Sometimes it’s a small thing that snags my attention and, like a thorn caught under the skin, it then has to be slowly worked out into the light of day.
Caroline Lucas begins the sixth chapter of Another England: How to Reclaim Our National Story (2024), entitled ‘English Nature’, by quoting George Monbiot’s pronouncement, in Regenesis (2022)that: ‘One of the greatest threats to life on Earth is poetry’. For any number of reasons, not least because reading poetry helped me get through lockdown and because I choose to coordinate a small poetry-reading group that includes people who write poetry, that pronouncement struck me first as really silly and then as actually potentially dangerous.
One way of introducing what I want to set out in this essay is to suggest a major problem we now face is precisely the use of this type of silly, unqualified, “click-bait” generalisation, a habit that trivialises and so can seriously distort, very necessary debates about important issues, including about environmental issues that may well turn out to be matters of life and death.
I understand that, as a campaigning newspaper journalist who must produce regular copy, Monbiot needs to cultivate habits that enable him to hold the attention of readers and that one way of doing that, given his pitch, is to keep identifying and condemning new “greatest threats to life on Earth”. It was not unreasonable that, after Lula’s victory in the 2022 Brazilian presidential election, for example, he should have tweeted: “Bolsonaro was a threat not only to the lives of Brazilians, but to life on Earth.” I certainly wouldn’t quarrel with the basic sentiment behind that statement. However, as a particular individual politician Bolsonaro was one of a number of self-serving right-wing demagogues like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage; individuals who gain power and/or influence by divisively capitalising on people’s fears, prejudices and unreal desires. “Poetry”, on the other hand, is not of any one particular type, orientation, or set of qualities, not least because it’s been part of human expression across much of the world for several thousand years. (The first poems we know about, written by a woman named Enheduana who lived in what is now called Iraq around 2300 BCE, depict, for example, a world frighteningly subject to change, conflict, chaos, and contradiction beyond human control).
For Monbiot to make such a silly blanket generalisation about poetry, and for Lucas to repeat it, seems to me indicative of something more than just the use of a lazily provocative generalisation. What worries me is that, as a rhetorical habit, these are a milder variation on the kinds of generalised provocations used by Bolsonaro, Trump, Farage, and their kind. The same kind of generalisation, in the last analysis, as Trump’s absurd claim that all Mexicans are: “drug dealers, criminals, and rapists”.
To be fair to Lucas, she doesn’t simply take Monbiot’s claim as given. She goes on to modify its sentiment so as to criticise what she sees as the effect of the ‘strong elegiac theme running through much of the literature of the English countryside, a mood of loss, mourning what has gone instead of fighting to protect what is left’ (p. 154). Again, I can’t really quarrel with the sentiment behind that view. However, the index of Lucas’ book lists ten references to the nineteenth-century poet John Clare, whose work she claims to admire as reflecting the insights of an ‘agricultural labourer with an intimate knowledge of the realities of rural life’ (p. 129). So how does she square her admiration for the poetry of John Clare with Monbiot’s characterisation of poetry as “one of the greatest threats to life on Earth”? I don’t believe she can, in which case it’s plain silly to use that click-bait quotation.
In an interview with Monbiot in Green European Journal , December 2022 the interviewer raises Monbiot’s generalisation about poetry: ‘you mean that our societies are clinging to a “ridiculous fantasy” of country life [which I presume is a phrase quoted from Monbiot], including the beauties of sheep and cattle herding’. To which Monbiot responds: ‘We have a real problem here that our perception of food policy is very dominated by aesthetics, by poetry, by pictures’. I don’t doubt that many people in the UK have a misplaced perception of the countryside, in no small part the result of a host of complicated historical and cultural factors. These include the war-time propaganda based on an ideal English rurality absorbed by my grandparents’ and parents’ generation, the way literature is traditionally taught in British schools, children’s books and, yes, the aesthetics of photographs, paintings, films, television, and advertising. But to simply dismiss the resulting perceptions as a “ridiculous fantasy” seems to me, at best, wildly patronising and, at worst and in terms of the psychosocial changes we urgently need to make, not just unhelpful but profoundly counter-productive. One question this begs, however, is just who do Monbiot and Lucas take to be their readers?
I suppose, as a lifetime member of the Green Party, I am one type of person they can reasonably expect to read what they write. My commitment to the Greens means that I understand and support both a good many of the changes they call for and, as it happens, share Lucas’ distrust of traditional elegiac pastoral themes. But that doesn’t mean I’m ready to accept silly, and ultimately dangerous, blanket generalisations. And I very much doubt I’m alone in this.
My view of Monbiot’s claim that “we” (?) have a serious problem in that “our” ‘perception of food policy’ is ‘dominated by aesthetics, by poetry, by pictures’, is that it’s underlying reductivism and negativity is informed by an attitude what Rebecca Solnit long ago identified in As Eve Said To The Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art (2001). It’s a book I constantly return to because, as its title suggests (and like her earlier Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Hidden Wars of the American West), her understanding of issues of land and environment is firmly intersectional and inclusive. It’s for that reason that it includes her thoughts on why traditional Leftist thinking often has trouble with aesthetics including, that is, both poetry and beauty.
Solnit argues that Western culture has had a problem with beauty ever since: ‘Thomas Aquinas disposed of it by asserting that the beautiful was the same as the good, which meant that it had no extramoral, no autonomous power at all’. This view was reinforced by the medieval notion that beauty ‘is mutable and therefore false’ (p. 83). These medieval notions connect in a number of ways to Monbiot‘s generalisation about poetry. One is suggested by Solnit’s understanding that those on ‘the Left would like to deny beauty as a motivating force altogether’ because they want to ‘deny the power of form and embrace content alone – as though the two were separable’. Like medieval moralists, many on the traditional Left seem to link formal beauty in the arts ‘with a corrupt seductiveness’ that might gain ‘power over us rather than we over it’. And here she goes on to identify what I take to be a fundamental issue. Many on the traditional Left enlist science and reason against what they see as the reactionary, emotional, irrationalism of Right-wing demagogies. They want not only ‘to reside in the rational space of the head’, but to weaponise an authoritarian view of reason itself. That inevitably opens them up to the implicit fear that to ‘be seduced’ by art ‘is to be reminded that there are things stronger than reason, than agenda’. A fear that haunts those on the Left animated by a vision of power where ‘authority is the desire to have the last word, to close the conversation’ (pp. 83-84). It’s on this basis that I think we should understand Monbiot’s hostility to poetry. That hostility would then be, at root, a fearful response to the fact that aesthetics, poetry, pictures, etc. have the power, in Solnit’s words, to keep the conversation open, to encourage us, where necessary, to ‘start all over again and again’ (p. 84). Poetry can be, in short, a challenge to the notion of “scientific” reason as a guarantee of authority.
Monbiot claims to have read over 5,000 scientific papers before writing Regenesis. I can’t help thinking it’s a pity he’s not also read more widely. For example, Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory (1995) might have helped him understand something of the historical complexities and paradoxes that inevitably underpin environmental debates. It might even have helped him to have read more widely in the scientific literature. Of particular relevance here would be the work of the cognitive scientist and linguist George Lakoff. Lakoff is author of More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (1989) – written with Mark Turner ‘in the service of helping the study of poetry function to promote ethical, social and personal awareness’ (p. 214); The Political Mind (2008), which explores how underlying “framings” influence political debate, and the paper ‘Why it Matters How We Frame the Environment’ (2010). Unlike Monbiot Lakoff, a Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, understands that poets are craftspeople who ‘use basically the same tools we use’ when we speak or write, in particular in their use of metaphor as a form of thought that is ‘indispensable not only to our imagination but also to our reason’. He argues that poets, by using ‘capacities we all share’, are able to ‘illuminate our experience, explore the consequences of our beliefs, challenge the ways we think, and criticise our ideologies’ (1989: p. xi). The value of Lakoff’s work to a journalist or politician turned author would be, at the very least, that it demonstrate why progressive political arguments based on “objective”, “scientific” reasoning are simply not sufficient to change peoples’ minds. But I suspect, having read Lakoff, that Monbiot is too wedded to his belief in the absolute, “scientific” rightness of his own standpoint to genuinely listen to anyone who would challenge or critique his views.
I won’t attempt to summarise the many-stranded argument of The Political Mind here. What I can say is that my concern about Monbiot’s underlying attitude is that while he argues for what he sees as environmentally-sound social and political actions, he all-too-often does so using a rhetoric framed by what Lakoff calls the values of ‘The Strict Father Model’. There’s often nothing wrong, other than his over-emphatic emphasis, with the scientific content of Monbiot’s writing. My problem with it is that his rhetorical assumption of moral righteousness and unwavering belief in his own ability to identify the real sources of evil – anything from Welsh sheep to all the other “greatest threats to life on Earth” he’s named over the years. Underlying assumptions and a self-belief that belong to a mindset grounded in a strict, patriarchal, religious morality that can easily shade into totalitarianism.
As Simon Schama reminds us, writing about the management of woodland under the Third Reich, it’s ‘painful to acknowledge how ecologically conscientious’, and how heavily committed to conservation of the natural environment more generally, the Nazi regime actually was (p. 119). My point being that an absolute commitment to radical Green values is not incompatible with a totalitarian mentality. As Schama points out, the militant wing of Green politics struggles with ‘the normal processes of representative democracy’ because it sees its cause as ‘a revolutionary contestation with bourgeois capitalism for the fate of the earth’ and, in consequence, craves ‘the authority to impose salutary solutions’ for what it presents, not unreasonably as ‘a crisis of paramount importance’ (p. 119). My concern is that, if we care about the fate of the earth and are to find some way to address the “wicked problems” we now face, we will need to find ways of arguing our case that avoids a tacit endorsement of authoritarian attitudes, the greenwash of bourgeois capitalism, and the blind denial of environmental realities adopted by Right-wing demagogues.
To do that we’ll need to be clear that the strict, ultimately authoritarian, paternalism that in different ways frames both radical authoritarianism and right-wing demagogy is best contested by fostering a progressive Green ‘politics of empathy’ predicated on ‘protection, empowerment, and community’ (Lakoff, 2008: p.81). Lakoff argues that narratives ‘are brain structures that we can live out, recognise in others, and imagine, because the same brain structures are used for all three kinds of experience’ (p.93). If an individual or group constructs a self-identity based on internalising the Strict Father Model, he or they are unlikely to listen to, or empathise with, the narratives that are of vital importance to others because, like the Strict Father, they will be convinced that they know best. The result is then likely to be first withdrawal from debate and, ultimately, violent confrontation.
In Monbiot’s case, his insistence that he can and must argue so as to ‘close the conversation’ is underpinned by his belief that his arguments contain the scientific content makes his case incontestable. What this insistence has meant is that, when he tries to put his ideas into practice in contexts where others frame the values of landscape and memory differently, things inevitably go wrong. This happened with his attempts to substantially “re-wild” the Welsh uplands. (See my posts on this blog from 08.03 2022). The problem of a rhetoric based in an unacknowledged “Strict Father” framing, and in particular its implications for any hope of achieving real change, are at the heart of what lies behind my concern about Monbiot’s silly generalisation about poetry.
Of course I fully acknowledge that, for Monbiot and for those Greens for whom he can do no wrong, all this will be an irrelevance, a distraction from winning the argument set out in Regenesis. That being the case, it’s important to add that none of what I have written above means that I dispute the broader trajectory of that argument – namely that we need to radically change how our food is produced. Rather, my concern is that Monbiot’s argument is undermined by underlying assumptions about himself and others, including his contempt for those whose view of country life he dismisses as a “ridiculous fantasy”. That it’s possible to propose alternative routes towards similar ends to Monbiot’s, but without evoking contempt for the historical situation of ordinary people or their attitudes, is suggested by a book like Colin Tudge’s Six Steps Back to the Land (2016).
In short, my argument here boils down to our needing to better understand, and then to resist, evocations of the “Strict Father’ framing mentality, whether we encounter them in the generalisations of a “man of the Left” like Monbiot or of the Right-wing demagogies he quite rightly criticises. Engaging with poetry is, in my view, just one way in which we can help ourselves do both those things. The “how and why” of that claim is the subject of the second part of this essay.