The story of Rosa Parks is both a true episode from history and a fable created to make history. Like the iconic photographs of the soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima, the couple kissing in Robert Doisneau’s Le baiser de l’hôtel de ville, and the milkman moving through the rubble of bombed-out London, the photo of Rosa Parks on the bus was staged. It is a sympathetic journalist, not an aggravated segregationist, seated behind her. And as she later acknowledged, what happened wasn’t quite as simple—as memorable—as a tired woman being told to move from the front of the bus to the back. But she embodied the most inspiring version of events because she understood the power of narrative. Parks was brave for being the hero of her story, but heroic for being one of its authors.
History not only makes a good story in retrospect; good stories become history. With regard to the fate of our planet—which is also the fate of our species—that is a profound problem. As the marine biologist and filmmaker Randy Olson put it, “Climate is quite possibly the most boring subject the science world has ever had to present to the public.” Most attempts to narrativize the crisis are either science fiction or dismissed as science fiction. There are very few versions of the climate change story that kindergartners could re-create, and there is no version that would move their parents to tears. It seems fundamentally impossible to pull the catastrophe from over there in our contemplations to right here in our hearts. As Amitav Ghosh wrote in The Great Derangement, “The climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.” I would call it a crisis of belief.
Know Better, No Better
In 1942, a twenty-eight-year-old Catholic in the Polish underground, Jan Karski, embarked on a mission to travel from Nazi-occupied Poland to London, and ultimately America, to inform world leaders of what the Germans were perpetrating. In anticipation of his journey, he met with several resistance groups, accumulating information and testimonies to bring to the West. In his memoir, he recounts a meeting with the head of the Jewish Socialist Alliance:
The Bund leader came up to me in silence. He gripped my arm with such violence that it ached. I looked into his wild, staring eyes with awe, moved by the deep, unbearable pain in them.
“Tell the Jewish leaders that this is no case for politics or tactics. Tell them that the Earth must be shaken to its foundation, the world must be aroused. Perhaps then it will wake up, understand, perceive. Tell them that they must find the strength and courage to make sacrifices no other statesmen have ever had to make, sacrifices as painful as the fate of my dying people, and as unique. This is what they do not understand. German aims and methods are without precedent in history. The democracies must react in a way that is also without precedent, choose unheard-of methods as an answer …
“You ask me what plan of action I suggest to the Jewish leaders. Tell them to go to all the important English and American offices and agencies. Tell them not to leave until they obtain guarantees that a way has been decided upon to save the Jews. Let them accept no food or drink, let them die a slow death while the world is looking on. Let them die. This may shake the conscience of the world.”
After surviving as perilous a journey as could be imagined, Karski arrived in Washington, D.C., in June 1943. There, he met with Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, one of the great legal minds in American history, and himself a Jew. After hearing Karski’s accounts of the clearing of the Warsaw Ghetto and of exterminations in the concentration camps, after asking him a series of increasingly specific questions (“What is the height of the wall that separates the ghetto from the rest of the city?”), Frankfurter paced the room in silence, then took his seat and said, “Mr. Karski, a man like me talking to a man like you must be totally frank. So I must say I am unable to believe what you told me.” When Karski’s colleague pleaded with Frankfurter to accept Karski’s account, Frankfurter responded, “I didn’t say that this young man is lying. I said I am unable to believe him. My mind, my heart, they are made in such a way that I cannot accept it.”
Frankfurter didn’t question the truthfulness of Karski’s story. He didn’t dispute that the Germans were systematically murdering the Jews of Europe—his own relatives. And he didn’t respond that while he was persuaded and horrified, there was nothing he could do. Rather, he admitted not only his inability to believe the truth but his awareness of that inability. Frankfurter’s conscience was not shaken.
Our minds and hearts are well built to perform certain tasks, and poorly designed for others. We are good at things like calculating the path of a hurricane, and bad at things like deciding to get out of its way. Because we evolved over hundreds of millions of years, in settings that bear little resemblance to the modern world, we are often led to desires, fears, and indifferences that neither correspond nor respond to modern realities. We are disproportionately drawn to immediate and local needs—we crave fats and sugars (which are bad for people who live in a world of their ready availability); we hyper-vigilantly watch our children on jungle gyms (despite the many greater risks to their health that we ignore, like overfeeding them fats and sugars)—while remaining indifferent to what is lethal but over there.
In a recent study, the UCLA psychologist Hal Hershfield found that when subjects were asked to describe their future selves—even a mere ten years from now—their brain activity on fMRI scans bore more resemblance to what appeared when they described strangers than to what appeared when they described their current selves. When subjects were shown images of themselves in which their appearance had been digitally aged, however, this disparity changed, and so did their behavior. Asked to allocate a thousand dollars among four options—a gift for a loved one, a fun event, a checking account, or a retirement fund—subjects who saw their aged avatars put nearly twice as much money into their retirement accounts as subjects who didn’t.
It has been widely demonstrated that emotional responses are heightened by vividness. Researchers have described a number of “sympathy biases” that generate concern: the identifiable-victim effect (the ability to visualize the details of the suffering), the in-group effect (the suggestion of social proximity to the suffering), and the reference-dependent sympathy effect (the presentation of the victim’s condition as not merely dreadful but worsening). One group of researchers conducted a direct-mail fundraising experiment with about two hundred thousand potential donors. If the mailing featured a named individual as opposed to an unnamed group, donations increased by 110 percent. If the donor and the target belonged to the same religion, donations increased by 55 percent. If the target’s poverty was presented as newfound instead of chronic, donations increased by 33 percent. Combining all these tactics led to a 300 percent increase in donations.
The problem with the planetary crisis is that it runs up against a number of built-in “apathy biases.” Although many of climate change’s accompanying calamities—extreme weather events, floods and wildfires, displacement and resource scarcity chief among them—are vivid, personal, and suggestive of a worsening situation, they don’t feel that way in aggregate. They feel abstract, distant, and isolated rather than like beams of an ever-strengthening narrative. As the journalist Oliver Burkeman put it in The Guardian, “If a cabal of evil psychologists had gathered in a secret undersea base to concoct a crisis humanity would be hopelessly ill-equipped to address, they couldn’t have done better than climate change.”
So-called climate change deniers reject the conclusion that 97 percent of climate scientists have reached: the planet is warming because of human activities. But what about those of us who say we accept the reality of human-caused climate change? We may not think the scientists are lying, but are we able to believe what they tell us? Such a belief would surely awaken us to the urgent ethical imperative attached to it, shake our collective conscience, and render us willing to make small sacrifices in the present to avoid cataclysmic ones in the future.
Intellectually accepting the truth isn’t virtuous in and of itself. And it won’t save us. As a child, I wa
s often told “you know better” when I did something I shouldn’t have done. Knowing was the difference between a mistake and an offense.
If we accept a factual reality (that we are destroying the planet), but are unable to believe it, we are no better than those who deny the existence of human-caused climate change—just as Felix Frankfurter was no better than those who denied the existence of the Holocaust. And when the future distinguishes between these two kinds of denial, which will appear to be a grave error and which an unforgivable crime?
Be Leaving, Believing, Be Living
A year before Karski journeyed from Poland to inform the world that the Jews of Europe were being slaughtered, my grandmother fled her Polish village to save her life. She left behind four grandparents, her mother, two siblings, cousins, and friends. She was twenty years old and knew only what everyone else knew: the Nazis were pushing east into Soviet-occupied Poland and were only days away. Asked why she left, she would say, “I felt I had to do something.”
My great-grandmother, who would be shot at the edge of a mass grave while holding her stepdaughter, watched my grandmother pack her things. They didn’t speak. That silence was their final exchange. Knowing no less than her daughter, she didn’t feel that she had to do something. Her knowledge was only knowledge.
My grandmother’s younger sister, who would be shot trying to trade a trinket for something to eat, followed my grandmother out of the house that day. She took off her only pair of shoes and gave them to my grandmother. “You’re so lucky to be leaving,” she said. I’ve been told that story many times. As a child I heard it as “You’re so lucky believing.”
Maybe it is just luck. If a few factors had been different around the time that my grandmother left—if she had been ill, or if she had just fallen in love with someone—maybe she would not have been lucky to be leaving. Those who stayed weren’t any less brave, intelligent, resourceful, or afraid of dying. They just didn’t believe that what was coming would be so different from what had already come many times. Belief can’t be willed into being. And you can’t force someone to believe, not even with better and louder and more virtuous arguments, not even with irrefutable evidence. As the filmmaker Claude Lanzmann puts it in his spoken prologue to The Karski Report, a documentary about Karski’s visit to America:
What is knowledge? What can information about a horror, a literally unheard-of one, mean to the human brain, which is unprepared to receive it because it concerns a crime that is without precedent in the history of humanity?… Raymond Aron, who had fled to London, was asked whether he knew what was happening at that time in the East. He answered: I knew, but I didn’t believe it, and because I didn’t believe it, I didn’t know.
I sometimes daydream about going from house to house in my grandmother’s shtetl, grabbing the faces of those who would stay, and screaming, “You have to do something!” I have this daydream in a house that I know consumes multiples of my fair share of energy and I know is representative of the kind of voracious lifestyle that I know is destroying our planet. I am capable of imagining one of my descendants daydreaming about grabbing my face and screaming, “You have to do something!” But I am incapable of the belief that would move me to do something. So I know nothing.
The other morning, on the drive to school, my ten-year-old son looked up from the book he was reading and said, “We are so lucky to be living.”
One piece of knowledge I don’t have: how to square my own gratitude for life with behavior that suggests an indifference to it.
My grandmother took her winter coat when she left home, even though it was June.
Hysterical
One summer night in 2006, eighteen-year-old Kyle Holtrust was riding his bicycle against traffic on the east side of Tucson when a Chevy Camaro struck him and dragged him beneath it for thirty feet. A witness in a nearby truck, Thomas Boyle, Jr., leaped from the passenger seat and ran over to help. Flooded with adrenaline, he gripped the frame of the Camaro and lifted its front end, holding it aloft for forty-five seconds while Holtrust was pulled free. When explaining why he did what he did, Boyle said, “I would be such a horrible human being to watch someone suffer like that and not even try to help … All I could think is, what if that was my son?” He felt he had to do something.
But when asked how he did what he did, he was at a loss: “There’s no way I could lift that car right now.” The world record for a dead lift is 1,102 pounds. A Camaro weighs between 3,300 and 4,000 pounds. Boyle, who was not a weight lifter, exhibited what is called “hysterical strength”—a physical feat, performed in a life-or-death situation, that exceeds what is usually considered possible.
One amazing person lifted the car off Holtrust’s body, but then many people pulled their cars to the side of the road to make the ambulance’s journey quicker. They were every bit as important in saving the young man’s life, but we don’t think of their acts as exceptional. To lift a car into the air is the most one can do. To move your car to the side when an ambulance appears is the least one can do. Kyle’s life depended on both.
When I was in grade school, police officers and firefighters gave annual presentations intended to inspire civic awareness and responsibility and to educate us about what to do in dangerous situations. I remember a fireman telling us that every time we saw an ambulance, we should imagine it carrying someone we love. What a miserable thought to deposit in a child’s head! Especially because it doesn’t make the right connection. We don’t get out of the way of an approaching ambulance because a loved one might be in it. And we don’t get out of the way because it’s the law. We do it because it is what we do. Making way for an ambulance is one of those social norms—like waiting in lines and putting garbage in a garbage can—that is so ingrained in our culture we don’t even notice it.
Norms can change, and they can be ignored. In Moscow in the early 2010s, there was a rash of “ambulance taxis”—vans made to look like emergency vehicles on the outside but outfitted with luxurious interiors and rented out for upwards of two hundred dollars per hour for the purpose of beating the city’s infamously bad traffic. It’s hard to imagine anyone who isn’t inside one of those vehicles being okay with them. They are an affront—not because we are being taken advantage of as individuals (most of us will never be passed by such a vehicle) but because they violate our willingness to sacrifice for the collective good. They exploit our best impulses. Home-front blackouts led to looting during World War II, and food rationing to forgery and theft. In London, when a Piccadilly nightclub suffered a direct hit by the Luftwaffe, rescuers had to fend off those trying to take jewelry from the dead.
But those are extreme examples. Almost always, our conventions and the identities they form are subtle to the point of being invisible. Sure, we don’t drive around in fake ambulances, but many of the ways we now live will look as bad (and far worse) to our descendants. The word “ambulance” is written in reverse on the hoods of ambulances so that it can be read in the rearview mirrors of drivers in front of them. You could say that the word is written for the future—for cars that are ahead on the road. Just as someone in an ambulance can’t see the word “ambulance,” we can’t read the history we’re creating: it’s written in reverse, to be read in a rearview mirror by those who aren’t yet born.
The word “emergency” derives from the Latin emergere, which means “to arise, bring to light.”
The word “apocalypse” derives from the Greek apokalyptein, which means “to uncover, to reveal.”
The word “crisis” derives from the Greek krisis, meaning “decision.”
Encoded into our language is the understanding that disasters tend to expose that which was previously hidden. As the planetary crisis unfolds as a series of emergencies, our decisions will reveal who we are.
Different challenges require, and inspire, different reactions. Alarm is an appropriate response to a person pinned beneath a car, but someone who abandons his otherwise beautiful home because of a tiny leak is
alarmingly overreactive. What does the condition of the planet require, and what does it inspire? And what happens if it doesn’t inspire what it requires—if we reveal ourselves to be people who put flashing lights atop our vehicles to avoid traffic but won’t turn off the lights in our homes to avoid destruction?
Away Games
Despite the numerous observed instances of hysterical strength, it has never been demonstrated in a controlled setting, because it would be unethical to create the necessary conditions. But even beyond the witnessed cases, there are reasons to assume it is a real phenomenon, including the effects of electrical charges on muscles (which demonstrate a strength that far exceeds what can be willed) and the performance of athletes at the most important competitions. It is no coincidence that the great majority of world records are set at the Olympics, when the viewing audience is vastly larger than that of any other competition and the stakes are much higher. Athletes are able to try harder because they care more.
Across sports, individuals and teams win more often when competing at home. (Not only are the majority of world records set at the Olympics, but the host country almost always overperforms.) Some portion of this can be explained by getting a good night’s rest in one’s own bed the night before, eating home-cooked food, and playing on a familiar field. Some can be explained by referee bias toward the home team. But the greatest advantage may be delivered by the supporters: playing in a stadium of one’s fans generates confidence and offers a powerful incentive to win. A study of Germany’s Bundesliga soccer league demonstrated that home-field advantage is greater in stadiums where the soccer field is not surrounded by a track than in those where it is. The closer the fans are to the field, the more their presence is felt—the more home feels like home.
We Are the Weather Page 2