How is it possible to be Green Liberal?
Or why it sometimes takes an oxymoron to resolve a paradox
While browsing the social networks a few weeks back, I caught sight of a comment defining the Green Liberal Party (whom the author clearly had no great love for) as “le parti de l’oxymore, or the oxymoron party,” of course referring to the rhetorical device in which two terms — in appearance perfect opposites — are combined into a single image, such as Baudelaire’s “black sun” or Camus’ “deafening silence”. The commenter was thus inferring that what the Green Liberals are trying to do is impossible; so blatantly contrary to the laws of nature that the party is inevitably aware of it and therefore dishonest. We can also read in his assumption that environmental protection and wildlife preservation are left-wing issues.
Today, the agendas of all parties support reductions of CO2 and pesticides, and developments in the areas of soft mobility and cleantech. Climate change protests have been pounding the streets of major cities throughout the world. The UN hosted an enormous Climate Change Summit 2019 on the initiative of their Secretary-General. It seems everyone has come to an agreement, at least in the verb: we must act now.
What we hear less is how the climate emergency is getting the upper hand over each and every party on the political chessboard. Preserving our environment is an indispensable precondition to all other human activities, which is why it is strong-arming parties into rethinking the standard composition of their ideological landscape.
“It’s more obvious the way the climate crisis challenges a right-wing dominant worldview, and the cult of serious centrism that never wants to do anything big, that’s always looking to split the difference. But this is also a challenge to a left worldview that is essentially only interested in redistributing the spoils of extractivism [the process of extracting natural resources from the earth] and not reckoning with the limits of endless consumption.”
Naomi Klein
Reverse the order of priorities
The order of priorities must be reversed in traditional parties if they want climate change to be more than an election-time décor. The fact is that there can no longer be social justice without a concern for the ecology, nor economic freedom insensitive to the environment. How could there be justice in an environment that is being destroyed? How could we continue to make gains at the cost of our planet’s health, a planet that provides our habitat and holds both our origins and impassable horizon?
Balancing the scales between (financial) opportunities and (environmental) risks has become tricky business. To date, we have given little regard to the costs incurred by the environment, nature, and other countries to meet our needs in energy and diverse manufactured goods. Rare metals being mined to produce circuits for our computers at the price of poisoning land and men, the manufacturing of our clothing polluting the drinking water of populations who lack basically everything but the force to work serving us, at the cost of seeing vulnerable plants and wildlife born from the same waters disappear, exotic commodities being produced through trenches of deforestation and trans-shipments that suffocate the oceans have all, until not so long ago, been perceived as a lesser evil or some collateral damage the environment would somehow manage to absorb and annul.
We have been living with a loan on the Earth and are acting like we don’t see it
Well this is no longer so, and the current imbalance between opportunity and risk is proof of the pitiful accounting work done over time, despite a world filled with statistics experts and MBAs in economics. We can now gauge the poorness of calculations that failed to take the entire chain of life into account: we have been living with a loan on the Earth and are acting like we don’t see it. But no printing press or devaluation can pay off this deficit. It’s cash up front, in-kind, as they say.
The range of explorable solutions in our left/right thinking mode is stopped short by a brick wall: the entire left-wing focusing on defending cake everyone, the right-wing magnetically oriented toward the freedom of enterprise, both based on the same assumption that mankind is master of the Earth. This assumption is where our ideologies take root. It is what must be eradicated if we do not want to merely fall into step with farfetched, foolish and implausible conclusions extoling, on one hand, an extreme retrogression (like the anthropologist who has returned to nature’s ways in who knows which glacial and untouched part of North America), and on the other, progress pushed to its peak with projects to migrate to other planets (a true bezossian dream… that gives astrophysicists like Michel Mayor their daily laugh). Somewhere in between, we have the climate-skeptics who offer no other solution than to noisily blast die-hard climate activists, collapsologists and other prophets-of-woe with accusations of attempting to gain power by spreading fear. Once again, these three categories drink from the same fountain of logic: either we grow but keep destroying, or we preserve the environment but must back down from our achievements. If you contemplate keeping our greatest successes, ceasing all destruction seems like a contradiction, an impossibility (proof being: we have progressed through destruction), like an unreachable posture or an alliance of opposites Don’tupholdable only by an oxymoron itself.
Don’t panic
I’m betting on just the opposite. Take a second to imagine that what we perceive as contradictions are nothing of the sort: merely paradoxes, seemingly contradictory affirmations that, based on truthful premises, seem logically inacceptable.
Science has always had a healthy appetite for paradoxes. Wikipedia cites no fewer than 160 of them, selected amongst the most famous in the fields of psychology, economy, sciences, computer sciences, politics, geometry and probabilities. Some hinge on a shift in meaning, such as the Swiss cheese paradox*, while others are the fruit of epistemological shortfalls only to be resolved centuries later, such as Zeno’s paradox, devised somewhere between 490 and 430 BC and settled through modern algebra in the 17th century (which demonstrates that an infinite series of strictly positive numbers can converge into a finite sum)**. Paradoxes toy with the limits of our understanding, taunt our conceptual frameworks and point us down the path we must pursue to solve them.
Let’s tackle paradoxes
Time has come for us to tackle the paradoxes of the contemporary world: How to preserve the gains of our achievements without overexploiting our lifespring, the planet we call Earth? How to consume local in a global world? How to solve the thorny issue of pension funds when increased life expectancy is a progress of our society? How to make sure health insurance premiums aren’t making us sick? How to comfort our fellow citizens fearful of lacking (necessities, possessions, nice things, and all the extras you sometimes just need), while despite that fear, more and more of us are aspiring to live healthier, more authentic lives?
An economy that does not serve the ecological transition would be lethal and a transition devoid of the economy’s support would be ineffective.
Our environment is our prime necessity and human activities must be put at its service, beginning with the economy. An economy that does not serve the ecological transition would be lethal and a transition devoid of the economy’s support would be ineffective.
Being Green Liberal is not an oxymoron; it’s a commitment to untangle the menacing paradoxes that have been bestowed upon us.
*The Swiss cheese paradox, which the Swiss refuse to call the gruyere paradox since they know better than anyone else that gruyere cheese HAS NO HOLES. One of the most famous “Barbara”-type syllogisms, meaning a syllogism with two premises and a universal affirmative conclusion. It goes as follows:
Major premise: The more cheese you have, the more holes you have.
Minor premise: The more holes you have, the less cheese you have.
Conclusion (thus): The more cheese you have, the less cheese you have.
This syllogism is false because it uses a semantic shift on the term “cheese” between the major and the minor premises, considering “cheese” in the major as a volume (including the holes) and in the minor as a density of matter (excluding the holes).
**Between Zeno and the 17th century, this paradox of movement stimulated the reflections such mathematicians as Galileo, Cauchy, Cantor, Carroll and Russell, which allowed Bergson to affirm that “the philosophers have refuted it in so many vastly different manners that each refutation takes away the right from all others to think itself definitive.”
Philippe Boulanger and Alain Cohen in Le Trésor des Paradoxes (Ed. Belin, 2007).
