No
common
sense

Philosophy tackles
climate change.

An Examination of
the State we are in.
- Part 1 -

By Matthew Pye

Colophon

Author: Matthew Pye
Guest Authors: Vappu Väänänen, Ginny Tyson, Jules Pye (‘3 Essays for Childpress’)

ISBN/EAN: 978-90-74730-43-3
First run: January 2019
Published by Fysio Educatief in coöperation with ChildPress.org
Copyright ©2019 Fysio Educatief

Proofreading: Sean O’Dubhghaill & Generation Z
Cover Illustration: Stijn van der Pol
Cartoons: Carl Jonsson
Design: www.thisissaf.com

Graphs and Photography: All sources listed with image, unless the original source
could not be tracked. In case you find a copyrighted image, please let us know.

Fysio Educatief • Groenburgwal 59 • 1011 HT Amsterdam
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Foreword

I had the privilege to challenge Matthew Pye and some of his colleagues from around Europe with the project of constructing a new Philosophy syllabus. It was my task to convince them of the value of crystalising clear competences and scaffolding explicit learning targets. As the working group went through the different stages of building the syllabus, the value of Philosophy has become more and more evident to me.

I am convinced that young students (and adults) are hungry for this level of reflection and guidance. With the book, Matthew Pye continues the work of the syllabus and the teaching by opening up the classroom to everyone, breaking down walls between school and real life, and between different generations. The reading of this book will enable young students to examine the topic of climate change and simultaneously become more autonomous thinkers, move beyond their egocentric thinking, and go into dialogue with great thinkers.

I look forward to discussing the book with my young adult daughters with whom I share the strongest concerns about the most astonishing senseless transformation of the planet that is going on.

Els Vermeire

Inspector for the European Schools
Coordinating Inspector of Education (Flanders)

No Common Sense
(Part 1)

Preface
The Plan
3 Maps
The Book
Credits
Essays
No Common Dictionary

Preface

An astonishing transformation of the Earth is happening right now. This change is affecting every living species on the planet. If this change is not stopped, it will move through human civilisation like a wrecking ball.

This is not a Hollywood movie trailer. This is not the blurb for a science fiction novel. This is simple, mainstream science. The change that is happening is climate change. Yet, we have no common sense of it, even though this shift is radical and deeply damaging to human life.

The Extra-ordinary truth of Climate Change.

There have been major dramas in the planet’s history before. For example, 66 million years ago (66.043 ± 0.011 Ma) a massive asteroid marked a massive full stop (over a hundred miles wide) at the end of the dinosaurs’ paragraph of history. The Chicxulub crater, which still marks the Yucatan Peninsula, was the result of a blast that was as strong as 10 billion Hiroshima A-bombs. The dinosaurs did not see it coming. How could they? The Ampelosaurus had the biggest brain of all of them, but it was only the size of a tennis ball¹, and their club-like feet would also have made it difficult for them to grip a telescope.

By contrast, homo sapiens have brains the size of a decent melon and it is filled with about 16 billion neurones. Although we have puny bodies, we have managed to construct high-precision scientific instruments with our intellectual and physical dexterity. We can see far into the past with our satellite dishes, and quite clearly into the future with other high-tech equipment.

The Moa Loa Observatory in Hawaii, for example, can measure the make-up of our atmosphere to the accuracy of 1 particle per million. It has been collecting samples since 1956, and the steep upward curve of the data points in a truly alarming direction. The details will follow, but the main consequence is clear. Unchecked emissions will push the eco-system over an irreversible tipping point in the near future. It will not be pretty for us. The headlines of that change will result in mass migration, catastrophic floods and storms, alongside food and water supply failures. Atlases and geographical charts will have to be redrawn extensively.

Geologists, at their research desks, have drawn lines through the planet’s deep history to divide time into the main blocks of life that have come and gone. Sometimes these lines can actually be seen in the Earth itself. The Chicxulub asteroid left a band of compacted quartz in Mexico. Furthermore, the wider fall-out of this impact created the K–Pg boundary. This is a band of sediment filled with ‘stardust’ that has been identified all around the Earth. The thin layer of rock at this level of our lithosphere has such a high level of the extremely rare element iridium, that scientists are now quite sure that something really cosmic happened to the dinosaurs.

The Industrial Revolution has forced geologists to get out their big marker pen once more as they prepare to draw another decisive mark across planetary time. The Chicxulub asteroid notwithstanding, it could be argued that the Earth has never seen anything so dramatic happen to it in such a short space of time before. Absurd as it might be, how thick and bold this line will be depends on the political decisions that will be taken in the coming few years.

If ever there was something to write about, this is it.

Human genius and stupidity is on display in equal and astonishing measure, and we urgently need to make some common sense of it. This is true at two levels. Firstly, we have no common sense of its reality. Secondly, we are not making a common sense response to it. The first problem concerns perception, while the second problem concerns ethics. However, whilst it might be helpful to set out the problem of climate change with these two categories, it will become clear that these two domains are intimately connected. Epistemology (the analysis of knowledge) and Ethics (the analysis of what is Right) complement and overlap with each other.

The title of this book has been taken from the famous pamphlet, “Common Sense”, written by Thomas Paine in 1776 because he was tackling a similar set of problems. Paine wanted to get the American colonists to see the absurdity of their situation with their mother country. “No Common Sense” is closely positioned to that, as an attempt to portray the absurd situation we are in as clear as possible. We are in the middle of a constitutional crisis with mother nature, and those in power are simply not acting in the economic and democratic interests of their people. The reason we cannot see the crisis is because we are stuck in various illusions about reality – and there is an urgent need to be woken up.

As Paine so eloquently wrote, “The Sun never shined on a cause of greater worth. ‘Tis not the affair of a City, a County, a Province, or a Kingdom; but of a Continent—of at least one eighth part of the habitable Globe. ‘Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected even to the end of time, by the proceedings now. Now is the seed-time of Continental union, faith and honour. The least fracture now will be like a name engraved with the point of a pin on the tender rind of a young oak; the wound would enlarge with the tree, and posterity read it in full grown characters”.

(Common Sense, Volume 1, line 85).

Really looking into space.

It is time to get philosophical. We live our whole lives only perceiving a very thin slice of reality. Right now, pet dogs are tuned into sounds that we cannot catch, pet cats are tracking smells well beyond our range. Right now, millions of quarks are passing imperceptibly through the earth and Supernovas are spilling their enriched guts into countless areas of the universe.

The English school master Edwin Abbott Abbott [sic] was very very [sic] aware of these limitations of human perception and wanted to pass this ignorance onto his students. Writing satirically as ‘A Square’, he admitted his limited understanding of the world in a multi-dimensional work called, ‘Flatlands’. Taken at surface value, the book is about how A Square (a 2 dimensional shape) encounters real problems when he visits different dimensions.

Firstly, A Square has a disturbing dream about a visit to ‘Lineland’ in which no one can recognise who he really is because they just see him as a sequence of dots. In fact, the monarch of Lineland feels so threatened by the absurd notion of an extra dimension that an attempt is made to kill him.

Then, after waking up from this awful dream, things get more disturbing. A Square encounters A Sphere. And so, in a shocking twist, the problem is reversed. No matter how hard A Square tries, he just cannot understand what A Sphere is talking about. A Sphere tries to show the depth of the 3-dimensional world that it comes from, but all A Square can see is a series of linear circles and ovals.

That is until he visits Sphere World.

In Sphere World he comes to understand how limited his previous experience was. After seeing these deeper dimensions to existence, he returns to Flatland. However, his insights are suppressed by those in power. Abbott’s ‘Flatland’ not only questions the veracity of our perceptions, it also functions as a cultural critique. He was putting forward a critical view of the fixed social strata of Victorian England; not only does A Square realise the conceptual limits of his normal sense of the world, he also observes how tightly knowledge is controlled between the dimensions and how much resistance there is to seeing the world in a different way.

Indeed, towards the end of the novella, A Square tries to convert his Grandson to the ‘Gospel of 3 dimensions’ but his attempt to explain the radical difference between going ‘Up’ and going ‘North’ is a futile one, as he cannot point to it in two-dimensional space. The Grand Council of Flatland eventually arrest him for his subversive attempt to challenge the status quo. It is during his imprisonment that the novella ‘Flatland’ is written. The novella is a memoir, attempting to explain the fuller reality of things so that future generations might see the truth.

Abbott writes in his Preface:

To
The Inhabitants of SPACE IN GENERAL
And H. C. IN PARTICULAR
This Work is Dedicated
By a Humble Native of Flatland
In the Hope that
Even as he was Initiated into the Mysteries
Of THREE Dimensions
Having been previously conversant
With ONLY TWO
So the Citizens of that Celestial Region
May aspire yet higher and higher
To the Secrets of FOUR FIVE OR EVEN SIX Dimensions
Thereby contributing
To the Enlargement of THE IMAGINATION
And the possible Development
Of that most rare and excellent Gift of MODESTY
Among the Superior Races
Of SOLID HUMANITY

(Preface to the Second and Revised Edition, 1884.)

The book was largely ignored after its publication in 1884. However, after Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity was published in 1915, the common sense understanding concerning the dimensions of space and time was radically shaken up, and interest in ‘Flatland’ spiked.

Abbott was a teacher and he wanted his students to confront the limits of their common sense of the world. There are many more dimensions to existence than those to which we are habitually used. Similarly, the conclusions of modern climate science are an offence to our common sense of the world. We should be shaken up by the climate scientists’ summary reports for the IPCC. Something appalling is unfolding in front of us, and yet we are not responding. The physical and social realities of climate change expose a great number of paradoxes and contradictions in the human condition. They require a genuine openness of mind and heart to see.

Knowledge and understanding is not simply acquired by the intellect, it requires courage to think outside of our normal boundaries. Within an individual, just like within society, there is often a moral fight for control over what is permitted to be known.

1 https://www.livescience.com/26539-giant-sauropods-small-brains.html

This is the plan

Dear Students,

You have the right to know the truth.

You have the privilege, over the two years of the course, of becoming acquainted with many of the great minds of Philosophy. Each of the chapters here work as a self-contained unit that can be used to pursue a particular interest. However, each chapter also belongs within an overall plan. It looks like this:

No Common Sense - Part ONE

Overturning Common Sense

Before inviting the different philosophers to examine our predicament with climate change, it is essential to first get an accurate and clear picture of what is going on. Millions of people are very anxious about what is happening above their heads, and they would appreciate some guidance in sorting through the different, often disturbing, headlines that appear with increasing frequency. How do I keep track of where we are up to with climate change? What are the important statistic? How close are we to a 1.5°C rise? What would the consequences of going over a 2°C rise be? The aim of Part One is to lay out the main conclusions of climate science into some sort of clear and ordered view.

Getting a clear view of climate change is not just difficult because it lies beyond our sensory experience, there are numerous obstacles in the way to attaining a decent vantage point. Firstly, not everyone has the time to chew through the scientific literature – and even if someone was qualified and motivated to do so, the technical detail of those research papers, and even their summaries, are difficult to decode. Secondly, the media only provides us with a limited and fragmentary view of the situation, and trying to do independent research to fill in the gaps through the internet is very demanding because it is awash with the junk of so many uninformed opinions. Thirdly, human beings are very skilled in the art of censorship, both at a political level and a personal level.

The Philosophers in Part One have been selected because all three of them were particularly good at seeing through the clutter of cultural life. Nietzsche, Arendt and Paine were prepared to take on social taboos and to overcome comforting illusions in order to establish a more authentic view of reality. The other major theme that links thinkers in Part One is that all three of them were also sharply aware of the power interests that shape how we perceive the world.

Broadly, Part One starts with questions of what is real and progressively unfolds the questions of what is right as it moves towards Thomas Paine in Chapter 4.

In more detail:

Chapter One will deal with the mainstream conclusions of the science. There has to be a sound empirical basis for any discussion, and the following chapter on “What is Real?” will set out the headlines from the science of climate change research. When the main conclusions from the data are put alongside our social responses to the issue, some significant questions about human psychology arise. Chapter Two will invite Nietzsche to develop our understanding of how our impression of what is real, can be heavily influenced by our sense of what is right. Our perception of the world is not just a simple case ‘looking’. Not only do we always see reality from a limited perspective, but we are also deeply moral creatures who instinctively filter our experiences according to basic psychological instincts.

To that end, Nietzsche offers a bridge from Epistemology to Ethics.

Chapter Three opens up the ethics of climate change further with Hannah Arendt. She takes on the challenge of understanding how people can become part of thoughtless totalitarian regimes – having experienced first-hand the devastating brutality of the Nazis. Her insights, arrestingly perceptive at the time, remain extremely pertinent today. Thoughtlessness can have catastrophic consequences.

Finally, Thomas Paine’s life and work are examined in Chapter Four. His revolutionary book, “Common Sense” (1776) spoke truth to power. There is an unavoidable tension between the high-mindedness of Philosophy and the mucky reality of climate change, but one of the most striking achievements of Thomas Paine’s life and work, is that he managed to remain utterly committed to both ideals and reality at the same time.

No Common Sense - Part TWO (2019)

Developing our Common Sense

The Science - What is Real?

Part Two takes broadly the same shape as Part One - it starts with the empirical evidence of the science and then moves on to consider the political implications of the main conclusions. The difference is that in Chapters 5 and 6, the science sets off from a more basic level. The elementary building blocks of the climate change consensus are put together piece by piece.

As most of the reality of climate science lies beyond the senses, it is informative to start with the work of Descartes. He was engaged with establishing a proper space for scientific enquiry away from the traditions and dogmas of the Church. The theory that the sun lay at the centre of the solar system (put forward by Copernicus in 1543) seemed rather counter-intuitive to common sense. However, when this model was bolstered by the observations of Galileo through his telescope (in 1609), it became impossible for the church to ignore the findings. Science was creating some uncomfortable truths for those in power, and Chapter 5 shows how Descartes’ deploys his ground-breaking philosophy in ‘Meditations’ (1641) to find a constructive way forward out of the impasse.

Dogmatic reactions to science are still prevalent today. The work of a handful of fossil-fuelled climate change sceptics to stall the political debate has been remarkably successful. Chapter 6 reluctantly takes on the task of actually discussing something so intellectually and morally impoverished with the help of Popper.

These two thinkers also represent the two main branches of Philosophy: Descartes is a Rationalist, while Popper is an Empiricist. The former represents the power of reason to slice open reality in a clean and analytical way. The latter represents the importance of supporting any claims with an open-minded approach to the evidence. Philosophy is not some airheaded speculation; it must always respect the data. These two thinkers show the contrasting methods through which philosophy can probe reality.

The Politics – What is Right?

Chapters 7 and 8 deal with the major social and ethical questions posed by climate change.

In Chapter 7, the psychological and ethical roots of the problem are examined through the probing work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His deep but qualified respect for democracy points in the right direction for finding some solutions to the key political dilemmas we are faced with. Rousseau was one of the founding fathers of “Social Contract Theory”, a branch of Political Philosophy that established the main co-ordinates of our Western social order. The dull title of this tradition conceals the huge impact it had on our political lives, especially with its concern for Human Rights. This book will argue from within its bandwidth.

Plato and Socrates were two Athenians who kick started Philosophy in the Western world. The enduring value of Plato’s ‘Republic’ becomes clear again. Chapter 8 emphasises the importance of having our desires and our spirit guided by reason. The final conclusion of this book is that we urgently need new binding laws rooted in national governments, that will frame our democratic lives in a realistic way, inside the laws of nature. These actions require all the different bodies of the United Nations to think clearly too.

Billions of people are concerned for the future of their children. Billions of people are broadly aware of the dangers of climate change. Yet there have been no significant shifts in policies or action – our emissions are consistently and rapidly rising. We are in an absurd situation.

Yet, social change can be extremely swift. Hopefully, these 8 philosophers can do their part to sharpen the broad social consensus on climate change into a focused and loud call for effective legislation.

Climate action needs to be faster than climate change, it is the most important race human civilisation has ever had.

(My apologies to Aristotle, Hobbes, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Thoreau, Rawls and all the other great thinkers, who have so much to say, but had to be left on the substitute’s bench for now)

A Modern Meditation

Picking out Chapter 5 for particular attention: Descartes wrote his ‘Meditations’ in 6 chapters, one for each day of work before the Sabbath. He intended his readers to take the time each day to reflect on each one progressively. He was emulating the style of a prayer book², whilst at the same time setting the modern world in motion. Descartes was living on a fault line in human cultural history. He understood the need for a radical overhaul in human thinking - about themselves and the planet. The scientific knowledge of his day could simply not be accommodated inside the old systems of thought and culture.

When faced with a new scientific reality of climate change that poses an offence to our minds and society, a step-by-step guide is needed to get our heads around it all. This book, of course, is written by a normal bloke with a normal teaching job; there is no genius anywhere here. Indeed, this is not an original work of Philosophy, each chapter simply uses the insights of different philosophers from the past, to illuminate the present.

However, the general intention of this book is similar. Descartes’ book invited his readers to see how quickly our common sense of the world unravels when the simplest lines of thought are followed through to the end. Likewise, the fuller reality of climate change is a brutal shock to our common sense. And finally, Descartes attempted to offer a constructive conclusion to his book, after all the radical uncertainties that he raised. These eight amateur chapters will try to follow his example. Descartes lived in a time that respected the Sabbath. He limited his book to only six chapters – one to be read every other day. By contrast, our 24/7 society is moving so fast towards a crisis that such a luxury is not affordable and so, this book overflows into 8 chapters.

2 For example, the “Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola” (1548)

Who is this book for?

Those inside the classroom

Philosophy is a subject that makes demands on both the head and the heart. For those fresh to the subject, the aim has been to provide a comfortable starting point - without diminishing the impact of the thinkers or the issues at stake.

For those with some experience, the aim has been to recapture some of the vitality that these revolutionary thinkers brought to the world. Philosophy is a subject that keeps on giving; and the great thinkers of the past always reward those who continue to revisit their work.

For those Philosophy students holdling this book who are going to be tested by the European Baccalaureate, I have tried to model each chapter with respect to the demands of the syllabus that we are both tested with. Importantly, I have tried to open up a ‘trialogue’ between the world, the philosophers and ourselves. But really, it is all about helping you become autonomous.

The shocking truth of climate change, both scientific and social, has to be persistently dragged before our minds. There might be some repetition of the main points throughout the book, because each chapter should also be able to stand alone for any teacher or student who does not have the time to make use of the whole book. Indeed, repeating the main riffs of climate change in the different contexts of each thinker is oddly necessary; this is because it is remarkably easy to be too casual about the disturbing reality in front of us. We have ‘No Common Sense’ of the physical truth of climate change and ‘No Common Sense’ in response to it. It therefore seems important to keep the key truths clearly visible.

The world needs autonomous thinkers and autonomous citizens more than ever before. For this most important of examinations about the State that we are in, Philosophy is your remarkable tutor.

Leaving the classroom door open

One of the more banal prompts for writing the book came from the problem that presents itself when a student misses a lesson for a good reason, and is keen to catch up. It is never easy to summarise 45 minutes of deconstruction, reconstruction, detail and debate into a short explanation – so these eight sequential chapters are offered as a ‘take-away’ to chew over.

But what if you missed out on studying Philosophy all-together?

Predictably, this book offers an open door for anyone to engage in Philosophy.

Some adults express the regret that they did not have the option to study Philosophy when they were younger. Whatever the reason for this feeling, unlike a Philosophy class, there is no problem about arriving late to the discipline.

The clear disadvantage of the reader not being in a classroom is that you cannot enter into a live dialogue with the thinkers and those around you. However, there are some evident advantages of holding a book: you can pick your nose, chew gum, swing on your chair, shout out-loud whenever you want, or simply take everything outside into the fresh-air and sit on the grass, if things start to get a bit claustrophobic.

Although there is no live debate, each chapter tries to raise each philosopher up from the past with all their contexts and concerns – and these great minds can then help us interrogate our present. Indeed, Thomas Paine wrote “Common Sense” in a polemical style, and he did so for a range of reasons. For example, his approach enabled him to write with a directness and an urgency. It also provided a way for him to grapple openly with the key issues surrounding the critical question of American Independence, because he wanted the reader to join in the struggle to understand and to act. What is plainly true is that he did not adopt a polemical tone in order to mask the limitations of his arguments.

It often serves a Philosophy teacher to be quite confrontational by inhabiting the person and the ideas of the thinker at hand because it can help keep the students awake on a Friday afternoon. However, the more important reason is that by adopting a bold attitude to the material, it brings to the surface of the students’ minds some surprising assumptions about the world that would have otherwise lain dormant - being frank thereby creates a genuine point of contact and interest.

Can these bones live?

At the turn of the 6th century BC, the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel addressed his fellow Israelites. They were faced with a truly formidable threat to their existence³ in the shape of a very mean looking Babylonian Army out in the East. God commanded Ezekiel to shave off all his hair, bake his bread over the fuel of human faeces - and whilst laying on his left side for 390 days, he was to contemplate the future of his society that had really lost touch with some of its core values. After following these symbolic orders, God eventually shows Ezekiel a vision of a ‘Valley of Dry Bones’, and he then asks him the now famous question, “Can these bones live?” (Ezekiel 37:3).

Faced with our own very real existential threats, we can ask ourselves the same question. Can the bones of our rich cultural past take on flesh and speak to us again? The answer is surely “Yes”, and the good news is that doing Philosophy does not require Ezekiel’s lifestyle choices to get started.

3   In 597BC, Israel had become a vassal state to King Nebuchadnezzar, and the prophet Ezekiel was writing from exile in Babylon back to his people with words of warning. The fist of the Babylonian Army was about to smash through Israel (it did, in 586BC). Ezekiel’s warnings also came with a vision of how things could be restored.

Three maps
to help you navigate
around this book.

For our basic geographical need to find a bank, a friends’ house, or a museum in a foreign city, we now have smartphones. This same bit of technology can also enable us to look up a simply astonishing range of opening times, sport results, or quirky facts.

Yet modern life remains bewilderingly confusing. Society is extra-ordinarily complex and busy, and so finding our proper place in it is rather challenging. We need help developing our cognitive maps of the social reality around us.

This book offers 3 maps to get started:

1) A map of a slice of time

2) A map of the U.N. Institutions

3) A map of what Philosophy is

All three maps are to be found on the following pages.

Map 1 - The Timeline

Having a clear family tree can help us understand ourselves. Map 1 lays out the place of each of the Philosophers in our deep family history. The 7 thinkers that headline the chapters of this book are put alongside the major cultural and scientific events that are significant for climate change - in a three layered timeline.

In a society that seems to be continually pressing on the refresh button to update the present, understanding our past has become especially important.

Map 2 - The U.N.
Institutions

In various air-conditioned offices dotted around the globe, from New York to Nairobi or/and Geneva, there are thousands of desks, computers and people who are dealing directly with Climate Change - all of them established by the United Nations. Anyone who would like to follow the latest news on Climate Change will be confronted with their acronyms: UNFCCC, UNEP, IPCC, WMO... and so on.

Map 2 sets out how they all fit together.

Map 3 -What is Philosophy?

It takes some time to understand what Philosophy is about, and what is supposed to be happening in a Philosophy book. It takes some time to figure the rules of the game.

Philosophy is a subject that can seem a bit intimidating, and frankly, sometimes it can just seem a bit odd.

Map 3 is an attempt to draw a picture of what is going on. At the bottom right of the image is the reader - the self. This is the starting point - our everyday life. Through a dialogue with the Philosophers we are drawn away from common sense assumptions about ourselves and our situation. This movement out of our corner enables us to see the world from a different angle and it enables us to take a critical distance from ourselves.

The space in the middle of the triangle is where Philosophy happens - at first this unfamiliar place can be a challenging zone to find our feet in. However, through a continual ‘trialogue’ with the Philosophers, our world, and our own experience, we can build up the strength and skills to become autonomous thinkers and agents.

Philosophy is not just the understanding of different arguments, it is not just the history of ideas. It is a subject that interrogates us and our world. It draws the mind and the heart out of clichés and comfortable illusions - and invites us to be more fully ourselves.

In the simplest terms, as it says on the label, Philosophy is literally the “love of wisdom” (from the Greek, φιλοσοφία).

No
common
sense

Part One

No Common Sense

Love can do it to you. Grief can do it to you. Nature can do it to you. War can do it to you. An act of kindness can do it you. A road accident can do it to you. A strange co-incidence can do it to you. Sometimes it can just happen to you as you eat a bowl of cornflakes.

After it has happened, our normal sense of who we are, and our basic understanding of what we are doing here, can be powerfully and irreversibly overturned. Everyday events have a new significance that can feel wonderfully full of potential, or unbearably heavy. What used to seem familiar, now looks utterly alien. After it has happened, what used to look like common sense, now appears as seriously odd. It is the same old life, but it is also radically not the same.

Philosophy can do it to you. Philosophy can overturn common sense. It is a subject that can upend our understanding of ourselves and it can transform our expectations of society. In contrast to love and grief, war and accidents, we can choose to do Philosophy and attempt to see ourselves and the world in a significantly different way. This overcoming of common sense often involves a feeling of vertigo as we adjust to our new perspective. But the mental buzz is not the goal. Philosophy is not some mystical meditation, or an effort to achieve a weird high-mindedness. At level zero, Philosophy is the pursuit of truth. It is an attempt to get a better understanding of what really is the case. The plain fact is that Philosophy is simply committed to finding out what is real and what is right. It is just that during the exercise of trying to get to the root of things, Philosophy does throw up some dizzying conclusions and it offers some arresting vantage points. So, for anyone willing to engage, there is a real possibility that Philosophy can do it to you.

If the upheaval of a world view has never happened to you, why go looking for it? If most things seem to be going OK, what is the problem? A change of perspective is tough to achieve. It requires a lot of critical thinking and determination to move the boundaries of our thoughts. Moreover, whilst there might be some upsides to seeing a new dimension to the world, the shift might also bring along some uncomfortable consequences. It is fair to say that following our common sense of the world is normally enough to get us through most situations. So why bother? What is wrong with the status quo?

The problem is that sometimes the ordinary and the conventional are just broken by reality. So, whilst Philosophers spend their time trying grasp reality, sometimes reality just barges in and grasps us. No matter what we think, no matter how much we are committed to the truth or not, sometimes our lives are just invaded by the truth. Even if we thought we had a good map of how things work, reality can trash it. Even if our common sense has told us that we were pretty much on the right lines with our way of life, reality will not hesitate to disturb our plans. Reality has no respect for human opinions, it is intolerant of sentiments, it just stubbornly exists. The bald fact of the matter is that it is the human who is then forced into doing all of the adjusting.

What is Real? What is Right?

Philosophy, in its efforts to make proper sense of the world, has two major concerns. ‘What is real?’ and ‘What is Right?’ The rich history of philosophical enquiry has thrown up some very alarming problems that sprang up when we started to think about life in a focused and probing way. There are a startling number of paradoxes, contradictions and puzzles behind our spontaneous understanding of the world.

Both of the subject’s branches have had to deal with a wide range of offenses to common sense, when our ordinary view of the truth has been overturned. We have lived with a real world all our life and have made ourselves more or less busy, and so some of these issues may never have presented themselves. Yet, any inquisitive step into either of these two fields of enquiry immediately throws up a maddening number of questions and difficulties.

Chapter One - ‘What is Real?’
with graphs and Pye charts

Philosophy – An offense to Common Sense

Climate Change - An offense to Common Sense

The science of climate change in six graphs

Conclusion – A medical emergency

Chapter 1

‘What is Real?’

Philosophy - An offense to Common Sense

The bluntest offence to our everyday reasoning comes from the brute fact that we exist. Why is there anything at all? Why is there something and not nothing? More pointedly, why am I even able to ask myself these questions? In fact, if the universe is made up of material stuff, then why should this matter give rise to something which we call a psychological experience? Where does this whole ‘watching TV’ experience come from, it is so mental, but I am just a physical object? Indeed, I have been watching TV my whole life through these eyeballs and I have been listening to the quiet soundtrack of my own mind that has offered a narrative to all of the events, and yet, there is no clear account of why this is happening inside my tiny carbon lump of the universe. I am not even sure if I am controlling this soundtrack - the ghostly scriptwriter in my mind is connected (somehow) to a physical brain, and this greyish blob is under the totalitarian control of the laws of chemistry and physics. So how could my shadowy mind ever wrest any proper control over the content of what is going on with the matter in my brain?

It gets more problematic. That last paragraph has assumed that there is a clear distinction between mind and matter. Modern Physics, through Quantum mechanics, has thrown into question if there is such a clear boundary between the observer and the observed. At the deepest level of stuff that we can get to, everything looks a bit loopy. Through science’s probing of the subatomic world, it has discovered that our capacity to find any sort of conceptual frame for reality is under serious stress. The truths of Quantum Physics simply violate our experience of the world at the humanoid level. Modern Physics is utterly incompatible with common sense, yet it is a highly sophisticated and remarkably precise type of knowledge about reality.

Indeed, the progress of science has pushed humans to realise the limits of our regular ideas about life. It was science that brought us the first telescope in 1608, and since then the gap between what is real and what we can sense has widened further and further. The accuracy and depth of the data has developed at a remarkable pace. Those privileged enough to look through Galileo’s telescope in November 1609 were agog at the corrupt surface of the moon and later swooned as they observed the hairy legs of a bug in his microscope. Yet these scientific instruments are now available as birthday presents for children in the Argos catalogue. The progress of science since Galileo’s time was made clear by the readings taken from a NASA telescope in 2014, which was able to measure the diameter of exoplanet ‘Kepler-93b’ to an accuracy of 120 kilometres⁴; an impressive level of accuracy given that this planet lies 300 light years away from Earth. Looking in the opposite direction, science now knows that 1 million atoms can be lined up along the width of a human hair.

By pushing the limits of what we can know, science has pushed us into new fields of knowledge and it has overthrown whole systems of belief. Sometimes a new scientific fact has implications way beyond the field in which it was discovered. Chapter 5, on Descartes, will explore the revolutionary effect that the observations from Galileo’s telescope presented to the political, social and religious orders of the 17th century. Galileo’s observations confirmed that the common sense view of the solar system needed turning on its head, and it was not a comfortable episode for those in power.

Climate Change
An offence to our Common Sense

Science can measure, in a precise manner, which particles make up the atmosphere above our heads. Since 1958, the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii has been measuring the make-up of the atmospheric molecules, expressed as parts per million (ppm) or billion (ppb) (the number of molecules of a gas per million/billion molecules of dry air). This data has been plotted onto a graph that is known as ‘The Keeling Curve’ after the scientist, Charles David Keeling, who set it up. The latest readings show that there are now 410 particles of CO₂ in every million (410ppm). Nitrogen (N) makes up over three-quarters of the rest with 780,900ppm, alongside Oxygen (O) that occupies 209,500 ppm. Science has known since 1824, through the work of French physicist Joseph Fourier, that carbon is a greenhouse gas because it traps thermal radiation. For CO₂ to be such a minor component of the atmosphere is a reminder of how highly finely balanced the equilibrium of the Earth’s systems are.

Although 410 parts per million does not sound like a lot, a carbon reading of 410ppm informs us that we have bumped up the level of CO₂ by 46% since the start of the Industrial age. It tells us that humans are heading for a catastrophic collision with the forces of nature. It is a concentration of CO₂ that is unprecedented in 4 million years⁵ and when geologists look back in time to previous epochs that had the same levels of CO₂ they do not see a world which is compatible with human civilisation as it is now. “Current levels of CO₂ correspond to an equilibrium climate last observed 3-5 million years ago, a climate that was 2-3C warmer than today, and sea levels were 10-20 m higher than those today”⁶ Climate change is real. It is happening and if it goes on unchecked, it will impose itself on human life with an unacceptable level of disruption and violence.

This scientifically demonstrable fact is an offense to our common sense on a number of levels. Firstly, if the climate has been so temperate and accommodating in the past, then it is hard to imagine that it would switch so dramatically to become such a dangerous enemy. Human beings have just experienced an unusually balanced climatic period known as the ‘Holocene’ that lasted from 11,700BC until the modern day. This interglacial period provided a benign equilibrium for Neolithic homo sapiens to grow up in; these are conditions that our more immediate ancestors in the Bronze Age and Iron Age enjoyed too. In fact, moving beyond this into the Palaeolithic, for the last 800,000 years the level of CO₂ was entrenched in a stable range, between ~180ppm and ~280ppm⁷. Therefore, a reading of over 410ppm is not an historic level, it is a very deeply prehistoric level.

The greenhouse emissions of the Industrial Revolution, which continue to flourish across the globe, has suddenly jolted the planet into a new geological period tentatively known as the ‘Anthropocene’⁸. It is defined by our massive range of impacts: radical changes to flora and fauna, massive extractions of metals and minerals, deposits of nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizer in the soil, radioactive fall-out, development of new minerals and ubiquitous materials like plastics, and greenhouse gas emissions. This new epoch has already started to show its teeth.

The turkey who has been fed so regularly and diligently by the farmer all year cannot imagine when he hears the shake of the grain bucket on December 24th that things are going to turn out so badly after breakfast. Likewise, it is truly difficult for us humans to imagine a different set of coastal maps from the ones that we have all grown up with. It is hard to imagine a whole city going under water because it all seems so concrete.

Secondly, climate change is a truth that is essentially non-sensory. The climate can only be seen in scientific graphs. By contrast, we sense the weather because it blows in our face, chills or warms our bodies and gets our clothes wet. The weather happens to us. Fudging the difference between the climate and the weather is a common tactic used by sceptics and activists alike. But the distinction can be made clear by simply thinking about the difference between a forest and a tree.

When you are in the middle of a forest you can only see the trees around you; each tree is like a weather event. By contrast, the whole forest is out of sight. Not only can you not see the trees hundreds of miles away, but the forest has been around for hundreds, thousands or perhaps millions of years. The forest, in this fullest aspect, is like the climate. One dead tree does not signify anything about the forest, you need to be able to look at the bigger picture. One flood or storm, one cold or warm winter, does not signify anything about the climate, you need to have much deeper and wider data to be able speak scientifically.

By extension, a third challenge to our common sense about climate change stems from our inability to experience change. For obvious reasons, the human mind is set up to see the world in the present tense, we just get to see our lives moment by moment, and so observing long term change⁹ is generally elusive to us. We are shocked to see an old passport image of ourselves from a decade ago, we are shocked to see relatives after a long break. The imperceptible change, cell by cell, of our faces is not something that we can see in the conventional sense of the verb.

The late Physics Professor Al Bartlett famously gave a lecture about the human inability to grasp change. Starting in 1969, for 36 years he gave his (unchanged) talk about change a total of 1,742 times¹⁰. He always opened with the same arresting claim, “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function”. By just playing around with simple arithmetic, he demonstrates the real world consequences of steady growth rates.

For example, he calculated that if the 1999’s population growth of 1.3% per year continued, it would lead to a population density of 1 person per square meter on the dry land surface of the earth in 780 years¹¹. That is not enough room for anyone to swing a kitten in. Yet we would have to farm this square meter for all our food, park our car in it, whilst also squeezing our share of all the houses, hospitals, schools, factories and shops into it too. Similarly, the headlines for climate change sound diminutive, between 1-2% growth per year; since the 1970s, though, our GHG emissions grew on average 1.6% per year, and had doubled by 2013¹² - and on current trends it will be up four times by around 2050.

Thinking about environmental issues in percentages and rates is clearly a necessity for some types of analysis, but it does not always help us to get a common sense of what is actually going on. There would be intense media attention and debate about population growth if it were to become an annual event. Having 83 million¹³ extra people disembarking off a giant spaceship every New Year’s Day would cause the current residents of Earth to ask some critical questions about how they might be fed and located. Given the current stress marks that can already been seen on the planet’s resources, the fact that we are adding the equivalent of the entire population of Germany to a closed mass system every year is one of the most remarkable silences in our current political thinking. This political silence about population growth is equally bewildering when the negative implications for climate change of having to factor an extra 83 million people every year into the carbon emissions calculations are considered.

Bartlett’s point is not that we would ever reach a point of one person per square meter in 780 years, because the stress would snap civilisation and the planet much earlier. His point is that humans have to concentrate to be able to see the real action that is actually occurring inside a steady, long-term trend. This lack of awareness makes humans very prone to making disastrously passive responses to critical issues.

In Munich, a 43 year old female patient was admitted to hospital in October 1978. Suffering from a lesion in section V5 of her brain; patient ‘LM’ complained of extreme headaches and vertigo, but more puzzlingly, she could now only see the world in snapshot images. Her disorder is known to medical history now as Gross Akinetopsia¹⁴. It is more commonly known as ‘Motion Blindness’. Patients suffering from Akinetopsia, with their strobe-like vision, find it very challenging to pour a glass of water and cross a road. They have also reported difficulties in following a conversation as the fluent soundtrack does not match the stuttering images of the lips that they see.

LM is the only extensively documented case of severe Motion Blindness. Yet, perhaps we are all suffering from that condition in a sense. We can see the evidence for climate change, but for various cognitive reasons, as this massive wrecking ball speeds towards our society, we really struggle to perceive what is coming our way.

The science of climate change in six graphs

Science can put reality on hold so that we can get a good look at it. A graph can provide a good sense of the timing of events. The following 6 graphs illustrate the most fundamental facts about climate change. They are made from the baseline data that human civilisation is dependent upon.

Indeed, before any philosophers are invited in to talk, a proper base of evidence about climate change has to be established. The latest conclusions of the best available science have to underpin any philosophical enquiry. Every graph and claim made in this first chapter is supported by the relevant references to the scientific literature.

Philosophy’s respect for the truth demands that this foundation is put down. 7 chapters of philosophical exploration will follow, but the science must speak first.

Graph One – The cause of Climate Change

These are the long-lived greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. They are the cause of climate change. The graph is from the global atmospheric authority, the ‘World Meteorological Organization’ (WMO)¹⁵.

The data shows that our emissions have been increasing and are continuing to rise relentlessly. The projection for 2018 (in a paler colour) and beyond continues in the same direction.

Stating the obvious, we are not controlling our emissions. The line on the graph is going up, and new records are being set every year16,17. In the last 30 years, radiative forcing (the technical label for the ‘warming effect’) has risen 46%. The overall average increase was 0.03 w/m2 per year, but the last 5 year average was 0.04 w/m2 per year.¹⁸

These blunt facts mean that we are not decreasing our emissions. Conversely, we are accelerating them¹⁹.

A rise from 2.1 to 3.1 W/m2 radiative forcing might not sound like a lot, but when the 1 Watt per square meter increase is cashed out into a different set of units, the reality of it all is rather amazing. A 1W per m² increase across the entire earth’s surface amounts to a 510 trillion Watt force. This upturn is the equivalent of 600,000 Hiroshima nuclear A-bomb explosions per day²⁰.

When geologists create images of the planet of how it must have looked in the deep past, as a snowball earth or a greenhouse earth, it is hard to imagine the forces that must have been at work over millions of years to make such transformations possible. When we look at our earth from satellite imagery today and see a giant disco ball, we might simply be reminded of the streetlights at home. Yet these lights represent just a fragment of the power that human beings are affecting the planet with, on each spin. The lights don’t flash red, blue and green, but if they did it might help us to visualise the reality behind the glitz.

A ‘Disco Ball Earth’ could be a very apt symbol for the Anthropocene.

Graph 2 – Energy Sources

The reason why our emissions are increasing is due to the fact that we are still meeting the large majority of our energy demands with fossil fuels. The chart below shows that 82% of all our energy is produced by either Coal, Oil or Gas. These statistics are taken from the latest data of the International Energy Agency. It shows that wind and solar power has dramatically increased from around 100Twh to over 1,000Twh, a whopping 1000% increase.

However, increasing the size of an apple pip by 1000% does not change much if it is in competition with slowly inflating Beach Balls and Hopper Balls that had a sizeable head start. In fact, although fossil fuels use increased by a much smaller percentage, in absolute terms it outstripped green energy growth by 19 times.

In COP21 in Paris, President Obama proudly underlined the “ambitious investments” [sic] that the USA had made in tackling climate change by talking about the size of his ‘apple pip’. “Over the last seven years, we’ve made ambitious investments in clean energy, and ambitious reductions in our carbon emissions. We’ve multiplied Wind power threefold, and solar power more than twentyfold”.

Globally, Wind, Solar, Hydro and all other renewable non-emittive energy sources still only account for 4% of humanity’s energy supply. Nuclear Power, for all of its other complications, is at least carbon friendly, so we get to 9% with this included. Biomass, which is emittive and has great unsustainability issues, was at about 10%

The impression that we might have, from casually observing solar panels on people’s roofs or wind turbines in the open fields by motorways, is that green energies are significantly replacing fossil fuels. Politicians may frequently cite their commitments to huge-percentage increases in green energy supplies.

However, the data that matters shows very clearly that we are not making any inroads into curtailing our reliance on fossil fuel. In fact, all of the recent policy commitments to new investments in green energy are not even sufficient to deal with the increased demand for energy that will come in the years ahead from factors such as population growth. Therefore, fossil fuel use and emissions will continue to increase until 2030 and beyond21,22.

Graph 3

On 4th June 1992, every single Member State of the United Nations agreed on a document that brought the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change into existence - the UNFCCC. It had become very clear that humanity was stepping into very dangerous territory with global warming. The UN understood that the politicians needed regular updates on the science and regular reviews of the progress made in achieving the Convention’s objective. The ultimate decision-making body of the convention is the Conference of the Parties (COP) and as part of the plan, they established annual COP meetings in which these reviews would take place. The first COP meeting started in Berlin on March 28th 1995. These decisions’ importance was underlined when NASA scientist James Hansen gave a testimony to a Congressional Committee in 1988 in which the key conclusions about climate change were strongly stated.

The UNFCCC has a clear overarching goal, “To stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level which would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”. A list of the meetings is presented on the previous page.

There have been a long list of negotiated outcomes that often carry the name of the location in which they were agreed and purposeful slogans. However, despite all of the signatures, the troubling fact is that not a single COP (Conference of the Parties) meeting has been able to witness progress in meeting its declared objective. The reason for gathering hundreds of politicians, diplomats and scientists together was to achieve the goal that the UNFCCC was set up for, which is “to stabilise emissions”. The outcome of those meetings might achieve secondary targets, but it must ultimately be judged by the data on global emissions.

The red line which cuts across the years and the places is going up²³, we have gone from 360ppm of CO₂ to 410ppm, we have gone from an annual output of 8 excessive gigatonnes of CO₂ to 9, to 10, and onto 11. This is a very basic observation, but it has to be stated. The UNFCCC has many sub-groups, from Climate Finance to Climate Technology, from Deforestation to Gender, but it has one singular overriding purpose. It has to keep anthropogenic interference in the atmosphere to a safe level. All of the other targets and outcomes only have any value in how they relate to this central aim.

The UNFCCC is not doing its job.

At COP21, Obama announced the positive news about the bike that we are all travelling on at an impossibly fast speed, “… the good news is this is not an American trend alone. Last year, the global economy grew while global carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels stayed flat²⁴. And what this means can’t be overstated.” When the scientific reality is put squarely against his use of the word “stabilisation”, Obama’s statement does indeed sound like a major overstatement.

In graph 3, it can be seen that there have been some years during which the rate of increase started to flattened out, but this is hardly a comforting fact. Hearing your dad scream at you through the wind-noise that, “there is no need to worry!” because the speed of the bike going downhill has now stabilised at 100kmh is not very reassuring.

What is needed, is a firm and sensible application of the brakes to actually slow down the bike down to a speed that is compatible with your survival²⁵.

UNFCCC – A School Report