The Ostrich Effect: Right wingers threatened by reality are putting their heads in the sand

When I was grow­ing up dur­ing the Cold War, liv­ing with the specter of nuclear con­flict, sci­ence fic­tion hor­ror movies were a form of escapism from real-life dan­gers. “Inva­sion of the Body Snatch­ers” and “The Day the Earth Stood Still” were my favorite, while Godzil­la pro­vid­ed the scari­est moments on screen.

In a 1965 piece enti­tled “The Imag­i­na­tion of Dis­as­ter,” writer Susan Son­tag argued that such flicks made real dan­gers seem mun­dane, ”incul­cat­ing a strange apa­thy con­cern­ing the process­es of radi­a­tion, con­t­a­m­i­na­tion and destruction.”

A look at today’s world evokes the Armaged­don wor­ries we used to occa­sion­al­ly hear from Ronald Rea­gan. Forests and fields are burn­ing from Chi­na to British Colum­bia to Greece. Sea­wa­ter tem­per­a­tures off the Flori­da Keys have climbed above one hun­dred degrees Fahren­heit — the hottest ever mea­sured. Glac­i­ers are melt­ing and floods have struck such once-serene places as Ver­mont.

The “absolute­ly over­whelm­ing” evi­dence of glob­al warm­ing is everywhere.

“Euro­pean and North Amer­i­can tem­per­a­tures would have been vir­tu­al­ly impos­si­ble with­out the effects of cli­mate change. In Chi­na, it was more than 50 times more like­ly to hap­pen com­pared to the past,” Izidine Pin­to of the Roy­al Nether­lands Mete­o­ro­log­i­cal Insti­tute said Wednes­day, report­ing on results of a glob­al weath­er study.

How can this be ignored, e.g. by Rupert Mur­doch’s FNC, or denied even by likes of Don­ald Trump? The answer is the “Ostrich Effect.” Its name is tak­en from the long-necked bird renowned for alleged­ly putting its head in the sand to escape dan­ger. The dan­ger dis­ap­pears, at least in eyes of the ostrich. (Actu­al­ly, ostrich­es flop to the ground and lie still when they can­not escape.)

Ostrich tac­tics will nei­ther stop nor slow cli­mate damage.

No reas­sur­ances from Cliff Mass will bring back the melt­ed Ander­son and Lil­lian Glac­i­er in the Olympics. Nor will bring a win­ter snow­ball onto the Sen­ate floor keep D.C.’s heat index from climb­ing about 100 degrees Fahren­heit in summer.

But the Ostrich Effect is hav­ing wide appli­ca­tion across a wide spec­trum of social, polit­i­cal and envi­ron­men­tal issues. If you are white and do not like being told of the his­to­ry of slav­ery and white racism, par­tic­u­lar­ly if you are the gov­er­nor of Flori­da, you ban teach­ing it in schools and universities.

If you find peo­ple who iden­ti­fy as LBTQ+ unset­tling, you remove books from the library that dis­cuss them. You ban drag shows that make you feel threat­ened. If a pan­dem­ic threat­ens to hit, you claim the pro­tec­tion of “nat­ur­al immunity.”

If you do not like being remind­ed of gun vio­lence, as the coun­try aver­ages more than one mul­ti­ple shoot­ing each day, you out­law the track­ing of gun injuries and deaths by agen­cies that mon­i­tor pub­lic health.

Of course, too, if you lose an elec­tion, go into denial and say it was stolen. Claim, as do Trump and Kari Lake, that “every­one knows” that you won. So what if the facts are not with the Ostrich Effect, because that is the beau­ty of it. Facts don’t mat­ter. It solves every prob­lem — at least for you and your fel­low deniers.

In her essay, Son­tag described escapism of the Cold War era with the words: “We live under con­tin­u­al threat of two equal­ly fear­ful, but seem­ing­ly opposed, des­tinies: Unremit­ting banal­i­ty and incon­ceiv­able terror.”

Sci­ence fic­tion was deployed “to lift us out of the unbear­able hum­drum… into dan­ger­ous (fic­tion­al) sit­u­a­tions which have last minute hap­py endings.”

The “Ostrich Effect” is not mak­ing for hap­py end­ings in today’s world. Instead, it is fuel­ing a bat­tle for the nation’s soul – to use Joe Biden’s phrase – between those who face real­i­ty and oth­ers who con­jure up “alter­na­tive facts.”

The lat­ter see a world of demons that includes cli­mate sci­en­tists, any­one they con­sid­er their polit­i­cal oppo­si­tion, and much of the med­ical profession.

Cli­mate dam­age will not bring about the end of the Earth or the ter­mi­na­tion of life on earth. Our world will still be here. The globe will keep spin­ning. But human­i­ty’s addic­tion to fos­sil fuels may make much of it unrec­og­niz­able and unin­hab­it­able, espe­cial­ly for the gen­er­a­tions to come that we’re bor­row­ing this plan­et from.