Huffington Post - Alexander C. Kaufman
Robert Jay Lifton studied Nazi doctors and the threat of nuclear annihilation. But global warming changed everything.
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| Robert Jay Lifton jots down notes in the office of his Upper West Side apartment on a sunny October morning. Alexander C Kaufman / HuffPost |
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.
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| Lifton provided testimony as a brainwashing expert at the 1970s trial of Patricia Hearst, who committed crimes after she had been kidnapped. Bettmann via Getty Images |
"I consider the climate serve 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.
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| President Donald Trump posing with a hard hat in coal country during the 2016 presidential campaign. Mark Lyons via Getty Images |
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.
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