Service, Not Sacrifice
Do Nothing for the Planet: Part Two
Last time I argued that our climate crisis is really a crisis of consciousness, and that almost every solution we’re offered arrives disguised as a sacrifice. So here’s the follow-up question: if we’re not going to guilt or shame ourselves into saving the planet, what actually works?
I think the answer has far more to do with our identification than with our capacity for selfless action.
By identification I mean that sense of commonality, unity and identity that quietly shapes every aspect of our lives. It runs deeper than sexuality, race, age or interests: it’s the system that either creates congruency between our inner and outer worlds, or doesn’t. For a lot of us, honestly, how we identify feels less like belonging and more like a careful negotiation: a bit of frustration, a bit of repression, a lot of curation.
Generally speaking, we identify with things in the outer world that reflect some aspect of ourselves back at us, real or imagined. It shapes what we buy, who we befriend, the career we chase, the partner we choose. Kenneth Burke, in his 1969 Rhetoric of Motives, argued that identifying with others is fundamental to being human: it arises from our sense of division, our biological separateness, which breeds a kind of guilt about our differences and fuels the need for connection. We build symbolic structures and stylistic ideals, then operate inside them like actors, all hoping to be accepted. Which, incidentally, agrees rather neatly with the evolutionary psychologists who decided we like other people because there’s safety in numbers.
Robin Vallacher and Daniel Wegner put it another way: identification is a function and expression of thought, and, crucially, it can be influenced by our actions. Or, as Aristotle got there a couple of thousand years earlier, “we are what we repeatedly do.”
Now watch what happens to all of this from the standpoint of an expanded consciousness. Our self-concept becomes something different, more intangible; it shifts from a place of separation toward a place of love. And identification from that place produces genuinely intense empathy for all living things, because we start to see ourselves in other things. (I’m not talking about that slightly condescending line we’ve all received from a well-meaning relative at some low point. This is different.)
Here’s the part people resist. There has to be an element of identification, of solidarity, for us to feel empathy and compassion at all. Erich Fromm noticed that loving yourself is treated in mainstream culture as selfish, or, as Freud would have it, narcissistic. Freud’s theory of primary narcissism holds that the more love you turn toward the outside world, the less you have left for yourself. Spot the cynic. But love for others isn’t in competition with love for oneself. Love for oneself increases your capacity to love another. Because I said so.
There’s even some strange evidence for the blurring. Research at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies lab on “overcoming separateness” suggested that emotionally bonded couples could share information even when separated by great distances.¹ (Anyone who has ever accused their partner of cheating with no evidence is having a small Aha moment right now.) The dean of engineering, Robert Jahn, described how in such couples the individual identities “blur,” and called it “the recipe for any form of love: the surrender of self-centred interests of the partners in favour of the pair.” Puke. But also, love transcends individuality.
And this is exactly why sacrifice is the wrong frame. Kant pointed out that we perform moral acts under two very different headings. We can act out of duty, because we feel obliged, and derive no real pleasure from it. Or we can act because we’re positively inclined to, in which case we actually appreciate what we’ve done. Guess which one lasts.
Climate action could benefit enormously from cultivating identification with the planet itself, because it quietly bypasses the ego: it matches our own self-interest with the interests of the Earth. Harry Frankfurt argued that the essential difference between persons and other creatures lies in the structure of a person’s will: that a human can hold wants that sit above their primary wants, a want to be different that arises from self-reflection. Which points to something important: our identity doesn’t only live in our relationships or our actions. It lives in our values, our motives and our desires.
So if identification is the lever, and our values are where identity really lives, the obvious next question is the uncomfortable one: why, knowing all this, do we still fail to act?
That’s where we’re going next: to a burning house, and a frog who really should have jumped.
Notes
PEAR, again. This is the same Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research lab I flagged in Part One: the “bonded couples sharing information at a distance” studies come from the same programme. It ran for nearly three decades and produced tantalising results, but they were never robustly replicated by independent labs, and the lab closed in 2007. I find the idea beautiful and I’m not willing to pretend it’s proven. Treat it as poetry with a lab coat on, and hold it loosely.