Global Warming, Nukes, and the Cultural Police
There are plenty of good reasons for those who believe they are shepherds of God’s creation to care about global warming; and there are plenty of good reasons for environmentalists to prefer nuclear power over fossil fuels, given the relative ecological impact. So why are prominent members of the religious right complaining about the growing environmentalism among evangelicals? And why are some environmentalists inflamed by the warming of greens to nuclear power?
One common complaint by the disgruntled is that their wayward brethren are simply mistaken about the facts. Plenty of those on the right complain that global warming hasn’t been conclusively demonstrated; or they argue that even if it is occurring, that it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And plenty of environmentalists argue that nuclear power hasn’t yet been proven safe. This kind of hyper-skepticism, though, doesn’t exactly pervade the reasoning of either group on other issues. Indeed, we are all selectively skeptical in this way about certain things. So why some things and not others?
Here, I think, the theory of cultural cognition can help.
One way to think of cultural cognition is as a set of values-based heuristics and biases – mental shortcuts that are often helpful and sometimes harmful. Consider, for example, how ordinary citizens form political attitudes. Individuals can’t pay attention to all the issues that political leaders must address, so they attend selectively to a few issues that serve as proxies for broader values. They then use these values-indicating issues as proxies for broader interests. A person might, for example, say: “If this candidate agrees with me on guns, gays, abortion, and the environment, I’ll trust that she has my interests at heart on the other (boring and complicated) stuff.” This, as the late Aaron Wildavsky pointed out, allows citizens to form highly affective perceptions of candidates and issues very quickly based surprisingly little information.
But for cultural heuristics to operate in this manner, a community needs a relatively stable set of values-related issues to use as proxies for interests. Objections to changes in attitudes on these issues may thus be a conscious form of cultural-political regulation in which a community leaders try to keep members from wandering too far off the symbolic reservation. As Tony Perkins, President of the Family Research Council put it: “We’re saying what is being done here is a concerted effort to shift the focus of evangelical Christians to these issues that draw warm and fuzzies from liberal crusaders.”
The job of the cultural police is made easier by a host of cognitive mechanisms that help individuals evaluate factual evidence quickly in much the same way they evaluate politicians and policies. It is simply easier to believe that that which is base is also dangerous; and that which is noble is benign. When confronted with evidence that doesn’t conform to this pattern – especially if it is from someone who doesn’t share our values – we are more likely to dismiss it as biased and untrustworthy. That’s why it’s actually quite hard—cognitively speaking—for many on the right to credit evidence about the dangers of global warming and for many on the left to credit evidence about the benefits of nuclear power.
All the more reason, then, for the cultural police to worry when members of their community start to talk like the cultural opposition—it heralds the potential of cultural cascade. When evangelicals translate environmental issues into the language of scripture, for example, they turn many of these cognitive heuristics around, making it far easier for members of their community to credit risks that they might otherwise reject. Moreover, because they are members of the community to which they speak, they are granted more implicit trust than are cultural outsiders. By lowering the cognitive barriers to cultural change, this kind of innovation can be particularly threatening to the stability of cultural politics in which a communities leadership is heavily invested.
So what’s my point? If cultural hard-liners in both camps have cause for concern, they may be overlooking significant unintended victories. As has been hypothesized by the folks over at the Cultural Cognition Project (Dan Kahan, John Gastil, Geoff Cohen, Paul Slovic, Doug Kysar, and others including myself), recasting nuclear power as ecologically beneficial might make some greens think twice about it, but it is also likely to make conservatives think differently about global warming. In a series of experiments now underway, project members are testing the hypothesis that conservatives who would otherwise be dismissive of information about global warming become more receptive when the solution set includes cultural congenial elements like nuclear power — and even more convinced when it comes from someone who shares their values. If this turns out to be true, then one way environmentalists can convince conservatives that global warming really is a serious problem is to tell them that nuclear power is, at least potentially, part of the solution.
In a similar vein, I wouldn’t be surprised if progressives start to warm to Christianity in a similar fashion. So while watching the documentary Mountain Mourning might change some evangelists’ ideas about environmental issues, it can also effect attitudes of non-evangelical environmentalists toward evangelicals and faith. I can only give anecdotal evidence here, but some of my died-in-the-wool green friends are starting to think about the evangelical community in a different light.
What’s the moral of the story? It’s not that we should give up cultural politics — we can’t. It’s too deeply woven into our social and cognitive lives to be overcome. But cultural politics can be more interesting and innovative than many assume. The cultural police don’t have a monopoly on what is said, and the level of cultural-cognitive innovation seems, at least on some fronts, to be heating up. Should make for some interesting times!