A hopeful pessimist takes on the climate crisis, an interview with Professor Byron Williston

Oct. 9, 2024

How does a historian of seventeenth century philosophy become a climate ethicist? An interview with Professor Byron Williston (Department of Philosophy). Interview by Eric Story, PhD (Laurier Centre for the Study of Canada).

Eric Story (ES): Why do you think philosophy is important to understanding climate change? What does it provide that other areas of study—science, arts and otherwise—can’t?

Byron Williston (BW): Depending on what philosopher you ask, you’ll get a very different answer. But I think the majority will say it has an important role to play in clarifying our concepts. Generally speaking, philosophy helps clarify and refine concepts. We all operate with concepts, and philosophers are trained to both reveal existing connections among those concepts and to help us rearrange them into a more rationally satisfying order than they were in originally.

The major contribution philosophy can make to our understanding of the climate crisis is in ethics—my own area. This is mostly because ethics operates almost entirely in the normative realm, whereas most other disciplines are not terribly comfortable in this domain. We all have intuitions regarding what actions we should and should not be doing, what is permissible or obligatory, what virtues are important to cultivate (and what vices we should avoid), and so on. Although there is a lot of complexity here, what we are really talking about with all of this is how we can diminish the amount of avoidable harm in the world. When I first started researching this stuff, no one was talking about those being harmed by climate change, including the global poor, future generations and nature. Philosophy gives us the tools to do so.

ES: You became interested in climate philosophy about ten or twelve years ago. Was there a moment that convinced you to start writing about climate change?

BW: It’s hard to pin that down. With respect to my research in the history of philosophy, I felt it was at a bit of a dead end. I was on the lookout for something different. After my Ph.D., I worked for three years at the University of South Florida, and there I met a philosopher named Martin Schönfeld who was working on climate change and who introduced me to the topic. We became very good friends and he soon convinced me that this thing—climate change—was a civilizational threat.

Under that particular impetus, I got pretty freaked out. I became as panicky as a philosopher can be. At roughly this time, I started having kids and began thinking about the future in a way that I hadn’t before. So I think it was a confluence of factors that got me interested in this problem. But the major one was having the idea of civilizational threat presented to me. Like most people, I would say especially academics, I was simply not programmed to think in such grandiose terms. But the science was clear: there was, and is, no more accurate way of describing what is happening to the climate system and all the human systems that are linked to it. When the latest IPCC report describes itself as a “code red” for humanity, this is what that means.

ES: I want to focus on your most recent book, Philosophy and the Climate Crisis. In much of your work, you discuss the importance of the present-day generation allying itself to future generations. But in this book, you look for lessons in the past to move forward productively on the issue of climate change. Why did you decide to focus on the past when so much of your work has focused on the future?

BW: Great question. Part of the reason I haven’t looked too much towards the future in this book is I feel like I’ve said my piece in that respect in previous work. I’d like to get people to think about how we can reimagine our relationship with future generations. “What might they say about us? How will they judge our inaction and indifference?”

That exercise can be a motivator. I don’t think many people want to be despised by future people, even if they will be dead when the despising happens. When I engage in that imaginative exercise, I do despise my generation. I despise my generation when I listen to Greta Thunberg speak or think about my own children and their (possible) children. There’s a weird kind of moral progress in that, by the way. Coming back to Nietzsche, with whom I engaged in earlier work, he said that what was most contemptible about the “good Europeans” of his day (the complacent liberal bourgeoisie) is that they had lost the ability to despise themselves. That’s a good description of too many of us, in my view.

By contrast, in Philosophy and the Climate Crisis, I provide lessons from previous times where I think people saw their worlds in existential crises, much as we’re seeing things right now. My basic argument is that particular philosophers arose at crisis moments with an innovative concept that helped them work through that crisis. For example, Plato was writing in a time when Athens was completely culturally devastated after their defeat at the hands of Sparta during the Peloponnesian War. It was a totally pervasive sense of cultural and political loss.

Plato’s diagnosis of the problem was that it was the product of a bad epistemology—letting the sophists run the political show. Sophism, as a movement, is the idea that knowledge can and should be used solely in the service of power. Plato thought that was dangerous to the body politic, so he introduced, in The Republic, the idea of an epistocracy—that it’s the ‘knowers’ who should be in charge. We shouldn’t uncritically institute a Platonic epistocracy, of course, but the basic idea of rule-by-the-knowers is sound and extremely relevant in the post-truth age. Bad epistemology can breed scary politics. As one historian has put it, “post-truth is pre-fascism.”

ES: I want to dig into your transition from seventeenth century philosophy to climate philosophy because Descartes—a previous research subject of yours—makes an appearance in Philosophy and the Climate Crisis. Was bringing Descartes into a chapter part of rediscovering your previous work?

BW: Yes, this is a way of re-establishing a connection to my past research. But more importantly, I am trying to rehabilitate Descartes. Because in environmental ethics generally, Descartes is always the bad guy. Descartes, according to the official story, disenchanted the physical world, making it that much easier to dominate technologically and ultimately destroy.

I agree with this narrative to an extent. But the problem is that we are in the Anthropocene. By definition, the Anthropocene is the epoch where there’s no obvious or discernible distinction between human beings and the rest of nature because we’ve imprinted our technology on the rest of the natural world in a pervasive way. And the result is an expansion of the technosphere way beyond what anyone imagined in the seventeenth century.

What’s the response to that? Do we back off the project of technologizing nature? I don’t think that’s a possibility anymore. We are technological beings, and our technological imprint is only going to grow. Our only alternatives are either to make the technosphere something that reflects our best values or continue designing it in the ugly and unjust ways we already have. Those are our only two options, but neither of them involves backing off from the technological enterprise.

I think Descartes is essential here and needs to be rescued from this ‘bad guy’ narrative. Maybe the world would have turned out better if Descartes hadn’t invented the technosphere—maybe we wouldn’t have a climate crisis!—but he did and we have no choice but to deal with that fact. Wishing history had been different does not make for productive philosophy.

ES: In the last chapter, you make mention of the term ‘Anthropocene monism.’ What does that mean?

BW: Ontologically speaking, monism means there’s one fundamental kind of thing. Spinoza—the subject of chapter seven—argues that reality is one thing. God isn’t a transcendent being; God is just everything that is, was and will be. That is monism, or at least one possible version of it. What the Anthropocene tells us is that the monists were right. There’s only one thing, and it’s the technosphere.
And if there’s just this one thing, we can define our task as making the best version of it that we possibly can, rather than seeking to return it to some mythical, pre-technological state. We must think like monists, which means the technosphere is everything and our job is to design it in the most beautiful and just way possible. That’s Anthropocene monism.

ES: Do you have hope that we can change and confront the crisis adequately and timely?

BW: I do, but it’s important to explain what I mean when I use the word ‘hope.’ We need to distinguish hope from other concepts that are in the same ballpark. It’s not the same thing as optimism. Technically speaking, an optimist is someone who believes—based on evidence—things are going to turn out well in respect to some particular event or outcome. It is, or ought to be, evidence-sensitive.

But with respect to the climate crisis, I’m a pessimist. I don’t think we’re going to solve it. So if you are a pessimist, , then what are you going to do? I don’t think there’s any justification for giving up on the struggle. That’s a counsel of despair. The early Christians were onto something in describing despair as a sin. Because it is a massive moral energy-sapper, despair will dramatically worsen the problem if adopted on a wide enough social scale. Unfortunately, I see signs of this happening in the culture, and this worries me immensely.

Hope is the belief that because it’s not impossible that you can make things better and defeat your own pessimism, you have a moral duty to do whatever you can to make that happen. Unlike optimism or pessimism, which are epistemic concepts, hope is a moral concept. Hope is something you adopt for specifically moral reasons.

I describe myself as a hopeful pessimist. Some people raise an eyebrow when I say this, but you can be a pessimist in that you believe things will probably turn out badly with respect to some possible outcome, while also being hopeful in the active pursuit of alternatives to that outcome.

So the short answer is––yeah, I still have hope. My entire life is defined by a kind of radical hope in respect to this particular crisis. The good thing about hope is that it’s distinct from wishful thinking. It’s not averse to evidence. If it were literally impossible for us to avoid civilizational collapse in the next hundred years or so, then I think you’d be a wishful thinker if you had hope that things might turn out otherwise. Despair would be justified in this case. But I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that. Not yet anyway.

This interview has been edited for length.