'The Examined Life' helps understand our inadequate response to climate change

Robert McLean

 

Not for moment, I suspect, did Steven Grosz ever imagine that his long career as a psychoanalyst would result in ideas that could be applied to combatting climate change.

The Examined
 Life.

Grosz has told the story of his 25-years as a psychoanalyst and more than 50 000 hours of conversation into a slim book, “The Examined Life” and in doing that helps us understand why our response to climate change falls well short of what is needed.

He writes: “And research has shown, again and again, that when we do move, we follow old habits. We don’t trust emergency exits. We almost always try to exit a room through the same door we entered”.

Beyond Grosz’s findings, is the clear, and similar view, that most of us are not so much troubled by a new idea, rather we are conflicted by abandoning what it is we know.

There-in lies the trouble, humanity has wounded our climate through its addiction to habits that have reached their pinnacle since the Industrial Revolution and even though it is clear that the maintenance of them could end civilization as we know it, we refuse to take Grosz’s “emergency exit”.

An excerpt from “The Examined Life” recently appeared in the New York Times.