Climate Change is the battleground for Truth (capital T)

You know you have reached the apex of language’s detachment from meaning when a term like Fake News has itself become weaponized. In the furious debate over what was true and what was not in the 2016 presidential election campaign, the term “fake news” was coined to reduce noise. The idea was that by tagging a item as “fake news” it did not even warrant consideration and all subsequent debate that did so much to interfere with any signal could be avoided. This would allow energy otherwise squandered to be conserved for more worthy targets, targets that relied on interpretation of facts, the facts themselves true. That we need such a long-winded sentence to describe truth shows how far we have strayed down a path in which language’s ability to convey reality has been impaired.

Would be the question from any first year arts student, quickly followed by a reference to post-modernism. They would have inadvertently stumbled on to the culprit for our arrival into such a diabolical era with regards to what is real and what is not. Where modernism allowed two contradictory versions of reality to co-exist, yours and mine, the individual and the state, private and public, with postmodernism, one’s reality became a mystery even to oneself. It was the product of the Second World War and Holocaust, events so traumatic that under the stress reality began to buckle and collapse. Memory was exposed as treacherous to its owner and language was now unmoored from the meaning it once signified. We were imperially alone drifting in an inscrutable reality, the tools of language and memory blunted and broken beyond use.

Such a bleak situation was theoretically redeemed in two ways. First, language had been an expression of power, and therefore an instrument of oppression, and many viewed this postwar moment as an opportunity to destroy the structures that had lead to catastrophe after catastrophe, had killed millions and disempowered minorities, women and other oppressed. Secondly this aloneness was reframed as individualism, our reality became our opinion which was now sacrosanct, because “it’s my opinion, man.”

In fact, it allowed reality to be far more plastic and the powers-that-be, this time rampant consumerism, to have a far freer hand than ever before, to mould reality in a manner that best served its interests.

There has never been a more lurid and pure expression of truth serving power than advertising. Here reality was a pure fabrication, as time went on the product being sold receded into the background, and the reality itself became the thing for sale. And the conditions of postwar America were perfect for advertising execs to perfect the art of reality making - the cold war provided the USA with an ideological justification to pursue freewheeling capitalism while postmodernism had prepared the ground by breaking down society to its atomic units of individuals, too fragmented to effectively construct a competing reality of their own.

Yet reality did not descend into a formless soup. There existed two forces that contended there did indeed exist an objective reality - the first was the media, the second was science.

The relationship between the media and advertising has never been a comfortable one. It raises questions about influence and impartiality that drill down to conflicting versions of reality - how can a fabricated reality reside on the same page as news items that earnestly search for (or report on) the truth? The conclusion: truth is a master that cannot compromise. Yet in the postwar West this uneasy symbiosis continued, advertising provided the capital while media provided the content. This began to disintegrate the moment when web applications became advanced enough so that a credible looking newspaper could be built quickly and cheaply, while social media provided a prepackaged audience that responded to outrage over facts .And so media as a pillar of democracy had been disrupted by its hip and unscrupulous cousin, social media, while advertising, an infinitely adaptable form, thrived.

The next battle between postmodernism and an objective truth, between science and advertising took place in the debate over climate change. We had been here before, with the battle in the 1980s between medical science and big tobacco. Then as now we witnessed an advertising industry deployed at its most brilliantly insidious, skills sharpened in the postwar era, of seductive glamour, the selection of facts, the creation of artificial think tanks, and lying scientists, individually dismissed as harmless but ultimately conspired to create a deadly and fictitious alternative narrative, one where smoking cigarettes will not kill you.

This happened again and again, with big Pharma, the genetic engineering of crops and the gun industry, yet never had advertising and spin opposed science as in the battle for climate change. Again we see the war for truth take the form of a skirmish over language - the “greenhouse effect” became “global warming” which became “climate change”.

On one hand scientists, with no commercial interest in exposing the truth other than doing their job, had a demonstrable and proven reality, backed up by models and data with a vast consensus in their community. On the other the energy industry with vast financial resources at their disposal. This time the media were severely impaired and financially constrained, and so the fight for the existence of truth had to be won without this arbiter.

And so it played out for almost two decades, where any sliver of doubt was pried into a gaping hole by spin doctors and advertising agencies. Never before had the advertising agencies been employed with such extensive resources, every avenue was pursued with such energy, from Oil Companies using more green in their corporate logos to the creation of a fictitious solution (clean coal) to a problem they denied existed in the first place. PR Campaigns depicted big energy as not residing in glass skyscrapers but made of working class labourers, to be depicted with families, ideally in tranquil natural settings, to establish that coal WAS nature. These were sophisticated tools of pastiche and mimicry, of not fighting against the green movement but co-opting their veneer and the muddying the water. The battle was not one for what was true and what was not, it was between an objective reality that stated the world was getting warmer and the children of postmodernism that relied on reality being something one could fabricate.

Here in Australia we saw perhaps the most powerful media campaign in the country’s history deployed by the coal industry. It was a campaign that unseated a prime minister and poisoned the debate even today, where one still comes across climate deniers who maintain their position against an objective and proveable reality because “it’s my opinion”.