Climate and theodicy
June 17th, 2008 | Tags: climate, npr, theodicy | Leave a comment
Yesterday, All Things Considered chose to broadcast one of the most absurd comments I’ve ever heard. NPR listener Brynn Matthew of Los Angeles wrote in response to a story about flooding in Iowa and its impact on agriculture; here’s how Robert Siegel read Matthew’s comment:
“Another story about floods or drought has come and gone without a single mention as to why we’re having this extreme weather,” he writes, suggesting that climate change is to blame. “It’s a missed opportunity to ask Americans to come to terms with their choices. The next time you interview a farmer who’s suffering because of flood or drought, I’d like to know whom he voted for, what kind of car he drives, and how big his house is. Don’t like the weather? Well, you reap what you sow.”
(I have excerpted the broadcast here.)
Matthew’s comment is notable for deftly compressing a staggering number of fallacies and faulty inferences into such a small number of words — consider his apparent confusion of “climate” and “weather” and his risible implication, which neatly ties up a number of nontrivial assumptions, that individual votes constitute acts with measurable environmental impact.
I won’t address the propositional content of Matthew’s claim — nor will I consider how many Priuses are currently underwater in Johnson County, IA — since the comment is transparently ridiculous along so many dimensions. Rather, I’m interested in the form of his letter, which transcends standard self-righteous letter-to-the-editor puffery in order to inhabit the most callous neighborhoods of careless speculative theodicy.
This sort of rhetoric is awfully risky. Even if you agree with all of the speaker’s presuppositions about causality, justice, and agency, you might not agree with the particular application of these to single out actual humans for retribution. Just as with all attempts to explain complex events by ascribing them to deliberate acts of powerful agents — powerful agents whose intent happens to coincide with one’s particular biases, values, and morals — blaming disasters on a wrathful Gaia provides little actual explanation for anything; it merely provides evidence of Mr. Matthew’s prejudices and lack of tact, logical rigor, and basic human compassion.
Theodicy-based explanations of disasters (for example, Jerry Falwell on 9/11 or Sharon Stone on recent earthquakes in China) suffer because they often imply absurdities: how is it possible that the speaker is able to discern the precise will of God (or of “karma”), down to the level of finding specific acts that demanded some act of retribution, but only in this case — and can we then ascribe other, similar problems to God’s will (or to karma, or to a wrathful Gaia, or whatever) in a consistent manner? Returning to Matthew’s claim, might we imagine a young girl in Los Angeles who has asthma in part because she has admired the private jets of celebrities? Or could we blame one’s sunburn on consuming agricultural products — even at some point in the distant past? Finally, what of those in the developing world — who, with mosquito-borne disease and no indoor plumbing or air conditioning are disproportionately affected by climate change — what, beyond faint aspirations at the quality of life enjoyed in industrialized society, have they “sown?”
I’m not particularly insulted by Matthew’s opinions, since it is obvious that they were arrived at without much effort or reflection. (Indeed, the repeated presence of “drought or flood” in the letter seems to imply that this missive was not penned as a reaction to this particular flood but instead had been filed away for quick response to nearly any natural disaster affecting agriculture in the flyover states.) However, I am a little baffled at NPR’s decision to give airtime to such a screed.