What Has Emmanuel Todd Been Up to Lately?

It has been some time since Emmanuel Todd's media presence has been this strong. The demographer, anthropologist and historian who produced The Final Fall and After the Empire, if not getting so much attention for his recent book on the war in Ukraine as one would expect from the reception to his past books (World War Three Has Already Begun was actually published in Japan, not France), and at least in the English-speaking world not getting more than that for Où en Sont-Elles?: Une Esquisse de l'Histoire des Femmes (recently published in English translation in Britain as Lineages of the Feminine, but apparently pretty much ignored by reviewers in the Anglosphere), is getting more notice for his latest--La Défaite de l'Occident (translatable as The Defeat of the West). Indeed, in his native France he has been making the rounds of the press, giving interviews to the newspapers Le Figaro, Le Point and Le Journal de Dimanche, the news magazine Marianne, and French radio (RMC) and television (TV5), with the contents of these interviews appearing in whole or in part translated into media outlets not only across the European continent (I have seen pieces from Germany, Italy, Spain, Norway, Hungary, Greece), but beyond, from Azerbaijan to Vietnam (if, again, attracting very little notice in the English-speaking world thus far).

Todd has, in his discussions with his various interlocutors (and presumably in his book), continued to apply many of his established methods to recent events, and in the process extended old arguments. As was the case in After the Empire two decades ago, he argues for a United States whose power is overstated, as a result of a long (post-1965) decline in which deindustrialization under neoliberal policies has factored significantly, and the decay of its "soft" power with other countries amid changes in its values--with this given point by the country's involvement in conflicts abroad that bespeak both its policy elite's irrationality and its weakening practical military capacity; the rebound of a Russia supposedly on the verge of collapse, demographically and in other ways; and the prospect of Russia reaching an accommodation with Europe that, having suffered for following the U.S. in its path (in its own deindustrialization, for example), may assert itself newly as the United States weakens. In the course of making this argument Todd's remarks also seem consistent with his past work in premises, methodology and even his smaller conclusions, from his high stress on demographic data as an indicator of important social shifts, to the divergence between the U.S. and other countries in attitudes toward gender, to the decay of democracy in its old North Atlantic heartland as the U.S., Britain and France become more unequal and oligarchical. Indeed, this book much more recalls the Todd of twenty years ago than it does the Todd of ten years ago, when anxious about an increasingly powerful and dictatorial Germany's role in Europe he was prone to stress the community of values and interests between France and the Anglo-Saxon powers (the more in as it is specifically by way of such a Russo-German accommodation that there would be a Russo-European accommodation).

However, if much is familiar here (so much that some may be tempted to think Todd has simply refurbished old arguments), there is much that is different, and important. Todd, as one may have observed in his prior writing, has inclined to a view of modernity as being in crisis amid a collapse of fertility rates to below (often far below) replacement levels. (Indeed, it is with discussion of this crisis that he opens his prior Lineages of the Feminine.) And while he has been attentive to material factors here (in particular, criticizing neoliberalism as making it less and less possible for people with middle-class values and expectations to consider themselves in a position to properly bring up children), he also seems to think that there is as yet no solution precisely, and to have not just placed a greater stress than in his more geopolitically-oriented prior writing on gender, but a heavier one on religion (or at least, the traditional religious faith of the Western countries) than in the past. Indeed, Todd, for whom a major theme here is the state of Protestantism in those Western countries where it has long been the predominant religion (the U.S., Britain, Germany, the Scandinavian countries), has gone so far as to characterize his book as a "sequel" to Max Weber's classic study The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism--dealing with the consequences of the "death" of Protestantism as Weber did with those of its rise. Where in Todd's view in these countries Protestantism had for decades been only a "zombie religion" (in which belief in the religion's theology passes but respect for its moral guidance and values endures) he sees it as having since gone over to the "zero" state in their societies (where respect for the morals and values also goes, the religion gone from undead to dead), and correlating this with their attitudes toward gender (specifically the acceptance of "same-sex marriage," and acceptance of transgenderism). While Todd is not nostalgic for a more religious past, and pointedly acknowledges what he sees as the less happy side of this religious inheritance whose passing may be viewed as positive (as with an inegalitarian outlook that contributed to extreme forms of bigotry), he also sees Protestantism's passing as having played its part in American/Western economic decline, specifically through American/Western esteem for education, work and community integration passing along with it. Todd also sees the shift of Protestantism from the zombie to the zero state as more broadly contributing to a "nihilistic" cultural stance he sees as evident in U.S. cultural attitudes and foreign policy (narcissistic, destructive). In Todd's analysis all these merge in the combination of military conflict with "culture war," in which Russia has translated its conservative position into considerable soft power, alongside its recovering material strength, which he regards as being bolstered by a wartime import-substitution program making it a more, not less, dynamic modernizer and technological power, testimony to which is Russia's appearing more successful than the West in keeping its side supplied with ammunition. (In explaining this Todd stresses Russia's relatively very high output of trained engineers, reflective of a Communist stress on education, and especially education of this kind, whose benefits Russia continues to reap as the U.S. no longer does the benefits of its own, past, ethic, in this area.)

Altogether Todd gives us a lot to consider here, more than I think I can respond to all of as yet. Still, I admit that I have always found "hard," material, explanations far more satisfying than "soft" ideal or cultural ones for phenomena such as economic rise and decline. The result is that while it certainly seems to me fair to speak of deindustrialization; and even date the beginnings of U.S. decline here to about 1965 as he does; it also seems to me that this has had less to do with the decline of values, or educational failures emanating from any source (the cry that the country's problems are due to a shortage of STEM skills is an old racket too often treated uncritically), and much more to do with the exhaustion of the potentials of the post-World War II arrangements for sustaining a growing world economy, after which economic performance became more troubled and the arrangements unraveled (as seen with the beginning of the end of American manufacturing's long expansion and of the gold standard), with, to little surprise given the state of politics in the U.S. (the predominance of a conservative center ever more prepared to move right than left, the virtual non-existence of a left in an American discourse alongside the existence of a very powerful, reactionary, right, etc.), the country shifting rightwards, and in the process producing the neoliberal model as we know it. And if there have been changes in values, or at least behavior, the direction of change ran the opposite way, with the economic model the cause rather than the byproduct, as the proponents of a shift in model that had no popular base legitimized and encouraged adaptation to that model’s terms--the rise of neoliberalism, rather than the decline of Protestantism, much more easily connected with the narcissism, etc. that Todd describes.

Moreover, one should remember that the cultural changes that Todd treats as representative of the West have actually been highly divisive and controversial within the West, and not least the U.S.. If one can attend to, for example, the widening acceptance of gay marriage, one can also consider how in the culture war-torn U.S. the formidable religious right achieved the overturning of Roe vs. Wade in 2022, and has an unprecedented champion in the current Speaker of the House, two facts which quite suffice to make it appear that reports of the death of Protestantism have been "greatly exaggerated." So does it also seem to go in the economic sphere, where "economic Calvinism" also appears alive and well--not least in the endurance of the pieties about education (all too evident in the student debt load weighing upon the country's young and not so young), and the socioeconomic aspirationalism to which it bespeaks with all its associated values, including a tolerance for extreme difference of outcome (and perhaps also admiration for wealth as testimony to virtue) greatly exceeding anything to be seen anywhere else in the developed world.

Meanwhile if Todd is quite right that Russia's government has endeavored to accelerate the country's industrialization (or re-industrialization) I have yet to see much evidence for success in this area thus far. Certainly Russia has been very successful in sustaining and elevating its ammunition production. But what about, for instance, the production of the trucks needed to carry the ammunition to the guns? More broadly, what about output in areas like the machine tools needed for the industrial work? What I have been able to find does not support the claims for much progress here to date. Meanwhile, I am far from persuaded that deindustrialization suffices to explain the shortcomings in Western material support for the Ukrainian government relative to Russia's ability to back its own effort. (Todd emphasizes the problem of comparing the West and Russia on the basis of Gross Domestic Product--but when I undertook an in-depth comparison going beyond GDP to manufacturing value added and its medium and high-tech content; the physical output of key goods in steel, vehicles and microchips; and the production, consumption, import and export of machine tools; I found that NATO, and in certain areas even just the U.S. or even Germany by itself, possesses an enormous advantage, often by orders of magnitude.) Todd is quite right that, certainly to go by the contents of Vladimir Putin's speeches, the Russian government has brought the gender politics Todd discusses into its presentation of the war in Ukraine as a campaign against Western hegemony, but one may doubt the extent to which this is actually translating to meaningful advantage for Russia internationally. (This may be all the more the case in that, as Todd himself notes, Russia itself falls short of offering a full "counter-model" to what critics of this kind may see as the lacks of Western modernity, not least in the recovery of fertility rates in Russia still leaving it below replacement level.)

Finally I find myself more dubious than in a long time about Todd's reading regarding a Europe possibly going its own way. Where circa 2003 some (naively) imagined Europe being willing and able to follow a different path from a neoliberal- neoconservative U.S., European elites have proven thoroughly neoliberal and neoconservative themselves--all as the European project seems to have lost all popular enthusiasm (as Todd himself has remarked), arguably because of that neoliberal-neoconservative course (and, if one heeds Todd's argument, the deeper cultural changes that also make for an affinity between European and American elites). Along with how integrated their material interests were and remain (as in what Adam Tooze identifies as a trans-Atlantic banking system, in which U.S. bailout was indispensable to Europe's weathering the crisis of 2007-, or Germany's burgeoning trade with the U.S. and the surpluses it produces for that country, which in the past decade overtook Japan's), it is hard to see what motive Europe has to go its own way--all while, as Todd himself argued, Germany's weight is inseparable from its connection with those countries he called its "Russophobic satellites" in the Baltic region, another barrier to such accommodation. The result is that, if Todd has once again offered bold claims supported by some interesting arguments (based on a good many hard facts many prefer to skip over, like Western deindustrialization, Russian military-industrial successes, etc.), I am skeptical that his fundamental scenario--of a world scene transformed by a declining U.S. as Europe links hands with a resurgent Russia--will be borne out by the events of today any more than they were by the events of the early twenty-first century.

There is No Good Place to Be on a Warming Earth

As I have remarked time and again, a very large part of contemporary environmentalism--and certainly its more mainstream portion--has been founded on the darkest, most pessimistic Counter-Enlightenment thinking. Premised on postmodernism and Malthusianism; regarding the broad public as a "swinish multitude"; and denying any hope of positive social or political change; it screams about the danger--while being incapable of offering anything in the way of hope.

The result is that defeatism is all that is left to it, one expression of which is its haste to tell everyone that they are about to be dehoused. Live on a coastline? Sorry, you will just have to move. (They seem to especially love telling this to people in places like Miami and New Orleans--their "party town" image, perhaps, which proper Malthusians cannot possibly approve.) Live in an arid region? That's not going to be viable anymore. (The coastal folks have too much water, but they are going to have too little.) The tropics? Better find somewhere else to live. (Go north--to whatever isn't too coastal or too arid.) And this or that realization is followed up by images of latterday Volkerwanderung as millions, billions, relocate. However, anyone of even slight intelligence should be able to see that all of this quickly adds up to there being nowhere left to go--especially as unchecked global warming will mean that the situation will keep worsening, that the sea level will, for example, keep rising, so that areas that appeared safe at one point cease to be so not long after. And it cannot be any other way given that human reliance on freshwater supplies, productive farmland and water transport mean a continued collective dependence on areas particularly vulnerable to any worsening of the situation--while the losses of those areas will mean disruption going far beyond even the colossal human relocations. One would have more people living on far less of the Earth's surface, and getting along on far less of its resources, than they are now.

Meanwhile, how the world has dealt with its current refugee crisis, the worst since World War II but nothing next to the movements those speculating about such movements anticipate, does not inspire great confidence in the readiness of societies to accommodate the displaced on even a much smaller scale than they imagine.

All of this reveals this idea of vast relocations--especially in a world of hundreds of nation-states with all their borders--as the utmost silliness, though in fairness, I strongly suspect that were the troubles to run unchecked the frail international system, already bedeviled by what may be the greatest war danger in human history, would likely have long since escalated to the point of a devastating conflict before it comes to anything like forced mass relocation. (After all, problems like climate change, resource and economic stress, war, do not exist in separate compartments but are all complexly interlinked.)

All of this reminds us that if there is a solution to the problem it is exactly the one that misanthropic, technology- and progress-hating Malthusian-Luddite postmodernists completely reject, namely organization and technology to meet the crisis, with this not a matter of austerity-battered working people displaying great "convenient social virtue" in cheerfully deciding to individually live on less, but large-scale action to accelerate the "energy transition" and decarbonize transport and industry, hack the climate (they can whine all they like about cost and risk--the environmental movement's failures have left little choice but to bet on this route in some form), and minimize whatever damage is actually unavoidable (from slowing the melting of ice sheets to adapting coastal cities to higher sea levels, rather than some individual flight into an ever-shrinking and ever-poorer interior). Some of the technology we need to do all this is available; some exists in only the most nascent forms, and will have to be developed to a point of practical usefulness. Climate "inactivists" will look at acknowledgment of the latter fact and sneer at it as "unrealistic." (Sneering and calling things "unrealistic" are pretty much all that inactivists have in their intellectual arsenal of anti-democracy.) But in contrast with the fantasies of uprooting a planet's people and their life the idea that we can and should support the research and development of practical palliatives is the most pragmatic course--even when this means such exotica as cellular agriculture, or mega-engineering to slow the melting of glaciers.

Deindustrialization in France

In his writing on France's contemporary troubles (and the contemporary troubles of the advanced industrial world more as well) Emmanuel Todd has had a good deal to say about deindustrialization.

Taking an interest in the issue I looked over the United Nations' time series' on manufacturing "value added" (i.e. net output).

If when considering the matter we see Germany and Japan as at one end of the spectrum (less obviously dynamic than they used to be, but still colossal producers), and Britain and Canada at the other (with their manufacturing output sharply contracted in recent decades), it seems that France is very much in the latter situation--and Todd rightly understanding this as an important factor in the country's well-known discontents.

David Graeber's "The Bully's Pulpit": Some Reflections

Some years ago David Graeber published a remarkable essay in The Baffler, "The Bully's Pulpit," in which, as an anthropologist, he examined the matter of bullying. In doing so Graeber himself admits that "[t]his is difficult stuff," and tells us that he does not "claim to understand it completely." Still, one of the essay's virtues is a fairly clear conception of what bullying involves--what separates it from other sorts of conflict or aggression, which might be reduced to three interrelated aspects:

1. A significant disparity in power between the bully and their victim. (People who are, in the ways that matter, equals, and know it, cannot be said to bully each other.)

2. The complicity of Authority in the bully's behavior--whether by "looking the other way," or tacitly approving their conduct.

3. The inability of the victim to respond to the bully through means which are both societally approved and effective--and the victim indeed condemned no matter what they do. The victim is unable to flee; and cannot respond to the bully in kind because of the disparity in power; and so is reduced to either ignoring the bullying, resisting ineffectively, or "fighting unfairly." If they ignore the bully (apt to be a painful and humiliating course) the bully escalates their abuse to the point at which they cannot ignore it; if they resist ineffectively they demonstrate that they are weak, and are held in contempt for being weak; and if they resort to something unconventional they are held in contempt for that, too, and likely to be punished as everyone rallies around the bully.

Sanctimoniousness is thus a hallmark of such situations.

In Graeber's analysis the third aspect, the victim's reaction, and the sanctimoniousness toward it, is the point, "[b]ullying creat[ing] a moral drama in which the manner of the victim’s reaction to an act of aggression can be used as retrospective justification for the original act of aggression itself." Putting it another way, central to bullying is propagandizing for the view that the oppressed deserve to be so. (Thus do they abuse someone past the limits of their endurance, and then when they lash out, say "Evil, evil, evil! That's why we have to keep their kind down.")

It is absolutely vile, and I might add, vile in a particular way. While Graeber remarked his having not read Veblen some time after this piece was published, it seems to me that such ritual is yet another reminder of the endurance of what Thorstein Veblen identified as barbarism into our times--with the pervasiveness and severity of such ritual, and the tolerance of it and justification of it, very telling of how much such barbarism lingers in a particular society.

Fifth Generation Computing: A Reappraisal

Back in April 2022 I published here a brief item about Japan's generally unremembered Fifth Generation Computer Systems Initiative from the standpoint of that initiative's fortieth anniversary (which fell on that very month).

Much hyped at the time, it was supposed to deliver the kind of artificial intelligence toward which we generally still felt ourselves to be straining at that time.

Writing that item my principal thought was for the overblown expectations people had of the program. However, in the wake of more recent work on Large Language Models, like OpenAI's GPT-4, it seems that something of what the fifth-generation computing program's proponents anticipated is at the least starting to become a reality.

It also seems notable that even if fourth-generation computing has not been replaced by fundamentally new hardware, or even shifted the material substrate of the same fourth-generation design from silicon to another material (like the long hoped-for carbon nanotube), we have seen a different chip concept--employed in a specialty capacity rather than as a replacement for fourth-generation computing--play a key role in progress in this field, "AI" (Artificial Intelligence) chips. Indeed, just as anticipated by those who had watched the fifth-generation computing program's development, parallel processing has been critical to the design of these chips for "pattern recognition," and the acceleration of the programs' training.

In the wake of all that, rather than regarding fifth-generation computing as a historical curiosity one may see grounds for it simply having been ahead of its time--and deserving of more respect than it has had to date. Indeed, it may well be that somewhere in the generally overlooked body of research produced in the course of its development there are insights that could power our continued progress in this field.

Of Left and Right Transhumanism, Again

About a decade ago I had occasion to remark that while transhumanist thought may be said to have been more evident on the left than the right a century ago the existence of left transhumanism scarcely seems a memory where the mainstream is concerned today. This is arguably because of how completely the left has been cut out of the conversation--the bounds of "civil" discourse set by the centrism predominant at mid-century locking it out, and nothing changing that ever since (the left, indeed, coming to be more thoroughly excluded as the "center," deeply conservative from the start, only shifted rightward). However, there also seems little sign of interest in the matter these days on the left.

Why is that?

It may be that in a period like the 1920s, when many on the left felt confident that the future belonged to them, there appeared room for such visions--such that Leon Trotsky, for example, could be seen waxing transhumanist in the seemingly unlikely place for such that is the closing pages of his book Literature and Revolution. By contrast, after decades of catastrophic, bitter political defeat and disappointment (without which the aforementioned marginalization of the left to the degree seen today would not have been possible), the feeling can only be very different--with other issues far more pressing, leaving little time or energy for such concerns. It may even be that, so long accused of being "visionary," with anti-Communist cliché endlessly sneering at the left's claims to rationality and mocking it as a quasi-religion, those on the left hesitate to give their enemies any more ammunition by taking up such concerns as transhumanism.

Of course, were the issue of transhumanism to become more pressing this would change. Some claim that it already has in the wake of recent developments in the field of artificial intelligence, with one team of Microsoft researchers, who strike this author as having been rigorous in their assessment and cautious in their analysis of the new GPT-4 (certainly by the standard of a discourse which seems to think "What sorcery is this?" an intelligent response) suggesting that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), in however "early" and "incomplete" a form, may already be a reality. Considering their assessment I am inclined to emphasize the "early" and "incomplete" in their judgment--and to suggest that the developments and additions to actually turn what may be early and incomplete AGI into an undeniably complete and mature system (like the system's being equipped with elaborate planning-oriented and self-critical "slow thinking" as well as the "fast thinking" faculties that have so impressed observers, and its being modified so as to learn continually and retain what it learns via a long-term memory facility) may be a long way off. All the same, the extent to which people of ideological tendencies which have not felt the need to address these matters find themselves having to do so may be telling with regard to just how much these new developments really matter.

Will AI Puncture the College Degree Bubble?

Some time ago I wrote about the possibility that college degrees had become the object of an asset bubble-like pursuit, with the price of the "asset" increasingly detached from the value of the good amid increasingly irrational buying--facilitated, as bubbles often are, by burgeoning credit (the more in as student loan generators securitize the debt, providing other money-making opportunities).

The bubble has "inflated" to far greater proportions than onlookers had imagined possible--but it seems that amid harder times and much disappointment, this may be coming to an end as young people become more reticent about the time and money college requires, encouraged to some extent by the changing tone of the press. Ever inclined to the promotion of aspirationalism rather than egalitarianism, its cry of "STEM! STEM! STEM!" has given way to its suggesting young people consider becoming electricians.

Just as much as was the case with the earlier counsel of "Go to college, young man" the "Go to trade school, young man" advice can reflect any number of agendas (like cover for financial austerity that would make college less accessible), but part of it may also be the increasing acknowledgment of the simple-mindedness of the "Send everyone to college" mentality--the more in as so many fear now that when the "AI" come for people's jobs it will be the knowledge workers who lose their jobs first, as, far from truckers having to learn to code, out-of-work coders start thinking about getting trucker's licenses.

"Are We Seeing the Beginning of the End of College as We Know It?": A Follow-Up

Some time ago I speculated about the "end of college as we know it."

What I had in mind was the way that pursuit of a degree--and especially adherence to the "Cult of the Good School"--had become crushing relative to the return to be hoped for from it (to the point that the use of the word "bubble" has some justification). This seems all the more the case for the evidences that young people have become more skeptical about the economic value of a college degree--in part because of the disappointing experience of their elders in an economy ever more remote from the post-war boom and its hazy notions of generalized "middle classness," premised on the piece of paper you get on graduation being a ticket exchangeable for the life of an "organization man" (and the encouragement of "everyone" to go to college by centrist "liberals" more comfortable with preaching individualistic aspirationalism to being something other than working class than doing things that actually help out the working class--as seen in the matter of who pays the bill).

In recent the months "the conversation" has seen two significant, interrelated alterations. One is that, while we have not seen progress in the performance of artificial intelligence in tasks involving "perception and manipulation" such as would suggest an imminent revolution in the automation of manual tasks, progress in "Large Language Models" has called into question the livelihoods of the "knowledge workers" that college trains people to become. (Indeed, one thoughtful study of GPT-4 by a team of Microsoft scientists contended that "general artificial intelligence," in however primitive and incomplete a form, may have already arrived.) The other is a bit of cooling off of the chatter about there not being enough STEM graduates as instead commentators wring their hands over a shortage of personnel in the "skilled trades"--as the chatbots put "the coders" out of work, but still leave us needing electricians.

One can only wonder if those assumptions will prove any more enduring than those which preceded them--if the sense of imminent massive job displacement among knowledge workers will not prove to be hype, if the claims of a skilled trade worker shortage will not prove as flimsy and self-serving as the eternal claims of a STEM worker shortage. (Employers always say there is a shortage of workers--which is to say they always think wages are too high--and the media being what it is faithfully and uncritically reports their views, and no others, while much of the commentary has a nasty streak of intergenerational warfare about it, with grouchy old farts snarling that young people are too lazy or afraid of getting their hands dirty for "real work.")

Nevertheless, if there is any truth to all this--and even if there is not, but people act as if there is--there will be consequences for how we educate, credential, hire and work. However, we should remember that, contrary to the rush of the advocates of the powerful to insist that "There Is No Alternative" as they inflict pain on the powerless, facing those consequences there will be social choices--necessitating a critical attitude from the public toward those claqueurs who instead simply applaud.

Bill Gates Predicts AI Will Be Teaching Literacy in Eighteen Months. What Are We To Make of That?

Last year, when talk of a teacher shortage was topical, I took up the question of teaching's possibly being automated in the near term. Considering the matter it seemed to me notable that Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne's Future of Work study, which I thought overly bullish on the prospect of automation as a whole, rated teaching as one of those jobs least likely to be automated within the coming decades. Indeed, given their evaluation of the automatability of various tasks, far from seeing computers replace teachers, I pictured a scenario in which the disappearance of a great many other "knowledge worker" jobs worked by the college-educated had more people turning to teaching to make a living.

Of course, the months since I wrote that piece have been eventful from the standpoint of developments in artificial intelligence research. The excitement over progress in chatbots specifically surged with the releases of the latest iterations of OpenAI's GPT--experiments with which, in fact, convinced the authors of one notable study that "artificial general intelligence" is no longer an object of speculation, but, if only in primitive and incomplete form, a reality.

Now the cofounder and former CEO, president and chairman of the very company whose scientists produced that very study tells us that in eighteen months AI, on the way to becoming as competent as any human tutor.

Reading that statement I wondered whether it was worth remarking.

As a commentator on public affairs I have consistently found "Bill" Gates to be fairly banal--his views pretty much the standard "Davos Man" line whether the matter is poverty, intellectual property, or, as in this case, education--with Gates, one might add, far from being the most articulate, rigorous or interesting champion for his ideas. However, even if one is not impressed with his claims, or his arguments for them, the fact remains that in this culture where billionaires are so often treated as All-Knowing, All-Seeing Oracles by the courtiers of the media, and those who heed such unquestioningly, even Gates’ most unconsidered statements are accorded extreme respect by many, while Gates’ very conventionality means that what he speaks is apt to be what a great many others are already thinking--in this case, that the technology will be doing this before today's toddlers are in kindergarten. Moreover, even if they are wrong about that (Gates has been extremely bullish on the technology for some time now, rather more convinced than I am of its epoch-making nature), what he is saying and those others are thinking is apt to be what a great many will be acting on, or trying to, especially given the matter at hand. There is many a person for whom even the pretext of AI capable of even fractionally replacing the human educators they see as an expensive annoyance could be a powerful weapon--such that as the fights over math, reading, history and all the rest rage across the country's school districts, I increasingly expect to see the issue of automation enter the fight.

Is Climate Denial Spreading? If So, Why?

A recent poll regarding the public’s attitude toward climate change funded by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC) and conducted by the university's National Opinion Research Center (NORC) and the Associated Press (full results here) is getting some mention in in the more general press.

According to the poll the percentage of the public that believes climate change is a reality does not seem to have budged much--at 74 percent, within the familiar range of the past several years. What seems more significant is that the percentage who think climate change is not primarily human-caused has dropped--from 60 percent in 2018 to 49 percent in 2023. This seems mostly a matter of the growth of those who think natural/environmental factors are contributing equally as human factors to the phenomenon, which has jumped from 28 to 37 percent over the same time frame, rather than any drastic growth in the number of those who think it is mostly or entirely a natural phenomenon, which has risen comparatively slightly.

Still, if the change does not seem very extreme (one still has 86 percent at least believing that human contributions matter) it is not the direction in which those concerned for anthropogenic climate change would have hoped to see things moving--which, of course, is to see the number of those who recognize the reality of climate change as an essentially anthropogenic phenomenon growing, widening the support for action on the problem. Indeed, from the perspective of those concerned with the issue, and the extremely successful resistance of opposition to any meaningful action on it, any erosion is troubling. The shift from believing climate change is primarily human-caused to believing it is equally of natural causes is especially so because of what it may portend--a transition from the view of climate change as human-caused toward the view that human activity has nothing much to do with it at all.

Thus far I have not seen much interest taken by commentators in why this change may have occurred, important as that is to understanding their implications. However, I can think of at least three factors being of some significance here:

1. Less Mainstream Press Attention.
I have had the impression--unscientific, but all the same, strong and consistent--that amid pandemic, inflation and war climate change has got less press than before in the mainstream media, leaving people somewhat less conscious of the issue than before, and of the scientific consensus that climate change is an anthropogenic phenomenon. At the same time I have noticed no evidence that those pushing the opposite view have slackened in their efforts to persuade the public that climate change is nonexistent, or at least not caused by human activity. The result may be that there is less contestation of the climate denialist view than before, and that this is having its effect on public opinion. It is easier to picture this being the case because

2. The Country's Politics Are Shifting.
It is a commonplace these days that the country is becoming more "polarized" between right and left. I am not so sure this is a really useful way to think about the situation--in part because if there is indeed a left turn on the part of any significant portion of the population (a claim open to question given the ambivalence of the evidence) it is far from making itself felt in the country’s political life as an actual force. By contrast those who have moved further right have done exactly that. (Consider, for instance, how much better Donald Trump fared in his presidential primary than Bernie Sanders, or the weight the Freedom Caucus has within the Republican Party, as against that of the Democratic Socialists of America on the Democratic Party.) Attitudes toward the environment have been no exception here--and it is easy enough to picture those who have shifted rightwards as less willing to acknowledge anthropogenic climate change than before.

3. What "Human-Caused" Climate Change Means May Be Less Clear Than You Think.
It is a truism that polling reflects not just popular feeling on an issue, but the way in which it was asked about it--which can be tailored to elicit the answer the poller desires, or, should the poller be insensitive to the nuances of their own words, produce a misleading result they did not desire. Where this is concerned consider what it means for humans to be causing climate change. Specifically consider how many of those shaping the discourse on the subject have gone to great lengths to make people think of the human impact on the climate as a matter of individual "lifestyle" choices by everyday people--their diet, their choice of appliances, etc.--rather than collective behavior as manifest in large organizations ultimately directed by a powerful few--for instance, the investments of energy and utility companies, or the decisions of major governments. (Indeed, the EPIC poll itself is saturated with such thinking, particularly noticeable in its barraging the surveyed with questions about their personal consumption habits.)

Dumping the responsibility for the climate crisis on hard-pressed individuals who make their consumption choices from a range of options very limited by their means--(which many have long called out as unwise and unjust, an extreme inversion of Uncle Ben's teaching, putting on those who have none of the power all of the responsibility) plausibly elicits a refusal of that responsibility from many. No, they say, I am not the cause of a crisis, which inclines them that much more the view that there is no crisis of humanity's making generally, or even any crisis at all. Which, of course, is exactly the intended result of this "individualization" of the problem in the view of those critical of "climate inactivists" (who note, for example, that the individualistic vision of personal carbon footprint management came not from Greenpeace but BP).

If one accepts this reading of the situation at all then there seem to be three obvious "takeaways," none new to anyone who has been paying much attention, but worth repeating because they simply do not seem to sink in with a great many persons who really need to understand them:

1. The mainstream media so often held up as "our saviors" in a world of "fake news" and other such threats has often been anything but. (After all, it is the mainstream media that consecrated climate denialism as an intellectually respectable position in the first place--and left deeply flawed understandings of the possibility for response as the sole alternative--because of the political biases shaping its framing of the issues.)

2. The environment cannot be treated as conveniently disconnected from other issues the way some prefer to think. Quite the contrary, as people who pride themselves on alertness to the functioning of ecosystems should be aware, everything is connected, and how they think about other things will affect how they think about this thing.

3. Where those connections are concerned one especially cannot ignore the issue of wealth, power and justice when addressing problems like climate change, and the environment generally, a lesson too many environmentalists have forgotten too many times in the past.