H-Diplo | RJISSF Review Essay 123: Vanderheiden on DeLay, Future of Denial10 min read

Kari Norgaard’s Living in Denial challenges that relatively limited understanding of the nature of denial, instead theorizing what she terms “socially organized denial” by which climate science may be understood and accepted in the abstract but remains largely disconnected from people’s daily lives.[2] Treating denial as the result of a kind of cognitive dissonance, Norgaard’s analysis helped to shift our understanding of denial away from political economy or public relations and into the realms of psychology and the cognitive science of socially constructed emotions. Rather than trying to fill information deficits with more facts from climate science, she suggested, scholars should explore how any why people repress what they know about climate change in favor of a version of reality in which “everything is fine.”[3]

Tad DeLay’s Future of Denial takes these questions still further, exploring them in terms of the Freudian psychology of illusion and delusion as well as in ideological terms that owe to Louis Althusser and Karl Marx and through a wealth of historical illustrations from Precambrian changes to the Earth’s chemistry through the Black Death and into contemporary resistance campaigns and reactions against antifascism. Denial does not, in DeLay’s account, only manifest as rejection of climate science or among conservatives, as the earlier accounts held.[4] Rather, he persuasively argues, “climate denial should be a flexible term designating a broad range of activity” including forms of denial on the left as well as the right (10).

Because denial “is a contingency of repression, the putting away of an unpleasant idea,” it can engage human complicity in climate change at several nodes (8). Conservatives may deny the reality of climate change, or any anthropogenic drivers of it, as in more traditional understandings of denial. But liberals may deny moral fault for climate change while putatively accepting its existence and causation, or become preoccupied with false solutions. For liberals, he suggests, denial takes the form of “lashing out against what needs to be done,” such as the need to “dislodge capitalism,” instead embracing “pseudosolutions” that may offer some moral palliative but do little to constructively address the problem. As DeLay writes, all denial involves some form of negation: “one [conservative denial] tests and negates reality itself, while the other [liberal denial] negates and rejects moral culpability or alien ideas” (35).

One such “pseudosolution” that DeLay attributes to a form of denial is the carbon offset, which he views in terms of a misplaced desire for purity but dismisses as an effective mitigation mechanism. Following Sigmund Freud’s distinction between illusions (or beliefs founded on wishes) and delusions (false beliefs),[5] he suggests that “offsets and self-styled carbon-neutral industries tap into wishes for guiltlessness” and so “offer themselves as illusions” for those wishing to erase their carbon footprints (42). “The degree to which they are also delusions will vary,” he aptly notes, which suggests that offsets differ across the spectrum from highly regulated compliance offsets to largely ephemeral voluntary offsets in degree but not in kind, given his identification of such mechanisms as associated with denial. Indeed, he treats offsets as among the false or inadequate solutions that are symptomatic of denial and embraced as such. Those purchasing them care little about their reality or validity as carbon abatement instruments, he suggests, since “reality is a matter of total indifference when the object of purchase is a fantasy of purity.” Elsewhere he dismisses them as examples of “market-based absolutions of a purity industrial complex for beautiful souls who care, who really, really care” (210).

DeLay’s narrative does not merely psychoanalyze denial, but also theorizes it in terms of the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) by which political alliances rooted in one or another kind of denial are formed. On the ideological right, the Capitalist Denialist ISA represents the interests of capital and includes the fossil-fuel lobby and its ideological allies in libertarian think tanks and government, on which standard accounts of climate denial have largely focused given their organized sponsorship of climate skepticism during the 1990s and beyond.[6] Allied with this is the Reactionary Ethno-Nationalism ISA, which includes “white evangelical apocalypticism (literal future denial)” along with its secular variants of working class anti-intellectualism and insular isolationism, and which join with the Capitalist Denialist ISA to “form reactionary alliance in the Republican Party” (11-12).

In the quadrant that is associated with owners of capital but is on the left is the Global Climate Governance ISA, which DeLay suggests “acknowledges the reality and the threat” of climate change but fails to act accordingly, and so manifests a form of denial. Casting this position as one which merely seeks purity rather than taking seriously the climate emergency, and which is preoccupied with obviously ineffective private and individualized responses (“it suggests you look up your carbon footprint or purchase an offset,” 3), DeLay characterizes this ISA as mired in a form of denial that is every bit as insidious as the other two in his semiotic diagram.

This analysis of course raises the question of what might form the fourth ISA as well as whether it, too, involves a kind of denial. “What is needed is a fourth position,” DeLay notes, “a revolutionary one” that “detests the capitalist death drive and opposes the ethno-nationalist’s solution” but also eschews the illusions and delusions of Global Climate Governance (14). Without furnishing this fourth ISA with much ideological content or illustrating it through reference to current social movements, DeLay writes that “the telos of the fourth position is a post-capitalist ecological socialism” (14). Locating it on the left and associating it with working class interests, DeLay wonders “whether even the revolutionary’s desire for agency is denial,” taking on the challenge of trying to convince the reader that the revolutionary alone has the ability to escape the denial to which the other three apparatuses succumb (17). Despite the faults and limits of what DeLay refers to as Global Climate Governance and the various ways in which the logic of capitalism is implicated in the climate crisis, one wonders whether by the book’s end the revolutionary ISA suffers from illusions or delusions of its own.

Regardless, DeLay’s psychological-ideological framework of Freud’s though fused with that of Althusser and of a more capacious and damning conception of climate denial is provocative and original, allowing for a theoretically rich and insightful interpretation of climate politics over the past three decades and into the present. Bookending ten chapters on a range of issues that include mass extinctions, organized climate skepticism, ecological limits, and climate geoengineering (in thematic sections on sciences, decarbonization, and management), and also including chapters which are dedicated to footprints and offsets in the opening section and on migration in the final section, DeLay’s theoretical framework provides a critical lens for understanding these issues but in a way that does not dominate their exposition. Those ten substantive chapters on their own would comprise a valuable contribution to critical climate studies from the radical left, reminiscent of Tom Athanasiou’s Divided Planet[7] in their breadth and critical ambition or his collaborations with Paul Baer[8] in uncovering the political economic roots of the climate crisis. The book’s theoretical framework enriches that contribution by grounding it in this innovative conception of denial with the diagnostic and critical insights that it allows.

One can forgive DeLay’s somewhat tired critique of what he calls Global Climate Governance, which conflates what others have directed against the neoliberal institutionalism of some climate governance efforts with the disengaged privatization and individualization of quite different efforts. It may well be engaged in some kind of denial—and indeed DeLay’s more capacious conception usefully allows for it to be theorized as such—but the wide diversity of programs and actors in this category are neither as homogenous nor as uniformly delusional as DeLay maintains. As he notes in a moment of epistemological modesty, “nobody commands a god’s-eye view of the polycrisis,” so “we should read deeply where our expertise is slim” (16). Indeed, the latter imperative serves as the raison d’être for adding this text a short list of highly valuable recent texts on the politics of the climate crisis,[9] whether for academics or an educated and motivated lay audience. Readers from a wide variety of backgrounds who want to understand the nature of this crisis as well as why it remains so pernicious and intractable, will benefit from this accessible, engaging, and important book.

 

Steve Vanderheiden is Professor of Political Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is the author of Atmospheric Justice: A Political Theory of Climate Change (Oxford, 2008) and Environmental Political Theory (Polity, 2020).