Another trio of posts covering, below, the dangers of narrow thinking, and coming soon, how we can - and must - keep our hearts and minds open, then some examples of how it is already happening and how we may build on them. [Image: AP]
The Zone of Interest is a must-see film. Watching it is not an enjoyable experience, but it is an essential one: not the saccharine rush glass of coke of a feelgood movie, so much as the invigorating shock of a cold shower.
It could not be more timely, coming eighty years after the events it describes, as the living memories of the hell of the last World War are all but gone and a complacency has spread that Peace is a given, allowing attitudes to surface which may take us back to those darkest of days.
The power of the film lies in the interplay between two contrasting themes. There is the omnipresent backdrop of the Auschwitz prison camp, the incidental sights and sounds of which feel like a winch inexorably winding the tension up notch by notch. This is overlaid with the accretion of moments of seemingly nonchalant domesticity contorted by odd details leeching in from the surroundings, as when a child plays with a collection of teeth, as if it was their stamp collection. The cumulative effect is intense, forcing the viewer to ask, how would I be in a similar situation? How might we avoid finding ourselves in an equivalent position? Are we already set on that course?
A theme of the literature I have read about the Nazis is that many Germans initially thought them so extreme that they did not need to be taken seriously. By the time it was apparent they had an inexorable momentum, resistance for many seemed impossible. A similar complacency can be detected today in those who are unable or unwilling to comprehend the scale of devastation that will be wrought by climate heating and who assume human ingenuity will come up with technical solutions that will simultaneously arrest the increases in global temperatures and allow us to continue with our resource intensive Western lifestyles. This is despite the evidence before our eyes of the effects of the temperature increases to date and the absence of both any sign of these new technologies appearing at the scale or pace required, or of any decline at all in overall emissions. We are already living with climate heating, especially though not exclusively in the Global South and we are on track for carnage of a magnitude beyond anything previously experienced by humanity. These seem to remain, somehow, easy words for most people to read: living through it will be another matter.
The Zone of Interest provides striking examples of the compartmentalisation[1] which is both a cause of the distressing circumstances the protagonists find themselves in and the method they adopt to survive it. Hedwig Höss exists almost wholly within the house and beautiful garden she has created in the shadow of the concentration camp. She would rather stay in that perfect world she has created, adjacent to a living Hell, than follow her husband elsewhere. He meanwhile contemplates the extermination of thousands of Hungarian Jews merely in terms of a logistical challenge which stands between him and further career advancement.
By excluding everything else, narrowing their zones of interest down to such an extent, each are able to cope with the horror within which their lives play out, but in doing so they enable and entrench that horror further. As do we, as we train ourselves to dissociate the emissions that flow from the lives we lead and the work we do from those which ensure that Pacific Islanders will have to leave the places that for generations have been their home and that millions of others will be forced to migrate as swathes of the planet become uninhabitable for humans.
So we are very much on course to finding ourselves in a similar situation to the Hösses. We may not have genocide taking place directly over the garden wall, but we will be forced to take decisions that will increasingly have life and death implications for our fellow beings. I say this not for melodramatic effect, but because, considering the following (itself only a small smattering of the examples I could highlight), I am fearful of the future we are calmly carrying on to create:
Ø There is absolutely nothing to suggest that we are going to keep global temperature increases to less than 2°C (let alone 1.5°C). Despite all we know – both from exhaustive scientific study and the physical evidence springing up all over the planet – we have failed to reduce aggregate greenhouse gas emissions at all. We busy ourselves, talking about transition plans and ‘net zero’ targets set for twenty plus years hence, whilst racing through the remainder of the carbon budget, pumping gases into the atmosphere which will be there for generations
Ø Parts of the globe are already seeing the consequences of this on things like fresh water supplies; loss of the soils, pollinators and ecosystems which enable food production; and increasingly severe and frequent weather events
Ø Insurance premiums in many places are already beyond the budgets of many and are heading into territory where insurance will simply not be available, with the knock on effect that lending will not be either, bringing much of the economy to a juddering halt
How will we respond collectively to a situation where millions of people are on the move simultaneously? Will we recognise it as the greatest humanitarian disaster we have yet had to face, and mobilise a global effort to accommodate them? Or will we double down on recent behaviours, label them as ‘economic migrants’ (rather than people, forced by circumstances beyond their control, to leave the place they call home in order to try to stay alive), and do what we can to make them someone else’s problem?
As lawyers, will our role be to ensure all have access to justice in its most basic form, by helping to implement measures which deliver a Just Transition for as many as possible, enabling us collectively adapt from an extractive, fossil fuel driven economy to one focused on us living within the means that our planetary home can provide for us?
Or will our role be to protect the rights of ownership of the wealthy, regardless of whether they have more than they could possible need whilst others do not have enough to survive? Can we trust ourselves to make the right choices, when the time comes and we have to act, or will we narrow our own Zones of Interest to find ways to dissociate from the suffering happening around us and to justify our actions to ourselves? If we are not sure, what can we, and what are we willing to, do to avoid having to make that choice by changing things now?
That will be the focus of the next week’s post.
[1] For more on compartmentalism, see the remarkable I You We Them by Dan Gretton