Quickly now—what do an Emo Philips joke, the United Church of Canada, and a recent report on climate change have in common?
Well, they’re all in the above sentence, so that’s a start.
But let’s see if we can pull out a deeper commonality.
Back in 1987, Emo Philips gave the most wonderful performance of a joke sometimes described as being “about religion”—but really, it’s about a phenomenon that happens in group settings everywhere. Feelings of betrayal run strongest toward those we first regarded as closest to us, so when someone in our “circle” holds a different opinion over something important to us, we sometimes react more dramatically than if this opposing point of view had come from a stranger.
Here’s the whole joke, if you want a good chuckle before we press on:
In this skit, Philips interrogates a suicidal person about their religious orientation, and is delighted that they share so many similarities… until they come to one tiny difference, which leads him to shout “die, heretic!”, and push him off the bridge.
Now, compare this extremist behaviour with that of the United Church of Canada, which is one of the most “big tent” Christian groups in the world. While some Christian groups echo the stereotype in Philips’ skit, and practise their faith by fiercely condemning even the slightest deviation from group doctrine, the United Church of Canada is famous (infamous?) for having in its ranks an openly atheist ordained minister, Margaret Anne “Gretta” Vosper. Although some have always grumbled at the idea of an atheist leading services and teaching gospel, Gretta only really got into trouble for her disbelief when, in the wake of a terrible murder with a religious motive, she made a statement critical of those who believe in a supernatural god, because she felt that such convictions were responsible for violence in our world.
And yet… even that didn’t knock her from her position as a church minister!
Why? Because, unlike the stereotype in the Philips skit, the United Church strives to be as inclusive as possible; all who wish to celebrate the Christian god are welcome, so a gentle resolution to the matter of Vosper’s statement was reached in due time.
Let’s now hold those two extremes against our third object of contemplation: a September 11 joint publication of Lancet Planetary Health and the Earth Commission: “A just world on a safe planet”. This is a massive document, and as it just dropped yesterday, I haven’t read every section as thoroughly as I’d like to yet. What matters for our purposes today, though, is that this overview explores how we’ve currently veered outside seven of eight safe and just “Earth-system boundaries” (ESBs) necessary for human thriving, and need to revamp our whole approach to consumption, economic systems, the use of technology, and governance structures, if we’re to have any hope of easing planetary pressures in time to save more lives.
(Oh, is that all?)
The eight ESBs used in this research are paraphrased as follows:
Our overall climate must be kept to a maximum of 1.0°C of global warming.
Over 50–60% of our natural ecosystem area should be left largely intact—and a higher percentage is always preferred!
Greater than 20–25% of each km2 should be constituted of natural or semi-natural vegetation; this is necessary to maintain functional integrity in our biosphere.
Surface water flow needs to stay below 20% in monthly flow alteration.
The annual “drawdown” of groundwater from natural and anthropogenic factors must not exceed “recharge”. In other words: don’t take more water out than we put back into our water tables.
We need to keep our planetary nitrogen surplus under 57 (with an uncertainty range of 34–74) Tg, and total input of under 134 (85–170) Tg per year.
Similarly, our surplus of phosphorus needs to be kept under 4.5 to 9 Tg per year, and the annual mined input of phosphorus needs to be under 16 (with an uncertainty range of 8–17). The uncertainty here is a key component of this ESB; the range of acceptable phosphorous levels comes from a variability in local environmental boundaries that we need to maintain to avoid eutrophication, an oversaturation of nutrients that can trigger bursts of certain plant and bacterial growth at cost to overall ecosystem thriving.
To keep a lid on air pollution, the annual mean interhemispheric aerosol optical
depth difference needs to be under 0.15. This figure is matched with an annual limit of 15 μg/m3 of particulate matter smaller than 2.5 μm). In other words: we need to keep shiny objects of a certain size and refractive power out of our skies, so they don’t go around damaging more of our atmospheric conditions.
But even though all of these requirements appear to be highly technical, this report emphasizes that the policies necessary to return all these ESBs to “safe and just” status are much more holistic than they might first appear. Trying to tackle these locally, or even nationally, isn’t going to cut it. We need to think more inclusively.
Which is why that Emo Philips joke, the United Church of Canada, and this report all have one very big thing in common:
They all take us to the limits of what we consider to be a community.
Now, usually, at this point I’d wish my free-to-read subscribers a good week, and put up a paywall to reward paying subscribers for their kind support of the work, but it feels very strange to restrict access to a conversation about the need for more inclusive thinking, so today we’re going to explore the theme together.
(With thanks to my paid subscribers, for their indulgence.)
Two ways of looking at community
For years, I’ve struggled with the limits of everyday ideological discourse by trying to separate formal political vocabulary like “conservative”, “liberal”, and “leftist” from more behaviour-oriented language. A common term I’ve used for a while is “small-c conservative”, as a way of describing risk-averse tendencies in human beings.
Risk-averse humans are more likely to be suspicious of the unfamiliar, and to cleave to their in-group for reassurance and safety. They like routine, they like stability, and they’re much less curious about new experiences. They have a heightened fear of contamination, whether from disease and foul odours, or from people who don’t seem to belong. They like to know where everything goes, with solid categories that make it easy to differentiate between friend and foe, safe and dangerous.
And we are all risk-averse, at times. We have to be!
The small human child, freshly weaned from the breast and now like any other mammal starting to wander farther on its own, establishes a set of hard, black-and-white (if also routinely arbitrary) rules for itself to protect against foreign agents: what’s safe to eat, who’s safe to be around, what rituals and social structures must be maintained. For a few years in early childhood development, humans can be highly conservative in ways that make perfect sense for the offspring of a herd species.
Then, when we hit adolescence, our ability to accurately interpret a full range of emotion in other faces diminishes, and we start to see more threats, judgment, and anger all around us. Every time an adult tells us to do something that we were just going to do mom, jeez! it feels like we’ve been thrown into attack mode by a hostile force in our vicinity; and even though one of our parents might have been chuckling innocently at some little mistake we made, now we know for certain that we are the worst at this, and we’re never going to succeed and no one is ever going to love us so why even bother? (We’ll be in our room.)
This form of small-c conservative thinking is so painful, and it can consume many of us for years, until our hormones settle. Even then, many of us find in early adulthood that we’ve become acclimated for a host of other reasons (e.g., childhood trauma, and other un-diagnosed conditions) to more risk-averse forms of existence.
Late Millennials and Gen Z have been far slower to date, drive, leave home, get their first job, have sex, drink, marry, and have kids—but all for extremely coherent, small-c conservative reasons. Modern technology allows us to supplant in-person meet-ups with online hangs, and also means we’re monitored (and self-monitoring) to a level rarely seen in human history (small tribes aside). This situation might have been manageable, though, if not for some major economic crises and disparity issues rising during that same time frame. It’s not that other generations didn’t also struggle—but they didn’t do it quite as publicly, and they weren’t inundated at the same time by so many false representations of everyone else living better lives. Millennials and Gen Z didn’t cultivate more risk-taking behaviours both because we had fewer financial resources with which to become budding young entrepreneurs and because we grew up feeling that everyone was watching, so there was no room for failure.
Meanwhile, we know that when people do accumulate more money, property, and overall stability, their priorities tend to shift toward the maintenance of all three—pushing them yet again into more risk-averse modes of thinking and action.
Also, when people feel that they’ve lost something to which they believed they were entitled, more simplistic views of the world tend to arise. Racism, xenophobia, sexism, trans- and homophobia, religious prejudice, ethnic prejudice… we have so many dividing lines that stand ready to be exploited whenever we feel violated or robbed. Small-c conservative thinking in this context draws upon the false nostalgia of “better times”: a magical era when the original in-group seemed so much easier to define.
Here’s the tough part, though:
Small-c conservative thinking can show up anywhere on the political spectrum, for the simple reason that it’s much more fundamental to how human beings interact with their immediate environments.
This might seem strange, until you consider how party allegiance is passed on.
Many of us grow up in politically conservative households (I certainly did).
Others grow up in politically centrist/liberal households.
And some grow up in more dynamic, wholeheartedly leftist households.
But all of us remain human beings the entire time. This means we’re still the same mammalian critters I just described as going through small-c conservative phases: as toddlers, as teens, and perhaps as economically stressed-out young adults.
And yes, while we’re growing up in these diverse political environments, some of us take the time to consider arguments espoused in our homes. We decide if we share our parents’ views on everything from pizza toppings to religious beliefs, to political candidates and a taste in music. Some of us then decide that we don’t share our parents’ views, and our politics might drastically change in response.
Meanwhile, others grow up so confident in the self-evident righteousness of their households’ beliefs—about pizza, and religion, and politics, and music—that it never occurs to them to look for other points of view. They might have been raised in the most proudly leftist home, listening on their mamas’ knees to incredible stories of fighting for women’s rights and queer liberation, or of union clashes and fierce First Nations rights battles along rural roadways—but the sheer act of never testing their beliefs firsthand, never venturing out of the pattern of discourse they were given, will still cultivate highly small-c conservative thinking in them.
“Well, but does it really matter?” one might ask. “If someone was born into the ‘right’ political belief to start, why should they want to change just for change’s sake?”
But here’s the kicker: all movements change. Such is the nature, especially, of leftist and some liberal discourse: the focus of one’s activism is supposed to adapt over time, to keep building on past wins and responding to new crises in need of social justice.
However, if a person was raised in a liberal or leftist home without being taught the importance of testing one’s initial assumptions, or of stretching beyond the confines of what was first fed to them at home, then what happens when the whole progressive movement transforms all around them?
Just like any other small-c conservative thinker, they long for the good old days.
The “simpler” times, when activists were only looking for a few reforms.
They say to themselves, “Yes, we were looking for change, but this is going too far!”
They might even finally explore other political ideas, but without the years of gradual exposure that would have allowed them to develop a more nuanced life philosophy in the process. Instead, they might flip seemingly overnight from “pussyhat” to MAGA cap, and rail against the “lie” of progressivism as intensely as an atheist freshly born from a Southern Baptist home might rail against the words of his family’s faith.
Such is the danger of talking about ourselves solely in political terms.
Politics matters! But it matters because it triggers something much deeper in us.
Meanwhile, the term “small-c conservative” also doesn’t pack a big enough punch.
Whenever I think about how to construct more resilient democracies (societies, that is, where the greatest number of us might live in the greatest peace together, and where the quality of life for the worst off is at its highest level possible) another pair of questions comes to mind instead:
Where do we put our attention, when defining our in-groups? And,
What matters more to us: the people we keep out, or the principles we move toward?
Gatekeepers and centre-seekers
The Emo Philips joke works so well because our world is filled with painful examples of people slaughtered or cast out for differences of opinion and physical aspect that might seem utterly absurd to outsiders. In an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, the crew meets a species with a facial division—one side black, one side white—that means nothing to Federation members, but everything to the people of Cheron, who have crafted a whole culture of oppression contingent on which side has which colour.
The supposed relevance of often minute physical differences shows up throughout human history, though—and in a staggering number of global conflicts today. Could outsiders tell the difference between all the Ethiopian, Tigrayan, and Eritrean peoples engaged in fiercely clan-divided conflicts during the early heights of pandemic? How about the ethno-religious differences that currently mark out some Sudanese people for slaughter at the hands of others? Or the physical differences between Russians and Ukrainians, which even blended families in the region used to laugh about before the war? Many Palestinian and Israeli babies could also be swapped and raised in the other’s households without a second thought.
We are all so, so much more similar than our cultural stories would have us believe.
But we also know that there’s power in drawing a line in the sand. When we are the ones defining A, B, and C as acceptable, but E, F, and G as beyond the pale; or when we are telling X that they are permitted to do as they please, but Y and Z have to remember their place, we’re ultimately establishing ourselves in higher authority roles.
Folks who build community through a constant focus on gatekeeping are certainly acting on risk-averse behaviours, but they’re also often looking for control.
And the alternative drives them nuts.
For instance, when the United Church of Canada acts more like a “centre-seeker” by encouraging folks from all walks of life to move together toward a shared aspiration, rather than to hyper-fixate on who does and does not belong on the path, this behaviour models a kind of open-ended thinking that gatekeepers see only as a threat.
A threat to order.
A threat to clear categories of human being and their “place” in society.
A threat to power.
And again, this gatekeeping behaviour can happen anywhere along the sociopolitical spectrum. There will always be right-wing trans folk, lesbians, BIPOC, atheists, and “women’s rights” advocates who will happily support parties that want to set up rigid, punitive lines in the political sand for others in their demographic.
Just because someone belongs to a minority doesn’t intrinsically make them a “centre-seeker”, and it doesn’t preclude such them from strongly risk-averse behaviours, either.
But that joint report from The Lancet and Earth Commission?
The demands it sets upon us, to expand our sense of civic responsibility to meet the Herculean challenges ahead?
They are screaming at us: we cannot be gatekeepers if we want to survive en masse.
If we don’t learn how to be centre-seekers instead; if we don’t strive to loosen our fixation on keeping people out, and replace it with a radical call to bring people in, moving toward a shared goal of planetary restoration… well, we’re just going to continue to tribe up and break down, aren’t we? From now until we die, and well into the next generation or three, too.
And yes, my dear fellow cynics—I know which outcome is more likely.
I see evidence for it in all our natural life-cycles, which lean so strongly toward small-c conservative thinking throughout most our critical growth phases.
But I also refuse to roll over and accept that what comes “naturally” to us is the sum total of what we’re capable of as a species.
So if toddler-hood, adolescence, and early adulthood sometimes require more rigid, gatekeeper-inspired thinking for a bit? Well, so be it.
Still—we know that this moment requires something else entirely: a way of thinking about ourselves, our loved ones, our neighbourhoods, and our world with enough centre-seeking resolution to carry us all into a future of far more fruitful social action.
A whimsical fairy tale? Maybe.
But only if we keep refusing—for whatever reason, this time—to grow up.
Be well, be kind, and seek justice where you can.
ML
Come on and join us , M.L., us being the bastard outcasts, the universally, reviled “cynics” you allude to. We need your distinguished company -there are plenty of bullshit “Keep Hope Alive” thought content producers out there.
The Lancet does another of the highly researched Pie In the Sky thought experiments that paycheck earners at the research level of environmentalism have produced since the 60s. Those are marvelously fanciful projections of needed “radical societal transformation,” or whatever term they might come up with for reality-denying anti-sociology.
Where’s the description of the absolutely required prerequisite Mechanism for enforcing limits on the existing and growing global fossil fuel supersystem? Asking Gigantic Corp. nicely? Showing a picture of a oil-slickened bird and asking politely for F-250 owners to consider voting for tree-sitters? Miraculously finding ways to enforce carbon tax penalties on historical “legacy” externalizing corporations?
What more in the way of data do “we,” as members of a species that inherits irrational, beastly social governance, need to confirm that it is not cynicism but simple, common understanding that sees no way out?
I sometimes wonder if one benefit of how I was brought up was that I was always required to straddle several religious, racial, and ethnic communities. One can never tell about the causality of one’s personal traits but I believe this always made me feel like an outsider, all the time. Even in family gatherings, I would be an outsider in a way because my parents were different races and religions so you never get to be exactly like the people you’re with. This trait seems to extend to every possible collective I find myself in. So I always seek commonality, but I can’t ever fully embrace whatever is present within those group settings. I can’t easily take up the norms of the group, and so on. (Obviously, there are some real difficulties about this, as well. I’m usually doing or saying ‘the wrong thing’ and I can’t wholly succeed socially within the group. But I am used to this, and don’t mind it.) I’m not sure I fully know what it’s like to feel like ‘I belong’ in any situation. I observe that people want to belong a lot, and that they want to be accepted. But some people also feel very threatened if they don’t have a firm identity, and sometimes they form that identity by contrasting themselves with others who don’t have it. When that happens (it doesn’t always) it can be hard to avoid conflict, because the mere presence of another group, and the contrast, is partly what constituted their own identity. That’s not the truly serious problem, which comes from supremacy or the idea of wanting to be better than others.
Anyway, that’s a very roundabout way of saying groups that seem to have that idea of heterogeneity like the church you mention are very interesting! You can never completely get it, because you ARE contrasting yourself with those who seek homogeneity. But you can have a general ethos where you just aren’t going to freak out about whatever people are like. You’re going to be curious, and try to understand them. So the norms you’re embracing aren’t quite as prickly, and leave the boundaries of the community fuzzy. Yes, it is a good model for a different way of being, one that makes it easier for people to get along with one another. But I also notice that some people dislike this. They want something firmer, something they imagine as real and authentic. They seem to need this sense of closed-offness. I don’t understand it but I think it’s a partly a way to avoid the disorientation that comes with freedom. If you join a group that directs your thoughts sufficiently, it is possible you reduce the sense of anxiety you have about who you are because it’s always being validated by all these other people in the group. People seem to really need this. They don’t want who they are to seem arbitrary, and they find the collective validation affirming. I think they are perhaps deluding themselves. It’s every bit as arbitrary, it’s just a bit more elaborate and explicit as a process for shaping your identity than doing it on your own.
Anyway, this seems like a hard problem to solve—to get people to let go of that sense of who they are by exclusion and comparison. But it’s easy to do if you can overcome the idea that there is some right way to be human (other than morality, which can’t be completely arbitrary).