Plato’s Cave: Thinking about Climate Change

In The Republic, Plato explores the predicament of the Cave: a passive citizen body, a conniving and self-interested set of sophistic opinion-formers and demagogic political leaders, a systematically misleading and damaging order of political structures and common beliefs and appetites.

Does this have lessons for tackling climate change? In clinging to our current way of life and its fossil-fuel infrastructure, are we trapping ourselves in a modern version of Plato’s Cave—and if so, how might we escape?

https://www.gresham.ac.uk/sites/default/files/transcript/2024-06-13-1800_Lane-T.pdf

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1904814/15513345-plato-s-cave-thinking-about-climate-change-melissa-lane.mp3?client_source=small_player&download=true

REFERENCES

Aristotle and other Greek Thought: Texts and Scholarship

Allen, Danielle S. 2004. Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship After Brown v. Board of Education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Aristotle. 1984. Rhetoric, translated by W. Rhys. Roberts, in Jonathan Barnes, ed. The Works of Aristotle, Vol. 2: 2152–2269. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Lamb, Michael, and Melissa Lane. 2016. ‘Aristotle on the ethics of communicating climate change’, in C. Heyward and D. Roser (eds.) Climate Justice in a Non-Ideal World, 229-254. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lane, Melissa. 2024. ‘Experts in Politics: Lessons from Socrates and Aristotle’, Gresham Lecture delivered 30 May 2024: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/experts-politics. [Also relevant to Plato.]

Williams, Bernard. 2008. Shame and Necessity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Plato: Texts and Scholarship

Barney, Rachel. 2010. ‘Plato on the Desire for the Good’, in Sergio Tenenbaum (ed.), Desire, Practical Reason, and the Good, 34-64. New York: Oxford University Press.

Broadie, Sarah. 2021. Plato’s Sun-Like Good: Dialectic in the Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.

Lane, Melissa. 2011. Eco-Republic: Ancient Thinking for a Green Age. Oxford: Peter Lang [UK & Commonwealth edition]; 2012, Eco-Republic: What the Ancients Can Teach Us about Ethics, Virtue, and Sustainable Living: Princeton: Princeton University Press [North American edition].

Plato. 1997. Republic, trans. G.M.A. Grube, rev. C.D.C. Reeve, in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.

On climate change, scientific communication, ethics, and related issues

Allen, Myles, 2024. ‘A Just and Inclusive Net Zero: Who should get there first?’, Gresham Lecture on 21 May 2024: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/inclusive-net-zero.

Bok, Sissela. 1999. Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, 2nd Vintage Books edn. New York: Vintage.

Davey, Nicholas. 2011. ‘Philosophy and the Quest for the Unpredictable’, in Jonathan Bate (ed.) The Public Value of the Humanities, 303-12. London: Bloomsbury.

Douglass, Frederick. 2014 [1852]. ‘What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?’, in Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, ed. Blight, 368-73. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Fiske, Susan T., and Cydney Dupree. 2014. ‘Gaining trust as well as respect in communicating to motivated audiences about science topics’. Proc. National Acad. Sciences 111, Suppl. 4: 13593-7.

Hilzenrath, David, and KFF Health News, ‘Fauci Faces Congressional Committee over COVID E-Mails’, Scientific American, 3 June 2024: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fauci-faces-congressional-committee-over-covid-e-mails/.

Hulme, Mike. 2018. ‘“Gaps” in Climate Change Knowledge: Do They Exist? Can They Be Filled?’ Environmental Humanities 10: 330–37.

Kahan, Dan, 2010. ‘Fixing the Communications Failure’. Nature 463 (7279): 296-7.

Keohane, Robert O., Melissa Lane, and Michael Oppenheimer. 2014. ‘The Ethics of Scientific Communication under Uncertainty’. Politics, Philosophy and Economics 13: 343-68.

McNeill, John R. 2000. Something New Under the Sun: an environmental history of the twentieth century. London: Allen Lane.

Mouhot, Jean-François. 2010. ‘Past Connections and Present Similarities in Slave Ownership and Fossil Fuel Usage’. Climatic Change 105: 329–55.

Tufekci, Zeynep. 2024. ‘An Object Lesson From Covid on How to Destroy Public Trust’, The New York Times, 8 June 2024 Opinion: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/08/opinion/covid-fauci-hearings-health.html.

Wilkinson, Angela. 2010. ‘Beyond the Financial Crisis: The Oxford Scenarios’. Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford.

Williams, Bernard. 2008. Shame and Necessity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

FURTHER READING

On Aristotle and rhetoric

Barnes, Jonathan. 1995. ‘Rhetoric and Poetics’. In The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle, edited by Jonathan Barnes, 259-285. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Garsten, Bryan. 2006. Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Garver, Eugene. 1994. Aristotle’s Rhetoric: An Art of Character. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lear, Jonathan. 1988. Aristotle: The Desire to Understand. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

On Plato

Allen, Danielle S. 2010. Why Plato Wrote. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.

Burnyeat, M. F. 1999. ‘Culture and Society in Plato’s Republic’. In The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. 20, ed. Grethe B. Peterson, 217-324. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

Denyer, Nicholas. 2007. ‘Sun and Line: The Role of the Good’. In The Cambridge Companion to Plato’s Republic, ed. G. R. F. Ferrari, 284-309. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lane, Melissa. 2007. ‘Virtue as the Love of Knowledge in Plato’s Symposium and Republic’. In Maieusis: Essays in Ancient Philosophy in Honour of Myles Burnyeat, ed. Dominic Scott, 44-67. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rist, John M. 1997. ‘Why Greek Philosophers Might Have Been Concerned About the Environment’. In The Greeks and the Environment, ed. Laura Westra and Thomas M. Robinson, 19-32. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Wallach, John R. The Platonic Political Art: a study of critical reason and democracy. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001.

On climate change, scientific communication, and related issues

Cialdini, Robert B. 2001. Influence: science and practice, 4th edn. Boston and London: Allyn and Bacon.

Hulme, Mike. 2009. Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jackson, Tim. 2009. Prosperity without Growth: economics for a finite planet. Sterling, VA: Earthscan.

Leiserowitz, Anthony, 2006. ‘Climate Change Risk Perception and Policy Preferences: The Role of Affect, Imagery, and Values’. Climatic Change 77: 45-72.

Malka, Ariel, Jon Krosnick, and Gary Langer. 2009. ‘The Association of Knowledge with Concern about Global Warming: Trusted Information Sources Shape Public Thinking’. Risk Analysis 29: 633-647.

Markowitz, E.M., and Shariff, A.F. 2012. ‘Climate change and moral judgment’. Nature Climate Change 2: 243-247.

Moser, Susanne C., 2007. ‘More bad news: the risk of neglecting emotional responses to climate change information’. In Moser and Lisa Dilling, eds. Creating a Climate for Change: Communicating Climate Change and Facilitating Social Change, 64-80. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Olson, Randy. 2009. Don’t Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style. Washington, DC: Island Press.

Swim, Janet, Susan Clayton, Thomas Doherty, Robert Gifford, George Howard, Joseph Reser, Paul Stern, and Elke Weber. 2009. ‘Psychology and Global Climate Change: Addressing a Multi-faceted Phenomenon and Set of Challenges. A Report by the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on the Interface Between Psychology and Global Climate Change’. http://www.apa.org/science/about/publications/climate-change.pdf (last accessed 1 June 2024).

Professor Melissa Lane

Melissa Lane is the Class of 1943 Professor of Politics, Princeton University and is also Associated Faculty in the Department of Classics and Department of Philosophy there, as well as the Director of Princeton’s University Center for Human Values. Previously she was Senior University Lecturer at Cambridge University in the Faculty of History and Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge.

She studied for her first degree in Social Studies at Harvard University, and then took an MPhil and PhD in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, where she was a student at King’s College, supported by appointments as a Marshall Scholar, Truman Scholar, and Mary Isabel Sibley Fellow of Phi Beta Kappa. Having previously held visiting appointments at Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford, she will be Isaiah Berlin Visiting Professor in the History of Ideas in the Faculties of Philosophy and History at Oxford University, and a Visiting Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in Michaelmas Term 2024.

She is an author, lecturer and broadcaster who has received major awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship and Lucy Shoe Meritt Residency in Classical Studies at the American Academy of Rome. She has published widely in journals and authored or introduced nine major books including Greek and Roman Political Ideas; Eco-Republic; and Of Rule and Office: Plato’s Ideas of the Political.