Michel Alhadeff-Jones
Hello and welcome back. Today we are going to talk about the relations between our experience of time, identity, political belief and extremism. We are going to explore the connections between time and the narratives we produce to give meaning to the complexity of our existence. The need to be able to relate past, present and future is probably a core feature of the human condition, especially when people feel they evolve in a time of crisis or uncertainty. The narratives people develop to orientate and project themselves through the time of their existence and throughout history express as much their core beliefs as they translate their deep hopes and fears. Such narratives express who we are and how we compose our identity in a world perceived as uncertain. They become even more powerful when they explicitly relate to the end of the world. They carry a heavy political weight that influences the ways people envision what they can or cannot do. How can we better understand the connection between identities and narratives that grant people's relation to changes and transformations? How to interpret and articulate visions of apocalypse, discourses on collapsology and hopeful optimism? How to grasp the power dynamics that surround the production and the influence of such discourses? To discuss such questions, we have the privilege to welcome today Nomi Lazar and Andy Hom Nomi is professor of politics in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa in Canada. She writes about crisis from a number of angles, including emergency powers, constitutions, political legitimacy, rhetoric, temporality, climate emergency, conspiracy theories, and apocalyptic and utopian politics. Her research is supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the British Academy, where she co-leads with Keri, the global convening program, The Times of a Just Transition. In Canada, Nomi was appointed, in 2022, to the Public Order Emergency Commission's Research Council, and, in 2024, to the Foreign Interference in Federal Elections Commission. She's also served as an elected member of the University of Ottawa's governing board from 2021 to 2024. Nomi, thank you for being with us today.
Nomi Claire Lazar
Thank you very much for the invitation.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones
Our second guest is Andy Hom. Andy is a senior lecturer in international relations at the University of Edinburgh in the UK and an associate editor of the journal International Relations. His research interests include timing and time, security and international relations theory. He's the author of International Relations and the Problem of Time, and the co-editor of Moral Victories, the Ethics of Winning Wars, also Time, Temporality and Global Politics, and several special issues. His most recent work can be found in the international affairs, international relations, foreign policy analysis, renewal and international theory. Andy is currently working on a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship titled Temporal Struggles for Existence. Andy, it's a pleasure to welcome you today. Thank you for being with us.
Andy Hom
Thank you, Michel.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones
So, before diving into the topics I just evoked, could you both tell us a bit about the origins of your interest in the study of time in your respective fields? When and how did you realize that time was important in your research topics, and what do you find stimulating and critical about it?
Nomi Claire Lazar
Time came into my work from three different angles. First, I've always had a fascination with timekeeping devices. And, as an undergraduate, studied the history of science and technology and became quite fascinated by the role of advances in timekeeping and their interactions with the social circumstances of science, and particularly interested in the dialectic between how social circumstances would drive the development of new technologies and then those technologies would, in turn, impact social circumstances. Then a second thread was reading Machiavelli and coming to understand that what seemed to be a quite different approach to understanding politics and what politics was about, so, this sort of focus on glory in Machiavelli, for example, came from assumptions around how time moves. So, if you start from the assumption that states rise and fall, that there's a sort of a cyclic aspect to politics, then the values that you're going to prioritize are gonna be different from the values you prioritize if you understand political events as moving in a linear fashion. So, if you think the state's gonna fall anyway, you might prioritize glory as opposed to something like equality or liberty. So, there was that stream as well. And then what finally solidified my interest and led to me writing the book on Time and Politics Out of Joint was reading A Little History of Clocks and Calendars, that was a gift from a cousin of mine. And in the book, I realized that all the major calendar reforms had been undertaken by political leaders who were in the midst of chaos, so, revolution or some kind of upheaval or regime change. And it occurred to me, as a political scientist, that that's a pretty strange thing to do because at times of upheaval you have lots of different draws on your resources, and tweaking a calendar seems like a kind of a technical exercise that shouldn't be front and center. And the fact that it wasn't just one leader responding like this, but that we could see this pattern of playing with calendars all across different cultures, different time periods... Caesar, Augustus, every dynasty founding Chinese emperor, dynasty founders in classical Maya land, the French revolutionaries, Ataturk, Lenin, Stalin, I could go on all day. So, at that point you have to ask yourself, what political work is playing with calendars or playing with time doing? And that thread, sort of, what are the politics around this? Not just what are the theoretical aspects around it with respect to political thought or the history of science and technology, that kind of solidified everything for me and got me interested in how time interacts with the way events are described and thus the way they play out.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones
Excellent. you, Nomi. Andy, what about you?
Andy Hom
My interests grew out of a historical intellectual coincidence. I've just been sort of chasing it ever since. So, that was back in the late 2000s, when I had pivoted away from a failed career in product design and engineering towards political science and international relations, and I was trying to figure out what to write my master's dissertation about. And I was looking at sovereignty, which a lot of people have written a lot about. So, that was a bit daunting. And, for non sovereignty folks, it's just the idea that, you know, modern nation states are organized by territorially distinct and inviolable borders. While I was reading those histories, I kept noticing that the history of timekeeping would kind of flit in and out, if you will. And, so, I started chasing that a bit. And then I discovered that the era in which national territorial sovereignty arises is also the era in which precision clocks, as we now know them, or precision time pieces, are kind of finally mastered. This was a centuries long process. It was very difficult. It's easy to forget now because watches are so reliable and so mundane and inexpensive, relatively speaking. But nation states used to devote, you know, fairly significant sums in the form of awards to try to spur the development of a more reliable timekeeping piece. And by reliable, it has to sit on an ocean, on a ship at sea rocking back and forth with wild swings and temperature and humidity. And if it doesn't work or if it falters then, you know, because you need accurate timekeeping to calculate longitude, your distance traveled from east to west, you may end up somewhere other than where you were trying to get to as part of your colonial or imperial exploration and expansion. So, that was a thread and I just kept pulling on it, and before long it wasn't just longitude but it turns out that timekeeping and the politics thereof was vital to the rise of rail networks across industrializing societies. It used to be that if you caught a train in Cincinnati bound for Los Angeles, you would move through a dozen different local noons or local starting and stopping points. And you might need to have more than one timepiece to try to figure out when you might need to make your connection. It was not impossible, but it was very difficult. Timekeeping shows up in colonial discipline. It's one of the ways in which primarily white Christian and capitalist settlers impose discipline and try to remake native populations or indigenous populations in their image. Unifying the national time becomes part of what it means to be a nation. So, I think it's Bismarck who said, as Germany was going out of, know, dozens of kind of overlapping ⁓ sovereignties into one national state, said it was right and proper that if we were going to be one nation, we should have one time. And, so, now, instead of a bunch of local noon's, you get a single time zone for Germany. And then you get time showing up all over the study of war from the things like handing out mass produced wristwatches or pocket fobs in World War I, or the Great War, for the first time to help time those murderous charges over the trenches into no man's land, to the Schlieffen plan of the same war, which helps the Germans deliver a massive number of troops to the French border, but because they are maximizing railroad efficiency and the timing of this, there's no way for them to move back. So, the fact that they go to the border means they have nothing to do other than mill around and invade. So, I kept pulling and the thread kept getting longer and longer. And there's probably a time joke in there about how long is a piece of string at this point. But, at least, for my academic career, it's been 15 years or so. Time, to me, is fascinating because once you start looking for it, sometimes it's in hidden parts of politics, but sometimes it's right up there, right out there in the open, like the Khmer Rouge, you know, announcing that the first year of their reign in Cambodia was year zero, or the massive daylight savings time protests into legislative controversies that we see going on now, or things slightly more subtle like George H.W. Bush declaring a new world order during his presidency. That doesn't make sense without some kind of assumptions.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones
That's great because both of you already kind of introduced some key elements and I think some, very nice element of, of background. Nomi, you want to react?
Nomi Claire Lazar
Yeah, I just wanna add a couple of fun, illustrative anecdotes of some of the themes that Andy just brought up. So, first of all, with respect to the unifying time zones to make railroads easier, this was extremely contentious in Canada, in my home country, and I remember reading this anecdote in a 19th century text where, just after a little town in Ontario was put onto the standard time zones, a bar owner had refused to recognize the new time zone and had shut his bar at the legally required time according to the old sort of sun dependent time zone. And when the government brought charges against him for operating his tavern outside the allowed hours, the judge threw the case out saying that he refused to recognize that this legislation could actually overturn the authority of the sun itself. So, I always like that anecdote because it sort of raises this tension between these two artificial time measures, because, of course, the sun is also just a measure that we pick to count time. It's not time itself. It's a flaming ball of gas. So, I like that anecdote. And then just with respect to having a single unified time zone in a state and having that be politically significant, I always think about China, which has one time zone, and it's called Beijing Central Time, and that means that every hour, people in China hear the phrase, Beijing Central Time, and we can all just think about the kind of effect that has.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones
Thank you. That's enlightening. So, let's move on a bit with actually what each of you is working on currently. So, Nomi, was wondering if you could give us examples of extremist discourses that you've been studying and how they rely on specific rhetorics of time? You've already started introducing a bit how using calendars and reforming calendars is a way for people in power to assert their control. But, when it comes to extremist discourses, what can you tell us?
Nomi Claire Lazar
So, as I was writing the Out of Joint book, which looked at the ways political leaders can legitimate power and legitimate change, I looked at different kinds of temporal rhetorical frames. And what I mean by a temporal rhetorical frame is that there's an infinite number of events that take place. And when we tell stories about what's happening right now, we can pick from any of those events to kind of trace out an arc of this and then this and then this, right, our present moment, and, so, we can anticipate that these various things will happen next because these frames usually have sort of a set structure to them. So, we know the type of story, for example, an apocalyptic story, that things get worse and worse and worse, that there's impurity, that there's corruption, et cetera, and then there's sort of an explosive moment of purification and destruction that then leads to a timeless stretch of peace. And, so, that kind of story, for example, is the way that fairy tales often go. If we think about, "and lived happily ever after," right? So, there's this sort of rise in conflict, right? Things getting worse and more tense, then the explosive climax and then the happily ever after. So, we find that kind of structure in a lot of literature, a lot of film, et cetera. And, by the way, that structure is also visible across cultures. It seems to be resonant across cultures. And I can talk a little later about why that might be so. So, political leaders are sort of able to tap into these types of stories, these structures of stories, to help people understand what's happening by situating the current moment in a series of events that they pick out from this plethora of events and then suggesting what would naturally come next. So, that's what I mean by a temporal rhetorical frame. And while I was writing Out of Joint, I suggested that people are sort of more or less equally amenable to these different temporal frames, that people can resonate to these different frames. But after I finished the book, I started wondering whether, in fact, apocalyptic frames specifically might be different. For one thing, people tend to resonate with them a lot stronger. So, apocalyptic frames do tend to be associated with violence, for example, with people giving up everything and rejecting their families, giving away all their possessions, et cetera, to go and follow a movement. So, there is this aspect that people resonate with something much stronger than they would, for example, with a progressive frame. And the second is it does seem to be more selective. So, fewer people seem to accept apocalyptic stories. I mean, everybody enjoys them at the cinema or in novels, right? But fewer people seem to accept apocalyptic stories. And then the people who do, like, resonate with them more strongly, that raises this question, like, what is different? What is different about an apocalyptic?
So, that question was on my mind as I began reading about different kinds of extremism, et cetera, and it becomes quickly evident that most of the narratives that extremist political movements employ, regardless of whether they're religious extremists or secular, whether they're on the right or the left, do tend to use this apocalyptic frame. And people who study extremism, tend to get hung up on a few puzzles. So, for example, there's this weird thing where people who are left-wing extremists sometimes become right-wing extremists. So, first they're ready to give up everything, kill and die, for one set of ideals. And then suddenly, or maybe over the course of time, they're ready to give up everything, kill and die, for what seemed to us to be the opposite set of ideals. So, that's one big puzzle. Then there's the seeming irrationality of some kinds of violence that we find with extremist movements. So, I started to call this kind of violence intrinsic violence versus instrumental. So, some political movements use violence tactically to get attention, for example, or to make situations difficult for government to try to get what they want. But then there are other kinds of violence that seem counterproductive to political ends. It might seem to be violence for violence sake. So, this is what I call intrinsic violence, and that's another puzzle of extremist movements. Like why would people do this when it goes against their own political interests? So, those are a couple of the puzzles that I started to think about, and it seems to me that what's helpful about using the apocalyptic frame here to try to understand this is that if we focus on the structure of an apocalyptic story rather than its content, then it makes sense how an apocalyptic story can be satisfying to people regardless of its content. So, an apocalyptic story provides a sort of satisfying type of ending to a sense of things being out of joint or disordered. And, so, I started thinking of this as a kind of cognitive obsessive compulsive disorder. So, the way that some people can look at a desk that's messy, such as mine, and be kind of okay with that, that the world and the events in it are kind of chaotic. Sometimes we use ideology to try to make sense of things that are a bit chaotic and we can sort of live with that. But that there might be some people who just cannot stand, who can't deal with the chaos of events, who can't deal with the fact that things are always changing. They find it intolerable that it looks to them like someone has smashed all the plates but everybody refuses to notice. And, so, the apocalyptic type story provides this mode of trying to satisfy that feeling, to bring things to a final resolution that will create stability that goes on forever. And, so, if it's the structure and not the substance, then it makes sense that people can move from one movement to the other. What they want is resolution, and the content of the resolution is less important. So, that's one thing. And then with respect to intrinsic violence, it makes sense rationally from the perspective of creating order. So, if you think about Kant, for example, who argued that even if society was gonna dissolve, you would have to execute the last murderer first, right? So, it's the sense of sort of cleaning house that has to take place before order is restored.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones
Thank you, Nomi. It seems to me that there is a fair amount of points you are raising that I think connect with the Andy's work. Before to explore more in depth the connection, I'd like to hear you first, Andy, about what you've been working on. So, Andy, you have been working on right-wing extremism. And to prepare this episode, I read an article you wrote about Heidegger's existentialism and how it relates to what you call right-wing Renaissance. In this article, you discuss the relation between how people relate to time in their lives, existential anxieties, and right-wing extremism. Could you give us examples that illustrate how one's attitude toward the time of one's own existence is linked to extreme political belief?
Andy Hom
What I'm finding is that across a variety of what we might call global radical right-wing violence, it's not necessarily the specific substance of ideas, but rather the kind of action scripts which are existentially informed. So, it's the ways in which the people who conduct these attacks decide what must be done. And what must be done is quite often a mass casualty event often undertaken by a single or very small group of attackers. So, the specific content of the grievances can range from, you know, incelibates, which is involuntary incelibates, I should say. These are men who have come to believe that they have been denied their right to sort of casual or available sex by women and in some way that is actually violating, you know, their kind of status or their identity as real men. We see similar scripts for action in neo-Nazi attacks like the 2011 attack carried out in Norway, which is I think the worst terrorist attack in Norway's history. Certainly in recent memory, this is dozens of teenagers at a youth camp shot down plus multiple bombs near the Oslo City Center, but we also see it in phenomena that are much older like the white power movement. This white power movement, as we know it today, is coming out of the kind of return of Vietnam veterans and a lot of racial and economic anxieties or grievances that were stoked in the 1970s and you see the white power movement turning to a book called the Turner Diaries, which is all about a kind of fantastical set of racial grievances where the whole solution to the racial grievances is to stoke or foment a race war so that afterwards, you know, white Christians can live as they were always meant to. This is the logic of the book. So, what's interesting to me across those is, whether it's racial grievances or economic grievances or sexual grievances or political ideological differences, what all of the mass casualty attackers end up deciding, and I'm getting this from their manifestos or from the court transcripts or the kind of the interviews they've given, is that the only thing that they can do is to undertake a mass casualty event, which not only kills a lot of other people and destroys life around them, it often takes their life, not always, but often takes their life. And that's okay because what that moment means to them is that everything that has gone wrong in their life can be resolved in a single spasmodic destructive act, which also seals the meaning of their life as a kind of reaction against this. One of the very first in incelibate shooters in Los Angeles said, he mentioned anxiety over and over in this manifesto about kind of sex and about being a real man. And then he said, "I was left no other choice but to do what I did today, and in doing what I did today, I became who I really am." And that kind of phrasing is not so different from a variety of white power, mass casualty attackers. So, what's really interesting to me about this is that, without wishing to claim a direct intellectual lineage, the idea or the kind of logic that in doing one thing that is quite dramatic and violent, that you become not only who you are, but you give your entire life a sealed, settled meaning, is a lot like what philosopher Martin Heidegger describes as a temporal ecstasis, right? Which, if I can kind of loosely translate that, that's a temporal unity in which we reinterpret our past, we act in the present in a way that seals our future. So, again, it's a single moment where everything comes together and everything is settled forever after. I'm not wishing to claim in any way that any of the incelibates or right-wing radicals or turner-diary enthusiasts are also readers of Heidegger. As a reader of Heidegger, it's quite dense material. So, the puzzle I'm currently chasing is how did these ideas trickle down from or, I guess, spread out from Heidegger's very technical philosophy of time through existentialist thought and culture, and then down through several decades from Heidegger to the 1970s and onwards where we get people acting and talking like Heideggerians without, I suspect, having read Heidegger.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones
Thanks for those explanations. Keri, you wanted to jump in?
Keri Facer
Yeah, I mean, I just want to say I'm fascinated by both of these pieces, by both of your research and this sense of the search for clarity in some way. But I hear slight differences because on one level from Nomi, I hear the suggestion that the apocalyptic narrative is a moment of simplification, of reducing complexity to this kind of, that after this, this pure simplicity, this finished moment will happen. But Andy, if you're talking about what the phrase was, temporal ecstasis, is that maybe right? That sounded like a search for meaning. That sounded like a temporal intervention to create meaning. So, are these the same things or are they the same story that you're talking about through in two different domains, one the apocalyptic narrative, the other the kind of extremism, or is there a difference between those two framings? Maybe, Andy, I mean, where do you see the connection or the difference between your work?
Andy Hom
That's a great question, Keri. I wouldn't be prepared to deny or exclude that they might be variations on the same action script. But I do think there are some important differences, at least as I understand them, from the apocalyptic. For Heidegger, again, in the way in which his themes kind of resound through these attacks, you're absolutely right. It's about making meaning out of what is often felt to be a meaningless life or an anxious life or an unsatisfying life. One of the interesting parts is that both Heidegger and all of these right-wing shooters also say, "because I have successfully made this meaning, which I am confident and content is going to sum up my life in a way that I find, again, meaningful and sort of satisfactory, I'll let the chips fall where they may afterwards." Now, some of them commit suicide. The Norway shooter is in prison still. And what they've said is, you can't worry about the consequences. If what you have done made sense, then, you know, resolute, authentic commitment to that moment dictates that you simply have to accept the consequences. You can't feel bad if there's collateral damage. You can't feel bad if people who you weren't aiming at, you know, weren't intending to harm are harmed. And you also have to just accept if you are in prison for life or if you end up dying. So, whether that's the same kind of simplification or kind of settling of the whole story that Nomi's finding it, I'm not sure about yet. It's an interesting difference for sure.
Keri Facer
What do think Nomi?
Nomi Claire Lazar
I think you've raised a really interesting question there and I do see some interesting parallels with Andy's conception. So, I've been sort of focusing on the psychological discomfort and the notion that the time after the explosion kind of thing gives a sense of mental peace and mental order. It also matters that this is told in the form of a story, right? So, that ending doesn't just give psychological peace. It does give meaning to everything that came before, so, this sense of an ending. The sense that everything was finally resolved helps make sense of all the suffering that came before.
Keri Facer
I mean, it's fascinating all of this. It starts making me think of potentially the toxicity of thinking with these futures. And the more I'm talking with other folks about different kind of temporal frames, to what extent does the future start causing a whole load of problems? But we'll come back to that. We're also going to cover that in another podcast.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones
I wanted to piggy-tail on what both of you already introduced because reading both of your contributions and listening to you right now, actually, it seems really that both of you highlight the importance of recognizing fear and anxiety toward change, and ultimately toward death, as a core dimension in the way people elaborate narratives about who they are and how they act in society. So, to some extent, we can all relate to that. In your opinion, what differentiates people who embrace extremist positions from others when it comes to their experience of time and the way they elaborate narratives that legitimate their action? Andy, you were using this word, sealing, there was sealing the present and the future. And seems to me it's a very striking word. How do you understand the specificity? Because in a way we all have to deal with the anxiety of living in a world that is uncertain, chaotic and so on. But we don't all refer to that kind of narrative or way or pattern of action to solve that anxiety.
Andy Hom
It isn't the beliefs on their own and it isn't the kind of existential temporal logic that unites the people I'm looking at, not on its own. We can get into kind of existential culture and thought later if we want to, but you know, all of us in kind of global northern pop-culturated, if you like, societies have been abiding existentialism for generations in one form or another. So, that isn't enough on its own. So, I suspect what it is is a kind of a triple combination, I guess. And perhaps you might think part of that's psychological, so, an inability to kind of resolve grievances or anxieties, kind of internally, if you like. The presence of these existential logics, to kind of tie back to what Nomi was just saying, that the act that you commit might end your life or might end others' lives, but it will also provide a sense of an ending that's meaningful. So, the difference between end and ending or a chronological conclusion that also comprehends everything that's come before it. But then the third thing for my group of kind of research objects is they all come from at least historically privileged political subject positions, and have been losing some of that status as they understand it. Whether it's economic decline, you know, or racial or sexual or some other thing, I guess there's no way around saying that they feel entitled to certain things that they are no longer getting, that they either have direct memories of kind of enjoying in the past or they have received kind of family or social histories of receiving in the past of being in kind of dominant or privileged subject positions and they find that intolerable for one reason or another.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones
You mentioned narrative that they also inherited. What's the role here or affiliation?
Andy Hom
There's an interesting link there to Heidegger's notion of heritage, where the whole point of acting in the present is to creatively reappropriate your own history as you understand it, to make something now that is more meaningful and more, you know, actualizing, I suppose you might say. Having grown up in a part of the US that is kind of full of this subject position, I would say that the role of affiliation can be very strong and that, you know, you might be hearing around the dinner table, at church services, even in school now, you know, that there was a certain kind of golden era that's been taken away from "us". That's us in scare quotes, or us defined in certain ways and, you know, taken away by various kind of malefluous forces, if you will. So, sometimes it's called the blob. Actually, it's called the blob quite a bit in existential literature. Sometimes it's the woke mob. Sometimes it's political correctness. Sometimes it's the federal government. Sometimes it's a global elite. It's more about the structure than the specific content, that they are taking it away from us and we have to do something about it. And then that we becomes, I am going to do something about it today.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones
So, in what I hear from what you said, is really something about restoring a sense of justice in a way. And, so, in a way it seems that the discourses about the temporality of the cause that is defended, although what you say is that the cause itself is not that important in itself, it has to do with how we inherited an understanding of some form of injustice in a way. Is it correct to say this way?
Andy Hom
I think that's quite apt, Michel, especially if we stipulate that every arrangement of justice hides or suborns certain injustices or kind of offloads them to other people or other places. So, there's a strong sense of injustice driving these grievances, but that injustice is the idea that the status quo that's been removed or kind of forcibly taken away from them was in any way just for, you know, a global population is hard to sustain, right? It was just for a very privileged, specific minority.
Nomi Claire Lazar
Andy just pointed out that every configuration of justice conceals other injustice. And, to me, that's the thing about stasis frames. And by a stasis frame, I mean, a conception of time coming to an end that is so inherently dangerous. So, in trying to bring about any kind of lasting condition, any kind of lasting social political condition, or whatever kind of utopia that might be, whether that's of some kind of religious conception, et cetera, you face two problems. And the first is that whatever configuration that is, that still is going to hide other forms of injustice. And we know this from every attempt at building even micro utopias that has ever existed. They're all absolutely riven with other novel forms of injustice. And, so, the notion that you're trying to bring about an end, trying to bring about a condition that would be static, right? Which is what an eschatological or an apocalyptic frame is after, is in itself unjust. So, you have to let things keep moving. And sometimes things are going to get worse and sometimes things are going to get better. But if you try to freeze things, then you're freezing some kind of injustice within that. So, that's one element that I think we need to keep in mind, like, why we should be very hesitant about apocalyptic frames in politics, whatever kind of politics they're trying to achieve. And the other reason we should be hesitant is that time never actually stops. That's a fantasy. Right? So, and it's a fantasy built into all kinds of utopianism, right? If only we can, you know, achieve X, right? If only the revolution will come. But there's very little attention given to the fact that a moment later, were you to achieve perfection, any form of change is degradation. So, you have to actually stop time, which of course is impossible, in order to have stasis, to have stasis with respect to political and social conditions. So, it's both impossible in itself and also intrinsically undesirable. And, so, it's for that reason that process frames, that understanding that we do exist in these sort of conditions of flux and sometimes that's gonna bring about situations that feel intolerable, that we have to sit with that. We don't have to sit still with it. We can fight to make things better. But we have to understand that things will get worse again and be okay with that. Not okay in the sense that we stop fighting, but in the sense that we understand that that's the way of things. That's the way of events.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones
This contrast you make between stasis frame versus process frame or processual frame and how you connect that with the way people relate to the experience of time, I think that's really fascinating because it's really a way to relate to change, a way to relate to processes. And I think, especially in current time where crisis occupies such a big space in a way in the way we understand what's going on in the world, understanding crisis as events versus understanding them as processes that unfold through time, that have antecedent and that will have consequences, I think that's particularly crucial nowadays. And, so, I appreciate that distinction that you introduce in the way people may relate to changes in a way that privilege what you call status frame. I think that's really helpful.
Nomi Claire Lazar
I'm just finishing up a paper on the crisis frame and how it works in politics that suggests that crisis does not have an ontological character. It's not something that we notice in the world and call out, but that it is a rhetorical frame that serves certain political purposes, some of them useful and some of them nefarious.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones
Well, we have to anticipate another episode to discuss about that. So, the four of us have met through the Times of a Just Transition, the research program funded by the British Academy that is co-led by both of you, actually Keri and Nomi. So, we share our concern for the transformation of the world we are living in, taking into consideration the individual and collective actions that shape processes of transition, including social and ecological ones. So, I'm curious, how do you interpret the role of discourses about the end of the world in the context of climate politics? And how do you understand the ways apocalyptic ideas move people from belief to action in this specific context?
Andy Hom
I think what's really interesting about those discourses, Michel, is that they haven't moved a lot of people to action. They haven't moved a lot of governments, especially some of the governments that have been most impactful on the climate historically, haven't succeeded in moving those governments or their voting publics enough to action. You can find in the climate literature various kind of descriptions of the climate apocalypse as, you know, a very slow moving, but all the more irresistible apocalypse or, you know, there's just reams of evidence that actually the apocalypse is already upon us. If we take us to be global, truly global, then, you know, islands are losing shoreline. People, you know, on those islands are losing their livelihoods. But what's not happening is that large swaths of people in kind of global north, you know, high polluting countries are not feeling the direct impacts or haven't been for as long as people in global south or just historically marginalized parts of the world. And, you know, when we talk about apocalyptic narratives, I mean, having dabbled in Southern Baptist Christianity, where I grew up, apocalyptic narratives sound like, you know, they're often delivered as a kind of a day of judgment, right? A single day of judgment, or maybe a fairly brief breakdown period into chaos and disorder, followed by redemption, right? Or by the second coming of Christ, if you like, in that narrative. But it all is a fairly tidy, episodic moment, right? It doesn't take that long for everything to resolve, for the state of affairs to become the way that God intends it to be. None of that is really like the pace of the climate apocalypse, which is on the order of years, decades, maybe even generations, depending on where you look. I think what's interesting, to me, is that it looks like there's quite a misfit there between climate scientists who are calling apocalypse, and the evidence suggests rightly so, so, I'm not taking any issue with that, but the ways in which the apocalyptic warning can spur people to action. You can read dozens of stories about climate apocalypse over an entire season where you have really nice weather, your house continues to be your house, and nothing happens in many places of the world. So, there seems to be, to me, a slipped timing effort there to use apocalyptic frames to motivate people to action who aren't currently or haven't traditionally felt the impacts of that.
Nomi Claire Lazar
I think that part of the issue here is the mismatched protagonists in the apocalypse story, because, I mean, there's never actually an apocalypse, right? It's never actually the case that everything comes to an end. There are only apocalypses with respect to certain things on which we place value. So, cultures, people, communities. So, for example, there are several indigenous writers in Canada who have said, the apocalypse has already come and gone, right? And, so, it's always the apocalypse of something which constitutes the protagonist in a certain apocalyptic narrative. And, so, Andy's point that there's sort of this mismatched timing here, I think kind of trades on that, that it's not literally true that even people living on low-lying islands are just gonna be wiped out, but their way of life might be, and the place where they live, which is intrinsic to their identity, might be. But that's not the same as saying everything is going to come to a final end. It's saying things are going to change very dramatically. And these catastrophes that are happening constantly, aren't happening constantly in the same place, I mean, except potentially in California. As we think of ourselves or our community as protagonists, that that apocalyptic story just doesn't tend to resonate the way people want it to. And there isn't by now ample evidence that using apocalyptic frames for climate politics, like, to try to talk people into acting or acting faster, just doesn't work. So, along those lines, it might be worth visiting other kinds of temporal framing. For example, grand cyclic rhetoric is incredibly effective at times like this when people are feeling disoriented and hopeless. I mean, this is what populism uses. So why not harness that style of rhetoric? Like, look, we've ended up being dragged down, you know, partly through our own fault and partly through the fault of our human compatriots, into this condition where the world is at risk. But we have the resources within ourselves to make the planet great again. Why not borrow those grand cyclic stories that make people feel empowered, that give them a sense of togetherness, a sense of purpose, and use those frames as motivators to confront a danger, just shift how people understand what the danger is, what those very same things that draw people to populist narratives can potentially be harnessed for climate purposes as well.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones
Your comment opens up a question that I was going to raise about, in a way, what can we do from what you've learned actually from your research on this topic? So, both of your contributions point toward the challenges involved when people choose to embrace the complexity of life or the opposite, deny it by embracing absolute closed and rigid positions. So, your work questions what it means to recognize and acknowledge that our relation to change and time is always open and that there are many ways to relate past, present and future, some more hopeful and some more disparate, some more fluid and some more rigid. So, in a way, I'm aware that for psychologists like me, there is a risk to reduce such phenomena to individual features. Fear and anxiety raise resistances and rigid defense mechanism and therefore extremist positions can be interpreted as an expression of people's personality, individual life circumstances or even trauma. Now, the power of your work here seems to me that it relocates such issue at the collective level of political discourses.
So, I'd like to hear more about what you do from what you've learned in your research regarding the ways people elaborate political discourses that rely on specific temporal conceptions. How does it influence what you think deserves to be done socially and collectively? So, Nomi, you actually gave us a hint with the reference to grand cyclic rhetoric. In your opinion, what kind of political action discourse can help people move away from rhetorics that rely on a conception of time that favors absolutism and extremism?
Nomi Claire Lazar
In day-to-day interactions, so, for example, in my work as a professor, one thing that I try to emphasize with my students as I'm pointing out how different forms of temporality are working through, for example, figures in the history of political thought, is this idea of sort of endless fluidity and change and that it is possible to sit with change and the ways that that can be quite psychologically supportive. So, I've been thinking over the last year or so of this line from the poet Rilke where he says, 'no feeling is final'. And you can substitute so many things for feelings. You can say no power is final, right? Power keeps moving. You can say no circumstance or condition in the world is final. Something always happens next. And once you really sit with that, you're able to acknowledge that yes, things get worse. And also, sometimes things get better. And when they get worse, it's not that you just sit there and wait for them to get better. You can act to help them get better, but they will get better. And then they'll get worse again. And that's just the way of things, and becoming at home with that, I think, has some strong parallels with coming to recognize that other things which seem aberrant to us like sickness or death or feeling sad, et cetera, just form part of the whole fabric of human existence and, in the same way, the notion that events are always moving, that sometimes they get better, sometimes things get worse, forms part of the whole fabric of our social and political existence. And, so, coming to not just to recognize that, but to feel at home with it, I think can, in my experience, has given some of my students sort of a way of dealing with what's going on around them in a fashion that can help evade the sort of polarized situation, which I think leads to nothing good.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones
I appreciate that very much because it really connects for me with the kind of rhythmic approach that I embrace and this idea that we need to embrace the rhythmicity of our life experiences and our history as a way also to understand the complexity of how change unfolds through time. Andy, I know you're not inclined to make any prescription based on your research, but I'm wondering how you envision the place of the collective in the way people relate to their fears and their discourses about the end of time?
Andy Hom
You're right, Michel. I am deeply ambivalent about prescribing. I come from a discipline that gave the world a clash of civilizations and the end of history and the democratic peace. So, arguably we've had all the impact we're entitled to and mostly in the negative direction through those ideas. One of the real tragedies of the phenomena that I've been studying, these kind of mass casualty events, is that they only become possible through a lengthy process of of atomization or individuation to the point of loneliness. And this is not to claim that it's only loneliness or that all lonely people are mass shooters, but rather that that's one of the necessary, if not sufficient conditions for these attacks, is that, in each case, they've come to believe that not only are they alienated and all alone, but that means that only they can do something on their own, not in concert with others, right? Not in a community, not in a collective. And that strikes me as one of the key differences between the individuals I'm studying and a lot of the premises of kind of modern life, certainly of lowercase r republican, kind of democratic communities. The whole point of having civil society and community-based structures is to ensure these kinds of things don't happen, right? That you can make meaning with others and that others will remain meaningful to you. But I'm still in the realm of diagnostics here, which is where I'm most comfortable. If I had to prescribe anything out of that, I would say this takes me back to a really underappreciated small branch of political realism. Political realism is often thought of as, you know, naked power politics or just kind of nihilistic Machiavellian, you know, pursuit of authority. And that's not what I mean. What I mean is a recognition of the tragic sensibility or the tragic potential in almost any political acts than any individual or collective undertakes, but also the acknowledgement that collectives and political actors still have to act, right? We still have to try to solve crises or try to solve problems or work our way through dilemmas, even as we're also can never forget that our solutions might become part of the problem, right? So, that's the perpetual dilemma, I think, in the political realism that I appreciate. And one place that leads us to the importance of what what I would call and others have called the politics of limits... So, trying to bring this background to what Nomi was saying, how do you devise a collective action or a collective response or solution to something like climate change or any of the other multitude of challenges that are confronting us, that also kind of firewalls itself against catastrophic unintended consequences or, you know, political abuse and access while still enabling something to be done? In some cases that could be like threading a needle, but it's also a matter of being willing to say, well, actually we do want to limit these particular levers because they're so vulnerable to abuse while also realizing that we need to leave open a number of other possibilities. We don't know which one is the right one. As Nomi said, sometimes things will get better and sometimes things will get worse, but we're trying to avoid the kind of outcomes that actually create true apocalypses in localities, or for some groups, while still allowing other groups to move on.
Nomi Claire Lazar
I just want to jump in there for a second because what Andy just said raises this really hard truth, which is we don't know what's going to happen. So much of what we do as social scientists, as scientists, as people in the humanities, is geared toward prediction for the purposes of risk management. And we're quite good at that for highly localized things. So, for example, you know, scientists are pretty good at figuring out what's going to happen next, you know, if they do X, then Y will happen. And social scientists are reasonably good at describing specific effects probabilistically. But the thing is, humanity as a whole, so, if we're talking about the realms of the social and political, and for each outcome, we're looking at a probabilistic scenario, then over the course of those scenarios interacting, and then over the course of time, the probability that we have any idea what's going to happen a year from now, much less 10 years from now or 50 years from now, approaches zero. We just don't know what the future holds. And, so, I think part of Andy's sense of concern with what sometimes we call grim pact, the grim pact of research, and I'm not sure I'm using that exactly correctly, is that when I say things like, why don't we just harness this populist tool for some other purpose? Like, we don't know what the externalities of that are going to be. And I think a lot of folks really rely on the notion that we do when we just don't. I mean, nobody imagined that, or fully imagined exactly where we'd be right now politically. Certainly I, as a Canadian, didn't imagine that we would be in this condition with the US even six months ago. So, because we can't know the future, any intervention that we might attempt, we have to recognize could go horribly wrong. We need that humility and often we don't have it.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones
Yeah, I think for me, the connection here is really strong with Edgar Morin's contribution. He was a philosopher and social scientist, and wrote a lot about the complexity of actions. And he talked about the ecology of action to actually refer to what both of you are describing, this idea that once an action is out in the world, we never know exactly what it's going to produce and, therefore, how can we think about policies when we take that as a core aspect of reality? Keri, I see you want to react.
Keri Facer
Yeah, I mean, I'm finding this fascinating. So, I have a feeling that we're all process philosophers now, or we've been reading a lot of Octavia Butler, God is Change. I suppose the thing that lands to me or the question that still sits with me is the one when I think about the people that you're talking about, Andy, and you are talking about fundamentally a loss of meaning, this question, like, where's meaning in this? One of the things that I've thought about for quite a while is how do you deal with the question of meaning in a world of constant change? What do you hold onto? How does one find something that one holds onto without this promise of a future that you're working towards? And what I take from what you're saying is, is there a question where we let go the idea of the future out there and instead shift towards, I think Barbara Adam and Chris Groves call it Lived Futures. So, it's the sense of, what is living in the moment that can be taken care of? So, there's a shift away from this sense of the kind of teleological predictive frame through which one gains meaning or through which one achieves that kind of sense of certainty towards a sense of saying, what is it that we want to take care of in the present, which is a kind of flip in terms of an anchor. Because what I worry about spending 15, 20 years working in the futures field, the awareness of the lack of prediction, you can end up in this sense of, ok, so there's nothing. There's just emergence. We live in an emergent complex world. Okay, so, what does one hold onto in that setting? Now, I'm not suggesting that some people are gonna be unhappy in that, but some people are. I mean, a desire for purpose, I think, is a core kind of function of human existence. So, I just want to push back to where does meaning come from in a world of constant change? And I'm not suggesting you need to prescribe this. I'm just interested in where you're landing on this.
Nomi Claire Lazar
So, I sort of think an awareness of fallibility, or even of the likelihood of fallibility, needs to create paralysis. That's one thing. I think instead it should create humility with respect to policy, and that humility can lead to policies, for example, that are open to being re-examined frequently. So, basically, if the world is fluid, then be fluid in response. So, it's not don't do anything, but be adaptable and fluid in response, and that can find a place in the policy realm. And then from a purely individual perspective, we always have control over our own comportment. That's something that we have complete control over. And, so, in the worst case scenario of meaning construction, the kind of creation of the self as a work of art type thing. So, how am I being and what is my path as a being? And how am I comporting myself? And how am I reflecting upon myself and my actions in relation to the world? That's a story that has tremendous meaning, that is profoundly connected with the rest of the world. It's not narcissistic because, of course, how you're comporting yourself is how you're comporting yourself in relation to, over which we maintain complete control. So I wouldn't say that humility demands inaction, and I would say that part of humility is recognizing that the most certain work you can do is the work that you do on yourself, if that doesn't sound too horribly cheesy.
Andy Hom
You're putting your thumb on something that waxes and wanes as a concern for me as a kind of an individual and a scholar, which is that despite dabbling in kind of organized religion and reading a fair amount of philosophy and ethics over the years, I'm not sure I've really moved much past Kurt Vonnegut's
organizing ethos, which is don't be an asshole, or try not to be. I think actually he says try not to be, so, there's the humility that sometimes you will. That's not gonna become a party political platform anytime soon, but I think if we marry that to the humility and the kind of the prudence that I hear Nomi talking about, it's about cultivating meaning through the process by which we adapt. And first is recognizing that we're always adapting. So, the idea that, again, Nomi talked about stasis before, but the idea that I am always who I've always been is just a very useful and attractive fiction for a lot of agents, but it's never really true. I mean, if we combine this with, you know, what Michel I'm sure could tell us from psychology about the way that memories are constructed in fluid, even who you think you were is not actually who you thought you were a year or two ago, much less who you actually were 10 years ago. And, so, there's a certain kind of just embracing that process. And the last thing I would say is, yes, treating the work on the self a bit like a work of art, but only on the register of say, a weeknight introductory pottery class work of art, not a Van Gogh or a Picasso work of art. So, you know, finding a way to work on ourselves, but, you know, as a kind of a misshapen lump of clay that could collapse at any moment.
Nomi Claire Lazar
I think that that's a wonderful way of capturing it that also reflects humility. I just wanted to point out, I've also been thinking about Kurt Vonnegut all the time over the last few months. There's another saying of his that fits perfectly with the themes we've been exploring, which is this phrase, 'So it goes', which basically captures this acceptance of flux and a certain level of chaos in the world to which we have to adapt ourselves.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones
It's very interesting because as I'm listening to you, I mean, I'm reconnecting with something that has to do with containment and feeling contained. And, you know, in psychoanalysis, it's the weight put on the early years of life where the infant built the capacity to face the environment through the fact that he is contained by the parent's presence. We cannot take for granted that even adults are always able to do that. That's really what resonates from what you said, how we have to think about it at the individual level of how we contain ourselves and learn to be contained in our relationship with the people around us, but also the role and the function of political discourses and political actions in the way they provide way for people to feel that their life makes sense and their life is somewhere contained by specific vision of the world.
Keri Facer
I'm still sort of puzzling on this sense of what holds meaning across all of these, across change. And I think about Margaret Archer, who's a sociologist. She talks about life and what she calls morphogenetic societies, so, societies that are constantly changing. And she talks about the difference between two different sorts of reflexivity and the shift away from the reflexivity that we had in the community, which she calls communicative reflexivity. A cost benefit reflexivity is when you kind of assess the consequences, you look and you predict and you kind of decide what's gonna work, which we know doesn't work. And she says, now we're left with a situation where we've got neither communicative reflexivity because we don't have the kind of strong communities that hold us, nor cost benefit of analysis, because we know that the predictive doesn't work. And, so, you've got this risk of a fractured reflexivity. So, she talks about fractured reflexivity as we live in change, but we're just pulled. We're pulled from place to place to the thing that pops up, which is why I could see that left and right could be equally appealing to somebody who feels pulled to a particular narrative. And, so, she makes the case for what she calls spontaneous meta reflexivity, which is a very long phrase. It's not quite as good as the Kurt Vonnegut phrase, don't be an asshole. Which is about saying that holding onto a single value allows you to navigate all of this, to make the judgment about what to care for in a world where so many things pop up. The one that I come back to here is the phrase, be kind. You know, what would happen if we stuck with being kind?
Michel Alhadeff-Jones
So, to conclude this episode, I'd like to ask each of you the following questions. In the current context, what is, and I put it in quotes, 'the end of the story' that you tell yourself about the world we are living in? I know you both have children and I'm wondering what narratives do you share with them when they feel anxious about the world?
Nomi Claire Lazar
Well, I basically come back to Rilke and I tell my child, just like I tell my students, something always happens next. No thing is the last thing.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones
Thank you. Andy?
Andy Hom
I try not to tell them about a lot of the historical episodes that my research has made me aware of, knowing that one is on the cusp of adolescence and the other one is kind of, you know, soon to enter a double digits in age. And, so, you know, I think there's a risk there of kind of too much reality can be a bad thing at certain times. We might need to ask them what I say, because so much of it is also in the context of the kind of humdrum of every day, pick up your clothes, put your dishes in the sink. Also, by the way, here's a way to deal with that particular anxious moment. And, so, maybe I'm too caught up in the process to really be able to give a good answer to that.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones
Well, actually what you're suggesting is there actually focusing on the everyday and the casual things of the everyday is also a way to somewhere maintain a sense of sanity and hope also. Okay, very well. Thank you to both of you for taking the time to have this conversation with us. Nomi Lazar from the University of Ottawa and Andy Hom from the University of Edinburgh. Thanks again for this time in your company.
Andy Hom
Thank you, Michel, and thank you, Keri.
Nomi Claire Lazar
Yeah, thanks for having us.
