Kari Norgaard on denial: If being aware of climate change is an uncomfortable condition which people are motivated to avoid, what happens next?
After all, ignoring the obvious can take a lot of work. In the Norwegian community where I worked, collectively holding information about global warming at arm's length took place by participating in cultural norms of attention, emotion, and conversation, and by using a series of cultural narratives to deflect disturbing information and normalise a particular version of reality in which "everything is fine." When what a person feels is different from what they want to feel, or are supposed to feel, they usually engage in what sociologists call emotional management. We have a whole repertoire of techniques or "tools" for ignoring this and other disturbing problems. As sociologist Evitiar Zerubavel makes clear in his work on the social organisation of denial and secrecy, the means by which we manage to ignore the disturbing realities in front of us are also collectively shaped. How we cope, how we respond, or how we fail to respond are social as well. Social rules of focusing our attention include rules of etiquette that involve tact-related ethical obligations to "look the other way" and ignore things we most likely would have noticed about others around us. Indeed, in many cases, merely following our cultural norms of acceptable conversation and emotional expression serves to keep our attention safely away from that pesky topic of climate change. . Selective attention can be used to decide what to think about or not to think about, for example screening out painful information about problems for which one does not have solutions: "I don't really know what to do, so I just don't think about that". The most effective way of managing unpleasant emotions such as fear about your children seems to be by turning our attention to something else, or by focusing attention onto something positive. *Hoodwinking ourselves?* Until recently, the dominant explanation within my field of environmental sociology for why people failed to confront climate change was that they were too poorly informed. Others pose that Americans are simply too greedy or too individualistic, or suffer from incorrect mental models. Psychologists have described "faulty" decision-making powers such as "confirmation bias", and argue that with more appropriate analogies we will be able to manage the information and respond. Political economists, on the other hand, tell us that we've been hoodwinked by increased corporate control of media that limits and moulds available information about global warming. These are clearly important answers. Yet the fact that nobody wants information about climate change to be true is a critical piece of the puzzle that also happens to fit perfectly with the agenda of those who have tried to generate climate scepticism.
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