The following is a paper that I wrote in a Politics and Religion course, it examines how Al Gore has effectively used a vice and virtue frame in "An Inconvenient Truth" and how this rhetoric has succeeded in the past and is the best approach to framing of the global warming debate. The paper was built upon James Morone's "Hellfire Nation," in which it is argued the rhetoric of vice and virture has been a recurring successful theme in American history. Victorians succeeded in using vice and virtue to pass prohibition while a social gospel was used to advance the New Deal and Civil Rights. In the following I argued that Al Gore and other environmentalists have brought the social gospel back into American public debate as they argue for agressive reforms to combat global warming.
In the late 1990s the Clinton Administration negotiated the Kyoto Protocol to create a strong international effort to limit greenhouse gas emissions in order to combat global warming. The treaty failed ratification by an overwhelming bipartisan margin in the United States Senate. Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe famously declared, "Could it be that global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? I believe it is (Moyers, 2006)." Following their failures to pass Kyoto and to rally public support behind a major initiative to combat global warming, environmentalists have begun to establish a deeply moral tone in discussing this issue. Lead by former Vice President Al Gore with his recent movie about global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, they are beginning to establish a new Social Gospel similar to that described by James Morone in Hellfire Nation, in order to rally the public behind major changes. This was a necessary change in rhetoric and may be the only hope for the action that is necessary to solve our climate crisis.
Morone discussed three fundamental elements of moral thumping that always hold true as an important part of this rhetorical style, though they are manipulated differently depending on whether the argument reflects a puritan narrative or a Social Gospel narrative. These elements are, laziness, substance abuse, and the threat of violence, all boiling down to what Morone terms "the most powerful sin," sex. Sex holds its power, according to Morone, for the challenge it poses to the most basic moral precept of Puritanism, "control thyself." These narratives are always present in a good case of moral thumping, blaming the sinner in the case of the Victorians, and blaming the social causes in the case of the Social Gospel (Morone, 16-17).
The Social Gospel shifted the focus of these elements. The sin of laziness was transformed into collective laziness, an unwillingness to work together to fix our problems. The sin of substance abuse was transformed into greed, and the threat of violence would come from social conditions or foreign powers rather than sinful individuals. This is evident from looking to the way Franklin Roosevelt framed his "New Deal" in the early 1930s.
At the heart of Roosevelt’s moral talk lay his utopian picture of a shared community. Roosevelt constantly pounded the selfish individual. He closed his first, hard fought reelection campaign by wearily telling supporters, ‘I should like to have it said of my first administration that the forces of selfishness...met their match.’ Instead he extolled mutual responsibility...
Eventually, Roosevelt’s little sermons took a predictable form, almost a formula. First invoke religion; in the next breath, turn to social conditions. Faith sets up economics. "We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals," Roosevelt said in his second inaugural address. ‘We know now that it is bad economics." Again, cheering his own first term: "The greatest change...has been the change in the moral climate of America." With this change came our rediscovered ability to improve our economic order (Morone, 354).
Roosevelt talked about the sin of laziness in terms of refusal to collectively act for the betterment of society. He changed substance abuse into "heedless self-interest," and the dangerous other who was threatening violence was transformed from the poor underclass to the economic state of the Country. The basic moral precept of "control thyself" was summed up by these three into the fundamental idea that individuals should not pursue personal wealth at the expense of others. Martin Luther King Jr. and others later seized upon the Social Gospel during the civil rights movement. The sins were similar to the ones set out by Roosevelt. Laziness was refusal to collectively act for the better social good, the substance was social injustice, and the dangerous other threatening violence was twofold, both the southern segregationists who violently fought the civil rights protesters, and the Soviet Union (Morone, 416-417).
This is the model that has been taken by Al Gore and others in their attempts to rally the public behind reforms in American energy consumption. The policy prescriptions are the same as they were during the Clinton era. Curb emissions by investing in clean sources of renewable energy, and enforce caps on factories and automobiles. In the new rhetoric that environmentalists have developed, the old puritan sins take center stage as they always have in the Social Gospel, laziness, substance abuse, and the threat of violence, once again all coming down to the precept "control thyself."
The sin of laziness in the Social Gospel, to reiterate, is a refusal to collectively act to solve our problems. Towards the end of An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore shows a graph of American carbon dioxide emissions today, where they have been in the past, and where they will be in a few years if nothing changes. He then shows a small piece of the future carbon emissions chopped off the block by taking a single very simple step, such as turning the lights off when leaving a room. Gore showed about four such steps for energy conservation which alone would stop the increase in carbon emissions and begin to reduce them. The message could not be clearer: there is no excuse for lack of action but sheer laziness and sloth. Gore used this scene to prove that we can all personally make big changes if we just try (Gore, 2006). Collective laziness is nearly always the chief sin in Social Gospel rhetoric. The challenge for environmentalists is to inspire people to take action. Al Gore sought to create that inspiration through his movie by shaming us into action, the steps are so simple, yet so many people will not do anything to reduce their impact on the planet; they are sinners for their laziness. Even the title leads to this idea of collective laziness as one of the chief sins afflicting our society, An Inconvenient Truth, suggests that we have ignored what good science tells us and have refused to act merely because its not convenient, Gore calls for an acknowledgement of this truth and collectively stepping up to fight it, instead of taking the easy way as we have been and ignoring the problem because its not convenient at the moment.
Opponents of action, including President Bush, have often pointed to dire economic consequences if we act (Martin, 2006). However, supporters have pointed to studies showing that action to stop global warming may actually improve the economy (Forbes, 2006). By demonstrating that the resulting technological advances will create good jobs supporters of taking a major initiative against climate change have found another way to frame opponents as lazy.
Americans are also committing the sin of substance abuse. Even the staunch opponent of legislating carbon emissions, President Bush, admitted in his last State of the Union Address, "America is addicted to oil (Bush, 2006)." The Sierra Club regularly puts out reports warning about the dangers of "gas guzzling" automobiles, bringing to mind an individual consuming far too much, and equating this to the use of gasoline in automobiles (Sierra Club, 2006). Just the images that environmental activists will put out to woo the public their way, bring drugs and alcohol to mind. The dirty, polluting smokestacks are easily equated to someone smoking tobacco, or even worse, marijuana. The parallel between global warming and substance abuse is easy to see and understand, even without thinking of it as a moral issue, it’s easy to equate fuel consumption with substance abuse. And just as prohibition prevailed in the 1920s, a prohibition on gasoline and emissions may soon follow.
The threat of violence is a twofold threat. First there are the dire warnings of what will happen if we don’t stop polluting. The second threat of violence is a byproduct of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Al Gore relies upon the first, showing the dire consequences of continuing on the same path, and demonstrating the science which tells us that catastrophes will happen. The dire warnings of stronger hurricanes, more deadly heat waves, and the flooding of coastal cities (among other things), are meant to shock the viewer into action. It is a vivid detail of the violence that will be reaped upon this earth if we do not act. Morone describes a similar "shock and awe" tactic from the abolitionist movement, when he discusses Theodore Weld’s book American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, which vividly described the physical abuses of slave owners and sought to shock its readers towards acting to end slavery.
In one section...Weld simply reprinted advertisements for runaway slaves; each ad featured the telltale physical marks by which the owners identified the runaways: "a woman much scarred by whipping"; "a Negro boy...much marked with the whip"; "I burnt her with a hot iron on the left side of her face... to make the letter M." The book was an antislavery sensation-it sold 22,000 copies in its first four months (Morone, 146).
Just as Weld sought to describe the horrors of slavery in the most shocking terms possible in order to rally support for abolition, Al Gore has done precisely the same thing by showing dire consequences of refusing to change our behavior.
The other threat of violence is a response to the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks. Tom Friedman recently described how Democratic Party strategists James Carville and Stan Greenberg of view energy independence as a political winner for the Democratic Party. Carville argued, "Energy Independence, its now the number one national security issue. It’s become kind of a joke with us, because no matter how we ask the question that’s what comes up." Friedman expanded upon the argument:
So does this mean the public would accept a gasoline or BTU tax? No, Greenberg said. The public wants government to impose much higher auto mileage standards on Detroit and much more stringent energy codes on buildings and appliances. People want a tough regulatory response, a la California (Freidman, 2006).
Perhaps the horrors of 9/11 have brought us to a place where energy efficiency is now taken far more seriously than it was pre-9/11. A similar context, argues Morone, set the stage for the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.
<blockquote?"If we were trapped in the dungeon of a totalitarian regime," King said, "we could not do this. But the great glory of American democracy is the right to protest." The cold war forms the crucial context for the entire movement... At every step of the civil rights campaign Americans would remind one another how this must look to the rest of the world (Morone, 416). </blockquote>
By the time the civil rights movement began, individuals such as McCarthy and Dulles had already established the Soviet Union as the world’s ultimate evil (Morone, 380-382). The civil rights protesters were able to seize upon this for a contrast, where they could fight injustice here and set their struggle in the larger international struggle for human dignity against one of the cruelest regimes in human history. The Soviets had no respect for justice and equality went the argument, so we should. Thomas Friedman’s argument is similar in that it takes the moral struggle of environmentalism and sets it as the thing that will win the great international struggle of our day, the war on terror.
The threat of violence requires a dangerous "them" on which to place our fears. In the second example of energy independence as a national security issue, the dangerous group is obvious, the terrorists. In the first example however, it is a little more difficult to place the threat in anyone’s hands in particular since the threat comes from Mother Nature, or God himself (depending on your perspective). However, during the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt preached a Social Gospel in which the sin was greed, and the blame for greed was placed squarely upon the wealthy, the "money changin’ racket boys," as Woody Guthrie would term them, equating FDR’s politics with Jesus Christ’s (Guthrie, 1945). As Morone puts it:
The American "them" had passed from the poor failures on the fringe of power to the greedy, who had grabbed too much. Their malevolent influence radiated from the top. "Sometimes a guy’ll be a good guy," sums up Tom Joad in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, "even if some rich bastard tries to make him [act mean]." The blame for American troubles lay not with the lazy poor but with the irresponsible rich (Morone, 357).
Just as during the Great Depression, much of the blame for pollution and environmental degradation has been placed upon the wealthy, who have exploited the planet for their own narrow self-interests. As a West Virginia woman with dangerously polluted tap water referred to the owner of the mining company and his large home atop a mountain, "To me its like he made a statement, you know, he’s God, god on the mountain, but he’s as close to God as he’s gonna get up on that mountain (Moyers, 2006)." The blame for pollution lies with the wealthy factory (or in the West Virginia example mine) owners who pursue their own narrow self-interest while destroying the planet and the lives of other human beings. She feels confident in saying that he will never get to heaven, because his sin is so great. As evangelical leader Richard Cizik put it, "I believe human beings are in jeopardy...this is about people (Moyers, 2006)." Cizik and others in the evangelical community are presented in a recent Bill Moyer’s documentary as a new breed of evangelical Christians who care about the environment. They have seized upon biblical morality in order to fight for better environmental laws, particularly regarding carbon dioxide emissions. They see it as an ultimate sin to put the earth and the other people on it in danger from climate change. Their involvement in the struggle has undoubtedly helped to shape the vice and virtue Social Gospel that now dominates the discussion.
Ranging from National Security hawks, to Al Gore, to evangelical Christians, advocates of energy reforms to combat global warming have taken on a decidedly moral tone in recent years. It may be the only way to convince the public to act towards this important issue. All the elements discussed by James Morone in Hellfire Nation are now strong parts of the new environmental rhetoric. There are the central vices of laziness, substance abuse, the violent enemies are emphasized by these new Social Gospel preachers. Gore and others saw the failures of the Clinton Administration to sell the American public as a failure of rhetoric, and they have sought to garner support using the best moral tools they can and have taken the message wherever they can. In fact, Gore says as much in An Inconvenient Truth, he felt his efforts in the past to deal with this issue had been a failure (Gore, 2006). Carville has taken it to the Democratic Party establishment anxious to appear serious about national security, Evangelicals have taken it to their churches, and Al Gore has taken it to anyone who will listen. If the campaign succeeds it will be thanks in no small part of the reformation of language that environmentalism has undergone since the failure of the late 1990s.
REFERENCES
- "Is God Green?." Moyers on America. Bill Moyers. PBS, 10 Oct 2006.
- Morone, James. Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History. 1st. New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2003.
- An Inconvenient Truth. Dir. Al Gore. Perf. Al Gore. Paramount Pictures, 2006.
- Martin, Mark. A global warming moment." San Francisco Chronicle 28 Sept 2006, print: A1.
- Oxford Analytica, "California Emmissions Law Spurs Reform." Forbes Magazine 19 Oct 2006:
- Friedman, Thomas. The Mandate in Waiting." Oregonian [Portland]10/14/2006, print: B4.
- Guthrie, Woody. Dear Mrs. Roosevelt. 1945.