I read a blog by a climate scientist, Roger Pielke Jr. He works on the UN climate reports. Recently he posted a book review preview, to be published in The New Atlantis (Summer 2022). The book was Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, And Why It Matters by Steven E. Koonin. In the review, Dr. Pielke talks about a developing thing in science for the masses: dualism.

For well over a decade, the American debate over climate change has largely been a battle between two extremes: those who view climate change apocalyptically, and those castigated as deniers of climate science. In institutions of science and in the mainstream media, we see the celebration of the catastrophists and the denigration of the deniers. Predictably, the categories map neatly onto the extremes of left-versus right politics. The most apt characterization of this polarized framing is as a kind of Manichean paranoia—a politics defined by the belief that the debate is really a battle of absolute good against absolute evil over the future of the world.

Dualism is a view of the world where there are two usually-opposed options. Manichaeism is an old religion (200-700 A.D.) that took the Aristotelian/Gnostic cosmology of heaven and Earth where heaven is the place of all goodness and light, and earth is the place of all evil and darkness, and there is a gulf, a firmament, between them.

What demarks the new politics and science is the paranoia that comes with living at the extremes. Back in 1964 Richard Hofstadter in his Harper's essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" wrote

I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.

The paranoid person 

does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish.

With the recent politicization of climate change, evolution, and energy, the paranoid style now applies to science. Social media is the playfield, not the journals. In fact, mentioning peer-reviewed research results in social media can get you banned (1, 2, 3). Science is becoming an argument from the extreme, for the extreme.

From Dr. Pielke:

Today, the Manichean politics of climate change play out on social media, where leading scientists, journalists, and other combatants seek, to borrow from Jonathan Haidt, “to shame or punish someone publicly while broadcasting one’s own virtue, brilliance, or tribal loyalties.” The incredibly fascinating, important, and nuanced issue of climate change has become an online team sport between the good guys (your side) and the bad guys (the other side).

The politics of Manichean paranoia, as I have elsewhere argued, have had a deeply pathological influence on the debate over climate science and policy. My own experiences—which include being attacked by the White House and investigated by Congress for publishing and communicating peer-reviewed research—are symptomatic of the pathology, but they are only small examples of how the debate seeks to force participants into one of two extreme camps. 

Paranoid dualism had in its sights, over time, Masons, Mormons, Catholics, Jews, Blacks, Illuminati, government, antigovernment, communists, McCarthy, religionists, antireligionists, pagans, witches, successful entrepreneurs, hippies, rockers, police, baseball players, baseball owners, bosses, workers, the mob, politicians, Republicans, Democrats, Ralph Nader and whatever party he represented, paying taxes, not paying taxes, Texans, Californians, New Yorkers, Canadians, Mexicans, The Irish, China, Japan, slaves, slave owners, carpetbaggers, soldiers, draft dodgers, General Lee, General Pershing, General Sherman, General Schwartzkopf, General Patton, general mayhem and general order. In the past, this was the attitudes of extremists.

But now no one seems capable of pushing back against the two camps to occupy the reasonable middle. Everyone has turned into an extremist, left or right, utterly vacating the middle ground.

But history gives us some hope:

Will the climate change? Sure.
Will we adapt to future change? We always have, and for the better every time.

Will we run out of current fuels? Eventually.
Will we find new sources of energy? We always have.

Let's have a look at the biggest disruption to climate and humanity in recorded history, the Bronze Age collapse. Around 1200 B.C. there was a massive drought, accompanied by volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, around the Mediterranean (Ruth in The Bible records the drought, and the Philistines of Chronicles and Kings were probably those displaced and beaten back by Egypt when Crete became unlivable). Mass migrations ensued, and the wars fought when one people went to the land of another people completely disrupted Bronze-age trade. So what came of this disruption? The Iron Age, when the tin from Crete and other mines was not available, mankind learned better how to mine and smelt iron. And a new trade built up, with stronger arms, bigger boats, more durable goods which the arms protected and the boats transported.

And iron gave way to steel, and steel gave way to silicon. And the industrious and practical middle ground is where these changes happened.

We always survive change, and end up the better for it. It's a fundamental story of history.

"Occupy Wall Street." "Occupy the White House." "Occupy Congress." Nonsense. Occupy the Middle.

You can't be extreme nor paranoid in the middle. In the middle we make compromises. In the middle no one is perfect so we allow for other's mistakes. In the middle we work, and we pay taxes, and we do good things. And we screw up on occasion, but nobody's focused on the middle so no one will notice. It's a nice place to live.

So dump your social media accounts until they learn to love being average, get to know to your neighbors, leave the paranoid life behind. The middle is quite comfortable.

And what became of the book review? Koonin 

present[s] an alternative, nuanced perspective largely missing from public debate. But after some early resistance, Koonin gives in to the Manichean politics, embracing the conventional, divisive framing. The response to the book has been predicable, with both supporters and opponents relishing the battle—combatants in a deeply polarized struggle have an existential need for their mirror image. Koonin’s book could have challenged the pathological politics of climate change. Instead, it reinforces them.

Sigh.