quants and poets

7/27/2019 Quants and Poets

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Paul Kingsnorth

The Quants and the PoetsIf, a century ago, the keenest talking heads of the age (who would that

have been, I wonder: Chesterton, Shaw, Belloc, Jo Chamberlain?) had

battled it out amongst themselves about the future of infrastructure and

energy, what would that debate have looked like?

If, say, they had all agreed on the importance of rolling out a massive, global plan stretching

decades into the future, based on endlessly argued-over scientific facts which themselvesdisguised a lot of underlying political, cultural and social assumptions about the way the world is

what would they have been arguing over? Precisely how many ostlers would be needed by1950? The importance of a large-scale dung clean-up operation on the streets of major cities? Aresearch and development programme to investigate the plausibility of time machines? Sourcing

the funding for an urgent nationwide rollout of dirigible charging stations?

Thoughts like these have been drifting into my head, then drifting out again, for a few weeks

now, as I have observed the predictably bitter squabble going on in the green communityand,

inevitably therefore, in the mediaabout Fukushima and the future of nuclear power. I am, it issafe to say, no scientist (something I have in common with most of those who hold strong

opinions on nuclear power, by the looks of it) and I have no real idea what is currently going on

in those Japanese reactors (ditto) I dont know, either, whetherthe worst nuclear accident since

Chernobyl will turn out to be the high-water mark of the global nuclear industry somethingwhich would apparently be a triumph or a catastrophe depending on which pundit youre

listening to.

But I do wonder whether it is a high water mark for the greens. For a long time now, the green

movement has been in retreat, and that retreat now seems in danger of turning into a rout. From a

standing start four decades ago, the greens have seen some of their ideas (mainly the ones aboutusing our resources sustainably) spread widely and sometimes deeply into popular and

political culture. They have also, inevitably, seen those ideas watered down. I have covered this

subject before and dont intend to do so again here in any detail, but it might be worth reflecting

a little bit on the bind the greens are now in.

We all know by now how big, and unstoppable, the global industrial machine is. We know thatthe global economy relies on resource consumption like a fish relies on gills, and we know that

when this imperative is combined with accelerating technological change, a rising human

population, the virus-like spread of consumer values, a mass extinction event, a changing climate

and resource scarcity in a number of (admittedly contested) areas, the results do not look pretty.When we add all this up we also know, if we are being honest with ourselves, that we are not
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going to be able to prevent the crash into the bufferswhich has already begunfrom getting

very messy indeed.

At this point, things get complicated. If we are highly politicised people, whose values and self-

image are predicated on being activists in the cause of preventing such terrible things, we may

simply not allow ourselves to be honest about this. This is understandable and I know what itfeels like, having been there myself for quite a long time. At this point, we have to lie to

ourselvesto go into denial for the sake of our psychological health. So we might pretend to

ourselves that one more push (ie, doing the same thing yet again) may do the trick. We mighttell ourselves that The People are ignorant of The Facts and that if we enlighten them they will

Act. We might believe that the right treaty has yet to be signed, or the right technology yet to be

found, or that the problem is not too much growth and science and progress but too little of it. Or

we might choose to believe that a Movement is needed to expose the lies being told to ThePeople by the Bad Men In Power who are preventing The People from doing the rising up they

will all want to do when they learn The Truth.

Whatever the story, it will be a story based on the need for an external event or events, which canonly be brought into being by way of more action. This way, we can tell ourselves that the only

thing to do is to keep on keeping on. After all, the alternative must be giving up and watchingthe world burn.

This is where the greens are today. It is a hard place to be, and it is a place made even morefearsome by the single-minded obsession with climate change that has gripped environmentalism

over the last decade. The fear of carbon has trumped all other issuesso much so that is now

common in popular culture to see green ideas represented simply as arguments about carbon

emissions. Everything else has been stripped away. All that matters now is cutting carbon.

It is in this context that the nuclear rumpus has occurred. The Japanese earthquake and tsunamiripped apart a nuclear power plant, and with barely a days grace the pundits were swooping onthe place. Most of them seemed to see this tragedy simply as an opportunity to forcefully restate

their existing positions on nuclear powerIt will kill us! It will save us!even as the fuel rods

were still melting. Some people used Fukushima not to restate their case but to change theirmind. But whatever the argument, the growingand understandablesense of desperation was

the same.

The greens are in a corner. If you believe that climate change will wreck the Earth and that the

only way to prevent that from happening is to reduce emissions in a fantastically short time

period, then you are in a very perilous place. Its not that this argument is necessarily wrong itprobably isnt, though the lack of certainty is always worth highlighting. But it is so obviously

impossible to do what it is claimed Must Be Done to stop it that futility or despair can end up

being the only places to turn.

My feeling is that the green movement has torpedoed itself with numbers. Its single-minded

obsession with climate change, and its insistence on seeing this as an engineering challengewhich must be overcome with technological solutions guided by the neutral gaze of Science, has

forced it into a ghetto from which it may never escape. Most greens in the mainstream now


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spend their time arguing about whether they prefer windfarms to wave machines or nuclear

power to carbon sequestration. They offer up remarkably confident predictions of what will

happen if we do or dont do this or that, all based on mind-numbing numbers cherry-picked fromthis or that study as if the world were a giant spreadsheet which only needs to be balanced

correctly.

In this, the mainstream green movement is only reflecting and feeding upon wider societal

trends. We live in a remarkably literal-minded and reductionistic culture. Im struck listening to

or reading the news, for example, by how nothing is seen to be real unless it is sanctioned bythe priesthoods of either Science or Business, and preferably both. A culture in which Richard

Dawkins and Ian McEwan are seen as intellectual guiding lights is the kind of culture which

produces an environmental movement made up of frustrated, passionate people who feel obliged

to act like speak-your-weight machines just to be heard.

If we want to move beyond the futility and despair imposed by the cold narrowness of this

worldview, where do we look? What is missing here is stories, and an understanding of the

importance of stories in getting to the bottom of what is really going on. Because at root, thiswhole squabble between worldviews is not about numbers at all it is about narratives.

The fight between the pro-nukers and the anti-nukers, for example, is actually quite archetypal.

Though both sides pretend to be informed by science and facts both are actually informed

primarily by prejudice. Whether you like nuclear power or not is a reflection of the kind ofworldview you have: whether you are a confident embracer of the Western model of progress or

whether it frightens or concerns you; whether you trust science or tend not to; whether you are

cautious or reckless; whether you are progressive or conservative. On issues ranging from

GM crops to capitalism, these are the underlying stories that actually inform the green debate.That they are then supported by a clutch of cherry-picked facts easy to come by, after all, in the

age of Wikipedia is a footnote to whats really going on.

The mess that the greens have got themselves into is at least partly due to them paying more

attention to numbers than narratives. Green political thought, in its early incarnations, was

radical and challenging. It was about the stories we tell ourselves about the world: stories aboutprogress, industry, the conquest of nature and many of the other narratives that the Dark

Mountain Project exists to highlight. The early greens challenged these stories with others,

drawn in some cases from ecotopian imaginings about better future but in many more cases fromthe stories of existing non-industrial societies: the Kalahari Bushmen, for example, who lived for

35,000 years in a culture which managed to survive in remarkable harmony with non-human

nature even with lions prowling outside the huts of its people (a story touched on in Dark

Mountain book two). You want sustainability? The Bushmen were the longest-recorded humanculture. They were genuinely sustainable for longer than we can imagine. Industrial society got

them in the end, like it gets everything, but the example remains.

This kind of thing, of course, was what made it so easy to attack the greens as Romantics and

primitivists (which some of them were and still are.) In response, environmentalists decided to

get serious, so as to be listened to in the corridors of power. They started wearing suits and


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pretending to be economists and speaking the language of business and science. It was a

perfectly sensible approach in many ways, and it yielded many clear dividends.

But it may also have doomed the greens in the longer term, for now they find themselves caught

in a narrative of other peoples making. Almost by accident, mainstream green politics and

argument threw out most of the alternative stories it grew up with, like a child throws out his oldteddy bears: that was then, but this is now, and now we are Grown Ups. This approach has left

environmentalism in a position where its advocates now find themselves unable to do anything

but argue about which machines they would prefer to use to power an ever-growing industrialeconomy. Any sally outside this tightly-controlled ghetto sees them rained with bullets from all

sides: accused of wishful thinking if they talk about zero-growth economies; called snobs and

hypocrites if they criticise consumerism; attacked as terrorists if they engage in direct action to

protect wild nature; called naive idealists if they ask whether planning for a future much like thepresent is really such a good idea.

This has always been the case, of course, but now the greens are being heard in the corridors of

power the stakes are much higher. A global anti-green movement now exists and is growing inpower and influence. Meanwhile, the greens have been taken over from within by smooth-

tongued purveyors of business-as-usual without the carbon. The message is clear: stick toarguing about the machines, and youre welcome to play with the big boys. But drop all the other

nonsense, alright? This, demonstrably, is how radical movements die.

Im currently trying to get my head around exactly how the current economic crisis has

happened, and in the cause of doing so I am reading John Lanchesters bookWhoops! which

explains it in terms that even people like me can grasp. This evening I was reading Lanchesters

description of how banks have changed in the last few decades. When his father worked inbanking it was a staid business populated mostly by non-graduates. Today, if you dont have a

first-class maths degree from Oxbridge youll find it hard making it in the industry. This,Lanchester suggests, is part of the problem: banking has become so specialist, so complex, thatmost peopleincluding many bankerssimply dont understand how it works.

The maths geeks who now run the futures and options operations in banking are known asquants. One MBA student quoted in the book reported that on his course the students were

required to identify themselves as either quants or poets. That is: did they do numbers, or did

they do words?

These days, the green movement is being taken over by quants. Its easy to see why. Quants

present easy, numbered, labelled arguments which may sometimes require a maths degree butdont require a rewiring of your worldview or an examination of your narrative. A green quant

might be telling you to change your lightbulbs or come out on the streets in favour of a nuclear

power plant or a windfarm, but hes not asking you to examine your values or your societys

underlying mythology. And if you talk to him about this, it is very easy indeed for him to laughand tell you loftily that this is all very nice but is hardly comparable to the serious business of

saving the world one emission at a time.


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This is the context in which the nuclear squabble is being played out.Here, for example, is an

article which claims that renewable energy cant meet our energy needs? But our needs for

what? Coffee machines and fast broadband, or clean drinking water and living ecosystems?Middle class life in a consumer democracy or a liveable human existence? Or do we now think

these are the same thing? If you really want to see where a green quant is coming from, simply

catch him in the middle of one of these arguments and ask him (and it usually is a him) to defineneed. Then watch the narrative spooling out like film from a broken cannister.

As a poet, of course, I have a vested interest in objecting to this, and I often do, but I dont do itwithout empathy or without some doubt. I know why it has happened. This, after all, is an

approach designed to produce clear and concrete resultssomething which is undeniably useful

in an age of ecocide. But what narrative framework are the results being produced in? Because

its that framework, in the end which will determine where those results take us.

Too many green quants, then, and not enough green poets? I think so. Or rather, I think that the

poets have been cowed into silence by the dominance and urgency of the quants narrative. How

to reassert the importance of stories, then, is perhaps a key question now. Green poets mightperhaps start by observing that worlds are not saved by the same stories that are killing them.

They might want to observe that saving worlds is an impossible business in the first place, andthat attempting to do so is likely to lead to some very dark places. Or they might try and explore

what it is about how we see ourselves which reduces us to this, time and time again arguing

about machines rather than wondering what those machines give us and what they take away.

The friction between the quant and the poet could be represented by focusing on a few bickering

individuals, or by trying to divide the greens up into Two Cultures. But it could also, perhaps

more honestly and productively, be represented as a tension that is present within all. None of usis wholly, or even primarily, rational and analytical, and none of us is quite devoid of poetry

either, though it is sometimes hard to find it. These divisions are themselves stories that we, inthis particular culture, tell ourselves about how humans work. The quants and the poets are bothneeded, but I would argue that, right now, the poets ought to take the leadif indeed that is ever

something that poets are capable of. We have no shortage of arguments about numbers and

machines, but we do have a great shortage of workable stories. That is to say: stories that dontjust have happy endings, but have convincing plots as well.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028063.300-wind-and-wave-energies-are-not-renewable-after-all.htmlhttp://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028063.300-wind-and-wave-energies-are-not-renewable-after-all.htmlhttp://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028063.300-wind-and-wave-energies-are-not-renewable-after-all.htmlhttp://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028063.300-wind-and-wave-energies-are-not-renewable-after-all.html

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