A humbling responsibility; a remarkable opportunity

A friend told me gloomily that he had no idea what he wanted to do when he graduated. I bought him a drink and told him about Alexander the Great and Aristotle.

By the time he was an old man, Aristotle knew a thing or two about politics. He had witnessed the collapse of the once great Athenian democracy, and the myriad subsequent failures patched together out of its ruins, none of which quite had the strength to survive. His solution was the Lyceum, a school that trained young men to live well and therefore lead well.

He wrote an ethical treatise for his students, among whom was Alexander the Great, which argued that whatever character they wished to project upon becoming kings, they would have to practice all their lives. He explained that small acts of courage, like standing up for a friend, would prepare the spirit for greater ones, like going into battle. It followed logically, he said, that the harder the challenge, the stronger the character it forged.

Young Alexander was enamoured of the idea. He told Aristotle he was going to conquer the known world. Aristotle was not exactly impressed; his glory-hungry charge had not understood the full story.

Aristotle had wanted Alexander to practice a particular kind of personality; a happy one. Happiness he said, was the result of actions consistent with a set of virtuous principals. By doing happy-making deeds, a person becomes happy, and so do the people around them, meaning they become even happier. How did he, and subsequent philosophers like Kant, judge if a principal was virtuous or not?

By how much it helped the community.

Aristotle came to this conclusion with the following logic: whether the Gods exist or not, it is up to each of us to choose a purpose in our lives, for it is the act of choice that makes us human. Most people, when offered this choice, would opt to pursue happiness. This was something all the Greek philosophers agreed upon, but they each had a different way of getting happy. Aristotle considered all their ideas, and came to the conclusion that there were three main paths to happiness.

The first is a life of pleasure, the instant gratification of all our physical and emotional desires. But this soon becomes unhappiness because such pursuits invariably lead us into conflict with others in our community.

The second, then, is a life of learning, the endless pursuit of beautiful knowledge. But this too becomes unhappiness, for as we arrange our knowledge into ever more tidy sets, we stray further from real experiences, and thus further from the truth we were seeking. The third life, meanwhile, takes the problems of the first two and tackles them head on. Aristotle called it the “political life”, suggesting that if serving yourself or compiling knowledge makes us unhappy, then serving others and using knowledge would probably have the opposite effect. In other words, use the things that we learn about your community to solve whatever conflicts arise in it. Yet the political life is also the most difficult, with so many challenges to address. And that, of course, is the point. As he had explained to Alexander earlier, the bigger the challenge, the bigger the personality that comes out of it. You become a better leader through leading, the community becomes better for having a better leader, and you become better for living in a good community. A virtuous cycle ensues, as individual and community grow together. No wonder Aristotle wanted his young king to be happy.

My friend finished his drink and smirked, “so you think because I’m a cynic, that if you explain it to me rationally I’ll want to go and feed starving orphans. You think because I’m intellectual, that if you say some old Greek guy told me to do it, I’ll help you save the rainforest.”

“No,” I replied. “I was only trying to make you happy.”

Aristotle’s age-old dictum states “we are what we do”; to become great, we must take on great challenges. The epic magnitude of climate change should forge characters at least as great, if not greater, than Alexander’s. The parallel is forever being drawn between World War II and climate change, because nothing else matches the emotional and economic effort “total climate war” entails. Living through World War II, there was an acknowledged sense of history hanging over all. People were situated on a timeline, part of a lineage stretching out in both directions to the past and future.

There were hundreds who became heroes through their small actions or assigned duties, purely through association with the cause. By “hitching their wagon to something bigger” as Obama would put it, they too became bigger.

When you understand the dauntingly comprehensive task that is climate change, you will know what kind of a person you are. Is it all too hard, or is it just a chance to build your character?

This then is the story from an individualistic perspective; each of us is a king or queen and our kingdom needs a hero. Let us now journey deeper back in time, to discover what other scientific or philosophical concepts exist to support a positive take on climate change. It seems important to begin by contextualising this event within the greater human narrative. It is arguable that, if civilisation is a story then climate change is its climax. To understand that claim, we must go back to the birth of civilisation 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest story ever told. It speaks of the arrogant King Gilgamesh and his best friend Enkidu, living high off the lands and people of the ancient Middle East. Their realm, far from being the barren desert we recognise from the wars of today, was ringed by a forest stretching out to the ends of the Earth. In it lived a demon called Humbaba. Humbaba had never attacked humans but Gilgamesh decided to stop him before he got the chance.

Once he and Enkidu had slain the beast, Gilgamesh began to fell every tree, so that humankind would never again be threatened by the aimless whims of an uncontrollable wilderness. At last, only the two tallest trees in the forest - each enough, we can assume, to sink a tonne of carbon - were left standing. Enkidu, who had been sent by the Gods to quell Gilgamesh’s arrogance, warned his friend against their destruction. Gilgamesh felled them anyway, so Enkidu made the trees into doors for a temple in the city, hoping to appease the Gods for their crime. But nothing, and especially not this gesture, could assuage the divine rage now bearing down upon the pair.

The Gods laid a curse over all the lands that Gilgamesh ruled, to suffer drought, war and disunity for the rest of time. Now that does sound like the Middle East we know today. The last tonne of carbon that tips the scale on run-away climate change signals, for our global civilisation, the same deadly fate as those trees.

During the last Ice Age, around 18,000 years ago, the oceans froze at the poles leaving land exposed elsewhere. Humankind’s ancestors were able to walk from China to Australia, from France to Britain, or across the Bering Straight to America. As the Ice Age slowly ended, seas rose and sundered tribe from tribe. The climate reached a kind of equilibrium known affectionately to archaeologists as the Long Spring. In this new warmth, plants on the Middle Eastern plain hybridised to form farmable grain crops, which led some humans to settle there and domesticate wild sheep or goats. A civilisation sprang up, the descendants of which would one day learn to drill for oil fields beneath the wheat fields, turn spring into summer, and raise the sea higher still.

All cells function best at an ideal temperature, and as a result all living organisms perform homeostasis, a process by which they attempt to maintain a constant body heat. For humans the ideal average is 37ºC, allowing muscle cells to be at one temperature and stomach cells at another and so on. For the planet right now, the ideal temperature is 15ºC, allowing humans to be at 37ºC, fish to be at their ideal, and reptiles, birds and plants at theirs. For millennia life has inadvertently changed the planet’s temperature, making it hotter by breathing and decaying, or colder by sequestering carbon. Oil is the life that perished in stagnant seas on a younger, overheated planet, cooling it enough to make way for the diversity of organisms we know today. It is these homeostatic processes that, if we disrupt them, we will be left to perform for ourselves with technological super-projects.

When James Lovelock conceived of the Gaia hypothesis, he took pains to explain that the green movement was not about “saving the planet”; the planet would save itself by eliminating mankind. To do this, it would sacrifice its stable climate along with all the other species that rely on it, and return to a cycle of sweats and chills for a few million years, after which it may be lucky, enough stabilise again, and evolve the same diversity of life we know today. In a few billion more after that, the entire solar system will be sucked into the sun. Lovelock casts humankind as Gaia’s sentient organ, poignantly identifying our place among the geological processes: “at least she got to see herself before she died.” Being conscious, Homo sapiens have been able to observe the beauty and complexity of life on Earth, right at the point in history when, thanks to a stable climate, it was at its most diverse.

Some scientists argue that human consciousness is a scientific singularity, an event when a complex system forms a whole greater than the sum of its parts. It belongs to a lineage of singularities each made possible by its forbear: life, Gaia, consciousness. It began with life. Amino acids became DNA strands that became cells that became cells within cells until organisms emerged that could not exist without their myriad specialist elements within.

It was a new “social contract”, for those specialist elements could no longer exist without the organism they were a part of either. Life heaped upon life until the planet itself became self-regulating, with its living parts cycling through water, carbon and nitrogen at a pace ideal for them to remain alive.

The Earth System, Gaia, of which we are each a cell, allowed for a third singularity. Homo sapiens, over their 200,000 years (a relatively rapid evolution) became possessed of brains so complex that for the first time in the animal kingdom those synapses became self aware, a state we know as consciousness. Put very simply, what distinguishes consciousness from the wider animal experience is explicit knowledge of its own existence. Rather than relying on automated instinctual processes, the conscious organism can make choices about its own survival.

Before anything was known about the lineage of consciousness, Aristotle said that choice was our species’ defining trait, and the key to a life of meaning. Writing in the early 20th century, Heidegger had something to add; “It is only in full … awareness of our own mortality that life can take on any purposive meaning.” Imagine then just how meaningful things are getting when we are aware, not only of the death of our civilisation, but maybe even of our species.

Put the science of earth systems next to Aristotle’s virtue ethics and a strange new vision of the 21st century begins to crystallise. We are part of a planetary community, and serving it, through actions both simple and great, is the only thing that can bring us happiness. We are the privileged generation, for none before has had the opportunity to become, by the greatness of the challenge, so great in character. If we can hold back this storm we will have outstripped, and maybe even redeemed, all our forebears, from Gilgamesh through to the World Wars. That is a humbling responsibility and a remarkable opportunity. That is why I love climate change.

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