Pole Dancing

[ABC News/Getty Images]

At a recent job site, a pipeline worker began explaining to me how global warming isn’t real. “That’s a bunch of BULLshit, raaht thar”, he said in a deep Texas drawl. “The Earth works in cycles, ya see. Seven, ten years at a time. It’s actually tilting closer to the sun. Naw, naw. It says in Revelations man does not have the power to disrupt what had God created. He wouldn’t let that happ’n.”

He paused, leaning over to spit chewing tobacco on the ground. “Like the flood. You know why that happ’ned, right? Sin. The golden calf and all 'at. I am a jealous God, have no other gods beside me.” He continued, making it known what he thought of those who betray the trust of God by, for example, visiting strip clubs or viewing pornography—a deserved eternity in hell.

I could feel my blood pressure rising, because we had been here several times already in previous days. All those other comments unresponded to, the exaggerations, confusions, the outright lies. But I held my tongue. There was no convincing him of the validity, much less superiority, of the methods of science to observe the world and learn things from deep probing. It was simply his “belief” against mine.

He was right about one thing, though—the Earth is wobbling. In its revolution around the sun, the Earth is tilted on its axis at about 23.4 degrees, but the axis of rotation is itself gyrating circularly (termed precession), like a top whose momentum is about to expire. The angle of tilt has ranged from 22.1 to 24.5 degrees over a time cycle of about 41,000 years, influenced by isostatic rebound from the melting of Pleistocene glaciers which is slowly shifting the planet’s distribution of mass.

But wobbling has nothing to do with warming. Ninety seven percent of climate scientists agree that the increase in global temperatures measured since the Industrial Revolution is the result of the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from human activity, chiefly the burning of fossil fuels. Bubbles of air trapped in ancient ice cores show that CO2 levels are at the highest point in millennia, and current projections place the peak higher than anytime in Earth’s history. We’ve already begun to see some the effects predicted by models that rely on carbon concentration as the driving factor: droughts, floods, sea level rise, and the increased strength of hurricanes and wildfires.

To the contrary, it is climate change that has been responsible for some additional wobbling. Since 2000, the Earth’s axis of rotation, which had been migrating steadily south toward Hudson Bay, has taken an abrupt eastward turn at a rate of about 17 centimeters per year. The reason is attributed to recent redistributions of mass on Earth’s surface, including the drying of the Caspian Sea and loss of ice in Greenland, both direct results of Anthropocene warming and droughts.

Recently, though, it’s felt like the wobbling of the Earth on its axis is also a portent of our societal instability, the deep asynchrony causing a kind of motion sickness, or nausea. We don’t recognize each other anymore. We don’t see the other as essential to the whole. Yin and yang to be tacky. We’ve forgotten the forest for the trees, each of which looks more tempting to chop down with ever-sharper tools.

In his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt discusses the foundations of morality, delving into how we have become screwed up enough to hate one another. He describes his research on six universal principles from which cultures and people develop their thinking and norms around right and wrong. At their base, he says, the moral intuitions of liberals and conservatives are fundamentally different. Liberals tend to draw their conclusions primarily from one moral principle, which Haidt calls care/harm. That is, they tend to see the world as a struggle of oppressor vs. oppressed, prioritizing care for marginalized populations over the rights of powerful corporations, institutions, or individuals often at the other end. Conservatives, on the other hand, draw from a much broader moral matrix. They understand the care/harm principle, but also weight as equally important the other five principles that Haidt identifies, the ones that liberals tend to discount: liberty/oppression, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. They can see that quickly moving social change or a loss respect for authority (police, say) can lead to moral ambiguity and a breakdown of social order, and they resent blatant denials or disavowals of God. That moral foundation is all but unrecognizable to liberals, who have a blindspot when it comes to moral capital, “the set of shared habits norms, institutions, and values that make common life possible”. They do not grant legitimacy to moral arguments based in the other principles, instead attributing any pushback to bigotry, cultural backwardness, or a lack of education.

As David Brooks wrote in a recent column, the problem seems to be a breakdown of the “social body”, of trust:

“That basic sense of peoplehood, of belonging to a common enterprise with a shared destiny, is exactly what’s lacking today. Researchers and reporters who talk to the vaccine-hesitant find that the levels of distrust, suspicion and alienation that have marred politics are now thwarting the vaccination process. They find people who doubt the competence of the medical establishment or any establishment, who assume as a matter of course that their fellow countrymen are out to con, deceive, and harm them.”

This mindset, Brooks says, makes people conceive of themselves first as individuals, not as citizens. There is no shared project, no shared sacrifice, no shared responsibility. The other side starts to feel less like a debate partner and more like an existential threat.

Two poles, pointing opposite ways. The ground just as solid for both. Like two banks of a river that seem to be growing further apart, unbridgeable. Or two corners of a boxing ring, geometrically opposed. We’ve become adept at dipping and dodging, keeping our hands up, and never giving an inch. Strike first so as not to be struck and rationalize your failures and any emotions that lead you to incompatible conclusions. Perform for the jeering digital crowd.

Our current discourse is all show, no substance. I tend to think, though, that instead of distraction and sultry reassurances of our own righteousness whispered in our ear, we need to relearn how to participate. For our differences of opinion are not fault lines but complementary roles—lead and follow, turn and step, lift and dip. Like a figure skater pulling in her arms and legs to spin quicker, more precisely, closeness will ultimately mean stability.

I’m not sure where I fall in along the sinner/saint dichotomy. I’ve done plenty of both. But, if the needle on the great scale starts to drift to one side, is that the final answer? The court’s final ruling? If the top finally topples, whose fault will it be?

I don’t want to fight on ground I know I won’t be proud to win. It is not noble to rub someone’s nose in their own ignorance or provoke conflict where none is necessary. It is the hallmark of a renunciant to forego such encounters, to leave things better than when he found it, and to always provide a home in oneself for the hearts of others. And strip clubs? No interest.