Religion as Anthropocene Externality? Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner’s "SuperFreakonomics"

 

Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s Freakonomics (2005) and SuperFreakonomics (2009) don’t explicitly address the anthropocene, but their analysis of the climate movement as a religion resonates provocatively with our class discussions. Levitt is an American economist currently working as the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, he is also the Faculty Director and Co-Founder of the Center for Radical Innovation for Social Change. He was co-editor of the Journal of Political Economy as well as the co-founder of a business and philanthropy consulting company. In 2006, after the release of Freakonomics, he was featured as one of Time magazine’s “100 people Who Shape Our World.” Dubner is an award-winning author and journalist. Best known for his works with Levitt he has also released several other books, including, Turbulent Souls/Choosing My Religion (1998), and Confessions of a Hero-Worshipper (2003). Coming from distinctly different fields, Levitt and Dubner together write well-rounded, researched, and articulated pieces of work with unexpected insights for thinking about the Anthropocene and religion.

In SuperFreakonomics, Levitt and Dubner approach the realities of society from an economic perspective. They use statistics and data in order to determine what drives certain human behaviors. One of the chapters in the book focuses on global-warming, its risks, its misinterpretations, and its uncertainties. Particularly compelling is their analysis of “externalities” within the climate crisis. Pollution, for instance, is an externality: those who are responsible for the majority of pollution do not suffer the consequences of their actions and therefore do not have an incentive to pollute less. However, I was especially interested by their articulation of the similarities between the movement against global warming and religion. 

Most people respond to uncertainty with more emotion—fear, blame, paralysis—than might be advisable. Uncertainty also has a nasty way of making us conjure up the very worst possibilities. With global warming, the worst possibilities are downright biblical: rising seas, hellish temperatures, plague upon plague, a planet in chaos. It is understandable, therefore, that the movement to stop global warming has taken on the feel of a religion. (89) 

Levitt and Dubner’s characterization of a religious movement inspired by science, is a controversial idea. Although they both believe in global warming and that the environment is in grave danger, they argue we must face the ways its uncertainties parallel those of traditional religions. Even the most sophisticated climate statistics are constrained in their ability to know the future. This is not to say that the ice caps aren’t melting, or that the Earth isn’t warming. It’s just that with a system as complex as the climate, whose climate models (even the most sophisticated ones) are limited in their ability to predict the future ; given the scale of climate change this uncertainty forms a sort of religious feeling. 

Levitt and Dubner’s ideas engage issues that have come up in our class discussions. For instance, their analysis on externalities in the climate crisis resonates with our conversations on the existence of the capitalocene. Externalities understood as problems caused by those who don’t experience their consequences are a perfect explanation for the ways capitalism causes, and continues to worsen, the environmental state. Levitt and Dubner define the movement responding to global warming as a sort of religion dovetailed perfectly with our class, too. We have discussed how religions such as Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism have contributed to the climate crisis. The point of view of SuperFreakonomics adds an interesting new perspective. Rather than seeing how religions affect the climate crisis, it’s powerful to think of the climate crisis itself as a religion. I’ve often been asked “do you believe in climate change?” without realizing the parallels between science and traditional religions in the way the Anthropocene is experienced. 

The environmental blogosphere, and environmental advocacy groups, such as the Union of Concerned Scientists have interpreted SuperFreakonomics to understate the severity and probability of climate change. This interpretation was that Levitt and Dubner were extreme global-warming deniers whose analysis of the current climate is ideological and unscientific. However, I rather understood it as pointing out a perspective well worth considering. The similarities they drew between conventional religions and environmentalism are certainly thought-provoking. For instance, in the context of describing those they are not alone in calling climate change “heretics,” they observe, not without irony:  

Like all the best religions, fear of climate change satisfies our need for guilt, and self-disgust, and that eternal human sense that technological progress must be punished by the gods. And the fear of climate change is like a religion in this vital sense, that it is veiled in mystery, and you can never tell whether your acts of propitiation or atonement have been in any way successful. (91) 

They illustrate how, for them, religion is not a good or helpful thing. However, not everyone views religion through the same lens as them, or would evaluate the same traits in order to define a religion. 

Levitt and Dubner comment on the uncertainties and powerlessness most of us have within the climate crisis and how it mimics one’s restlessness in religion. We are unable to do much of anything to ameliorate or even affect the situation we’re in. Only a small privileged few, those who are responsible - not for creating the situation we’re in, but for continuing to worsen it - have the power to fix it. Levitt and Dubner’s argument in Superfreakonomics offers us an opportunity to reflect on certain externalities that we contribute to on a daily basis and become aware of subconscious religious feelings. These religious responses that we experience might even unwittingly shape our thinking and acting in the Anthropocene. 

(CB)