The culture war as mating strategy (and climate issue)
Cynicism from my sickbed
Christoph Ulański via Flickr (edited)
The culture war is dismal, but at least it provides good reading material from adroit analysts such as Ed West (sign up for his Substack). This morning his latest – “The culture war as mating strategy” – landed in my inbox as I continue to recuperate from a nasty bout of food poisoning, and it got my illness-raddled mind thinking…
The culture war as a mating strategy, and why this matters to climate (and climate comms).
Back in 2002 and 2003 the world was building up to war in Iraq. I was the BBC’s man in Warsaw, sometimes surfacing in Moscow. Protests happened and people turned up in many, many thousands on the streets of cities across the world. The media covered the protests, and the protesters complained that the media wasn’t covering them.
“They’re mainly trying to get laid,” I messaged a friend in Bush House. “That’s what protests are for. Turn up, impress like-minded potential mates, have a pint afterwards and either end up in bed or with somebody’s phone number.” I still maintain this cynical viewpoint: they’re about showing off and copping off, and both have been enhanced by social media and the US-import of the clever hand-written protest sign.
(That said, when I investigated an apparent anti-war march in downtown Warsaw it turned out to be mainly homeless people who thought there was going to be a handout of free soup. This did little to change my sceptical view of protest marches.)
That’s the thing with protests: they are, literally, organised mass virtue signalling, and when young people are involved, they link neatly with mating strategies. There is a synergy between the motivation to protest issue x, a more extreme position on issue x, and younger people.
Younger people tend to hold more intemperate views, and they’re often of the left. I was young once and I remember. Partly this is idealism with a dollop of naivety, as the world starts to open up in all its glory and young people justifiably ask why seemingly great injustices have not been dealt with. It’s also competition, as they try to out-compete each other by adopting more extreme positions, also reinforcing their independence of thought compared to their childhood years. There’s always somebody cooler than you, and it’s not because they’re milder or wear less hair gel.
I remain convinced that on the internet this drives the toxicity on display on social media platforms like Twitter. The famous New Yorker cartoon had a dog at a computer stating that on the internet nobody knows you’re a dog. In real life nobody knows that the Twitter pile-on mainly involves intemperate 14 and 15 years outbidding each other in their extremism.
To reflect upon another fascinating Ed West post about why the Left dominates institutions, the most vocal demonstrators and activists tend to be leftist and leftish because those elements tend to value the outcome of doing so more than – say – rightish students. The leftish ones get the virtue signalling, the copping off, and in some cases the institutional leg-up for instance as student union reps. The rightish ones concentrate on their future careers as management consultants.
So why is this relevant for the climate? Simply because these dynamics elevate extreme emotions and outbidding on the subject of climate action. Whether screaming about doom or sacrifice or gluing yourself angrily to a piece of infrastructure, the message it gives out is wrong. Go back to my previous posts for more, but in essence (skip if you’re heard me say this before):
In the beginning it was about why: convincing people that climate change was happening and needed action. It then moved to what: the process of setting targets and aiming for them. Now we’re at how: how the hell do we move to that low-carbon world with economies wrenched away from fossil fuels and re-piped to clean energy?
This how bit is massively complex but also quite simple: it requires a systemic change in the way we do things, rather than a tweak here or there. Fitting a solar panel to your garage might make you feel virtuous, but it’s only when we repurpose the entire economic base of what we do to run on clean energy that we get there – and that’s everything from grids to markets to industrial processes. And change on this scale requires a massive injection of political will.
This necessarily means that we have to talk to a broader audience than climate action people are used to (and I don’t mean the activists). Political will (and change in companies and businesses) comes with the consent of the governed. Warning of doom or sacrifice won’t cut it – you need, pragmatism, more optimistic messaging about opportunities and jobs and the future of your kids, and that it’s absolutely within reach. Otherwise it’s left to the blue-haired kids and the detached and smug liberal elites.
So there you have it. The culture wars can be seen through the lens of mating strategies, either in Ed West’s terms about conceptions of family life, or in my belief that it’s about competition for mating. And that, unfortunately, explains another difficult dynamic in climate action where the most extreme voices are the loudest – which is bad for what we need to do for the environment and climate now.