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The Face-Offs That Fuel Good Work

May 13, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Good work always has a long-term goal. 
 
I’m thinking this week about long-term goals of mine, like acting to confront climate change and the assaults on knowledge by misinformation. Both goals are intertwined and both seem difficult if not impossible to impact. How can my actions advance either of these priorities?
 
I always have a lot on my To Do List, and my impulse is always to check off one big item and move on to the next one. Climate change and misinformation are big items. But then I remember that one of my jobs this time of year is groundskeeper. In the near acre around my home, I’ve learned the hard way to move away from bold, all-at-once kinds of goals like “give the whole place a haircut” to keeping my intentions smaller and closer to the ground.
 
Nature has forced me to become more modest when it comes to shaping its whims to my demands given the time, tools and sweat I can commit. I have more confidence than I used to that chipping away a little at a time will bring the landscape towards “what I have in mind” for this unruly plot in the middle of a city. Knowing that victories “only I can see” will eventually add up to the embrace of trees, hedges, plots and vistas in my imagination is what turns my job as groundskeeper into good work.
 
Groundskeeper lessons dovetail nicely with a couple of quotes from Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark about even more daunting challenges and where we find the hope to confront them.

in Hurricane Katrina, hundreds of boat owners rescued people—single moms, toddlers, grandfathers—stranded in attics, on roofs, in flooded housing projects, hospitals, and school buildings. None of them said, I can’t rescue everyone, therefore it’s futile, therefore my efforts are flawed and worthless, though that’s often what people say about more abstract issues in which, nevertheless, lives, places, cultures, species, rights are at stake.

Of course, it’s that first rescue that seeds the hope to become a rescuer again: the first act making your next act possible. Solnit gets lyrical here:

You row forward looking back, and telling this history is part of helping people navigate toward the future. We need a litany, a rosary, a sutra, a mantra, a war chant of our victories. The past is set in daylight, and it can become a torch we carry into the night that is the future.

“You row forward looking back”—even if only you can find anything worth celebrating in what you’ve done already—because you’ve turned what were once only good intentions into the on-going satisfaction of good work.
 
Whenever my values and priorities have me seeing the battle ahead as light versus darkness, I’ve had to re-learn the wisdom of Voltaire when he told me that “the best is the enemy of the good” and Aesop when he taught me why the tortoise beats the hare. They’re cold water on a hot parade every single time, but also the most sensible marching orders. Lately, I’ve been pondering how they should guide my “face-offs” with climate change and the ongoing assault on knowledge.
 
What actions will seed enough hope to fuel my next ones?

How does good work on both of these challenges get off the ground?

1.         Confronting Climate Change

Celebrating the beauty and wonder of nature and reminders about the gorgeously nuanced ways that we used to talk about them (like Robert MacFarland does) reinforce those who are already believers in nature. Warnings based on the science or on what prophetic observers carry back to us from the frontlines also speak mostly to believers who were already open enough to hear the call (my recent post about Barry Lopez’s Horizon).
 
These celebrations and warnings only reach unbelievers when they’ve already made themselves available for persuasion—which is not often enough. Communing with believers can feel like a tent revival when most of those who need converting are still outside the tent. Given my experience as an advocate for clients and for new ventures in business and government, I’ve been looking for ways to persuade more of the unbelievers to come into the tent so they can hear the call too.
 
The challenge for would-be persuaders is enormous given our values (or “political predispositions,” since they are largely the same on an issue like this) and other priorities that we have as Americans. In a widely-read and research-intensive article called “Climate Change: US Public Opinion,” political scientists Patrick J. Egan at NYU and Megan Mullin at Duke describe Americans’ reactions to climate change as of 2016 from polling and other analyses they conducted:

The public’s level of concern about climate change has not risen meaningfully over the past two decades, and addressing the problem with government action ranks among one of the lowest priorities for Americans….Even liberals and Democrats who accept climate change science and express concerns about global warming’s affects rank the problem well below many other national priorities…In 2016, for example, Pew found Democrats prioritizing climate change lower than several concerns not traditionally associated with their party, including terrorism and crime…[So] the effort to slow global warming is additionally challenged by the fact that the issue has no core constituency with a concentrated interest in climate change.

It feels much the same today.

Features of climate change in particular have put the challenge of confronting it on a low burner. As examples, Egan and Mullin point to:

– our highly-politicized disagreement about whether there is really a problem with man-made climate change at all; as well as 

-how a changing climate is difficult if not impossible for the average person to see; 

-the difficulty of attributing events (like a particular fire or a storm) to the broader phenomenon; and 

-the often-mentioned fact that the worst effects of climate change will happen in the future and be experienced someplace other than America.

Politics aside, the imperceptibility and remoteness of climate change make it difficult for most of the public to make the imaginative leap into actively addressing it.

I discussed one response that these authors recommend here last week. Within the conservative, libertarian and Republican “values” communities, formerly skeptical thought leaders who have become convinced that the threats of climate change must be addressed are perhaps the only ones who can enlist their communities’ support by “making hay” out of the same reasoning that persuaded them.

Egan and Mullin also identify two avenues for someone like me, who is already convinced about the urgency of the problem but is looking for a way to persuade the vast majority who, while not quite skeptical or politically-opposed, fail to see it as a priority that’s important enough to act upon. These avenues exist in places where the effects of climate change are (in all likelihood) being experienced already, or rely upon policy developments in states like California and New York where climate change has already seized a larger share of the public’s imagination.

According to the authors, the more that members of the public “correlate key weather events they have experienced with climate change,” the more important or “salient” the issue becomes to them. For example, those who experienced flooding in Staten Island or along the Jersey shore after Hurricane Sandy may not be convinced enough by the correlation to support a comprehensive national climate change policy but they probably want to “adapt” to its likely risks and become more “resilient” in the face of future ones.

If the connection between extreme weather and climate change is strengthened, this may expand the national conversation from mitigation alone to adaptation and resilience. Even under the most optimistic emissions scenarios, infrastructure investments will be needed to reduce the harmful effects of climate change on Americans

Since this article was written, correlations between climate change and practical responses to its likely risks have also been made by Americans who were impacted by the recent wildfires around Paradise California and are regularly inundated by high tides in Miami in the absence of any storm activity. There are clusters of Americans along its vulnerable coastlines and in the more fire-prone West who are correlating climate change with risks that are no longer theoretical.
 
As people pay the costs of what is probably climate change, the core, underlying problem becomes more of a priority. The “good work” of persuasion is more hopeful when done in places and around events where meeting some of its likely harms have already been bought and paid for. These communities have, in effect, been opened to persuasion by climate-related impacts that seem new to them and out of proportion to what they have experienced before. That means my advocacy to enlist their further commitment to mitigate climate change itself (and not merely react to it) holds out the hope of bearing fruit.
  
Egan and Mullin also cite research that proves “the very strong correlation between state policy and public opinion” and argue that states like California and New York are already influencing the national policy debate by acting alone. While the authors don’t say, I’d argue that it’s harder for fence-sitters on climate change to continue to remain uncommitted when majorities in other states are investing their tax dollars in targeted policies. Those “watching but not yet acting” are also susceptible to committing more deeply if the advocate they’re listening to avoids the partisan bloodletting while persuading them with arguments that have already succeeded in these vanguard jurisdictions.
 
Like my groundskeeper or Solnit’s rescuers during Hurricane Katrina, each patient step of persuasive advocacy can build hope in the next step until the core constituency to confront climate change has been assembled and activated by my good work and the good work of many others.
 
(While I recommend it highly, the Egan-Mullin article is dense with charts and annotations. To make it more accessible, one of its many fans created a comic book version that’s also worth a look.)

2.         Speaking Up for What I Know

These days, even what we consider to be “knowledge” (that’s supported by evidence, is worthy of belief, and is accepted as true) isn’t safe in a world of communication that’s dominated by information-sharing platforms like Facebook, Twitter and You Tube.

In the climate change debate for example, conclusions that are based on carefully assembled scientific evidence often seem to be given the same weight and claim of legitimacy as the arguments of climate change deniers. Egan and Mullin illustrate how media channels have regularly allowed deniers to create an equivalence between their ignorance and the fact-based evidence that scientists have been gathering.

As the public was learning about the [climate change] problem in the 1990’s, the mainstream media’s adherence to the journalistic norm of balancing coverage between two sides of a dispute resulted in misrepresentation of climate change science [and] understanding the scientific certainty about [the] human contribution to the problem.

Danah Boyd is a principle researcher at Microsoft. Her recent speech to a group of librarians arises out of the same vulnerability that all “knowledge” faces in the current media landscape. She aims her argument at librarians because “[y]ou all are deeply committed to producing, curating, and enabling access to knowledge. Many of you embraced the internet with glee” because it promised to make what is “not yet knowledgeable” available to more people while reducing overall ignorance. But today she asks them: 

-what if the internet and its on-line communities are being subverted by misinformation instead of liberated by knowledge? 

-what if this misinformation is being manufactured in order “to purposefully and intentionally seed doubt” and “to fragment society” instead of enabling honest debate and our ability to move on together when the debate is done?

In her speech, Boyd describes how misinformation that is designed to divide is being deployed and what people who are committed to defending knowledge can do about it?

One of the best ways to sow misinformation is to make sure that doubtful and conspiratorial content is easier to access than evidence-based material.  For example, she cites the gunman who recently massacred Muslims while they were worshipping in Christchurch, New Zealand. He exploited “the information ecosystem” we are all immersed in to ensure that his video recording of his killing spree was widely shared before content moderators could discover it. He filled “the data void” about his mentors and beliefs in a widely-reported counterpoint to those who condemned his actions, as if there were a legitimate debate about it. He “produc[ed] a media spectacle” by using the available channels to disseminate misinformation to millions who were susceptible to his disunifying message. 

There are opportunities to provide misinformation whenever there is “a data void” created by the media’s’ (and the public’s) curiosity. Why did he kill Muslims? Why is climate change a hoax? One way to fill the data void is with words that are strategically created to muddle what we know and how we feel about it. Boyd talks about how Frank Luntz accomplished this with words and phrases that were designed to seed doubt around various issues. Luntz is a “public opinion guru” perhaps best known for developing talking points and filling the data void around Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America.

In the 1990s, Frank Luntz was the king of doing this with terms like partial-birth abortion, climate change [or the even more muddling, global warming]  and death tax. Every week, he coordinated congressional staffers and told them to focus on the term of the week and push it through the news media. All to create a drumbeat.

All to engender emotional dissonance if not quite rational doubt.

According to Boyd, media manipulators also:

create [information] networks that are hard to undo. YouTube has great scientific videos about the value of vaccination, but countless anti-vaxxers have systematically trained YouTube to make sure that people who watch the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s videos also watch videos asking questions about vaccinations or videos of parents who are talking emotionally about what they believe to be the result of vaccination. They comment on both of these videos, they watch them together, they link them together. This is the structural manipulation of media. Journalists often get caught up in telling “both sides,” but the creation of sides is a political project.

So if “the other side” is misinformation, what should defenders of knowledge do? Here’s the straw man that won’t work:

You will not achieve an informed public simply by making sure that high quality content is publicly available and presuming that credibility is enough while you wait for people to come find it.

And here’s invitation from Boyd that I’m accepting:

You have to understand the networked nature of the information war we’re in, actively be there when people are looking, and blanket the information ecosystem with the information people need to make informed decisions.

+ + +

Moving from best intentions to good work is the biggest and most important step of all. For me, it involves discovering where and how to take it.

This post was adapted from my May 12, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning. 

Filed Under: Being Part of Something Bigger than Yourself, Building Your Values into Your Work, Work & Life Rewards Tagged With: acting on convictions, available for persuasion, best is enemy of good, climate change, from good intentions to actions, global warming, good work, knowledge, Megan Mullin, misinformation, open enough minds, Patrick J Egan, persuasion, taking a stand, tortoise beats the hare

How to Engage Hearts and Change Minds in the Global Warming Debate

May 5, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Conversations that change minds always appeal to people’s priorities.

These are conversations we’ve had here about subjects like the risks of climate change (“An Enabling Perspective for Our Wounded World”), the current imbalances in the American economy (“The Social Contract Around Our Work Is Broken”), the impacts of innovation (“Whose Values Will Save Us From Our Technology?”) and their effects on workers, families and communities.
 
Unfortunately, many of us don’t talk to anyone about how a warming planet is already impacting us, how the risks are accelerating, and what each of us can do about it. “What has climate change got to do with me?” or more pointedly, “What has global warming got to do with what is important to me?” 
 
What environmentalists consider a horrifying catastrophe barely registers as a concern for many of us, and much of that disconnect comes from how environmentalists have talked about it. It’s almost as if they think the health and beauty of the earth (remember “the snail darter”?) is more important than the freedom or prosperity of the people in it– when the challenge should never be expressed as an either/or.
 
Arguments about the sanctity of the biosphere that may seem obvious to me won’t persuade skeptics who are far more concerned about making a living off the land. So it’s fair to ask: why can’t the risks of global warming be conveyed in terms of its impacts on human freedom and prosperity—that is, through the lens of a very different set of priorities? Otherwise, we’re doomed to leaving half of the constituency that’s needed for change out of the loop.
 
Whether a skeptic is open to listening to someone who wants to persuade them is also key. I’m never going to change your mind if you don’t trust me already, and much of that trust comes from having credibility within a community that already shares at least some of your values.  It’s how Nixon’s legacy as an anti-communist gave him credibility with conservative constituents when he wanted them to change their minds about improving relations with communist China in the 1970s.
 
Until recently, there were very few leaders in the community of global warming skeptics whose minds were changed by the environmental record AND who were also willing persuade others who share their values to change their minds too by discussing how they became convinced by the enormous risks that are involved. Whether the issue is climate change or something else, the stature of the persuader and his or her willingness to explain their evolution from skeptic to believer in a language that speaks to common values also matters. 
 
Some recent polling data about the gulf between believers and non-believers when it comes to global warming speaks to the enormity of the bridge-building challenge.
 
According to a Gallup poll in March, nearly 70% of Republicans believe that alarm over a warming planet is “generally exaggerated” while nearly the same number of Democrats (67%) believe that global warming will pose “a serious threat” in their lifetimes. When political affiliation is removed from the polling questions, the results are equally compelling. The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that only 60% of the public think that global warming will affect people in the US, only 40% believe it will affect them personally, and 2/3rds of those polled never talk about climate change with anyone else. For many people, climate-related threats to our way of life are not even on their radar.
 
Those most knowledgeable about climate science are almost unanimous in their alarm over global warming. But those who aren’t paying attention or are waiting to be convinced are unlikely to persuaded by “the facts” that fuel the experts’ alarm. On the other hand, they might be persuaded by someone they are listening to already and are open to hearing out.
 
This openness to persuasion was evident from studies Charlan Nemeth shared in her 2018 book on the power of dissent. I discussed her findings in a couple of posts (“Why Voice Your Dissent?” and “Dissent That Elevates the Group”) about how somebody who disagrees with you–often vehemently–can also change your mind.
 
As long as a group trusts you enough to “give you the floor and listen to what you have to say,” you’ll likely engage them in your argument when it’s grounded in your values, demonstrates your care about where the group is headed, and provides a glimpse of a better future for all of you if you succeed in persuading them.

You raise your voice because what you believe and what you know can’t stay silent any longer. You dissent because you care about being true to yourself and because you care about what will happen to the group if it doesn’t hear what you’re saying. [As a result,] the group will grapple with your knowledge and beliefs even when they don’t agree with them…In addition…the most productive dissent also contains at least a piece of the future that you are convinced that everyone in the group should want.  A dissenter’s convictions engage our convictions about what we know and believe, but so does her hopeful vision about the future [we can] create together. 

When dissenting opinions contain these three elements, those who disagree at first are more likely to open their minds and question their own positions.  When you are “in it” together (whatever the basis for that commonality), people will listen to your reasoned testimony when they sense your heart is in it too. Someone else’s grounded, caring and hopeful dissent essentially creates the space for reconsidering what we think and believe to be true. 
 
Of course, to persuade a skeptical group with your “dissenting” opinion, the group has “to give you the floor” in the first place, and the easiest way to receive that invitation is if you already share at least some of the group’s basic values. For example, to reach conservative, often Evangelical communities that have tended to be dismissive of the threat of global warming, climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe grounds the facts she knows as a scientist in the biblical values she believes in as a Christian.  
 
In her 2009 A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions (co-written with her husband who is a minister himself), as well as in her TED talk last December, Hayhoe’s persuasiveness arises from both her expertise and these shared beliefs.  She’s convinced that fear, even when justified by the science, only causes people to flee the issue or become demoralized because nothing they could ever do will really matter. On the other hand, a “rational hope” that individuals can make a difference when it’s tied to the values of her largely Evangelical audience has a much better chance to change minds and get her listeners to engage in solutions, even small ones. 
 
The Bible calls on Christians “to serve the least of these”—the poorest and most vulnerable in the developing world, who are already among the most affected by global warming. Hayhoe utilizes her scientific knowledge to paint a vivid picture of the suffering that billions of the poorest people will face if the world continues to ignore the scientific evidence. The message in her book and when she’s speaking is always clear. She “connects the dots” between their shared values and why her readers and listeners need to confront the challenges of a changing climate.  “Doing something, anything, about climate change is a step in the direction of caring for people,” she says. It’s a reason to believe that her audiences can feel, understand and act upon.
 
Hayhoe’s expertise as a climate scientist gives her knowledge-based credibility with her largely Christian audiences. Many of Nemeth’s dissenters who changed skeptical minds also had (or managed to build) subject-matter credibility that could be harnessed to values they shared with the groups they were trying to reach. Jerry Taylor, originally a Republican global-warming skeptic, supplemented his authority by reviewing the evidence of climate change and convincing himself that the risks it poses to his priorities—like its impacts on private property and personal freedom—demand that it be confronted without any more delay. Taylor runs the Niskanen Center, a libertarian-leaning Washington think tank. Over the past 5 years, he and his colleagues have been quietly building support among Republican legislators and staff for an aggressive federal carbon tax.
 
Since Taylor’s commitment to Republican and libertarian values is unquestioned by his peers, his “change of heart” given the evidence of global warning and the carefully tailored carbon tax he proposes to address it have been taken seriously by his colleagues. “This is one of our own,” he knows what he’s talking about, we need to hear him out, and maybe open our minds to the persuasion in his arguments. The significance of overtures like his to global warming skeptics cannot be overstated.
 
An April 16 article in the MIT Technology Review argues for the “science” (or at least the method) that seems to be operating here. The article is “How the Science of Persuasion Could Change the Politics of Climate Change,” while its tagline is: “Conservatives have to make the case to conservatives, and a growing number of them are.” In order to change minds on a hot–button issue that has been reduced to partisan sound bites, several factors are relevant.

The first is understanding how political stalemates first arise. We become polarized when members of “our elites,” our so-called “thought leaders,” rally us in one direction or another.  By the same token, to reduce political polarization the convictions of these thought leaders are the first convictions that need to be changed.

The real focus shouldn’t be on convincing the public, hitting people over the head again and again with the science and dangers of climate change. Instead, the goal should be to change the minds of the elites. 
 
When they send clear and consistent signals, mass opinions that seemed strong and fixed can swing in the other direction”…. The good news is this means you don’t have to change as many minds. The bad news is the ones you do have to change can be particularly stubborn ones.

This is why Jerry Taylor’s conversion experience is significant.  No one else changed his mind. He changed his own mind by studying the evidence around climate change, and, as a result, he and his allies are well-positioned to change similar minds in the elite government circles where they operate.
 
Another element in this kind of persuasion relates to the common values that the persuader shares with those who need persuading.

[Taylor] and his staff attempt to craft fact-based arguments designed to appeal specifically to their political interests, and present policies they can rationalize within their ideologies.
 
Notably, the Niskanen Center isn’t pushing the environmental regulations that conservatives despise. They’re advocating a revenue-neutral carbon tax, a market-based tool. Carbon pollution costs real people real money. It’s just that the polluters aren’t necessarily the ones bearing those costs. In a market that respects the property rights libertarians champion, that ‘externality’ needs to be priced in, Taylor says.

The MIT Tech article suggests that Taylor has been making headway with Republicans in Congress, but no one is “naming names” yet, suggesting that there is still “a ways to go” in getting these legislators out in front on America’s response to global warming.
 
To make their changes of heart even more palatable, the article also cites the so-called “co-benefits theory” advanced by some political scientists. In listing our gains once we cut greenhouse gas emissions, the newly converted can claim that they are also promoting goals like technological innovation, energy independence, national security, air quality, health and job creation. 

+ + +

The necessary coalition to address global warming will never coalesce until respected leaders in skeptical communities engage with those who deny the seriousness of climate change.
 
A skeptical community can be reached by both expertise and potential solutions that are consistent with that community’s’ priorities and values.
 
This kind of outreach recognizes that people’s identities are tied up in their political certainties and how those certainties reflect their basic values.
 
An appeal to values can change hearts enough so that an expert’s appeal to reason can also change minds.
 
There is a “rational hope” today that a skeptical public can be engaged deeply enough so that we will be able to come together to address global warming as well as almost every other intractable problem that requires a critical mass of public engagement.  

It’s about finding a few leaders who can reach enough people where they live.

This post was adapted from my May 5, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning. 

Filed Under: *All Posts, Being Part of Something Bigger than Yourself, Being Proud of Your Work, Building Your Values into Your Work, Continuous Learning Tagged With: carbon tax, Charlan Nemeth, climate change, dissent, elites, global warming, hearts and minds, Jerry Taylor, Katherine Hayhoe, minds through hearts, persuasion, polarization, political division, political divisiveness, reaching skeptics, science of persuasion, thought leaders, values

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