146 World politics and the future of politics
politics; in it the way how issues are communicated is crucial.
Communication is
a constitutive element of politics, especially in modern polyarchies, and without
keeping this knowledge in mind, all discourse about politics must fail to grasp its
reality. Reasons of space make lamentably not possible to reconnect diverse themes
present in this book (political identity, symbolic language, public sphere/opinion,
and – with due scientific caution, given the slippery terrain – imagination) into
a discourse regarding political communication, in which analytical and empirical
contributions overwhelm anyway what philosophy has to say.
The first reason why objective, (highlighted by science) lethal threats have so
far been neutralised in their possible impact on subjective perception and on pol-
icy is their abstract nature. The atomic bombing of 1945 lies more than seventy
years behind us, and the new generations have fortunately a paling image of what
nuclear war would mean; tales of MIRVs (missiles with multiple warheads), mega-
tons, nuclear winter and crop shortages require a degree of concentration on the
issue that few can be expected to show. Climate change is a statistical entity made
of measurements of phenomena happening now and even more figures resulting
from a mathematical projection of present processes into the future. Mass migration
comes onto TV monitors, but only in the Mediterranean and (some) European
countries is perceived as a problem affecting everybody, while its causal link with
the changing climate is indistinguishable from the causation of migration due to
pending civil wars. For the rest, climate change has so far been poor in sizeable,
impressive phenomena that hit large populations in the highest GHGs-emitting
countries. This abstract appearance of the two global threats, so different from the
event-based communication style of TV journalism, has sidelined them from public
attention for decades. Since the Internet has so far failed to dispossess TV as the
preferred source of political information, things have not changed much. Only the
interventions of powerful communicators such as President Barack Obama and
Pope Francis with his Encyclical (2015)
Laudato si’ have had some effect on public
opinion.
A second factor neutralising the political effects of global threats are the
denial
mechanisms actively or unconsciously set in motion. The campaigns launched by
the oil industry or the military-industrial complex in previous decades belong to
the first type, actively playing short-term interests (industrial jobs, nuclear security
by supremacy) against those of future generations. Groucho Marx’s famous quip
‘What has posterity ever done for me?’ represents a counter-argument based on
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