “Your science” and “our science” come to feel like alien
territories separated by a hostile border. Enemy science isn’t secretly believed
but publicly castigated; because it feels foreign, it actually becomes less
believable.
On another level, though, the scientific consensus around climate change has a
unique hurdle to overcome in gaining public acceptance. It tells a story that is
so alarming that it jams our ability to embrace it. Could seemingly innocuous
actions, institutions, and ways of doing things really be passively contributing to
catastrophe? It runs against the grain of our everyday hopes that things might
or could get better, replacing it with a curtain-fall. It feels so horrible it can’t
possibly be true.
Not only that, the way we as humans interact and exchange information—pints
at the pub, social media, water cooler talk—are organized around circulating
words and ideas that make us happy—or at the very least strategizing to
respond to solvable problems. A looming catastrophe like climate change jams
those channels. Climate change is talked about extensively in some circles, but
the severity of the threat it represents is in no way proportionate to how much
(how little) we talk about it. A quick headline scan of any given newspaper may
show one or two articles about climate change, but they’re always a minority,
incongruously placed beside recipes, election horse-race coverage, and
celebrity gossip.
Religion’s role in this is complicated, too. As far back as Lynn White in the
1960s, it’s been claimed that religious ideas—often associated with specific
religious traditions, especially those emphasizing “transcendence”—are
responsible for an eschatological worldview in which the value of planet earth is
reduced to near zero, paving the way for ecological degradation. But this focus
on theology is misguided. The range of, for instance, Christian positions on
environmentalism is profoundly broad. Starting with theology makes it seem like
religious believers are locked into specific templates of thought and action that
are directly downstream of their doctrines of creation. Far more promising, from
the perspective offered here, is paying attention to how specific religious
communities—often at the micro-level (individuals, families, households,
congregations rather than “world religions”)—feel about the natural world. Their
theological interpretations—and their responses to the science put in front of
them—are deeply guided by these emotional coordinates.
This is how truth hides in horror. When a fact arrives with overwhelming terror,
it repels us before we can face it. Predictions of the extraordinary scope of
destruction that unchecked climate change will bring—coupled with the
seemingly innocuous sources of that destruction—trigger a sort of bottleneck
effect that jams our ability to believe—let alone to respond. Like the floodirrigated vegetation in the Arizona desert pictured above, fed by water siphoned
off from the profoundly threatened Colorado River, we create an artificial—and
unsustainable—lush garden that conceals the ecological reality facing us.
But understanding this dynamic of facts and feelings shouldn’t lead to an
abdication of our responsibility to continue to shape public conversations about
the urgency of the challenges facing us. Seeing information and emotion as
interlinked is a way of understanding the landscape of persuasion itself. One of
the biggest mistakes we can make is to give up, to assume that persuasion is
dead. We often take extreme cases—like an interaction over social media, in
which the possibility of persuasion was incredibly low from the very
beginning—as somehow reflecting the essence of the scene of persuasion.
This is the kind of misstep that a failure to recognize the deep interrelation of
thinking and feeling leads to. We assume that people are either “reasonable” or
“unreasonable” because they either accept or resist what are—to us—obvious
facts.
We need to rethink this. Confronting the challenge of climate change means
being clear-eyed about the need to reach people where they are and constantly
refine our strategies of outreach, communication, and persuasion. This means
recognizing that more information, more research, and more facts are not a
cure-all—but nor are they valueless. Changing minds is always a matter of
reflecting thoughtfully on how information feels.
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Donovan Schaefer is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious
Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His most recent book, Wild
Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism after Darwin (Duke University
Press, 2022), argues for a reconsideration of the relationship between feeling
and rationality and considers the implications of this shift for topics like climate
change, racism, conspiracy theory, and secularism.
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2022.”
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