The Moderate Flank's new name and our work since November

Author

Climate Majority Project
March 09, 2023

Hello friends,

After our last update what we used to call the moderate flank has ripened, and the community around it expanded and consolidated itself. It’s a dynamic beginning.

Since November we:

  • have decided on a new name, Climate Majority Project.

  • Launched the website

  • held our second gathering, on truthfulness

  • appeared in various media channels

  • are organising a third gathering on Inner Work that will take place on the weekend of March 10 in Bidston, Liverpool

  • engaged in market research on the moderate flank. There will be a call debriefing this on March 22 from 3:30pm to 5:00pm. Join us via this zoom link!

  • selected a new fundee - Wildcard.

  • have been made contact with lots of people who are trying to find their place in this wave of emergent serious mainstream climate action

  • Are in the late stages of assembling a book exploring the forming majority for mainstream serious climate aciton

  • have refined our theory of change and written a second version of it. You can read the ToC 2.0 here. If you would like to discuss it with us, grappling with it in greater depth, we will be hosting a call for this on March 20 at 7:00-8.50pm. Here is the zoom link to access it.

  • Additionally our co-directors Liam Kavanagh and Rupert Read are co-organising a residency on big-picture thinking (Apr 5 - May 2) with Victoria Wilding that will help participants fit their own personal efforts into a broader time of transition white allowing time for remote working. It is open for application by anybody. For more details see later in this email or the residency website.

  • Rupert Read will be a guest facilitator at “The Edge”, a 4 day retreat with our HEART Community Group collaborators (May 7-10) which is free of charge apart from room and board at Hunton Park, Hertfordshire, England. Find more details through the above link or at the bottom of this email.

New Name

We have decided on a new name The Climate Majority Project, which grew out of the suggestion “Climate Majority” which was one of the names suggested by people such as yourself (credit Adam Woodhall) and tweaked by our branding consultant Karina Korol. Climate Majority resonated for many in consultations held by our working group. However, that name could feel a little grandiose or premature, as our group does not fancy itself as the voice of the majority, and we don’t think a majority is ready to make serious action happen, now. The Climate Majority Project signals that we aspire to help form a majority that is concerned and organised enough to drive transition. It got such positive feedback from early testing that we decided to go with it. Our assessment of web traffic reveals that we will be able to be found easily in short order. We have reserved the domains climatemajorityproject.earth and climatemajorityproject.com.

Gathering on Truthfulness

Apart from being a welcome opportunity to meet each other and deepen connections, our gathering on truthfulness addressed the importance of communicating not merely what we understand to be literally true, but how to speak in such a way as to make it easier to be heard.

How do we convey urgency without offputting alarmism? How to help people be part of a community that hears the truth? This is rooted in a wider effort to communicate to the majority of climate concerned citizens who are not at home in the activist space.

Our group discussions raised the question of how much truth we must tell in order to have the integrity concerned citizens expect. Climate is not a stand alone issue, but neither can we share a perfect analysis of the overall social situation. Speaking truthfully also means having an honest understanding of how much trust you can ask of your audience. Starting a truthful back and forth discussion will yield more results than stating one’s own perspective authoritatively. Feedback from the meeting greatly affected our website and launch strategy, including the wording of our four pillars, that now we call truthfulness, resilient culture, pragmatic action, and shared understanding and strategy.

Wild Card

The latest recipient of support from the incubator is Wild Card:

Wild Card works to convince the UK’s largest landowners to address the climate and nature crisis by ambitiously rewilding. Their long-term vision is to see 50% of the country rewilded. Restoring our landscapes and biodiversity, amongst other things, is important in absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. One of their initiatives is the Rewild the Royals campaign, which has already gathered more than 100,000 signatures petitioning the Royal family to rewild their extensive properties and advocate for climate action, the latter being something King Charles has already publicly signalled concern for.

XR’s mainstream shift

XR’s “we quit” statement at the beginning of the new year begins to acknowledge that at the moment, as civil disobedience is increasingly punished by the government, blatantly disruptive protests are not nearly sufficient in establishing a mass surge of ambitious climate action.

We have often been asked what our take on this move on behalf of XR will be and whether or not we will be joining the April 21 protests. Following an internal deliberative process, this is the MF incubator’s response.

Media

Here are the latest month’s articles and media appearances:

Third gathering

Here are several reasons for this gathering that have found broad consensus across several group discussions:

 

  • Experienced activists see emotional challenges of climate action as very important, while these tend to be given short shrift in public discussion. If we are going to challenge this highly counterproductive trend, it will require some work at the outset.

  • This work will be especially challenging for people who work in demographics where therapy and support groups are not commonly used, so it is extra important to get communication challenges sorted out early.

  • People organising in these challenging contexts need support themselves, earlier rather than later.

  • People from demographics that are unusual among climate activists tell us that their climate awareness is an especially lonely experience.

  • We think the space for psychological work around climate has matured and could use a concerted campaign to publicise it. Supporting legislation might even be passed. This is potentially a hugely useful action that the moderate flank could do now.

  • We should concretely prepare for the fact that people we are drawing into climate action will have inner challenges that need addressing, such as:

    • A feeling that they can or should personally, fix the problem.

    • Manic work that will quickly result in burnout.

    • Savior complexes (infrequent, but highly disruptive)

    • A needing to have “the solution” and then disruptive conflict with others who have another answer (very frequent).

If you want to read a more nuanced document on our thought process regarding inner work for a climate aware majority, click here.

More on the Saving the World (Together with Everybody Else)

Democracy cannot work without intense discussion and moral imagination of possibilities that nobody can make real, so isn't our aversion to understanding the big picture a major reason why so many now think our world now needs “saving”? The trick is to see and imagine ourselves as something larger, rather than as the people who must change everything. This is not a fantasy, as we’re living in a time of change when searching podcasts for obscure perspectives has become a fairly mainstream activity. Millions of people are dreaming of a better world, right now as you read this.

The dismissive attitude towards big discussions was a hallmark of post-modernity — defined by acceptance of lives that we don’t believe in. The next cultural era is starting as business-as-usual, politics-as-usual, and thinking-as-usual have lost their aura of invincibility. Come and join us in preparing for your perspective, imagination and emotion for the exciting times ahead!

Emotionally, we will also prepare ourselves to be open-minded with embodied practices and bohmian dialoguing. We will deal with the resistance to imagining a better world because this creates disappointment with life as it is. The ideal participants will be looking to use the conversations to help fuel their own decisions about how they personally will be part of something larger.

Facilitators

The residency will be facilitated by Life Itself co-founder, Liam Kavanagh and Victoria Wilding.

Liam Kavanagh

Liam is a cognitive and social scientist and co-founder of Life Itself, and co-director of the Climate Majority Project a climate organisation devoted to spreading consensus for serious climate action across cultural boundaries. He draws on cogntive scientific, meta-modern theory, contemplative practices, and collective wisdom to navigate the tensions that immobilise cultural imagination. His book with Perspectiva "beyond the shadows of the enligthenment" explores how to move past the dogmas around over-rationality, individualism and moral superiority by addressing their emotional roots rather than trying argue with them.

Learn more about Liam and his work here.

Victoria Wilding

Victoria is an evolutionary activist with a particular interest in advancing human development. Her focus is on the development of a new level of psychological management and its importance to facilitating large scale systems change. She believes humanity needs to consciously and intentionally develop their social, emotional and cognitive capacities to envision and build systems that serve all life on the planet.

Victoria is most well known for her breakthrough work synthesizing practice and knowledge around presence and meta-systemic cognition. She is quick to get to the core of an individual’s thinking and facilitates deep understanding, new perspectives and innovative solutions.

While Victoria brings enormous and credible knowledge and experience to the table, her real magic exists in her presence. Victoria is wildly irreverent, fun, and always a straight shooter. She has an unparalleled ability is to get right to the heart of a matter with profound compassion and breathtaking clarity.

Learn more about Victoria and her work here

Questions – To be questioned, changed, and added to by participants.

Big Questions:

World Care:

  • As the climate change and biodiversity crises become too obvious to ignore, is the time ripe for a new politics that can help to address larger issues and unite a polarised society?

  • How can a widespread cultural movement toward a saner balance of having and doing (emphasizing things and accomplishments) with “being” (appreciation of life and finding content) be built.

Self Care

  • How can we work for social transformation without falling into a delusional “messiah complex” taking the weight of the world on our shoulders? Is messianism an outcome of pathological individualism?

  • Likewise how do we use reason without “fixing”? Is fixing an outcome of inflated belief in our intellect?

  • Can daily imaginative awareness of ourselves as part of something larger address our feelings of smallness?

  • How do we draw motivation from our moral imagination?

Some “Smaller” questions:

  • Can political identity be (re)built around pragmatism and integration of different viewpoints?

  • How can we understand scepticism towards opinions of “elite” middle-class urban educated people who dominate environmentalism (and likely are most of our participants), and ask what we need to do to be more trust-worthy.

  • Why do we need to plan for a movement towards slowing down and appreciating what we have (“just being”)?

  • How do we find synergy between global warming, "poly-crisis" and prosocial culture change?

  • Is “worldwide awakening” really a viable strategy?

  • Being realistic about the gravity of climate and biodiversity predicaments and the political inaction behind them v. The need for optimism. Not being bound either by the myth of certain progress or trapped by opposition to it.

  • Maintaining commitment to social justice on the world stage without becoming immobilised by hopes and demands for unattainable perfect climate justice.

  • Taking advantage of improved technology while not simply depending on technology and market forces to achieve transition.

We will set the big questions together, and the rules. The important principles that will be used are:

  • Building understanding together rather than competing to be in the right.

  • Listening deeply and responding to what people actually say, steelmanning not strawmanning.

  • Respect for the importance of the intellect, and humility about its limits.

  • An ideal of free discussion between skilled conversationalists, who do not need to be bound by rules because of their grace and skill, and a pragmatic acceptance that rules are often helpful because none of us are perfectly graceful or skillful.

  • Experimenting with various methods of discussion.

Some examples of world saving questions are below. Which ones we explore will be negotiated among participants.

  • How do we address polarisation?

  • How can we address global warming?

  • How can we promote recognition of the value of all life?

  • How do we address the massive economic equality, racism and historical injustices that are rife across the globe?

  • How can education be done much better?

  • How can societies be happier and live in harmony with each other?

  • What is consciousness and will changing attitudes towards it change civilisation?

The principles of this residency

We will respect the importance of the intellect, while also trying to be pragmatic and humble.

  • Accepting the importance of “the life of the mind”, even if it is exaggerated in our culture.

  • Asking questions that matter to the joy and suffering of living beings.

  • Realising that thinking about big questions should be a responsibility in a democratic society, even if it is in practice a privilege accorded to few. (see below for more on these points)

  • Not being ashamed of big words and complex ideas, while not being indulgent.

  • Accepting that intellectual indulgence is something real, but that throwing this or related terms around has a chilling effect.

  • Refraining from long lectures about anyone’s superior practicality.

We will do our utmost to have discussions that are really about getting somewhere together rather than scoring points.

  • Respond to things that others actually say, rather than what we would like them to have said, so that we can have a devastating argument.

  • Making sure we understand thoughts correctly, before contradicting them.

  • Having good taste about when we interrupt one another.

    • For example, somebody may “go on” too much. There’s no right answer about when to interrupt them, but there is good taste and bad taste.

  • Assuming that others mean the smartest things that they might mean, given the inevitably manifold interpretations of their words. (steelmanning)

  • Appreciating one anothers contributions, and diverse perspectives, especially their civility and even-handedness.

Having an ideal of free discussion between skilled conversationalists, who do not need to be bound by rules because of their grace and skill, while accepting that rules are often helpful because none of us are perfectly graceful or skillful.

Experimenting with various methods of discussion:

  • Bohmian dialogue where participants speak with mindfulness is one tool we will use.

  • So is good old fashioned civil “good faith” debate and discussion where sides promote opposing views but with respect, rather than adversariality.

We’ve all been there: the conversation turns to the big picture, what a wonderful world we could have if we could just set our mind to it? Why does the better world we imagine elude us? Why can’t we make it like this? Why is our society seemingly in disarray? The questions come fast and furious.

The Edge – A 4-day Retreat

This is a 4-day retreat for people who wish to inquire, in good company, into the questions:

  • So, what’s most important now?

  • What’s my ‘thread’ to pick up? How can I make a difference?

  • What does it mean to live well now? How can I tell a story of my life that I’m proud to tell – no matter what happens?

There are three threads we’ll weave together over the retreat:

Transformative Adaptation & Deep Adaptation

How can we prepare and adapt now for what might be a very different way of life?

Joanna Macy’s “The Work that Reconnects”

The central purpose of the Work that Reconnects is to help people uncover and experience their innate connections with each other and with the systemic, self-healing powers of the web of life, so that they may be enlivened and motivated to play their part in creating a regenerative and sustainable civilization. We will journey around a spiral of Gratitude, Honouring our Pain, Seeing with New Eyes and Going Forth over the days of the retreat.

The Three Principles of Mind, Consciousness and Thought

Sometimes called the Inside-Out Understanding, the game-changing insights to be seen here are truly profound and valuable for anyone wishing to navigate from love, courage, compassion, well-being, clarity and innate resilience. Regardless of what’s going on around us.

And of course, we’ll be drawing on our own individual and collective resourcefulness, creativity and wisdom.

“What I experienced over the four days changed my perspective and allowed me to understand that preparing for change as a community is as important as if not more important than fighting for it to happen by others. I came away with a sense of inner peace and strength that I can tap into to be resilient in the work I feel called to do and to help build resilience in others.”

Contact [email protected] to express your interest in reserving a place.