I’ve been Gored: Al Gore, global warming, and the vital rise of geek philosophy

You can read some compelling accounts of the Town Hall event at Cinematical and Rude Pundit (and I urge you to read both is you’re in the least interested in the imperative issue of global climate change and how we might fix it), but I’ll tell you what I took from it: What Gore is proposing is the essence of geek philosophy, and watching him and the reaction to him is to see generational politics in action.

See, Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine (who may just be young enough to be an Xer; I can’t find his date of birth or age anywhere), hosted the Town Hall event, and he came out first and talked a bit about, as Cinematical described it:

a celebration of "a new kind of environmentalist" he called the Neo-Green, a gadget-savvy do-over of the spacey hippie drip of olde, one "that realizes that technology doesn't only create problems - it solves them."

Which is exactly the way anyone is going to inspire and motivate Xers, and probably the generations younger than us, by talking about all the cool things technology can do for us, that we can do with technology. Focusing on moving back to a time when the height of human achievement was the horse-drawn plough isn’t going to work. The future isn’t going to look like a hippie commune -- not that there’s anything wrong with hippie communes, but that kind of life is never going to appeal to most people. The future is going to look like San Francisco in the 24th century, like Starfleet headquarters. The May issue of Wired -- the magazine sponsored the Town Hall event and dedicated much of its May issue to Gore and global warming -- nails it:

Green-minded activists failed to move the broader public not because they were wrong about the problems, but because the solutions they offered were unappealing to most people. They called for tightening belts and curbing appetites, turning down the thermostat and living lower on the food chain. They rejected technology, business, and prosperity in favor of returning to a simpler way of life....

You don't change the world by hiding in the woods, wearing a hair shirt, or buying indulgences in the form of save the earth bumper stickers. You do it by articulating a vision for the future and pursuing it with all the ingenuity humanity can muster. Indeed, being green at the start of the 21st century requires a wholehearted commitment to upgrading civilization....

Cities beat suburbs. Manhattanites use less energy than most people in North America. Sprawl eats land and snarls traffic. Building homes close together is a more efficient use of space and infrastructure. It also encourages walking, promotes public transit, and fosters community.

Quality is wealth. More is not better. Better is better. You don't need a bigger house; you need a different floor plan. You don't need more stuff; you need stuff you'll actually use. Ecofriendly designs and nontoxic materials already exist, and there's plenty of room for innovation. You may pay more for things like long-lasting, energy-efficient LED lightbulbs, but they'll save real money over the long term.

And Gore, too, recognizes this, sees that the path to a green future -- the inevitable path; continuing on the road we’re on now is a recipe for disaster -- is one that offers potential opportunity amongst the danger. At the Town Hall event as well as on his appearance, last Sunday morning, on ABC News, Gore discusses the fact that the Chinese pictogram for “crisis” combines the two for “danger” and “opportunity.” Again from the May Wired:

Gore has become a neo-green entrepreneur, taking his messianic faith in the power of technology to stop global warming and applying it to an ecofriendly investment firm. The company, Generation Investment Management, which he cofounded nearly two years ago, puts money into businesses that are positioned to capitalize on the carbon-constrained economy Gore and his partners see coming in the near future.

If global warming is an invention of crazy liberals, or if it’s true but society fails to take notice, Gore loses in this venture (of course, we all lose if global warming is real and we do nothing). But if it’s real -- and there is no doubt that it is real -- then this gives lie to the typical right-wing argument against confronting global climate change: that it’d be too expensive, that it’d crash our economy. The truth is that global climate change will crash our economy if we don’t start doing something about it now. We can’t afford not to deal with the issue, but if technology is to solve the problem -- and it will -- then not to be on the forefront of that is economic foolishness of the highest order.

Those crazy liberals: just out to make a buck.

Words like “messianic” come up frequently in talk about Gore and this mission he’s given himself -- his campaign against global warming has been called a “ministry” -- and there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s how people are motivated, by being prompted to feel strongly about something. It was certainly in the air at Town Hall. I was waiting on line on the sidewalk outside to get into Town Hall that night when Gore and his wife pulled up -- in a single Town Car, with no entourage and no Secret Service detail -- and you could feel the ripple of excitement that ran through the crowd on line as we all watched him get out of the car and hurry into the theater. People applauded, just out of sheer joy at seeing him. And he grinned and waved. He was enjoying it. And we were enjoying his enjoying it. The issue is deadly serious, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get satisfaction out of working to fix it. In fact, this whole thing probably won’t work if there isn’t satisfaction to be had in it, whether from nursing the planet back to health or knowing our great-grandchildren won’t curse us or just making a buck.

And yet this is emphatically not a matter that is all about faith, no matter how “religious” is may be. It’s about facts, and science, and reality. It’s about a rage against scientific illiteracy and ignorance. If you look at what the detractors are saying -- the oil-company-funded “Competitive Enterprise Institutes” and its moronic “global warming is good for us” propaganda: “They call it pollution; we call it life” -- and at the mental contortions people will go through to maintain their ignorance about the issue, you see how the detractors actually count on apathy and scientific illiteracy as the only way to maintain what shreds of “legitimacy” they cling to. If you check the very citations the detractors use to “prove” their own claims, you can see that the detractors are twisting facts to fit their conclusions... but they’re counting on people not checking those citations. They’re counting on people being totally trusting. They rely on the audience being sheep.

And if we choose as a culture to be satisfied with that, with being sheep, then we’ll deserve what we get as a result. But I don’t think that’s gonna happen. As Gore said on the ABC News program -- watch the whole thing and see how suddenly charismatic he is -- “reality has a way of intruding on illusion,” and everywhere, he’s talking about dealing with global climate change as a “moral imperative.” And it’s starting to feel that way. At Town Hall, Gore likened the crisis we’re facing to the Civil War and the Depression and World War II. Maybe he’s familiar with Strauss and Howe’s theory of generational cycles of history and that they predicted more than a decade ago that just about now we’d be entering a period of social upheaval and crisis on a par with those very past crises. But invoking the Civil War and the Great Depression won’t be effective if the people Gore is speaking to don’t genuinely sense that we’re at another similar crossroads of history, at which we will be challenged in a way that threatens our very civilization.

Guess who else is sensing the same thing? The snarky voice of Generation X. In a 2004 commencement address to William & Mary grads (linked recently at Daily Kos), Jon Stewart, an alum, said:

Lets talk about the real world for a moment. We had been discussing it earlier, and I…I wanted to bring this up to you earlier about the real world, and this is I guess as good a time as any. I don’t really know to put this, so I’ll be blunt. We broke it.

Please don’t be mad. I know we were supposed to bequeath to the next generation a world better than the one we were handed. So, sorry.

I don’t know if you’ve been following the news lately, but it just kinda got away from us. Somewhere between the gold rush of easy internet profits and an arrogant sense of endless empire, we heard kind of a pinging noise, and uh, then the damn thing just died on us. So I apologize.

But here’s the good news. You fix this thing, you’re the next greatest generation, people. You do this—and I believe you can—you win this war on terror, and Tom Brokaw’s kissing your ass from here to Tikrit, let me tell ya. And even if you don’t, you’re not gonna have much trouble surpassing my generation. If you end up getting your picture taken next to a naked guy pile of enemy prisoners and don’t give the thumbs up you’ve outdid us.

Maybe the thing to be fixed will be the “war on terror,” or maybe it’ll be global warming, or maybe it’ll be something else entirely that we can’t predict right now but that will be on our asses before we know what hit us (mutated-ebola pandemic? alien invasion?). Whatever it is, it’s our next juniors down from Gen X who’ll be the foot soldiers -- as Stewart recognizes, even if only because it just feels right and not because he’s read Strauss and Howe too -- who will, for instance, be building the seawalls around Manhattan and London and rescuing penguins off ice floes in the south Atlantic and shepherding refugees out of Shanghai and Amsterdam. And Xers will be the colonels and the generals strategizing and planning, using all the entrepreneurial, get-it-done-now skills we learned as latchkey kids and children of divorce and settlers of the Internet frontier. And inspiring us all will be the gray champion, the Abraham Lincoln or the F.D.R., the Boomer who frames our grand challenge in moral terms and fires up our passion and enthusiasm.

Now, things could go scary-wrong and, if the mood of the nation shifted enough, that gray champion could be someone terrifying like Mary Worthington or Tom Coburn rallying the Millennial troops to organize community bonfires of condoms and Blowfish catalogues and copies of The Joy of Sex. But if things go right, Al Gore could be that gray champion. And if you watch that ABC News video or see An Inconvenient Truth and listen to the things he’s insisting we can do right now... it’s all about geek philosophy, about using technology in all sorts of neat-o ways to fix our mistakes. Me, I’d be calling for a ten-year, ten-trillion-dollar Manhattan Project to develop clean fusion power, and maybe we will see something like that before the global-warming crisis is over. But Gore is gung-ho on all sorts of stuff we can do now, and he’s passionate and determined and goddamn inspiring. It’s about being a proud geek and promoting geek aesthetics -- and forgetting all about the bullshit juvenile geek stuff that we’re gonna have to leave behind, the stereotypes about living in your mother’s basement and diddling with your PlayStation all day. It’s about how being a cool, smart, sophisticated geek is gonna save the planet.

SF writer Bruce Sterling hits on it with his Viridian Design movement:

Mao suits for the masses are not on the Viridian agenda. Couture is on the agenda. We need a form of Green high fashion so appallingly seductive and glamorous that it can literally save people's lives. We have to gratify people's desires much better than the current system does. We have to reveal to people the many desires they have that the current system is not fulfilling. Rather than marshalling themselves for inhuman effort and grim sacrifice, people have to sink into our twenty-first century with a sigh of profound relief.

If people are sheep -- and I hate to think that but I’m afraid it may be true -- if people need to be led to even their own salvation, then that’s gonna happen more easily of their own salvation is sexy. And it’s beginning to happen, as Wired noted in its May piece about what it called the Neo-Green movement, which is:

a new approach to commerce, one that refuses to sacrifice style for sustainability. Call it the green aesthetic. Tearing a page from the playbook of centrist politicians like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, the green aesthetes are charting a third way, triangulating between the hippies and the hip....

[R]egardless of age or income, consumers buy cars with gas-electric engines primarily because of what the vehicles say about them - to themselves and to everyone else. That's what Ken Kurani and his colleagues at UC Davis learned when they studied Prius, Civic, and Insight drivers in 2004 and 2005. "We had a hard time explaining why people bought hybrids," Kurani says. If consumers calculated the cost of the car and how much gas money a newfangled engine would save, the numbers wouldn't add up. But few actually did the math - and those who did didn't care. "We have yet to find anyone for whom saving money was the most important factor."...

For most buyers, the goal wasn't fuel economy. It was to produce fewer emissions, to minimize external harm - and to let everyone else know that they've made a deliberate choice to do so.

People are buying hybrids mostly because they’re cool, not so much because they’re better for the environment than pure gas-powered cars except that that’s what makes them cool. (If we could somehow make it cool to drive cars with polka-dot wheels, if wouldn’t mean people were really into polka dots except that polka dots are cool.) Sure, maybe a cloud of “smug” descended over the little mountain town of South Park when everyone there started driving “Pious”es and “Hindsight”s. But fine. We can deal with a little “smug” for a while, until everyone’s onboard and keeping the Earth habitable by homo sapiens is as classically stylish as a pair of blue jeans.

And it all starts coming together, signs of some kind of exit, an out, how we can get off the hamster wheel of mindless consumerism and soulless Toll Brothers suburban McMansion developments and 60-hour workweeks with only two weeks of annual vacation you can’t take anyway because you’re afraid it’ll make you look like a slacker and not like a team player. It’s a major challenge -- how do we redefine what is cool? -- but it can be done. In only, what?, ten years we’ve made cigarette smoking uncool. Whether you agree with the disdain now heaped upon smokers or not, the point is this: It’s theoretically possible to program a majority of people to feel a surge of disgust when they see some idiot tooling around town in a Hummer. We could enjoy that feeling of profound relief Sterling talks about if we can tie up the insanities of the typical American lifestyle with the devastation we’re wreaking on the planet and get rid of them in favor of something more sane, more livable, more gentle on the planet.

What those things are, and how we denote them as cool, I don’t know. But I’m finding it exciting to thing about what might be done. It’s about shaping a vision of the future that is optimistic and sexy and, yes, cool. It doesn’t mean it’ll be easy, but it does mean, hopefully, that at the end of the struggle, life will be better than it is today, more fun and more enjoyable and more satisfying.

I don’t know where we’re going, but it’s nice to feel like the journey there might actually be worth it.

(Technorati tags: An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore, global warming, climate crisis, Generation X, geek philosophy, gray champion, neo-green, Viridian Design, Bruce Sterling, Strauss and Howe)