What Are You Willing To Sacrifice?

Issue Nine: The Understory

Aug 30, 2020

British Columbia, and for that matter, North America seemed on the brink of a political shift that many had thought was impossible. It was May 2009 and Gordon Campbell had just been re-elected to his third term as Premier of BC (for U.S. readers, think of the position like a state governor). The noteworthy moment was not so much Campbell’s re-election but rather that his party had led the adoption of a broad, consumer-based carbon tax the year before—the first of its kind in North America. Environmentalists and economists celebrated Campbell’s re-election as proof of the electoral viability of pricing carbon emissions. But as Shane Gunster tells the story in Self-Interest, Sacrifice, and Climate Change : (Re-)Framing the British Columbia Carbon Tax (2010), the carbon tax was “less a symbol of an emerging ecological consciousness and more an example of the imposition of an unwarranted policy on an unsympathetic public.” British Columbians perhaps would have been willing to personally sacrifice to reduce greenhouse gas emissions had they been asked.

Instead of requesting British Columbians to shoulder the financial burden of the carbon created from their consumption, Campbell’s party proposed a revenue-neutral tax wherein the government would not keep any of the tax revenues for itself (estimated to be $1.85 billion in the first three years), nor invest it in clean energy, mass transit or other carbon-reducing infrastructure. Instead, they would return all the money to taxpayers in the form of personal income tax cuts, business tax cuts, a low-income refundable credit, and a $100 climate action dividend.

Carbon Tax by Christopher Porter (Shared by CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

From the moment the tax was announced, opposition grew from 52% initially to 64% opposed five months later. This could have been the moment that Campbell’s administration shifted the dialogue from revenue neutrality to environmental benefits. Instead, Premier Campbell issued statements like:

“This is the first tax in the history of the country that I’m aware of where all of the revenue is being used to reduce other taxes. . . . Every family in British Columbia is going to be ahead of the game at the end of this year in terms of tax" even if they were unable or unwilling to reduce their carbon consumption.

Rouge le Fou by Percy (Shared by CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Gunster believes the refusal to invoke the language of personal sacrifice in the framing of the carbon tax was largely responsible for its hostile reception and the hardship framing that befell the policy discussions. The Campbell government cultivated a narrow frame of personal self-interest rather than a broader frame of collective action as a vital response to meeting the greenhouse gas reduction targets by 2020. According to Gunster,

“Framing the BC carbon tax exclusively in terms of its financial benefits to individual taxpayers primed a self-interested value orientation that tends to make people less, rather than more, likely to both support environmental policies and adopt sustainable lifestyles.”

It seems preposterous that a government would roll out a significant piece of environmental legislation without connecting it to any of the environmental justifications for the policy. But that is exactly what the Campbell administration did under the premise that the carbon tax would shift behaviour without a platform for greater consciousness. And so rather than the carbon tax being a referendum on the willingness of British Columbians to personally sacrifice for a healthier planet, it became an issue of personal taxation with no clear environmental benefit. Opinion research found that if a causal link had been established between personal sacrifices and the environmental public good, the public would have endorsed carbon-reducing investments over income tax cuts.

Considering that few of us are responsible for framing policy decisions, what is the lesson for most of us to take-away from the BC carbon tax story? Should we be willing to accept a premium on our purchases for the environmental damage caused by our consumption? Does it matter whether that something is considered a life necessity such as food or electricity versus non-essential consumables such as the latest tech gadget or a holiday flight? What are we willing to sacrifice to have the kind of world that we want to live in, and how should that sacrifice be manifested in our everyday decision making, actions, and finances?

The science is clear that we need to alter our profligate lifestyles to avert drastic consequences from climate change. While I generally resist financial measurements as motivation for deepening our care for the living planet, if we are going to ask people to shoulder new financial burdens in exchange for a more liveable future, understanding the financial sacrifices should be at least part of the conversation. According to the research by Burke, Davis & Diffenbaugh published in Nature (2018), even if nations were to all meet their commitments under the Paris agreement, we’ll still see global temperature rise by two-and-a-half to three degrees Celsius which would result in a 15-25% reduction in per capita output by 2100. Are we willing to sacrifice a healthy planet and rising global inequality for the pursuit of perpetual short-term growth?

In this issue, I’d like to take a closer look at the concept of sacrifice as it relates to our relationship with each other and the natural world. Rather than centring the sacrifice on what we are willing to give up, I am interested in looking at what can be gained in sacrifice personally and collectively. Mitchell Thomashow suggests that instead of framing sacrifice as a dismal process of self-restraint and loss, sacrifices can help us to live in a state of grace. And in that state we can find deeper meaning for what we sacrifice and strengthen our connection to each other and the living planet.

Sacrifice Hiding in Plain Sight

Some of us are privileged to face a crisis of abundance. We continuously upgrade ourselves and the objects around us. We credit ourselves for making “sacrifices” by choosing the cheaper or more environmentally responsible versions of foods, hard goods, vacations, and cars. We spend countless hours weighing various choices of what to consume rather than the more vital decision of when we should be consuming at all. We know that this cyclical refreshing does little to increase our overall happiness, while further degrading the health of our environment. As John M. Meyer and Michael Maniates write in their essay, “Must We Sacrifice?: Confronting the Politics of Sacrifice in an Ecologically Full World” (2010),

“The assumption that citizens are willing to forgo current prosperity for future gain rests on the rather implausible belief that most of us are wholly content with our lives and the society within which we live now. Only in this circumstance would we experience any change in our consumption or our behaviour on behalf of the environment as a net and intolerable loss.”

If we are not wholly content, why is there such resistance to meaningfully sacrifice for others and a healthier environment? In her essay, “The Sacred and the Profane in the Ecological Politics of Sacrifice” (2010), Karen Litfin describes how in secular modernity it is not as though sacrifice has disappeared but rather that it has gone underground. Litfin describes “shadow ecologies” whereby our consumption has become distanced from the consequences of global supply chains. We have become blind to what and who is being sacrificed. When we consume tropical hardwoods, rare earth minerals in our tech gadgets, coffee, and chocolate, we do so largely or completely unaware of sacrifices made by a global underclass and the earth in order to support our consumption. Sacrifices have been concealed by design—wrapped in marketing and plastics so “consumers can live at a comfortable distance from the effects of their consumption” says Litfin.

Sacrifice as Connection

While we individually understand and subconsciously make sacrifices every day, sacrifice has lost much of its meaning to the contemporary late capitalist consumer. We have Adam Smith (or interpretations of Smith) at least partially to blame. As Anand Giridharadas writes in “The Win-Win Fallacy” (2018), Smith convinced us that the selfish pursuit of prosperity “takes care of everyone just as well as actually attempting to take care of everyone.” In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Smith wrote:

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.”

In “What Did Adam Smith Say About Self-Love?” (2006), Robert A. Black seeks to clarify that Smith’s encouragement of self-interest is not necessarily at the expense of others (needless to say the environment). Smith was convinced that self-interest would lead to higher levels of labour productivity, which would create a more cooperative society with higher standards of living. Benevolence would be lovely if it happened, but Smith did not find it necessary for a well-functioning economy, vibrant communities, or a healthy living planet.

So it should come as no surprise that we are now experiencing a crisis of meaning in our capitalist culture—whereby benevolence is an indirect and largely forgotten attribute of a culture built on self-interest. According to The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, sacrifice is defined as:

“The surrender of something valued or desired, especially one’s life, for the sake of something regarded as more important or worthy, or in order to avoid a greater loss, reduce expenditure, etc.”

Sacrifice creates a values hierarchy where something else has greater worth than what is being surrendered, i.e. taking mass transit instead of a personal vehicle to reduce personal GHG emissions. This concept recalls the theme of interconnectivity in Issue Seven: if we have lost a sense of sacredness in our culture, particularly as it relates to nature, how do we know to what ends we are willing to give something up for it? We are experiencing not just a collapse of meaningful sacrifice, but a cultural crisis of meaning.

Liftin reminds us that historically sacrifice has been “a life-affirming perspective that is rooted in a cosmology of interdependence that understands people as an integral part of a participatory universe.” This is the context for most historic cultures who practiced ritual sacrifice. For example, a central Mesoamerican belief was that the Universe was sustained due to the continued sacrifice of the gods. In turn, the Aztecs and other cultures felt a sense of indebtedness to the gods and would sacrifice in order to prevent significant environmental changes that would be detrimental to sustaining life more broadly.

Sacrifice as Relationships

If you’ve begun to embrace the worldview that nature is filled with gifts that bring about reciprocal relationships, it will not be a stretch to connect sacrifice as a gift-giving act itself. Sacrifices of significance are those done on behalf of someone or something far bigger than ourselves such as the preservation of nature. And in that act, our choice to surrender or forego something for someone or something else creates a relationship of reciprocity.

In her essay “The Real Power of Generosity” (2015), Sharon Salzberg writes that generosity is far more than just giving something up. The power in generous acts, or acts of sacrifice for our discussion, is the letting go. “It is in that choice to dissolve that we carry ourselves to greater freedom” relates to a principal tenant of the Buddhist tradition in how we might find greater joy and self-respect. True sacrifice is in its own way a gift not just to something or someone, but also to ourselves. We become bound to wider circles of identification that can create the kind of meaning lacking in the lives of many.

In The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World (1983), Lewis Hyde explores a different paradigm outside market economies whereby gifts become the currency of choice and create a vast decentralized society. Hyde is compelled by Marcel Mauss’s idea of three interrelationships created by exchanging between parties: the obligation to give, to accept, and to reciprocate. Mauss described sacrifice as a “total social phenomenon...a paradigmatic engagement of the material, the organic and bodily, the psychological and political in a wider choreography of social form.” Hyde uses the metaphor of a flowing river to describe a society based around the concept of gifts, whereas in a market system wealth becomes concentrated in stagnant pools. By imagining a society where gifts are continually in motion, we can start to envision a broader culture of meaningful relationships where the giver and the receiver are continually nourished by the gifts of each other. In this culture, psychological and social interdependence become foundational to modern life (Litfin).

Sacrifices of Freedom Summer Volunteers

Bob Moses - Freedom Summer by Princeton Public Library (Shared by CC BY-NC 2.0)

In Issue Eight, I drew parallels and distinctions between the civil rights movement and the climate change movement which I would like to continue here. Approximately one year after the Birmingham campaign, over 1,000 volunteers came to Mississippi to participate in Freedom Summer. The volunteers spent ten weeks creating new relationships by first sacrificing their comfort and safety for something more important than any of them individually: the right of Black Mississippians to vote. The volunteer program sought to expand the civil rights movement in Mississippi, and simultaneously register as many African-American voters as possible in the state. Even though African Americans constituted more than 1/3rd of the Mississippi population, only 6.7% of eligible African Americans were registered to vote.

I should qualify that the sacrifices of the Freedom Summer volunteers represent only a small fraction of individual sacrifices made during the civil rights movement. The reason I chose to investigate the Freedom Summer volunteers specifically is to better understand what conditions compel individuals from outside a movement to sacrifice themselves for a larger cause despite significant dangers.

For his book Freedom Summer (1988), Doug McAdam researched the experiences of the volunteers. He sought to better understand who the volunteers were before arriving in Mississippi, and who they became as a result of their time there. McAdam’s research found that the volunteers were “reformers rather than revolutionaries, liberals rather than radicals.” Volunteers were sons and daughters of financial comfort and in many cases significant wealth. As McAdam described the situation, “some of the least privileged persons in America were to play host to the offspring of the most privileged.” Many hailed from Ivy League schools and 90% were white. Only 22% of the over 1,200 applicants held full-time jobs; the rest of the applicants were spared the need to work because of their affluence. So why were over 1,000 people compelled to leave their lives of privilege and comfort to live in one of the poorest parts of the United States undertaking work of immense danger?

McAdam reminds us that Freedom Summer was during the Sixties when “large numbers of people began, through their choices, to challenge all manner of longstanding social, political, and cultural arrangements.” The Summer was within an atmosphere of “widespread optimism.” John F. Kennedy’s speeches frequently challenged youth to consider personal sacrifices through significant terms of service abroad, eventually culminating in his inaugural address: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” McAdam assesses that the courage and confidence of the volunteers was both a product of their time, but also of their privileged backgrounds:

“Among the most important byproducts of class advantage is the psychological heritage that normally accompanies it. Of special interest here is the sense of personal efficacy or felt mastery over one’s environment that often characterizes that who are economically well off...Persons in the upper classes do tend to have more control over their environments than those in the lower classes…They are more apt to experience their world as malleable and themselves as master of their fate, than are those who are well off.”

The volunteers knew that Freedom Summer would be dangerous, even if they couldn’t comprehend the full scale of the danger that lay ahead. While some of the questions in the SNCC volunteer application were standard, others such as “List the names of people to contact for bond” and “List your arrests: give place, time, date, charge, status of case” indicated this was an application form unlike any others the volunteers had likely completed. On the CORE Application, an open-ended question asked prospective volunteers to explain why they wanted to work in Mississippi. Here are some snippets from their longer answers:

“I feel that I must help. There is so much to do, so many barriers between men to be broken, so much hate to overcome.”

“This is not a struggle to be engaged in by the mere liberal, but the zealot, for the liberal can’t be counted on to make the sacrifices required.”

“Now I, too, am impatient and will act, because for too many years I have been passively waiting...Next year in the insulation of graduate school, I begin the lengthy study of medicine, dedicated to the alleviation of human suffering. Such ethical and intellectual dedication, without any bodily commitment, rings hollow, however, and is surely of no avail in the struggle against intransigent injustice in Mississippi.”

“The fight for Civil Rights—is the most significant challenge and the most crucial war my generation will ever be called to fight.”

McAdam noticed a similar idealism between many of the applicants, and, perhaps even more importantly, an optimism that these values could be realized through a generational mission in which they shared. He also discovered that through their roles as teachers and canvassers their sacrifices provided a foundation for ongoing sacrifices over the coming years. McAdam linked these volunteers to leadership roles in subsequent movements for women’s rights, gay rights, and the anti-war movement amongst others. The volunteers found greater freedom in choosing to dissolve their self-interests.

Of course, the volunteers were not the only ones sacrificing themselves. Black Mississippians were also putting themselves at great risk for the cause, as voting in Mississippi was sure to be met with hostility and in many cases even brutality. The very act of preparing oneself to correctly answer the 21 questions on the registration form, interpret 285 sections of the state constitution, and vote were dangerous acts that could only be justified by the importance to the collective. To give you a sense of the personal sacrifices, McAdam found that over the ten weeks of the Freedom Summer:

1,062 people were arrested (out-of-state volunteers and locals)
80 Freedom Summer workers were beaten
37 churches were bombed or burned
30 African American homes or businesses were bombed or burned
4 civil rights workers were killed (one in a head-on collision)
4 people were critically wounded
At least 3 Mississippi African-Americans were murdered because they supported the civil rights movement

While there was no assurance that their sacrifices would yield broad political change when volunteering, just one year after the Freedom Summer, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It helped eliminate legal barriers at the state and local levels that were preventing African Americans from exercising their right to vote as guaranteed under the 15th Amendment.

Conclusion

What we describe as an environmental crisis is a “creeping megacrisis—mass extinction of species, unprecedented climate change, unsustainable resource depletion, and myriad pollution dangers,” says Karen Litfin. While sacrifices for our children, family, colleagues, employers, or even ourselves are ubiquitous in our culture, they are often hidden in plain sight. These underground sacrifices in a secular culture often fail to cultivate new relationships of cascading reciprocity. The research of Shane Gunster and others show that sacrifice can be justified and even willingly embraced when it corresponds to a moral stance. But devoid of moral framing and the value to the collective, individuals will be left to analyze sacrifice from the lens of personal self-interest—closing rather than opening doors to the greater sacrifices needed in order to mitigate climate change and other societal challenges.

Sacrifices can forge new types of relationships founded on shared obligations rather than traditional market exchanges of value. A society in which gifts of sacrifice are being continually given for causes larger than ourselves builds psychological and social interdependence. By connecting our sacrifices to the change that we hope to see in the world, we not only carry ourselves to greater heights, but also bind ourselves in relationships of reciprocity with others. Collectively that web of sacrifices becomes stronger and more significant in affecting change.