Behind our common values

Tip 3 Bringing people together

We have alluded to common values. Tip 2 helped us discover powerful common values when we interact with people. But how easy is it if a renewable-energy advocate and a climate-denial advocate sit down for a human exchange? Each has a predisposition that the other person is a hopeless, impossible ignoramus, advocating renewables or fossil fuels. Or, in between these extremes, how do we bring people together? Here are tips to find or use those common values.

Recognize that common values are shared. They are not ones you alone hold, but that you both hold. Elif Shafak, in her book, How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division, has presented a rich and thoughtful gem: “Stories bring us together, untold stories keep us apart.” In our current turbulent time, we all have many common values, but we do not spend enough time together, sharing stories and our common values. Instead, we tend to highlight our differences, conservative v. liberal, gay v. straight, Jewish v. Arabic, right v. left, poor v. rich–and yet we breathe the same air, use the same sources of energy, eat almost the same breakfast or dinner, shower, suffer the same climate extremes, and will increasingly suffer under generations of climate disasters. This is not to deny differences, but to notice that we set up walls, barbed-wire fences, which the Chilean guitarist Victor Jara—who would later, with hands and fingers crushed, be killed—urged us to “desalambrar”, to tear down wired fences. In this age of change, and climate breakdown, we have become so divided, that we do not share, but eye each other as adversaries—chanting either drill baby drill, or shine sun shine, or blow wind blow.

To value means to have a deeply ingrained emotional regard, to say the object, person, or behavior is of great importance to a person. A common value means that a group lends great importance to it and the group shares in that feeling.

Let a person be heard, above all, the one who displays values you might disagree with. This goes two ways. You will not know what the other party thinks unless you ask, or listen, and do not prejudge. Elif writes, people have a personal and a collective yearning to be heard, often stifled at the top–“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the humans’ hierarchies?” Alexis de Tocqueville observed, cited by Marshall Ganz, “it is through association with each other that we can learn to reinterpret individual self-interests as a common interest.” We love one and denounce the other because, while we want to be heard, we do not want to hear of the gross irresponsibility they both commit. Common values are ones that we collectively hold. Our higher values of life, our liberty, the pursuit of happiness, welfare and the wellbeing of our family, jobs, and affordability are shared. If you listen, you can begin to share, based on what you hear. Endeavor to start conversations–even difficult ones–to find common values.

Point out that what unites us is stronger than what divides us. When we discover common values that we share with strangers, we discover how we agree and are alike. This can lead us to care for and appreciate each other. This experience is powerful and leads to a uniting of common goals for our greater good. We can begin dialogs to learn from each other and find solutions for a better future. We may make new friends in the process. One cleaver that separates is the “insiders” versus the “outsiders”. Typically and falsely, climate activists are portrayed as insiders pushing government regulations, while politicians, left or right, are portrayed as insiders or outsiders. Climate activists are really outsiders, united for renewable energy, and against fossil fuels and their associated political hierarchies. In this false divide, the manufactured chasm is helping each political faction to win mass support. The attempt is for one power elite to win over the followers of the other power elite, while those concerned about the climate are trampled into voicelessness. Held in common is to portray themselves as better and different, to perpetuate and sanction within the obvious division the very climate destruction, fossil fuel consumption, and enrichment of corporate complexities, which we should get rid of–if we were honest. This rule, not an exception, is what Brown University Prof. Roberts calls organized obstruction – political, economic, social, and military. With seeking common values comes another relevant Shafak gem, “when you feel alone don't look within, look out and look beyond for others who feel the same way, for there are always others”, in this case, a massive majority, struggling to be free from the present increasing tyranny of global warming all around us, but hardly recognizable.

Expose how the political elite betrayed us. Irrespective of political party, when it comes to climate change, we do not often point out the similarity of these politicians, particularly about the urgency of getting out of fossil fuels altogether. One group might say, a mix of fossil fuels and renewables are fine, another, fossil fuels are needed for years. The net result being, we are taught to accept the delay of the urgent transition to renewable energies. If the world's population knew now what they will know in 20 years, or if it truly saw what it is looking at, it would shame fossil fuel producers and the many waffling politicians. One value here is, politicians have a current and future responsibility to their citizenry.

Emphasize the unity of our ordinary needs. What most unites us ordinary folk is our need for food, clothes, a roof over our head, comfort and feeling safe. All this requires an income that makes these needs affordable. But fossil fuel producers, driven by the wealth fossil fuels generate and the messaging linked to that production, downplay this affordability and the benefits of renewables in two ways. First, fossil fuels are increasing loss and damage and lowering affordability of, for example, exorbitant housing insurance. Second, renewables offer savings, jobs, lower loss and damage, independence and self-reliance, and family wellbeing. That is why they are sustainable. For example, as climate change continues, agriculture will be disrupted, food costs driven higher, threatening our universal value that food should be affordable. One value here is to unite and fight against the higher food prices!

Expose how militarisation or defense are stoked to divert our thoughts, taxes, and budgets away from the necessity of dealing with the climate. In recent times, these diversions include extreme armed violence erupting everywhere as military confrontations, territorial takeovers, NATO expansion, calls for increased defense, or dropping blockbusters. Alliances are rearming to extremes resembling those of the 1950-60s Cold War. The need to rearm is driven by a purported common value that the enemy is coming while the planet's health or ordinary persons' wellbeing as a universal value is sorely sacrificed. So we are encouraged to pour resources into fighting and dying while fossil fuels emissions continue to explode under a long-term prospect of homo sapiens extinction. Challenging the false value that violence or war is good, or climate consequences are to be neglected–all can help to uncover the true values we hold of peace, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and a healthy planet.

Avoid reactiveness as much as possible. In communication, reactiveness prepares a listener to respond to a provocation from the outside, often dampening or turning off the information intake, raising apprehension, prompting silence, pushing an interaction breakdown, raising emotions. Our minds close off: telling someone their comment is stupid readies that listener to reject subsequent comments. “Here he goes again”. Telling a fossil fuel lover that fossil fuels kill, triggers rejection of the remainder of what the renewable advocate has to say: up goes an emotional wall. To reduce reactiveness, it's better to ask the home-owning fossil fuel lover, why are insurance companies raising rates. Allowing silent spaces after questions, giving the listener a chance to respond, can reduce reactiveness. Lying on the tarmac or blocking a freeway turns off not only drivers and passengers, but via the media or word of mouth, other listeners. Avoiding reactiveness promotes tolerance and patience.

Use relatable stories to create empathy. A priest citing Genesis 6, or why Noah built the Ark, to a congregation can have more influence on protecting our climate than a scientist addressing the same group. An influencer, an actor, or even an unknown person on TV can induce misleading thoughts such as “climate change is a hoax”, best met by an ordinary looking activist. The oil companies have had tremendous success here. We should talk about climate change, but not as something scientific, or in the IPCC, but as something new and unusual and concrete–those fires in LA, the flooding in Valencia, the heat in India. But if information becomes a drumbeat of seeming propaganda or the message of nerdy intellectuals, the message is lost. The “things we care about”, to quote Katherine Hayhoe, “are not shared enough”. Personal stories, such as how we fled the fires as our house was consumed by fire, are powerful. Empathy, not disbelief or skepticism or anger, is nourished.

Pursue a core common value: “avoid risk”. Everyday we face risks: food shortage, an auto accident, stock market decline, time, health issues, or economic instability. Risk avoidance is a deep and widespread value. Climate change risk in particular is a deeper, longer risk, not only to the individual but to humanity. We do not know when, or where, or how deadly it impacts, but it takes years to reduce. We cannot vaccinate against it. We have to choose to get out of fossil fuels now. Actions that avoid these risks are a great way to assert common values.

Use simple approaches to inviting conversations. As soon as you have eye contact, open a conversation with an invite. It could be, “Care to sign our petition on… food prices, building a bike path, on drinking water for all, or on loving one's neighbor…?” It could be a question such as Katherine Hayhoe suggests, a leaf out of a book about having impossible conversations: “On a scale of 1 to 10, with number 1 being “climate change is not an important issue in the world”, and number 10 being “climate change represents the greatest challenge facing the Earth today”, what number would you choose?” This is indeed an opinion question, but also induces consideration of values. In raising this question, people proved not just eager to talk to strangers, but the strangers proved eager to talk, and it was possible to disagree and yet share values. The asker clearly can, then should, seek out and share those common values.

The moral is simple. We must share our common values because they matter more than those that welcome death, destruction, hardship, or anxiety. Another is that even without a Ph.D., we should reach out and unite people in order to find common values and do extraordinary things.