Green Outside, Red Inside. How Environmentalism is Following the Same Path of Communism

There was a time when Communism was a respectable idea that had a large number of followers. Nowadays, it is considered the quintessence of evil. A similar evolution is taking place for Environmentalism, now moving rapidly into the category of “evil ideas.” In a certain sense, it was unavoidable: Environmentalism as a political movement had inherited from Communism some of its unpleasant features, including the tendency to oppress people in the name of an ideology. (see also my previous post on “Greenbashing”)

When I came to age in the 1970s, Italy was roughly divided into two halves: the “Whites” (not intended as skin color, but as the Christian Democrats) and the “Reds” (the Communists). The Christian Democrats were a majority in the South and the Islands, while the Italian Communist Party (PCI) was strong in the North and a clear majority in Central Italy. Tuscany, where I was born and lived, was a Communist stronghold.

Living in Italy in the 1970s and 1980s implied recognizing the existence of “areas of influence” where one of the two sides managed almost everything. The “Reds” had their shops, their cinemas, their markets, their social spaces, while the “Whites” had their equivalent ones. The hubs of the different areas were the “Casa del Popolo” (house of the people) for the Reds and the ACLI (Associations of Christian Italian Workers) for the Whites. Apart from the ideological orientation, these places were very much the same: a mix of coffee shops, bars, theaters, bowling places, billiard rooms, and places where people spent their time at endless card games of Scopa or Briscola.

Later, I found the same situation in another country, Lebanon, where I traveled to work on various research projects. There, the separation was in terms of religious beliefs, rather than political ones. And it was a much sharper subdivision, having led to a major civil war that started in 1975. In Italy, instead, the interactions between the two sides were almost never violent. Not that Reds and Whites were friendly to each other. Some Whites were rabid anti-communists, while some Reds were proud of their role in the war against the Nazis, and tended to hint that they still had their guns, well hidden, and that they could decide to use them. But there were accepted rules of cohabitation. There were no armed guards nor barbed wire separating the areas of influence. If you, as a known “White,” happened to stop at a “Red” shop for a coffee, you could have it without problems. It was just a sensation that you were not in the right place. You somehow “knew” that.

In many ways, belonging to one or the other color depended on one’s birthplace. Just like in Lebanon you belonged to the religion of your parents, in Italy you inherited the political views of your parents. My father was an active member of the Christian Democratic party, and that gave me a certain degree of “whitish” inheritance. Personally, I always saw myself as an independent, but I found it very difficult to maintain that position. If I tried to strike a middle ground, the Whites would see me as a traitor and the Reds a spy. It was the same situation as in Lebanon: you were either Christian or Muslim; there was no middle ground possible.

Even with girls, I soon learned that the Red ones were off-limits for me. It was strange; some of them I found quite attractive, but they looked different, they dressed different, they spoke different. Maybe they were genetically different, too (it seems to be true that political differences have a genetic origin!). In any case, there was an impalpable barrier that separated me from them. Eventually, I married a girl from a “white” family (I am still married to her), and I moved to the United States, where the “red” and “blue” colors were used to define different political tribes, but that’s another story.

In the late 1980s, I was back in Italy. The old Communists (the “zoccolo Duro,” or “hardcore”) were still there, but the Communist Party had started a spiral of decline that would accelerate with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, until it completely disappeared. At that time, I witnessed the foundation of the Italian Green Party of which I was a member for several years. It was an interesting story; among many other things, I saw many former communists recycling themselves as “Greens,” fully maintaining their traditional sectarian approach. Today, I am seeing history repeating, with environmentalism starting a spiral of decline similar to that of the communist party in the 1990s.

Memetics of environmentalism

As a modest practitioner of the science of Memetics, the cycle of growth and decline of ideas fascinates me. Communism is a meme, just like Fascism, Democracy, Liberalism, and many other ideas that invade us, correctly defined by Daniel Dennett “Meme-infested Apes.” All good memes have their cycles. Some are very long — sometimes we call them “religions,” and some are so short that we call them “Fads” (think of “Gangnam Style”).

It is the same behavior as biological viruses or other infective creatures. It grows, peaks, and declines when the affected population develops immunity. Virtual viruses (memes) do the same. In most cases, they decline naturally unless something is done to keep them alive.

Communism is no exception. We can follow its parable of growth and decline using the always precious “Google Ngrams,” which tells us how many times a certain term was mentioned in the large corpus of books that Google has digitized. Since I started with discussing the story in Italy, let me show how Communism’s popularity fared there.

The popularity of the meme follows the real-life experience I had in Italy. The interest in Communism peaked in the early 1980s, then faded. And here is the term “Communism” in English

You see that it peaked earlier than in Italy, but it followed a similar trajectory.

Now, let’s look at the cycle of environmentalism.

Environmentalism has not collapsed yet, but it is clearly not growing anymore. Google Ngrams cannot tell you when the term is used to approve or to disapprove the idea. Still, it is clear from the ongoing debate that it is now well advanced in the phase of rejection that will eventually usher the one of demonization.

In a previous post, I described the mounting “greenbashing” spreading all over the world, accusing the Greens of being “enemies of the people” with a language very similar to the one I saw in the anti-Communist pamphlets that my father brought home when I was a kid. Here is an example.

The Anti-Green propaganda, today is a little more sophisticated, but not that much.

A persistent meme used against Environmentalists is that of being “Watermelons,” green outside but red inside. They are accused of being Communists in disguise, using environmentalism just as a screen to hide their real plans of imposing a Communist dictatorship. This accusation is not completely wrong: Environmentalism absorbed several of the sub-memes of Communism; one, in particular, is the idea that you should force people for their own good to do things they don’t want to do. For instance, “De-Growth” may be an unavoidable feature of our future, but proposing it as a political goal has been a failure of biblical proportions.

But I wouldn’t say that there was any single mistake that led to the Greens’ doom, nor that they are really Communists in disguise. No, the reason for the decline is simpler. A political idea, whatever its nature, is embraced and put into practice because it is supposed to solve some important problems. Communism promised to solve the inequality problem; Environmentalism as a political movement promised to defend us from global warming and pollution. But Communism in the Soviet Union led only to replacing the old elite with a new one. Environmentalism led to many international conferences where delegates from all over the world came by plane to discuss how to reduce pollution and energy consumption — and never found a way to do that. No wonder that people lost trust in both these ideas. They didn’t just lose trust; they became rabid haters of concepts they believe were used to swindle them. See the current backlash about climate science and science in general.

Yet, we remain meme-infested apes. If we lose a meme, we are open to being infected by another one. In this moment of general confusion, people are now putting faith in evil memes, such as the one carried by a curious imp who carries a chainsaw and promises to help the poor by destroying the infrastructures that keep them alive.

That meme goes together with the one called “MAGA.” Both are promising a lot but will probably be unable to maintain much.

Is there some other meme growing? Yes, there is one: Renewable Energy.

Unlike the generic meme of “environmentalism” with its unpalatable baggage of degrowth and limitations, renewable energy promises to solve real-world problems. It fights pollution, creates jobs, generates wealth, improves security, does not create wars, and more. And you see how it grows.

Will renewable energy, as a way to solve problems, follow the same path as using a chainsaw? Will it be first enthusiastically adopted, then demonized? At the present stage, we cannot say. Maybe renewable energy will really solve our problems, or maybe its destiny is to be thrown into the dustbin of bad ideas. It is, anyway, our destiny of apes to be infested by memes. So it goes.