Politics of green unreality
Merv Bendle
The postmodern politics of climate change
In the realm of disinformation, the prize must go to Al Gore who appeared in front of video images of a collapsing glacier to declare that the South Pole will be ice-free within five years. Such deliberate misrepresentations are linked to a further feature of this type of postmodern politics: the assertion of a militant and intransigent stance and violent denunciation of all compromise. All of this is then cloaked with the trappings of high moralism and the attribution and acceptance of guilt and shame, especially by the leadership of Western countries, which specializes in self-laceration.
Whatever the ultimate effects of the Copenhagen Conference may be, it was an excellent example of the postmodern mode of politics that increasingly dominates contemporary societies.
Postmodernism has various characteristics, but the relevant one here is the assumption that there is no ‘real’ world and that what we take for ‘reality’ is a text, narrative, or stream of images which lack any underlying referent. Politically, this attitude manifests itself in a disconnection between the symbolism and substance of an issue accompanied by an obsessive concern with that symbolism and an ultimate disregard for the substance. Central to this literally unreal and increasingly sinister situation are the state’s efforts to deal with the omnipresent media. The latter operate on a 24 hour news cycle and myriad government agencies have been set up to manage the sort of politics this creates, in what is increasingly referred to as a ‘PR State’. Much of Australia’s extraordinarily large 114 person delegation to Copenhagen consisted of people associated with such tasks.