http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/robert-lifton-climate_us_5a186457e4b0649480742c6b
A Star Psychiatrist Swerves From Nuclear Armageddon To Climate Change
Robert Jay Lifton studied Nazi doctors and the threat of nuclear
annihilation. But global warming changed everything.
11/26/2017 10:33 EST | Updated 11/26/2017 21:30 EST
NEW YORK ― Robert Jay Lifton has spent his life trying to understand
some of the most unfathomable milestones of the 20th century.
The famed psychiatrist and author started his career in the mid-1950s
studying Chinese government-sponsored brainwashing, or “thought reform.”
In the ’60s, he began interviewing survivors of the atomic bombs dropped
on Japan, becoming obsessed with how the human mind copes with the
possibility of nuclear annihilation. By the late ’70s, he turned his
focus to the doctors responsible for the Nazi regime’s human
experiments, men who occupy a uniquely revolting niche in popular culture.
At 91 years old, he has arrived at his most daunting subject yet:
climate change. In his latest book, The Climate Swerve, Lifton examines
humanity’s struggle to understand what’s happening, how to deal with it,
and why powerful people and institutions sabotage attempts to avoid
destruction of the planet.
“The climate threat is the most all-encompassing threat that we human
beings face,” Lifton said in an interview last month. He walks hunched
with a cane now, but sports a mop of long, wavy white hair. He peered
through dark, thick-rimmed glasses out the window of a book-stacked
office in his modest Upper West Side apartment, located just blocks from
Trump Tower. “The nuclear threat is parallel to it in many ways … but
the climate threat includes everything.”
In other parts of the world, little doubt exists over the similarities
between nuclear weapons and climate change, which Lifton calls the
“apocalyptic twins.” The Marshall Islands served as a U.S. testing site
for atomic weapons throughout the 20th century. The Pacific archipelago
nation bears the scars of that experience today, with entire islands
vaporized in hydrogen bomb blasts and high rates of cancer linked to
radioactive contamination. Now the country struggles with rapidly rising
sea levels, which swallow large habitable areas, make storms more
destructive, and salinate freshwater supplies necessary to farm
breadfruit, a staple crop.
The phrase “climate swerve” gives name to the increasingly ubiquitous
sense of awareness that global warming is happening, and humans have
something to do with it. The term comes from the Roman poet Lucretius,
who wrote a poem identifying the “swerve” as the chaotic, unpredictable
movement of atoms that powers the creation and destruction of all things
in the universe. Renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt titled his
Pulitzer Prize-winning 2011 book on the rediscovery of Lucretius’
manuscript by a 15th-century papal emissary sparking the age of modern
thought The Swerve.
“I consider the climate swerve a movement toward the recognition of
climate danger and what I call species awareness ― awareness of
ourselves as a single species in deep trouble,” Lifton said. “The swerve
is toward that recognition, that consciousness.”
Despite many Republican Party leaders rejecting climate science
outright, few so-called skeptics today deny that change is afoot.
Rather, after years of dismissing scientists’ warnings, many ― including
fossil fuel billionaire Charles Koch, a chief bankroller of the denial
movement ― now acknowledge the climate is changing, but cast doubt over
whether, or how big, a role humans play in the process.
Years-long droughts, sea-swallowed coastal communities, and a
millennium’s worth of violent storms and floods making landfall back to
back have offered tangible evidence to bolster the popular consensus. In
the United States, 71 percent of Americans agree that most scientists
believe global warming is occurring, and 68 percent believe humans are
the cause, according to a Gallup poll released in March. Forty-one
percentsaid they now worried “a great deal” about global warming, a
three-decade high.
HuffPost sat down with Lifton recently to talk about global warming, his
new book, and the state of climate change denial in the era of President
Donald Trump. The following interview was edited and condensed:
When did the “climate swerve” reach critical mass?
It’s hard to give a definite date to when the climate swerve came into
significant force but I would say in the last decade or so, there have
been strong indications of the climate swerve. You can find them in
studies that were done of people’s awareness of climate change. Not only
of awareness of storms and climate threat, but awareness that it’s
human-caused. This has increased in recent years, as has the coverage by
the press and the general social knowledge. Before that, there were
significant moments as when [former NASA scientist] James Hansen
testified before a congressional committee in 1988. It was a significant
moment in making known climate threat and its danger.
Over the past decade, there’s been a shift in news coverage and how we
talk about climate change, to less of a “he said-she said” between
deniers and scientists and more rooted in actual fact and our actual
understanding of climate change. How have climate change deniers reacted?
In general, I see a shift from what I call fragmentary to formed
awareness. What I mean by that is for some time we’ve had fragmentary
images of ice melting in the Arctic or hurricanes or floods. But there
may be just an image that’s brief and disappears. Increasingly over the
last decade or more there have been formed ideas, a full narrative, the
idea that there’s something called “climate threat” and it has to do
with carbon emissions and that certain steps are necessary to mitigate
the threat. This a full narrative, it’s formed, and people are now
absorbing it in that formed awareness as opposed to the more fragmentary
kind.
Of course, in the past, as you implied, there used to be a ridiculous
kind of equal time, those who confront climate change say this, deniers
say that, and we have to listen to both. There’s been a greater
recognition that deniers or rejecters are giving false information
according to everything we know and all of the evidence leads to climate
change danger. That increasing recognition is crucial to our
possibilities for a wiser future.
But how has the tone or arguments of what the deniers or rejectors said
changed, if at all? How has that movement changed in reaction to the
climate swerve hitting critical mass?
There used to be full and absolute denial, and the insistence on the
part of various people that the whole idea of climate change is a hoax
and even a conspiracy on the part of scientists to get more research
grants or for their own benefits in some way. You don’t hear that so
much anymore. What you begin to hear is, ‘Oh we don’t know. Some
scientist say this, some scientists say that, I’m not a scientist.’ Even
that seems to be diminishing. These recent hurricanes that we had which
are severe as any on record and unique in sequence of at least four
major ones in rapid fire, they’ve created a kind of world-ending image
close to what we get with nuclear weapons. It becomes more and more
difficult to say there’s no such thing as climate change. It’s true that
the scientists tell us that climate change doesn’t necessarily cause
these hurricanes, but it turns severe storms into catastrophic ones.
This becomes known so that the whole idea that denying or leaving in
limbo any ideas about climate change becomes more and more difficult and
those who express resistance to climate change are more and more on the
defensive.
Do you see the U.S. as unique in how mainstream the climate rejection
has been? Do you see the Republican Party in particular as unique in how
aggressive its stances have been on this issue?
Of course there’s climate rejection and denial all over the world. The
U.S. seems to be unique in that a major party which now holds power in
most areas is committed to rejecting a fundamental truth that endangers
human civilization. That’s uniqueness, especially in terms of America’s
power in the world and the extent of American culpability in endangering
the planet with carbon emissions over the years. The Republican Party
finds itself in the position of controlling the country in most ways and
yet endangering our future and the human future in this rejection of
climate change. In that way, and in many others, one can say that
Republican leaders and Trump in particular may be the most dangerous men
in the world.
What about the climate rejection movement has allowed it to become so
entrenched in those partisan politics and in the conservative movement
overall?
It’s hard to know exactly how resistance to climate truths has become so
entrenched in American political life and especially on the part of the
right and the Republicans. But it has to relate to a long-standing
American distrust of government, of social policy involving government,
the kind of which is very necessary in relation to climate change.
[There is] a whole nativist and know-nothing tradition in American
history which has stood for anti-government and anti-governance, and
above all any kind of internationalism.
Who are the villains of this narrative, if it can be defined that way?
There are many villains. Before Trump, the Republican Party had had a
pretty consistent climate rejection position. Trump embraced that
position, carried it to greater extremity in his cabinet appointments,
more than was expected, and then you have the philanthropists like the
Koch brothers and others who finance it. It’s particularly egregious to
observe the hypocrisy of those who know quite a bit about the existence
of climate change but fail to change their position for reasons of
political convenience.
There are many such people among Republicans who will face a very stern
judgment indeed from history and will have been responsible for the
suffering and death of very large numbers of people. There are lots of
villains.
I would add to that such climate villains are helped by a general
tendency in human thought to resist the idea that nature can turn on us.
There is strongly the idea that nature will protect us, nature
represents growth. That sense, often a vague one, can contribute to
elements of resistance to the idea that the climate can change in ways
that are threatening to us.
At the root of all this, don’t you see a certain indictment of
capitalism in general?
There are many forces in capitalism that contribute to resistance to
climate truths. We’ve seen in it in the major corporations. But it goes
beyond capitalism per se, in my view. You get versions of socialism and
capitalism in China, or different forms of government in Russia or in
Europe, but all of them contribute to climate damage. So capitalism and
the way it functions has to be looked at critically, especially high
capitalism and extreme capitalism.
There are those, for instance like [former New York City] Mayor
[Michael] Bloomberg, who’d do their best to save capitalism by rendering
it more wise in relation to climate change. It’s a problem that goes
beyond capitalism, but versions of extreme capitalism which are focused
on fiduciary principles, you protect your investors and therefore you
must take the fossil fuels out of the ground, even though if we took
them all out of the ground it would do us in and threaten the whole
human future, that kind of extreme capitalism is deeply dangerous.
… If we were to carry on now simply as we are, in these mixtures of
capitalist greed and failure to act and the enormous, exaggerated
exploitation of fossil fuels, if we were to carry on and change nothing
over a period of decades, within the century we would do ourselves in.
We don’t have to do anything to change, just do what we were doing. I
call this the ultimate absurdity.
With nuclear weapons, you’ve got to build the weapons. You got to
actually use them in a nuclear war, maybe create nuclear winter which
could result in death of all people on planet, but you have to bring in
these objects and set them off. You don’t have to do anything like that
with climate. Just do as we’ve been doing.
This gets a bit into the concept of “malignant normality,” as you laid
out in the book. I was wondering if you could elaborate on that.
I came upon the idea of malignant normality in studying Nazi doctors. If
a Nazi doctor was assigned to Auschwitz, it was normal, it was expected
of him that he would do the selections of Jews for the gas chamber. Take
a leading role in the killing process in a reversal of healing.
With climate change and nuclear weapons, there is also a malignant
normality. With nuclear weapons, it’s that the weapons should be
stockpiled, maybe even used if necessary because that’s the way you
carry through deterrence. Deterrence always carries a willingness to use
them in certain conditions. So therefore we should be ready with our
duck-and-cover drills to carry out a nuclear war, survive it, win it and
carry on with life. These are absurdities that became part of nuclear
normality.
With climate, climate normality was in the everyday practice. We were
born into climate normality. This is the world which we entered and in
which we live now and which continues. If we allow it to continue as it
is now, it will result in the end of human civilization within the
present century. I came to the idea of malignant normality that has to
be exposed for its malignancy. Intellectuals and professionals have a
particular role, what I call witnessing professionals, bear witness to
the malignancy, the danger, of what’s being put forward to us as normal
and as the only way to behave. That’s happening more but we need a lot
of additional expression of resistance on the part of intellectuals in
protest and activism.
Bearing active witness against malignant normality in climate, nuclear
threat or anything else, requires protest and activism. I believe in the
combination of scholarship and activism and have tried to live by that
in my own work.
Where do you see the climate swerve at the end of this administration?
I’m hopeful enough to believe that the climate swerve will far outlive
this administration. The climate swerve is something that takes on a
much longer life. It’s only taking shape now and beginning. It’s a
larger wave of feeling and belief and consciousness and awareness that
will last for generations. Each generation will need to estimate,
examine climate danger and the embrace of a version of the climate
swerve that does the maximum amount to combat that danger.
I see the climate swerve as lasting for a very long time with ebbs and
flows and problems, but not being ended in any sense within the
foreseeable future. In that sense, that’s not a form of wild optimism
but that is an expression of some hope in relation to the human future
and our struggle with climate.