View from the couch: Why we don't give a hoot

[Guest guest]

>From the Los Angeles Times

 

If only gay sex caused global warming

Why we're more scared of gay marriage and terrorism

than a much deadlier threat.

 

By Daniel Gilbert

Daniel Gilbert is a professor of psychology at Harvard

University and the author of " Stumbling on Happiness, "

published in May by Knopf.

 

July 2, 2006

 

NO ONE seems to care about the upcoming attack on the

World Trade Center site. Why? Because it won't involve

villains with box cutters. Instead, it will involve

melting ice sheets that swell the oceans and turn that

particular block of lower Manhattan into an aquarium.

 

The odds of this happening in the next few decades are

better than the odds that a disgruntled Saudi will

sneak onto an airplane and detonate a shoe bomb. And

yet our government will spend billions of dollars this

year to prevent global terrorism and … well,

essentially nothing to prevent global warming.

 

Why are we less worried about the more likely

disaster? Because the human brain evolved to respond

to threats that have four features — features that

terrorism has and that global warming lacks.

 

First, global warming lacks a mustache. No, really. We

are social mammals whose brains are highly specialized

for thinking about others. Understanding what others

are up to — what they know and want, what they are

doing and planning — has been so crucial to the

survival of our species that our brains have developed

an obsession with all things human. We think about

people and their intentions; talk about them; look for

and remember them.

 

That's why we worry more about anthrax (with an annual

death toll of roughly zero) than influenza (with an

annual death toll of a quarter-million to a

half-million people). Influenza is a natural accident,

anthrax is an intentional action, and the smallest

action captures our attention in a way that the

largest accident doesn't. If two airplanes had been

hit by lightning and crashed into a New York

skyscraper, few of us would be able to name the date

on which it happened.

 

Global warming isn't trying to kill us, and that's a

shame. If climate change had been visited on us by a

brutal dictator or an evil empire, the war on warming

would be this nation's top priority.

 

The second reason why global warming doesn't put our

brains on orange alert is that it doesn't violate our

moral sensibilities. It doesn't cause our blood to

boil (at least not figuratively) because it doesn't

force us to entertain thoughts that we find indecent,

impious or repulsive. When people feel insulted or

disgusted, they generally do something about it, such

as whacking each other over the head, or voting. Moral

emotions are the brain's call to action.

 

Although all human societies have moral rules about

food and sex, none has a moral rule about atmospheric

chemistry. And so we are outraged about every breach

of protocol except Kyoto.

Yes, global warming is bad,

but it doesn't make us feel nauseated or angry or

disgraced, and thus we don't feel compelled to rail

against it as we do against other momentous threats to

our species, such as flag burning. The fact is that if

climate change were caused by gay sex, or by the

practice of eating kittens, millions of protesters

would be massing in the streets.

 

The third reason why global warming doesn't trigger

our concern is that we see it as a threat to our

futures — not our afternoons. Like all animals, people

are quick to respond to clear and present danger,

which is why it takes us just a few milliseconds to

duck when a wayward baseball comes speeding toward our

eyes.

 

The brain is a beautifully engineered

get-out-of-the-way machine that constantly scans the

environment for things out of whose way it should

right now get. That's what brains did for several

hundred million years — and then, just a few million

years ago, the mammalian brain learned a new trick: to

predict the timing and location of dangers before they

actually happened.

 

Our ability to duck that which is not yet coming is

one of the brain's most stunning innovations, and we

wouldn't have dental floss or 401(k) plans without it.

But this innovation is in the early stages of

development. The application that allows us to respond

to visible baseballs is ancient and reliable, but the

add-on utility that allows us to respond to threats

that loom in an unseen future is still in beta

testing.

 

We haven't quite gotten the knack of treating the

future like the present it will soon become because

we've only been practicing for a few million years. If

global warming took out an eye every now and then,

OSHA would regulate it into nonexistence.

 

There is a fourth reason why we just can't seem to get

worked up about global warming. The human brain is

exquisitely sensitive to changes in light, sound,

temperature, pressure, size, weight and just about

everything else. But if the rate of change is slow

enough, the change will go undetected. If the low hum

of a refrigerator were to increase in pitch over the

course of several weeks, the appliance could be

singing soprano by the end of the month and no one

would be the wiser.

 

Because we barely notice changes that happen

gradually, we accept gradual changes that we would

reject if they happened abruptly. The density of Los

Angeles traffic has increased dramatically in the last

few decades, and citizens have tolerated it with only

the obligatory grumbling. Had that change happened on

a single day last summer, Angelenos would have shut

down the city, called in the National Guard and

lynched every politician they could get their hands

on.

 

Environmentalists despair that global warming is

happening so fast. In fact, it isn't happening fast

enough. If President Bush could jump in a time machine

and experience a single day in 2056, he'd return to

the present shocked and awed, prepared to do anything

it took to solve the problem..

 

The human brain is a remarkable device that was

designed to rise to special occasions. We are the

progeny of people who hunted and gathered, whose lives

were brief and whose greatest threat was a man with a

stick. When terrorists attack, we respond with

crushing force and firm resolve, just as our ancestors

would have. Global warming is a deadly threat

precisely because it fails to trip the brain's alarm,

leaving us soundly asleep in a burning bed.

 

It remains to be seen whether we can learn to rise to

new occasions.

 

Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times