I’ve always been ambivalent about environmentalism. On the one hand, my gut instinct is usually to conserve and preserve as a default policy. On the other hand, a lot of environmentalists seem to adopt an absolutist posture. Any harm to the environment is bad. No tradeoffs. No cost-benefit analysis. No looking at the big picture. I’ve become more concerned with this tension as the need for practical environmental policy has become more imminent. I think I’ve managed to tease out some of the underlying causes of this tension and I believe it boils down to what Rafe and I have started calling the Ascetic Meme.
First, I must warn you that these thoughts are pretty preliminary, highly speculative, and undoubtedly controversial. It will also likely require more than one post to flesh them out. So bear with me. The crux of my hypothesis is that the polarization we are currently seeing on environmental issues is an emergent phenomenon stemming from some deep evolutionary psychology. Developing workable policies will require getting past this psychology and rationally examining what is actually in long term best interests of the human species.
My insight began by observing a common internal dialog of mine, “That’s cool! I want one. Yeah, but it’s really too flashy for me.” There seem to be competing personalities in my head when it comes to luxuries. I see similar behavior in my family and friends. These well off people forgo small luxuries that are pretty clearly a benefit to them with the rationalization that, “Oh, I don’t really need that.” Then for the big luxuries they do finally cave in to, they have to convince themselves that it’s alright to get them, which seems to require long drawn out conversations with me.
I see similar behavior among environmentalists. Take the “locavore” movement. The thinking here is that eating food grown close to you is better for the environment because it reduces the emissions from transporting food. Unfortunately, it turns out that the dirt-to-table emissions attributable to food are dominated by the production phase. So it’s better for the environment to produce foods in areas that require the least intensive methods and then ship them. For example, we should grow a wide variety of foods in New Zealand and ship them to England rather than grow them in England. But emotionally it seems more extravagant to eat food from far away. That’s why when you point out the efficiency argument to avowed locavores, they come up with all sort of other reasons why you should eat local–not why they eat local, but why you should. If they’re willing to bear the costs of eating local, more power to them, but leave me out of it.
It’s this combination of internal pressure and the incidence of proselytizing that leads me to believe evolutionary psychology may be involved. Humans appear to be wired for cooperation and enforcing cooperation. It’s easy to see how a bias against luxuries could also be adaptive in the ancestral environment. There’s already pressure to accumulate luxuries to signal status . Without some countervailing factor, early groups of humans may have dissolved into a counterproductive escalation of selfish accumulation. Note that I’m not claiming strong evidence for this effect, just putting it forward as a hypothesis.
In and of itself, this bias is probably a good thing even in modern times. Max Weber described how frugality was part of a highly successful work ethic in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. I owe my existence to this work ethic (all four of my grandparents are/were paragons of Protestantism), so I’m a fan. Also, people are generally bad at predicting the future, so “saving for a rainy day” is still good advice.
Let’s call this adaptive bias the Frugality Meme. Where we get into trouble is when it mutates into an extreme form: the Ascetic Meme. In this version, the goal is not to savings or modesty, it is suffering through deprivation, typically to achieve some sort of spiritual goal. Asceticism is a recurring theme in many world religions. More offensive is that it sometimes includes a compulsion to see other people join in this suffering. You can flog yourself, but please don’t flog me.
I see some environmentalists going down this extreme path. There are people dedicated to “sustainable living“, which appears to bear an uncanny resemblance to living like a monk. But hey, that’s their choice. What really worries me are environmentalists that don’t seem satisfied unless everyone suffers. You can find plenty of environmental extremist quotes on the Web, but here are my top three scariest:
“Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.” — Dave Forman, Founder of Earth First!
“If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to Earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.” — Prince Phillip, World Wildlife Fund
“We, in the green movement, aspire to a cultural model in which killing a forest will be considered more contemptible and more criminal than the sale of 6-year-old children to Asian brothels.” — Carl Amery
Obviously, these guys are wackos. What worries me more is that regular people often seem to reflexively behave as if anything that protects the environment is good. I plan on exploring how the propagation of this meme stifles debate in future posts.
[…] Insidious Ascetic Meme As I discussed in Environmental Ideology and the Ascetic Meme, the Ascetic Meme is a severe form of the Frugality Meme. In this post, I’ll explore how I […]
[…] Implications of the Ascetic Meme I’d like to thank everyone that stuck with me for Part I and Part II. Now we get to the punch line, which is very simple: because of the Ascetic Meme, we […]
[…] you can probably guess from my series of posts on the Ascetic Meme (here, here, and here), I think this approach is misguided. If you read those posts, you can undoubtedly […]
[…] certainly not saying I’m better than you. In this particular case, recall my statement in part 1 that I am a fan of the Frugality Meme and think it’s […]
Alex Steffen of worldchanging.org is in (nuanced) agreement with your thesis in the above post, Kev:
It’s Not Just Carbon, Stupid
Kevin, I really enjoyed this piece. I’m glad to hear there’s some push back, and completely agree that questioning is as important in science as it is in politics and religion.
I have to say, though, that I’m a bit of a “more with less” kind of person for a number of reasons. At the simplest level, I think it really helps to be able to evaluate our lives and direction from a cleared slate. The only way we’ll be able to figure out what impact we’re having (positive, negative, negligible or disastrous) is to have a baseline. When I started consuming less and less, I started seeing how much others were consuming — and I dare say, needlessly!
One way to put this stuff in perspective is view the 20 minute film “Story of Stuff” that a curious individual researched and presents for free on the web (site listed below). (Aside: favorite quote: “And if you think about it, what’s the point of an ad except make us unhappy with what we have.”)
Finally, I wanted to recount what was discussed on NPR today about average GDP vs. Happiness. In the past 50 years our average GDP has skyrocketed (over 7 percent annually avg), and yet our happiness is no higher. While I do believe that having more means to address health and education issues, and daily living is a good thing, I also believe that folks have been continually distracted from the good things in life (mostly people) by the bad things in life (mostly things that grow outdated and leave us wanting newer (costlier) things). One way to address this recurring disease is to distance ourselves (as a society) from all these “things”.
-Holden
ps. Two notes: 1) I do realize when we stop consuming we’ll hurt our own businesses, and I’m okay with this; I’m looking for a sustainable solution, and that includes people, not just dollars. 2) Sorry about getting on the tangent of “stuff” from the environmentalism — I find they’re plenty related.
pps. Excellent, simple movie: http://storyofstuff.com/
@Rafe. Steffen is more of a “sustainability hawk” than I am. I actually don’t think we are headed for a “collapse”. I also think nuclear power is an excellent option. But it’s nice to see even hard core environmentalists recognizing that carbon isn’t the only issue.
@Holden. I always take the happiness vs GDP statistic with a grain of salt. I’m actually reasonably up to date on the academic happiness research (recommended: Bruno Fey’s _Happiness: A Revolution In Economics_). The inter generational measurement issues here are rather daunting. Personally, I don’t know anybody who would rather live in 1959 than 2009.
@kevindick. Fair enough, on the ‘who would rather live in 1959 than 2009’, but I also have to posit that visiting some New Zealand towns was like stepping back a few decades, but with solar power, gluten-free restaurants, and mobile service. To generalize, I think they somehow avoided the ‘consumeristic’ pitfalls that plague the US currently.
@Holden. Yeah, but the mobile service and solar panels in NZ are the fruits of R&D and manufacturing done in other places like Japan and the US. You need a certain population density to support the provisioning of such technological marvels. But that same density tends to engage our primate status-seeking behavior. There’s no evidence you can have one without the other.
@kevindick. That, my friend, is a sad realization. I’m happy that I can break the mold (as plenty of others have, just not the masses) and actually contribute to green technology, without engaging my ‘primate status-seeking behavior’.
@Holden. I don’t see it as sad. Status seeking is the driver for much innovation. It’s like saying that fire can burn you is sad. If it couldn’t burn you, it wouldn’t be very useful. It’s both the power and the danger at the same time.
And I wouldn’t be too sanctimonious about not engaging in status seeking. Humans are incredibly inventive at such things. I see a lot of clear status seeking among environmentalists to see who can be the most visibly eco-friendly. In fact, one of the reasons I think the Prius was more successful than the Civic Hybrid was that the Prius clearly looks different from any other Toyota. So people know that you are into being green.
And all this talking about how low people’s carbon profiles are? That’s status seeking.
@kevindick. I’m not sure I agree 100%. Regarding the fire simile, I agree that innovation can do wonderful, as well as horrific things. But I would say that while fire isn’t a bad thing in itself, specifically burning people with fire is generally a bad thing. And I would say that consuming lots of resources in an unsustainable way is inherently bad for the health of our earth, and also our lives. Of course, consuming them in a *healthy* way *is* sustainable, and thus warranted. I just wish we could be a bit more realistic in drawing the dividing line (which I realize is different for each person, culture, income group, etc.).
I completely agree about greenwashing & prius’ & talking about carbon footprints. It’s an unfortunate reality, but an opportunity for making money for others as well — so many double-edged swords these days.
I’ll bow out at this point, thanks for the good discussion.
While I generally agree with Kevin about all of these things, one point where we seem to consistently diverge centers around my willingness to co-opt and manipulate these shared human proclivities like status seeking, for the greater good, and on a large collective scale. Kevin, I believe, feels that this encroaches on fundamental individual rights and believes the best we can do is to set up the correct rules and incentives and allow individuals to exercise their rights maximally therein. I think we can go farther if we also lean on and nurture people’s cooperative instincts, but Kevin says no that’s just wishful thinking and that all the data he’s seen says it’s not possible .
Kev, does that sound fair?
@Rafe. There are two things going on here. First, IIRC pure signaling behaviors are productivity-decreasing. Robin Hanson has some nice work showing this result. I believe this implies that co-opting signaling behaviors is always worse than an optimal incentive plan.
Now, you could argue from a practical point of view that the optimal incentive plan is not achievable. Fair enough, but then I’m worried about how we decide what is the “greater good”. Because we’re talking about manipulating people’s irrationality, I’m quite leery of any such process’ ability to rationally determine the greater good.