In psychology and cognitive science, magical thinking is non-scientific causal reasoning (e.g. superstition). James George Frazer and Bronislaw K Malinowski said that magic is more like science than religion, and that societies with magical beliefs often had separate religious beliefs and practices.
Like science, magic is concerned with causal relations, but unlike science, it does not distinguish correlation from causation. For example, a man who has won a bowling competition in a given shirt may then believe this shirt is lucky. He will continue to wear the shirt to bowling competitions, and though he continues to win some and lose some, he will chalk up every win to his lucky shirt.1

A rationalist definition: magical thinking as a form of delusion, a catch-all term for various ideas grouped according to their shared failure to interpret facts, resulting in an inability to comprehend events as accurately as is otherwise possible.

Examples of magical thinking, including the one above, typically involve the magical thinker asserting a hypothesis (or ‘superstition’) and the rationalist or scientific thinker doubting this hypothesis, siting a lack, or misinterpretation, of supporting evidence. What if this scenario is reversed? Under certain circumstances, might magical thinking cast doubt on a rationalist or scientific hypothesis, despite supporting evidence? The rationalist view would remain: magical thinking is delusory, rationalism is revelatory. The only difference being that, when a rational assertion is put on the defensive, magical thinking must not only promote misinterpretations of facts, but also deny, contradict and ignore them.

Not simply irrational, but counter-rational, this magical anti-logic is evident in Orwell’s doublethink, a ‘lunatic dislocation in the mind’:

‘Ashes,’ he said. ‘Not even identifiable ashes. Dust. It does not exist. It never existed.’
‘But it did exist! It does exist! It exists in memory. I remember it. You remember it.’
‘I do not remember it,’ said O’Brien.
Winston’s heart sank. That was doublethink. He had a feeling of deadly helplessness. If he could have been certain that O’Brien was lying, it would not have seemed to matter. But it was perfectly possible that O’Brien had really forgotten the photograph. And if so, then already he would have forgotten his denial of remembering it, and forgotten the act of forgetting. How could one be sure that it was simple trickery? Perhaps that lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen: that was the thought that defeated him.2

Could doublethink really happen? Orwell’s formulation is a coiling Möbius strip of consciousness and self-censorship: “The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.”3 Doublethink is thus defined as “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”4 But the contradiction here is necessary only because, in the fictional world of 1984, doublethink is policed by, and serves the interests of, a force outside the mind (a fascist state). The psychological mechanics are more plausible if we re-imagine doublethink with the driving censorious agency originating within the mind. This is the case in what is commonly known as a ‘state of denial’: in which the mind need not hold two contradictory beliefs, but only the one that it favours by unconscious instinct, even if there is evidence against it.

In Camus’ La Peste, the town of Oran is struck by a deadly plague. The novel begins by tracing the epidemic in its early stages: the town’s rats are infected by an unknown virus, and die in their thousands; an individual is taken sick with symptoms typical of bubonic plague, dying within hours; similar cases are subsequently reported, with increasing frequency. Despite the mounting evidence, the town’s residents resist acknowledging the burgeoning epidemic clearly indicated by these events:

Pestilence is in fact very common, but we find it hard to believe in a pestilence when it descends upon us. There have been as many plagues in the world as there have been wars, yet plagues and wars always find people equally unprepared. Dr Rieux was unprepared, as were the rest of the townspeople, and this is how one should understand his reluctance to believe. One should also understand that he was divided between anxiety and confidence. When war breaks out people say: ‘It won’t last, it’s too stupid.’ And war is certainly too stupid, but that doesn’t prevent it from lasting. Stupidity always carries doggedly on, as people would notice if they were not always thinking about themselves. In this respect, the citizens of Oran were like the rest of the world, they thought about themselves; in other words, they were humanists: they did not believe in pestilence. A pestilence does not have human dimensions, so people tell themselves that it is unreal, that it is a bad dream which will end. But it does not always end and, from one bad dream to the next, it is people who end, humanists first of all because they have not prepared themselves. The people of our town were no more guilty than anyone else, they merely forgot to be modest and thought that everything was still possible for them, which implied that pestilence was impossible. They continued with business, with making arrangements for travel and holding opinions. Why should they have thought about the plague, which negates the future, negates journeys and debate? They considered themselves free and no one will ever be free as long as there is plague, pestilence and famine.5 [italics added]

Likewise, Andy Warhol describes his own failure to believe in death:

I’m so sorry to hear about it. I just thought that things were magic and that it would never happen.
I don’t believe in it, because you’re not around to know that it’s happened. I can’t say anything about it because I’m not prepared for it.6

Anthropogenic Climate Change Denial

Anthopogenic climate change is the greatest contemporary threat to humanity: to survive it, we must act swiftly and decisively. This message, increasingly circulating the world’s population, is legitimised by scientific expertise and political authority. Yet commentators observe how the warning, in its various forms, has met a resistance to believe and to act. Mayer Hillman writes:

...in the UK population there is widespread public ignorance of, or denial about, the causes and dramatic effects that climate change is already having on our environment.
Excuses are widely deployed in everyday conversation, in professional debates, and by columnists in newspapers and commentators on television and radio. Superficially, they can seem reasonable. In fact, they are insidious, wrong-headed and dangerous in that they discourage people from facing up to the realities of climate change.7

Hillman seeks to diagnose the causes of this denial:

A psychological approach can help explain how it is that many of the excuses have come to be accepted as valid and necessary. Coping in situations of conflict, in this case between immediate wishes and long-term interests, relies on employing well-known psychological devices to maintain a mental equilibrium. These defence mechanisms are largely derived from the unconscious and include repression, suppression, denial, projection and dissociation. They provide a shield against the generation of anxiety and self-directed appeals to conscience in the face of unpalatable truths. As they are generally not consciously employed, it can be difficult for individuals to recognise their origins. As short-term measures, their use is understandable and may represent necessary components for coping with the real world. In the longer term, they can be seriously detrimental both to the individual and, in this case, to the future of the planet and the generations succeeding us.8

Almost ten years earlier, Ulrich Beck wrote:

[T]he resistance to insight into the threat grows with the size and proximity of the threat. The people most severely affected are often precisely the ones who deny the threat most vehemently, and they must deny it in order to keep on living.9

Journalist and campaigner George Monbiot personalises the phenomenon that Hillman and Beck observe in others, describing his own experience:

...when considering what might happen to people in my own country or in other parts of the rich world – in which the human impacts of global warming will be delayed both by our more forgiving climate and by the money we can spend on our protection – I have found the likely effects easy to catalogue but almost impossible to imagine. I can understand, intellectually, that ‘life’ in this country might not be the same in thirty years’ time as it is today; that if climate change goes unchecked it could in fact be profoundly and catastrophically different. But somehow I have been unable to turn this knowledge into a recognition that my own life will alter. Like everyone who has been insulated from death, I have projected the future as repeated instances of the present. The world might change, but I will not.10

As Camus did before him, Monbiot asserts denial as characteristic of human response to other mass crises:

Underlying this denial is the dissonance with which we face all possible catastrophes: plagues, wars, famines, even death itself. I might be deeply afraid of the impending disaster, but I am also confident that – through the grace of God or the other sources of good fortune that have preserved me so far – it will not apply to me.11

To be both “deeply afraid” and “confident” recalls Orwell’s doublethinkers, “holding two contradictory beliefs” and “accepting them both”. However, the body of Monbiot’s work indicates that he does not accept both beliefs equally; that he holds a generalised scientific postulate of anthropogenic climate change to be true, and consciously resists his desire to deny its implications. Moreover, he regards the desire to deny as an irrational compulsion, as Hillman does when he diagnoses it as a “defence mechanism” originating in the “unconscious”. Consequently, for these writers, arguments made to support the denial of anthropogenic climate change are termed “excuses” (excusing disbelief and inaction) and are attributed with properties that we have already seen earlier in connection to magical thinking: that is, misrepresentation of reality through faulty causal reasoning and misinterpretation of facts.

For example, number one in Hillman’s list of “excuses” is the phrase, “I don’t believe in climate change.” His examples of arguments put forth by those adopting this position include:

+ No one knows for sure about global warming.
+ Thomas Malthus got it wrong in 1798 in calling for population control on the grounds that the world’s resources were running out.
+ ‘Limits to Growth’ (the Club of Rome Report, 1972) was wrong in its claim that, based on growth rates at the time, many world resources would be exhausted by 2000.
+ The climate isn’t really getting warmer, there were vineyards in England in the Middle Ages.12

I would add to this list the following, that I have observed myself:

+ Historically the Earth’s climate has varied, and the current warming trend is an example of this naturally occuring phenomenon;
+ Global climate is driven by sun spots, not atmospheric carbon dioxide;
+ Historically humans have believed mythological narratives of apocalypse [millenarianism], and anthropogenic climate change is an example of this;
+ Climate scientists support the theory of anthropogenic climate change in order to generate, or attract, financial investment;
+ Governments propagate concerns over anthropogenic climate change in order to elicit a culture of fear that is susceptible to increased state control and stealth taxation;
+ It is too late to prevent catastrophic anthropogenic climate change, there are no longer effective measures available to us;
+ People will not change their behaviour to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, human nature makes catastrophic anthropogenic climate change inevitable.

Continuing in the ‘psychological’ vain, Hillman asserts that such responses are:

...based on the psychological mechanisms of ‘denial’ and ‘repression/suppression’. Denial is the process of refusing to acknowledge certain aspects of reality, choosing to disregard something because it is either painful or difficult to face up to. It involves a considerable amount of self-deception and distortion of evidence, enabling preferred action to continue in the face of conflict, distress and uncertainty. It is reflected, for instance, in people not wishing to be informed about the link between flying and its damaging contribution to climate change. The phrases ‘burying heads in the sand’ and ‘ turning a blind eye’ describe the related defence mechanism of repression. There is the subconscious hope that ‘it will go away’ if we ignore it. The more conscious version of repression is ‘suppression’. Information is deliberately shut out – as in refusing to read newspaper reports or even literally ‘blocking our ears’. These powerful, largely subconscious responses allow people to continue to wheel out ‘excuses’ which would not be credible if measured up against the actual scientific evidence for climate change.13

As a rational basis for disbelief, there are obvious flaws in the ‘excuses’ that Hillman sites: The proposition that “no one knows for sure about global warming”, has no bearing on its existence; nor do the historical examples of scientific modelling having failed to accurately predict future events. Typical of magical thinking, these statements articulate a correlative logic: “If no one knows for sure about a thing, therefore that thing must not exist,”; “Past claims have proved untrue, therefore present claims will also prove untrue”. However, this is a misconstruel. These statements do not assert disbelief in the existence of climate change itself (based on evidence), rather they assert disbelief in the claims made for its existence (based on doubt over the truth value of scientific pronouncements in general). This can be seen as an example of Lyotard’s theory of postmodern delegitimation, which foresees that, within postmodernity, the role of scientific claims in the debate over climate change will inevitably be undermined by a more general scepticism toward scientific claims: “science plays its own game; it is incapable of legitimating other language games.”14

George Myerson has examined this ‘encounter’ between climate change and postmodernity. He describes two incompatible postulates: (Lyotard’s) postmodernity marks ‘The End of Grand Narrative’15, leaving, “‘little narratives’ as the remaining field for science. But there could be no more grand narrative than global climate change – a narrative in the old grand style, where science legitimates both itself and political authority at the same time as telling a universal story.”16 Myerson’s view of the postmodernity that Lyotard describes is one that will hinder the resolution of any debate as wide-reaching as that of anthropogenic climate change:

...[Lyotard] proposed that we had entered a world of ethical impasses where ‘[o]ne side’s legitimacy does not imply the other’s lack of legitimacy’.
There is, he insisted, no longer a universal rule of judgement. We are left with ‘phrases’ that belong to different games. Judgement is still possible, but only within those locally valid rules. There is no way to join all the games together. Postmodernity is ‘heterogeneous’. It resists the unifying pull of modern reason: ‘There are as many universes as there are phrases.’17

Is a “universal rule of judgement” necessary to remedy the crisis of anthropogenic climate change? According to Hillman, the answer appears to be yes:

Global, national and personal solutions are vital. Global agreement is vital because the target of a 60 per cent reduction in emissions by 2050 proposed by the UK government, and the 80 per cent minimum that the authors of this book consider more realistic, only works to limit climate change sufficiently if all countries of the world are also engaged in emissions control and have their own reduction targets.18 [italics added]

Thus postmodernity’s heterogeneity, its refusal of grand narratives, poses a mortal threat to the planet’s human population (not to mention millions of other life-forms). The magical thinking of anthropogenic climate change denial, its faulty reasoning and correlative logic, functions as a block to the only measures that can prevent this imminent crisis. Therefore the nature of this resistance is crucial: if it is surmountable, then it is a matter of urgency that we should overcome it. So, how firmly held are the (dis)beliefs of anthropogenic climate change sceptics?

It may be that there is little conviction in the truth value of these ‘excuses’, even amongst enthusiastic proponents. Typically, these arguments are not accompanied with specific counter-evidence against the existence of anthropogenic climate change; instead weighing ‘phrases’ (Lyotard’s term) against one another in order to choose where to place belief. What I previously interpreted as correlative logic (“Past claims have proved untrue, therefore present claims will also prove untrue”) may well in fact represent a judgement based on probability (“Some past claims have proved untrue, therefore it is probable that some present claims will also prove untrue”).

To approach any degree of accuracy, these calculations of probability would require massive evidential data, but that is not atall the spirit in which they are evoked. As arguments against the existence of anthropogenic climate change, and the necessity to respond to it, they need only lend credence to disbelief and inaction: that is, according to Hillman’s theory of denial, to persuade and justify us in believing what we are already unconsciously compelled to believe. These ‘excuses’ constitute a meta discourse. The public debate coasts on a dematerialised trans-evidential plane, always and only deferring to second-hand reports and postulates from which it calculates fragmentary probabilities. In individual participants, the underlying intent is not a dialectical will to knowledge via dialogue, but an irrational and unconscious compulsion that diverts dialogue in order to serve its own ends. Truth value jettisoned in favour of a solipsistic drive for psychological comfort. Such is the picture that Hillman, among others, presents his readers.

The arguments sited above (Hillman’s, and my own) denying the existence of anthropogenic climate change are not all lies; some are wholly or partially true; but they are all bullshit. The sense in which they are bullshit is this:

What bullshit essentially misrepresents is neither the state of affairs to which it refers nor the beliefs of the speaker concerning that state of affairs. Those are what lies misrepresent, by virtue of being false. Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in its misrepresentational intent. The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to.
This is the crux of the distinction between him and the liar. Both he and the liar represent themselves falsely as endeavoring to communicate the truth. The success of each depends upon deceiving us about that. But the fact about himself that the liar hides is that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality; we are not to know that he wants us to believe something he supposes to be false. The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth values of his statements are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor to conceal it. This does not mean that is speech is anarchically impulsive, but that the motive guiding and controlling it is unconcerned with how the things about which he speaks truly are.19

Applying this definition to the mechanism of denial outlined by Hillman, it could be said that anthropogenic climate change deniers are bullshitting others, just as their own unconsciouses are bullshitting them. This is not the only root of anthropogenic climate change denial: much has been made by ecologists regarding the role that financial self-interest plays in motivating individuals and organisations to generate public confusion around climate change (in particular, those who have received sponsorship or investment from the fossil fuel industry).
The grand narrative of anthropogenic climate change claims relevance to all, but its complexity means that no individual can realistically claim expertise in every aspect of its causes and consequences. In order to respond appropriately to it, it is necessary to take as much of the available information into account as possible, despite that this will inevitably be very little of the over total information available. This scenario is conducive to bullshit:

Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled – whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others – to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant. Closely related instances arise from the widespread conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything, or at least everything that pertains to the conduct of his country’s affairs. The lack of any significant connection between a person’s opinions and his apprehension of reality will be even more severe, needless to say, for someone who believes it his responsibility, as a conscientious moral agent, to evaluate events and conditions in all parts of the world.20

What is rarely acknowledged by Monbiot, Hillman, and all those in favour of promoting acceptance of the reality of anthropogenic climate change is that Frankfurt’s argument (above) describes an aspect of the conditions of all sides of the anthropogenic climate change debate: there are bullshitters amongst those who argue for the existence of anthropogenic climate change, aswell as amongst those who argue against. The stake is personal belief, while knowledge of the existence of anthropogenic climate change is annexed to an esoteric realm occupied only by climatologists and other ‘experts’.

All responses to the perceived threat ought to be premised on the most conclusive available evidence, but this is rarely the case. Problems arise due to the complexity and ever-evolving nature of the information available. These are exacerbated by the dualistic media model of ‘balanced’ reportage: the supposed representation of “both sides of a debate” in order to present without bias (however illusory and disingenuously this is contrived) and present conflict (entertainment value). Media reports relating to anthropogenic climate change frequently include the opinions of politicians and ecologists, while lacking the voice of climatologists who may be able to verify the points argued, on the spot. Because of this, a subject that is essentially empirically based transcends the material evidence, morphing into a story of differing opinions and conflict. As such, in the form of a feedback loop whose origins may or may not be traceable, the majority of public commentary and (supposed) reportage propagates and fuels the discourse of climate change in which the public, magical thinkers included, partake. Can this bullshit debate shed any light on reality? No. Regardless of truth, it answers only to itself, and the protestations of either side cannot function as a prophylactic, neither against unfounded fear nor fatal indifference.

1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_thinking 29/09/07
2 Orwell, George (1949) pp.259-260 1984
3 Ibid. p.223
4 Ibid. p.223
5 Camus, Albert (1947) pp.30-31 The Plague (La Peste)
6 Warhol, Andy (1975) pp.121-3 THE Philosophy of Andy Warhol
7 Hillman, Mayer (2004) p.54 How we can Save the Planet
8 Ibid. p.55
9 Beck, Ulrich (1995) p.3 Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity
10 Monbiot, George (2006) p.205 Heat
11 Ibid. p.205
12 Hillman, Mayer (2004) p.56 How we can Save the Planet
13 Ibid. p.56
14 Lyotard, Jean-François (1979) p.40 The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
15 Myerson, George (2001) p.11 Ecology and the End of Postmodernity
16 Ibid. p.36
17 Ibid. p.17
18 Hillman, Mayer (2004) p.117 How We Can Save the Planet
19 Frankfurt, Harry G. (2005) pp.53-5 On Bullshit
20 Ibid. pp.53-55