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Fintan O’Toole: Disaster movie now playing on the big screen of Earth

Challenge for Cop26 is that humans have an in-built bias towards optimism

One of the first films ever made could be called an eco-disaster movie. In 1896, the Lumière brothers showed what they titled Oil Wells of Baku: A Close View. It is a very short sequence, shot with a stationary camera, showing vast flames leaping upwards and thick black smoke belching skywards from burning oil wells in Azerbaijan.

It looks now like a warning – all that filthy carbon shooting up into the atmosphere, the monstrous scale of the disaster emphasised by a glimpse of a tiny human figure passing in front of it. It seems like a trailer, a century in advance, for Werner Herzog's grim film of burning oil fields in Kuwait, Lessons of Darkness.

But film historians seem to agree that Oil Wells of Baku was not seen this way at the time. Screened in Paris, it was advertised as part of a portmanteau of scenes from an exotic far away city: “Fire resulting from an oil gusher at Bibi-Heybat oil field; the departure ceremony of His Excellency Amir of Bukhara in the Grand Duke Alexei steamship; a folk dance of the Caucasus; and scenes from the comedy, So, You Got Caught, which was performed recently in one of Baku’s parks.”

So maybe people in Europe in 1896 saw these moving images of environmental destruction, not as harbingers of the apocalypse, but as part of the great spectacle of life. They were just something else to be gawked at, along with the emir, the folk dance and the saucy comedy in the park.

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Given how much of our collective life has been [...] nasty, brutish and short, it is truly remarkable that humans seem to have something very like an in-built bias towards optimism

And 125 years later, with the crucial Cop26 UN conference on climate change about to get under way in Glasgow, we still have the same problem: humankind, as TS Eliot put it, cannot bear very much reality. Especially when that reality is the growing likelihood of our own destruction, it is a relief to bring on the rich celebrities, the dancers and the comedies, to be mere gawkers at the great spectacle of our possible extinction.

We are a funny species, and, as Samuel Beckett knew, nothing about us is funnier than our tendency to look on the bright side of life. No one is more typically human than his Winnie in his play Happy Days, buried up to her waist, then up to her neck, in sand but keeping her spirits up nonetheless.

Given how much of our collective life has been, over the centuries, nasty, brutish and short, it is truly remarkable that humans seem to have something very like an in-built bias towards optimism.

The cognitive scientist Tari Shalot has called this predilection“one of the most consistent, prevalent, and robust biases documented in psychology and behavioural economics”.

It helps to explain, of course, the "irrational exuberance" that takes hold in stock markets and property bubbles. It allows the National Lottery and pretty much every other form of gambling to thrive. But it also affects the way we see our lives. People routinely underrate their chances of getting divorced, being in a car accident, or suffering from cancer. Students expect to earn more than they most probably will. Parents expect their children to be well above average. And so on.

This bias may in general be a very good thing. It keeps most of us from going mad. Conversely, the minority of people who don’t have this natural optimism are much more likely to suffer depression.

But there is a huge problem with our constant search for reasons to be cheerful. As Shalot puts it, “people update their beliefs more in response to positive information about the future than to negative information about the future”.

In other words, we tend to embrace good news about where things are headed but minimise the bad stuff. And this process is self-reinforcing: “Selectively updating beliefs in response to positive information produces optimism that is resistant to change.”

This is one of the great challenges for the politics of the climate emergency. If you were advising anyone who was planning a campaign to change the way people think, you would say: go with the natural flow. The flow is optimism. So tell a cheerful story.

If we're doomed, we may as well squeeze as much fun as we can from the last days of humanity. If the ship is going down slowly, we may as well keep dancing on the deck

It’s not just what people want to hear; it is what we as a species are inclined to believe. And it works, even when it goes against the grain of the evidence.

Brexit, for example, was and remains a source of hope for very many people in England. Prime minister Boris Johnson may seem absurd to many of us, but there is still a huge market for his boosterism.

Sunny uplands and the golden age are still a place and time millions of people believe they can inhabit. What Johnson calls the “gloomsters and doomsters”, and what rational people call the realists, get no thanks for spoiling the happy ending that has such a powerful innate appeal.

But climate scientists and activists can’t go with this flow. They are forced to swim against the ever-rising tide. They have to provide the “negative information about the future” that most of us are congenitally disinclined to absorb.

Should they soften the truth? How can they, when the world is burning and drowning before our eyes?

Nor, though, can they afford to be mere prophets of doom. For pessimism, even when it has a burning mountain of evidence on its side, is paralysing.

If we’re doomed, we may as well squeeze as much fun as we can from the last days of humanity. If the ship is going down slowly, we may as well keep dancing on the deck.

A sense of urgency has to be fused with a sense of possibility. It is all too true that humanity as a whole has shown yet again its incapacity to process negative information about the future. Had it done so 30 years ago, the task facing us now would not be quite so formidable.

To be optimistic now is not to be in denial about what we are seeing, but to grasp gratefully the chance to prevent it getting a lot worse

But we are no longer dealing merely with predictions about the future. We have crossed the threshold into the reality that used to lie behind the closed door of impending events. The catastrophe is not a coming attraction. It is now playing on the big screen of the Earth.

And perhaps that tilts the optimism bias. To be optimistic now is not to be in denial about what we are seeing, but to grasp gratefully the chance to prevent it getting a lot worse. I think that if people now were shown that 1896 film of ecological destruction, most would no longer see it is a curiosity or a spectacle or a fragment of an exotic world.

They would see it for what it is: the beginning of a disaster movie whose end is approaching but not as yet determined; the opening of a script that can still be rewritten.