The Apocalypse and the Alienated Man
The threat of climate change challenges ideas at the very heart of western masculinity. That’s a good thing.
Photo by Bjørn Tore Økland.
Men aren’t doing too well. They are getting hooked on pharmaceuticals, committing suicide, and dying of despair at ever-increasing rates. There is an existential void at the center of the modern man, and people are lining up to explain it. Among the first in that line is Jordan B. Peterson.
The New York Times best-selling author, noted carnivore, and unexpected hero for lost boys proposes that men are alienated because male traditions have been lost. For those unfamiliar with Peterson, his popularity can be baffling. He is a grim and humorless figure, and his YouTube lectures run for hours. His speeches are riddled with allusions to Nietzsche and Jung, yet they manage to rack up millions of views. Nobody would sit through his content for entertainment value alone: there is something in what he’s saying, specifically something that speaks to young who men feel purposeless and idle.
Peterson’s ideas are a hodgepodge of group psychology, folk mythology, and reactionary politics: he thinks women distract men in the workplace, the archetypes of masculinity presented in Disney movies are indicative of universal truths, and young men would be happier if they cleaned their rooms. Oh, and he thinks we won’t solve climate change and shouldn’t even try.
In a bizarre exchange, a student at the Cambridge Union asks Peterson if combating climate change might be a unifying crusade for humanity, one that could give us a sense of collective meaning in divisive times. The student’s well-articulated and thoughtful question is met with a simple “no,” followed by jeering and applause from the audience.
When the audience quiets again, Peterson elaborates on his response by saying that “we have no idea what to do about it.” He then says solving climate change would prevent action on alleviating child malnutrition, argues that Germany’s green transition was unsuccessful, and does the verbal equivalent of throwing his hands up. In his response he cites the work of climate “skeptic” (read: denier) Bjørn Lomborg, the only “expert” referenced in Peterson’s response.
Of course, none of the claims in Peterson’s answer are true. What should be done is crystal clear. Improving climate by regrading soils, planting more food in urban areas, and not feeding caloric surplus to methane emitting livestock could both reduce emissions and dramatically improve child nutrition, but it’s clear Peterson isn’t interested in facts. Watching the clip, one is struck by the condescension and speed with which he dismisses the question.
The science should be easy enough to accept, especially for someone who dismisses feelings and claims to champion facts, reason, and rationality. As with most dichotomies though, the separation between facts and feelings is not a clean one. The fact that we are on the brink of species collapse makes people feel scared, feel sad, and feel guilty. By the same token, many of the causes of climate change are a result of emotional realities: our desire for the comfortable lives fossil fuels have so far given us, and the desire to provide abundance for our families and friends. It’s not shocking that men broadly, and Peterson’s followers specifically, shy away from seriously engaging with feelings they fear might undermine their claim to a “rational” view of the world.
This kind of emotional shut-down is anathema to what needs to be done to prevent species collapse. Finding the resolve to fight climate change often requires accepting the full weight of fear, anger, and anxiety that comes with recognizing the crisis. But the fight also has to be fueled by a sense of hope. After all, there’s little meaning to be found in fighting a battle that there is no hope of winning, and knowing how bad the odds are makes us feel vulnerable. As Mary Annaïse Heglar points out, people have to decide that earth is worth saving to do anything about it. That is often an emotional judgment more than a judgment of rationality.
It’s not just the daunting emotional element that is preventing the alienated male from grappling with climate change. It seems that simply acknowledging the fact of the crisis poses a threat to these men’s very identity. A recent study found that conservative white males are more likely than any group in America to endorse denialist views. The question is why, and what can be done about it?
Conservative ideology is one of tradition. Traditional family structures, traditional gender roles, and the traditional economic order, which today is industrial capitalism, rooted in a patriarchal, feudal agrarianism. This traditional system has benefited the conservative white male more than anyone else. This is by design, not by accident, and by the narrow logic of immediate self-interest, white male faith in this system makes sense. To accept global warming is to accept that these models of organization—in the family, between genders, and in the workplace—have massively contributed to ecological breakdown.
The causes of climate change are in part the result of a certain idea of masculinity, and the potential solutions run counter to that world view. Man as Peterson imagines him is fundamentally in conflict with the natural world, and climate change is just another expression of this primordial struggle. Men, in Peterson’s view, were made to dominate nature. The hunter spearing a predator and the president nuking a hurricane are the same fantasy, one of technology neutralizing a natural threat. A crisis that can’t be overcome by domination is threatening to this view.
Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, two postmodernist philosophers that Peterson would detest, argue that this narrative—the rugged individual forcing nature into submission through the might of his reason—became dominant during the Enlightenment period. “What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings,” they wrote in Dialectic of Enlightenment. “Nothing else counts.”
Peterson does not believe in collective responsibility. In his worldview, and that of most contemporary American conservatives, it is every man for himself. Peterson’s view is that individuals have personal problems they “generally avoid by adopting pseudo-moralistic stances on large scale social issues so they look good in front of their friends and family.” This is a perverse distortion of reality and a sad way to see the world. Ironically, the rejection of collective meaning and the dismissal of deep social bonds as mere posturing is part of what alienates these men and makes them turn to Peterson’s gospel in the first place.
Domination requires hierarchies. It atomizes people. The boss is alone because he has dominated his employees, the husband is alone because he has dominated his wife, and the young man is alone in his room watching Jordan Peterson videos because he has been dominated and atomized by late capitalism.
Climate breakdown is caused by viewing nature as a set of resources for us to extract. Our leaders still believe in infinite growth on a finite planet, even the ones that gesture most visibly towards environmentalism. Psychologists Jonas Anshelm and Martin Hultman suggest that masculinity as we understand it today is tied to faith in industrial modernity. To question whether fossil fuel powered industrial modernity is good is the same as questioning if masculinity is good.
The process of extracting resources, burning fossil fuels, and depositing the waste has been directed almost completely by men. Men controlled the economic and governmental hierarchies that gave birth to industrial modernity, they went out and dug the coal, and they brought home the bread as a result. Being a man, in the traditional sense, means getting to the top of these structures, or at the very least benefitting from them.
The male dominated structures of contemporary society (which, by the way, Peterson deems natural because lobsters do them too) have driven the planet to drought, floods, hurricanes, armed conflict, melting ice sheets, forest fires, and expanding diseases. Men, it seems, would rather die than admit there are forces that are stronger than them. At a deeper level, a man who wants to do something to combat climate change has to find a place for himself in society outside the one that has been so carefully constructed to forward his self-interest. What’s at stake for men who haven’t found that place isn’t a coral reef or a few glaciers, it’s the status quo of industrial patriarchy.
The solutions to climate change, like its causes, don’t fit the archetype of man in conflict with nature either. What’s needed—solar panels, trees, and regraded soils—don’t fit into the myth about man and nature being fundamentally oppositional. These solutions envision a harmony, instead of opposition, between man and the natural world.
This plays out in measurable ways. In one study, “Male participants were exposed to two gift cards—one that used more comically feminine design elements like pink and floral selected to threaten stereotypes or another gift card that was designed to not threaten stereotypes. The men were then asked to make a series of choices between green and non-green products to purchase. Men who were shown the ‘gender threat’ gift card chose more non-green products than men shown the other gift card.”
The fact that a pink floral gift card threatens someone’s masculinity enough for them to make real world choices that harm the environment should show us what is going on. Jordan B. Peterson and his ilk are not saying they don’t believe in climate change, they’re saying they are too insecure to do something about it.
If there is going to be a non-toxic world, then many men will have to be less toxic. Preservation and protection, instead of domination and extraction, may offer another model of how to be a man, one far more fulfilling than raging at women for wanting equal pay. To plant something and watch it grow, or to be a guardian of natural places, is one of the most satisfying possible pursuits.
There is no throwing a spear at global warming, and nuking a hurricane only gets you a radioactive hurricane. The way people interact with nature will have to change on a fundamental level.
The story of human progress as a continuing story of domination and industriousness in the face of hostile natural conditions is one that global warming makes problematic. If industrial society really were as great as Peterson says, it wouldn’t be leading us towards species collapse.
Peterson has put his finger on something-- the loss of meaning for men that Peterson has diagnosed is a real issue. But even if the good doctor has the diagnosis (partially) right, he’s botched the cure. Feminism’s radical challenge to the way we understand gender may indeed be deeply disturbing and destabilizing to the hierarchies young men hope to ascend. In the same way, climate change destabilizes a lot of the mythology that made old masculinities seem noble. But to try to uphold these hierarchies is absurd at best and dangerous at worst.
There is a better way to be a man, a masculinity more suited to the Anthropocene. There are men, real men, finding meaning in harmony with nature. They don’t see themselves in opposition to nature, but as a part of it. There’s Chico Mendez, the Brazillian Rubber tapper who was assassinated for protecting the Amazon. There’s Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, a nineteen year-old Indigenous activist who is part of the monumental Juliana vs. United States case to recognize a habitable environment as a human right. And there’s Masanabu Fukuoka, the pioneering farmer and author of One Straw Revolution. These are male role models for the Anthropocene. What they have in common is a reverence for nature, a skepticism of Enlightenment domination narratives, and a desire for a more harmonious existence with other life on earth.
Peterson thinks people fight for social issues to avoid personal responsibility, but the opposite is true. What could be a bigger abdication of responsibility than doing nothing in the face of an existential threat? Of course this comes with discomfort. Writing this, as a man, puts me in the uncomfortable position of having to do some self-examination.
I’m angry that my future has been stolen from me, and as a man I’ve been allowed that anger. Flare ups have been an acceptable, even encouraged, part of my person: playing on sports teams, watching TV, reading the news-- my daily life gives me unfettered opportunity to express that anger. I have a right to be angry at the fossil fuel executives and the oil and gas CEOs that are letting the planet melt for profit.
It isn’t enough, though, for me to be just another angry man. I have to be empathetic for the victims of the climate crisis. I have to be caring for the earth and all the people engaged in this fight for survival. I have to be joyous that I am a part of nature, and acknowledge my vulnerability. To fight the climate crisis, I have to be a better man.
Ismail Ibrahim is a freelance writer, landscaper, and a host of the podcast Holocene Nostalgia. He tweets @Ish_Ibrahim_1.
Congratulations! You’ve made it to the end of a delightful article, if we may say so. You can help make more of these by donating a small amount to The Trouble. Most of your money goes directly to paying authors. None of it goes to profit or advertisers, because we are a non-profit and we don’t believe in that stuff.