It is the outcome of the thorough-going degeneration, under the impact of economic crisis and boiling social tensions, of the bourgeois democratic order established 30 years ago this month with the adoption of the 1988 constitution. The process of transition from military dictatorship to civilian rule was touted by its stewards as “slow, gradual and secure.” It assured a blanket amnesty to the assassins and torturers of the Brazilian military and a defense of the property and profits of the capitalists who had supported the dictatorship.
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ERIC SCHECHTER—As I’ve already mentioned, people aren’t basically greedy and selfish. But our current culture certainly trains those traits into us. They’re built into the so-called “American dream”: You keep your stuff in your house, I keep my stuff in my house, and we’re taught that we don’t need to care about each other. Shootings in schools and shopping malls have become commonplace.
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GEORGE MONBIOT—Tony Jones asked Plimer to respond. His answer ranged from the correspondence we had had, to my absence of qualifications, to Roman warming, medieval warming, to the Met Office saying the UK would have a barbeque summer this year, to the temperature 4,000 years ago – in fact any temperature series except the one he was asked about. Whenever I pressed him to answer the question, Plimer said it was “the height of bad manners” to interrupt him. When Jones pushed him again, he started talking about wheat farming in Greenland and grapes in Roman Britain. In my quarter century as a journalist I have never seen anyone go to such lengths to avoid answering a simple point.
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MATTHEW MACEGAN—There is no reason to accept such a catastrophe fatalistically, however, as many climate scientists tend to do. The threat of nuclear war, combined with the growing crisis of global warming, raises ever more sharply the need to reorganize society along socialist lines in order to put an end to private ownership of the means of production and the system of rival capitalist nation-states, the main barriers to dealing with the global challenges that confront humanity.
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JOHN SCALES AVERY—Human nature seems to exhibit what might be called “tribalism”: altruism towards one’s own group; aggression towards outsiders. Today this tendency towards tribalism threatens both human civilization and the biosphere. Greed, in particular the greed of corporations and billionaire oligarchs, is driving human civilization and the biosphere towards disaster.
