THE HUMAN PARTY

To truly combat climate change, we must fundamentally restructure our national and international policy-making processes, in addition to rethinking the fundamental human aspirations that policy aims to satisfy.  These are big, complex targets, and they reach to the very core of contemporary society.   Universities can and must play a leading role in the societal restructuring needed to avert the global catastrophe predicted by climate scientists and government agencies around the world.

Universities across the United States have led the fight against climate change, drafting policies to substantially reduce their direct greenhouse gas emissions.  However, these proposals often only work to mitigate a school’s “tailpipe” emissions—those created by running its physical plant—without addressing the deep political and ideological crises that allow the unsustainable socio-technical regime of Western hydrocarbon society to continue unchallenged.  While gas-burning hot-water heaters and the power-plants generating our electricity may be the direct sources of climate-changing emissions, these physical sources of emissions are themselves the products of the complex political, economic, and ideological systems that have made them an integral part of the smooth functioning of our society. 

The changes needed to avert disaster must be at both the level of individual behavior and at the level of broader infrastructural systems.  Hydrogen-powered hot-water heaters are useless without a broader infrastructural arrangement that can produce hydrogen, compress, refrigerate, and deliver it to individual homes.  Bus travel cannot become a popular and viable means of transportation without adjustments in schedule structures and roadways.  Everyday human behavior is enabled by physical infrastructure and incentivized by economic signals;  governmental action, in the form of infrastructural investment and taxes which reflect the full ecological and social costs of human behaviors, is needed to enable individuals to embrace more environmentally-responsible technologies and ways of life.  

But until inaction by the government becomes politically costly, it will not assume this coordinating role.  Universities must train their students not just as academics, but as citizens.  Experiences inside the classroom and out must instill in students both the desire and capacity to organize coalitions that can make demands on those in positions of power — those who are both officially charged with making policy, and those who do much to influence it — to begin redirecting our society towards a more sustainable path.  A college education must prepare students to succeed in the workplace or the academy, but, more importantly, it must empower them to be leaders in the realm of organizing and direct action.

But the role of universities should go beyond providing more critical and far-reaching political education.  The aspects of society responsible for greenhouse gas emissions also correlate to broadly-held notions of what a “good life” entails.  Fighting climate change sometimes means fighting ourselves, because the societal changes necessary to avert cataclysmic environmental consequences violate what many of us consider to be essentially “good.”  Driving less or not at all would violate the sense of personal autonomy, privacy, and exclusivity that many learn to cherish; consuming less means forgoing the joy we learn to derive from conspicuous consumption; flying less means risking the loss of familial bonds and friendships that are deeply meaningful to us.   While most people would admit that luxury SUVs, excessive meat consumption and vacations to Florida and the Bahamas are environmentally irresponsible, they may seem justified by the happiness they provide, the feelings of fulfillment we’ve learned to derive from them, and their significance as an indicator of individual success.

However, forgoing these “goods” only registers as loss or sacrifice because we’ve been socialized to believe that our way of life allows for the maximum fulfillment of human potential and happiness - something which is simply not true.  As Herbet Marcuse of the Frankfurt School of social analysis claims, late Capitalism has averted revolutionary instability by manufacturing the needs which it is most able to fulfill: therefore, we measure well-being and success in terms of consumer goods and the class divisions that make their conspicuous consumption so meaningful, and the socio-spatial stratification we equate with privacy and autonomy.

A college education must work at a deeper level to open up the imaginative capacity of students to gain fulfillment in ways that our social structure often precludes.  Quite simply, we as a society must learn new ways to live a good life, ways that are dismissed by the dominant cultural values of late Capitalism.  To rise to the unprecedented challenge of climate change, we must collectively work to define a new American Dream, a new set of essential “goods” that a human life might aspire to.

What if solidarity with the Third-world poor or environmental stewardship became the deepest aspirations of our society?  What if conservation were embedded as one of our deepest moral goods?  What if our global interconnectedness and the mutual responsibility it entails were conceived of as a source of happiness far deeper than that gained from the endless cycle of wanton consumption that too many call the American Dream.  If these were our dominant cultural values, climate change—and all the flying, driving, and electricity usage that causes is—would seem to violate the values we hold most dear.   Changes aimed at averting climate would be welcomed as a necessity and not a burden.  To have a different society—one which doesn’t provide endless opportunities for consumption to the few at the expense of the many and the environment, we must become a different kind of human being, with new aspirations, belief systems, and priorities.  

Many college graduates feel that they found themselves at college; that those four (or two, or five) years made them the people they will be for the rest of their life.  Colleges have a unique opportunity to shape the desires and ethics of the people whose lifestyles and political orientation will largely determine whether our society is able to restructure itself.  With so much at stake, institutions of higher education must use their critical position to awaken an imaginative capacity within their students that will allow them to militate for deep societal changes—not out of a patronizing, aloof ascetism, but out of the desire to live in a way that is fundamentally, incontrovertibly good.