Sporting Shadows

The Tokyo 2020 Olympics, postponed to the summer of 2021, stick in the mind as the first Games held in near-empty stadiums. Yet while the trail of the Covid pandemic cast its pall over the event, a different kind of shadow loomed over the Games’ first week of competition.

US gymnast Simone Biles’ sudden exit from the women’s team competition, and subsequent departure from most of her individual events, offered the most striking evidence of the pressures felt by even – or especially – the world’s most high-profile and decorated athletes (Biles, expected for great things in Tokyo, had won four gold medals in Rio 2016). Biles’ withdrawal, on psychological grounds, was perhaps more notable for coming only weeks after Naomi Osaka – then the world’s number two-ranked female tennis player, and soon to be carrying the flag for Japan in Tokyo – pulled out of the French Open and Wimbledon, citing mental health reasons, before taking a hiatus from the professional tour.

The idea that Tokyo 2020 took place in empty arenas is, of course, somewhat misleading. Elite athletes like Biles and Osaka are always under the eye and scrutiny of an ever-watchful media audience in the hundreds of millions, and subject to what, arguably, is sport’s ever-intensifying relationship to this same media. While sports events and athletes’ participation in them is both determined and even demanded by media scheduling, the emergence of what are effectively franchise tie-in shows – series such as Netflix’s Break Point and Formula 1: Drive to Survive – have made the collusion between media and sport, and the expectations to perform, all the more apparent.

The Subject Behind the Star

If this media landscape forms some of its backdrop, one of the aims in my new book, Sport, Film, and the Modern World, recently published by Peter Lang, is to look at film’s role in both exploring and questioning these contexts of sporting performance. I consider what film might say, on the one hand, about the ideologies and cultures that encourage and produce elite athletes; and on the other, how film can be used to reveal the subject behind the sports ‘star’ – the individual, in other words, otherwise inaccessible to the TV cameras and sports broadcasting regimes.

Appropriately enough, Biles’ personal story of crisis and return is told this same month in Netflix’s Simone Biles: Rising; just in time for this summer’s Paris Olympics, even if a little too late for my book. But a version of Osaka’s story, in the form of an eponymous Netflix mini-series (shot by award-winning documentary filmmaker Garrett Bradley), appeared just a month after her public admission of mental-health concerns. This coincidence inevitably shapes our viewing and understanding of Bradley’s intimate film. But in some respects Naomi Osaka is revealing enough on its own, choosing to cast its focus away from the glitz of tournament play and success, focusing more – via lingering cameras and home-movie footage – on Osaka’s ceaseless training regime, publicity commitments and endorsements. It’s the portrait of a sportswoman as a kind of commodity, in other words, offering at the same time a glimpse into the person, and the psyche, behind the image.

A key focus in my book is the way, in fact, recent documentaries – works such as Zidane: A Portrait of the 21^st Century (2006), or Asif Kapadia’s Senna (2010) and Diego Maradona (2019) – have used conventions of fiction filmmaking (mainly, through the use of suggestive editing, close-up cameras and experimental sound mixes) in order to evoke ‘subjective’ experience and point of view: an increasingly frequent tendency, I suggest, in cinema’s growing concern with the tough realities behind sporting lives. One question this approach raises, in fact, along with the examples of Biles and Osaka, is what we might understand by the value, ethics, or more broadly the ‘ends’ of sport, once it crosses the line from play to professionalism, and then to the subjection of the body to forms of physical and emotional violence. The latter, arguably, is inseparable from modern sport, and the modern Olympic Games especially, with its motto of faster, higher, stronger. This creed, as John Hoberman suggests in his seminal study Mortal Engines, sustained a drive to extend through sport the limits of the human, almost by any means necessary: the Games, in other words, as a “gigantic biological experiment”. (1)

Olympic Victims

This experiment still has its casualties. The quadruple jump landed by 15 year-old figure skater Kamila Valieva, on her way to winning a team gold medal, was a high point of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. Yet just a few days later, Valieva was under the spotlight for very different reasons, when a drug test revealed banned substances in her system. The generally sympathetic media response to Valieva’s misadventures (though her four-year competitive ban would eventually be upheld) seemed premised on her extreme youth. The fault, it was implied, was with a Russian sporting system already tainted by doping allegations and banned, at that time, from fielding athletes under the national flag. Such perspectives might be further informed by films such as Marta Pruz’s Over the Limit (2017), focusing on the Russian rhythmic gymnast Margarita Mamun, in the run-up to the 2016 Rio Games. Pruz’s masterstroke (*spoiler alert*) is to show, in intensive and uncomfortable detail, the verbal, emotional, and near-physical abuse endured by Mamun – only at the end, to deliberately not show Mamun’s success in winning the individual title, restricting the information to a blank piece of text. By downplaying the glory, Over the Limit both shines a light on the price of winning gold, and asks whether such achievements are ultimately worth the cost.

As I consider in my book, however, we also need to look at a wider, and less obvious contexts to understand the broader ethical implications of the Olympic sporting dream. I, Tonya (2017), for example, a biopic of the disgraced ice-skater Tonya Harding, focuses on a figure easily ridiculed both for her abrasive, even ‘trashy’ style, as well as for her supposed involvement in a piece of tabloid criminality (the physical attack, planned by Harding’s husband, on a rival skater). I, Tonya is nevertheless notable for its reminder that the pursuit of success is woven into the fabric of the working-class American life in which Harding was raised. More significantly, though – in its focus on a pre-school Tonya being effectively pushed onto the ice by her ambitious mother – that this relentless drive is also, by necessity, something that female athletes above all must pursue from very early infancy. This is especially the case in sports such as skating and gymnastics, where female performers (like Valieva, or Biles, also 15 at the start of her competitive career) peak young. Even if her end result proved more nightmarish, Harding’s pursuit of the sporting dream – and the committing of children to extreme training programmes – is one that underpins all stories of sporting success: a fact we as a global sports audience might tacitly accept, whether we realise it or not.

Beyond the Finish Line

Moving forward, one of my main interests in this summer’s Olympics, and a likely subject for future research, will focus on different kinds of ‘ends’: namely, what happens to elite athletes at the culmination of their sporting lives, and what kind of cinematic narratives and forms might represent this transition? The Scottish tennis player Andy Murray, a three-time Grand Slam champion, is likely to end his twenty-year professional career in Paris. This will mark a suitable dénouement for a great player who also won back-to-back Olympic titles in 2012 and 2016. But after Paris, what comes next?

As I’ve recently pondered elsewhere (2), this same question lies at the troubling heart of Federer: Twelve Final Days (2024), recently released on Amazon Prime, which raises the notion of the elite athlete ‘dying twice’: the first death occurring when competition ends, and at an age that is for most others the prime of life, obscurity and empty days beckon. It’s the same question that haunts the earlier Andy Murray: Resurfacing (2019), which candidly records the player’s physical struggle to continue performing at the top level, and the equally painful existential questions accompanying it. In both films, we get to witness the material wealth and space afforded to such sportsmen at the very height of the sport. But at the same time, the film asks us to reflect on how these same environments will be filled, once each man can no longer do what has defined them and shaped their daily routines for almost their whole lives.

It’s not the place of the Olympic Games themselves, of course, to engage with these issues. The limitation of the popular sporting narrative, I would suggest, as too with many sports films over the years, is that both culminate with the moment of triumph – though without asking what the pursuit of victory may have cost, or what may be lost when the crowd has dispersed. And it’s here, as my work explores, that the imaginative resources of film step in to explore the gap.

A final thought on this same point: “I’m almost too frightened to win”. So says Ben Cross’s Harold Abrahams, minutes before the 100 metres sprint final in Chariots of Fire (1981), set during the previous Paris Games exactly one hundred years ago. It’s an enigmatic but increasingly suggestive line, reminding us that winning gold is not the end, but the beginning of something else. But it’s a reminder, too, that winning is also an achievement that may raise more questions – about the routes one takes to get there, and how these matter – than those it answers.

(1) John Hoberman, Mortal Engines: The Science of Performance and the Dehumanization of Sport (New York: The Free Press, 1992), p. 84.
(2) ‘You Only Live Twice’, More Than Coping,25 June 2024, https://morethancoping71.blog/2024/06/25/you-only-live-twice/

“You changed my life” – this is the gist of the fan mail Patricia Nell Warren received for her 1974 novel The Front Runner. It is the story of Billy, the 22-year-old front runner, who falls in love with his coach and participates in the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal. Billy wins the 10,000-meter race; one week later, at the 5,000-meter race, as Billy pulls away in his finishing sprint to win the gold medal and set a new world record, tragedy strikes… but read for yourself! A meaningful emotional relationship between two men that culminates in a “gay wedding” ceremony, an Olympian that has no issues with his sexuality and who is supported by fellow athletes, a welcoming campus atmosphere, the question of queer surrogacy – all this in 1974, just one year after the American Psychiatric Association finally struck homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

June is Pride month, and next month Paris, France hosts the thirty-third Olympic Games. A record number of queer athletes is expected to compete, more than in Tokyo in 2021 and in Rio in 2016. Warren can be credited with paving the way for them. In 2006, when the Outgames (nicknamed the Gay Olympics) were held in Montreal, the site of Billy’s greatest triumph and tragedy, Warren was honored with running the last lap of the men’s 5,000-meter race, a tribute to her trailblazing role in combating homophobia in athletics. In 2012, The Front Runner was recognized as instrumental in inspiring the launch of the Gay Games, and Warren was awarded a special “Personal Best” and gold medal by the International Federation of Gay Games.

However, there are still barriers to coming out. In the United States, in football, baseball, and basketball, very few openly gay athletes play (and often athletes come out upon retirement). British diver Tom Daley, one of the proudest athletes of our time, gave an emotional statement about his sexual orientation after he won gold with his partner Matty Lee: “I hope that any young LGBT person out there can see that no matter how alone you feel right now, you are not alone and that you can achieve anything. There is a whole lot of your chosen family out here ready to support you.” He was indirectly addressing LGBTQ youth in countries like Hungary, China, and Japan, where queer people continue to face discrimination. He concluded: “I am incredibly proud to say that I am a gay man and also an Olympic champion. I feel very empowered by that”. (1)

Half a century before Tom, Warren gave us such an incredibly proud gay Olympic champion.

Later this year, my book Patricia Nell Warren: A Front Runner’s Life and Works is coming out from Peter Lang. As the first book on Patricia, it begins with a long biographical chapter, followed by accessible discussions of all her works, including the voluminous reader responses. While The Front Runner is of course her blockbuster, she published a lot more. Two sequels, Harlan’s Race (named after the coach and set in the 1980s, the decade of AIDS and the Moral Majority) and Billy’s Boy (a science fiction adventure set in the 1990s), have appeared, while a third one, Virgin Kisses, was finished by Patricia weeks before her passing but remains unpublished. Some of her other novels focus on gay pride in the Catholic church (The Fancy Dancer), homophobic politics (The Beauty Queen), and a queer bullfighter in fascist Spain (The Wild Man).

The Lavender Locker Room: 3000 Years of Great Athletes Whose Sexual Orientation Was Different collects pieces originally written for Jim Buzinski and Cyd Ziegler’s online magazine Outsports.com and chronicles proud pioneers in athletics. The volume is exhaustively researched, and many living sports figures granted interviews to Warren: Achilles and Patroclus; Joan of Arc; Roman gladiators; George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham (now acted by Nicholas Galitzine of Red, White, and Royal Blue fame in Mary & George, where he plays the real-life lover of King James I of England); tennis player Bill Tilden; aviatrix Amelia Earhart; boxer Wilhelm von Homburg; open-water marathon swimmer Diana Nyad (now subject of the 2023 biopic NYAD with Anette Benning and Jodie Foster); tennis star Martina Navratilova; and David Kopay, the first professional athlete to come out.

While Patricia participated in Gay and Lesbian Pride marches (she was the grand marshal at parades in Boise, Los Angeles, Helena, New Orleans, Palm Springs, Reno, San Diego, St. Louis, Albuquerque, and other cities), memorials for gay and lesbian veterans, sports broadcasts (such as the Beijing Summer Games of 2008, which she covered for gay and lesbian networks), Democratic fundraisers, literary and cinematic events, college conferences, bookstore readings, and more, maybe what she was most proud of is her own press, Wildcat, which published all her books (and still does). Now there is a book about Patricia, another addition to Peter Lang’s exciting queer series. We could call it a win-win situation.

(1) https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/tom-daley-olympic-gold-tokyo-gay-lgbtq-community-message_uk_60fe9bfce4b0a807eeb41118

In seiner Rezension auf KlimabildungSalzburg.org bespricht der Artikelautor Hans Holzinger Werner Mittelstaedts neuesten Titel „Transformation und Ambivalenz. Steht die Welt vor dem Kollaps? Kurskorrektur oder Klimakatastrophe Mit einem Vorwort von Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker“:

„Werner Mittelstaedt zählt zu den Vertretern einer kritischen Zukunftsforschung in der Tradition von Robert Jungk. In seinem aktuellen Buch „Transformation und Ambivalenz“ steht die Klimakrise im Fokus. Diese sieht er aktuell als größte Gefahr für die Menschheit, wie der Untertitel des Bandes „Kurskorrektur oder Klimakatastrophe“ anzeigt. Mittelstaedt widmet sich zunächst den beiden Begriffen des Buchtitels. Unter Transformationen seien die „vielen winzigen bis sehr großen Veränderungsschritte auf praktisch allen Ebenen menschlichen Handelns zu verstehen“ (S. 15). Ihre Realisierung impliziere einen fundamentalen gesellschaftlichen Wandel, der die Lebenswirklichkeiten der Menschen fast überall auf der Erde umgestalten werde. Der Autor spricht von einem „Epochenumbruch“ (S. 16), den nicht nur Politik, Wirtschaft, Wissenschaft und Technologie, sondern „möglichst viele Menschen aus allen gesellschaftlichen Umfeldern“ (ebd.) zu gestalten hätten.

Was hat dies mit Ambivalenz zu tun? „Wir wollen etwas verändern, aber scheuen uns, dafür etwas zu tun oder zu unterlassen.“ (S. 18) Dies gelte, so Mittelstaedt, nicht nur für einzelne Menschen, sondern das Handeln ganzer Länder oder Staatengemeinschaften, die die Ambivalenz der Bürger und Bürgerinnen widerspiegeln, wie etwa die bislang 27 Klimakonferenzen der Vereinten Nationen seit 1995 zeigen würden: „Seitdem hat sich die Erwärmung beschleunigt und die Schäden in der Biosphäre und für die Menschen durch die Klimakrise werden Jahr für Jahr größer, weil praktisch nichts erreicht wurde.“ (S. 19) Wir seien gefangen im Fortschrittsversprechen und der Wachstumsgläubigkeit: „Durch das enorme Wirtschaftswachstum im noch jungen 21. Jahrhundert wurde das gesamte Erdsystem stärker als jemals zuvor im Anthropozän belastet.“ (S. 50) Mittelstaedt spricht hier von einem „drohenden Wachstumsdilemma“ (S. 73), denn das bestehende Wachstumsparadigma sei alles andere als nachhaltig, wenn das Wachstum aufgrund von zunehmenden Klimakatastrophen jedoch einbreche, drohten „soziale Unruhen und politische Krisen nie gekannten Ausmaßes“ (ebd.). Der Rechtsruck und die Proteste in Europa durch die Gas- und Energiekrise hätten einen kleinen Vorgeschmack darauf geliefert. Eine Megakrise wäre auch unter dem Einsatz klugen Handelns und allergrößter Disziplin der meisten Menschen nicht mehr zu lindern.

Im Zentrum der globalen Transformation steht die Umstellung der Energieversorgung. Auch hier habe der Krieg Putins gegen die Ukraine die Krisenhaftigkeit unseres Energiesystems deutlich gemacht, so Mittelstaedt. Flüssiggas (LNG) sei davor nur als Ergänzung, etwa für LKW-Treibstoff, verwendet worden. Im Zuge der Gas-Krise sei dieses aber zum Ersatz für russisches Gas geworden – mit problematischen ökologischen Folgen: „LNG aus den USA mit hohem Fracking-Anteil ist mehr als 6-mal und das aus Australien rund 7,5-mal klimaschädlicher als Pipeline-Gas aus Norwegen.“ (S. 93)

Mittelstaedt fordert ein neues „Aufstiegs-Narrativ“ (S. 134), das Klimaschutz in allen Bereichen und Berufen ins Zentrum stellt. Und er plädiert für ein neues „Fortschritts-Narrativ“ (S. 135). Dieses müsse vermitteln, dass gesellschaftlicher Fortschritt sich nur noch erzielen lasse, „wenn Menschen ein neues Verständnis im Umgang mit der Biosphäre und der Begrenztheit der Erde entwickeln und danach handeln“ (ebd.) Da kommt die „neue Aufklärung“ von Ernst U. v. Weizsäcker ins Spiel, der ein Vorwort zum Buch verfasst hat.

Einschätzung: Werner Mittelstaedt vermittelt die Dringlichkeit der Umsteuerung und zitiert zahlreiche Fakten, die diese untermauern. Seine Vorschläge zur Transformation sind pragmatisch und reformorientiert. Sie reichen vom Stopp der Flächenversiegelung über den Ersatz von Kunststoffen durch biobasierte Ersatzstoffe bis hin zu Tempolimits auf Straßen und auf den Weltmeeren sowie einer deutlichen Verteuerung des Flugverkehrs. Auch eine faire Verteilung des Wohlstands und die Begrenzung der Reichen mit ihrem gigantischen CO₂-Fußabdruck wird angesprochen. Heftig kritisiert werden die neuen Militarisierungsschritte, die ökologisch desaströs seien und für die Transformation nötige Ressourcen verschlingen. Der Autor setzt auf strukturelle Veränderungen und damit auf eine Zähmung des Kapitalismus – die Systemfrage stellt das Buch so nicht. Deutlich wird, dass der Wandel auch unserer Denkmuster und kulturellen Bilder von Fortschritt notwendig ist, wie die 95 neuen Wertorientierungen und Handlungsmuster am Ende des Buches nochmals vor Augen führen. Ein Buch, das einmal mehr die Dringlichkeit der Umsteuerung aufzeigt.“

Der Artikel wurde am 01. März 2024 von Hans Holzinger auf klimabildungsalzburg.org unter dem folgenden Link veröffentlicht https://klimabildungsalzburg.org/2024/03/01/werner-mittelstaedt-transformation-und-ambivalenz/

Mehr Informationen zu „Transformation und Ambivalenz. Steht die Welt vor dem Kollaps? Kurskorrektur oder Klimakatastrophe Mit einem Vorwort von Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker“ von Werner Mittelstaedt erhalten Sie unter dem folgenden Link https://www.peterlang.com/document/1358981

Dr Janet Bubar Rich became enchanted with horses in myths and legends while working on her Ph.D. in Mythological Studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute. During class breaks, she would look at the horses in the field across from the campus and, being so impressed with the magnificent animals, she began researching the symbolic meaning of the horse image across cultures over time. She found the symbolism to be similar in ancient Greek, Nordic, Hindu, and Buddhist mythologies, as well as in Native American legends, films such as Seabiscuit, and popular plays like War Horse. Enchanted by the way the horses “enable people to go further and move faster” than they can otherwise go, Dr. Rich was inspired to write a book that was published by Peter Lang International Academic Publishers in 2016 entitled Riding on Horses’ Wings: Reimagining Today’s Horse for Tomorrow’s World.

In her book, Dr. Rich points out that once Native Americans adopted horses for hunting and riding, the horse image started entering their stories. Parents would tell their children, “If you’re good, you’ll get a horse and the horse of your dreams will take you into the skies,” she discloses. The horse became a god figure for them as it did in so many cultures across the globe over time. Horses have been a symbol of ascent across virtually all cultures throughout history.

In her book, Riding on Horses’ Wings, Dr. Rich explores how horses inspire soulful imagination, and investigates how historical and mythological love of horses has, in our technological age, become the love of high horse-powered vehicles.

Rich refers to her book as a cautionary tale, cautioning readers and listeners to pay attention to horse power and with it, the need to protect horses and all organic life, including plants, water, and human life. We need to remain cognizant of getting too caught up in “horse power” and instead focus on “getting back to the horse.” The book puts forth a call for channeling our love of horses into action; of “taking life by the reins” and making the changes needed for the survival of horses and other species on earth, our home.

There are many theories that study the development of human society. But looking back at the more successful sociological theories in history, we can find that they all have a very important feature, that is, they basically emphasize the relationship between humans. From individual psychology to social psychology to macroscopic sociology, it is said that the composition and development of the entire society is based on the relationship and conflict between humans. To study the survival and development of human society from such a macroscopic perspective from the relationship between human and nature, human and the environment, or between human and the entire earth and even the solar system, the Milky Way, and even the universe, a more systematic theory is required.

For example, the Paris Agreement in 2015, although it emphasized that climate change will have a very serious impact on human society and set goals that countries around the world need to achieve in the next few years, how does such a climate change affect the structure of human society? This requires more theoretical support. So much so that some even think that perhaps rising global temperatures may be more beneficial to human society. This has led some countries to adopt a hands-on approach when formulating climate policies. Some people think that even if the climate changes drastically, they believe that humans can always automatically adapt to this new climate change when global temperatures rise in the future.

However, if we look at the problem from the perspective of a global climate environment where changes in the climate and environment have a decisive impact on the structure and type of human society, we will find that the rise in global temperature is not as simple as a figure of 1.5 degrees Celsius. The rise in global temperature will inevitably affect the structure and type of human society as a whole, which in turn will drag down the development of the entire society. When a very stable human social structure with a long history is destroyed, and the new social structure that replaces it cannot adapt to such changes in the climatic environment, then it may bring a series of humanitarian problems. For example, in the seventies of the last century, some leaders in some parts of Southeast Asia made wrong decisions to forcibly transform the traditional family-oriented society into a social-oriented society in Southeast Asian countries, resulting in the destruction of existing production relations and a sharp decline in food production, which in turn caused a famine in which millions of people died in the entire country.

5,000 years ago

Older than that, there is now some evidence that 5,000 years ago, the entire planet caused a huge flood due to a sharp rise in temperature. The flood led to the disappearance of many civilizations around the world. The most typical of these is the Liangzhu 良渚 culture in the late Neolithic period of China. More than 5,000 years ago, the ancient city of Liangzhu was a very prosperous Neolithic society. Since more than 10,000 years ago, this society has been continuously born and developed in the area of Hangzhou Bay. From the existing archaeological excavations, it can be seen that Liangzhu Ancient City is a prehistoric civilization whose overall development of society has reached a very high level. About 5,000 years ago, however, there was a rapid warming process on the entire planet. In addition to causing sea level rise, this rise in global temperatures is more serious in addition to inundating land at low coastal altitudes, but also leading to global climate instability. This climate instability may manifest itself in localized high temperatures, high heat, and extremely cold weather. These extreme weather events could cause the complete melting of snow-capped mountain glaciers in the Arctic, Antarctica, and the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau on the Asian continent, leaving no continuous water to replenish the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers, causing seasonal droughts. This uneven distribution of temperature on Earth leads to unpredictable flows in the movement of the global atmosphere. When very powerful typhoons and violent tectonic movements of the Earth’s plates occur, they can cause huge tsunamis. The emergence of such planetary-scale tsunamis, like the Great Red Spot storm on Jupiter, could last for decades or even longer. In the past few decades, a large amount of seawater has poured into the mainland area, causing a reverse flow of the Yangtze River. Coupled with the disappearance of glaciers upstream, this kind of water backflow can even reach the relatively low altitude of Wuhan and even the Three Gorges area, eventually causing huge floods. The Liangzhu culture in Zhejiang suffered as a result. The remnants of the surviving Liangzhu culture were forced to move south or west into the Chengdu Plain, which is relatively high.

During the period of relative stability of the global climate, the fluctuation of global temperature will be relatively small, but even such a small fluctuation can still make the entire earth enter a relatively cold ice age in a certain period of time. This ice age, which can be ignored from the perspective of the movement of the earth, has a huge impact on human society. During this colder ice age, temperatures are most affected by those near the northern hemisphere. When global temperatures are warmer, population growth pressures will lead to some human migration to the north of the planet. And when the Earth’s temperature fluctuates over a small ice period, the temperature in these northern regions can drop dramatically, leaving people who live in nomadic ways unable to obtain enough food. This caused a portion of northern humans to migrate south. When these human beings are hindered in their southward migration, it will cause conflicts between human cultures and thus wars. From the history after the Qin Dynasty in China, it can be seen that whenever the global temperature drops, the entire eastern Asian region will produce more serious disasters and wars. When the climate is warmer, the entire eastern part of Asia will prosper rapidly. This also reflects the impact of global climate change on the structure of human society. Using the knowledge of social thermodynamics, we can predict the impact of global climate change on these social thermodynamics parameters of human society, thereby providing a theoretical basis for human society to formulate effective policies to cope with climate change.

Industrial Revolution

After the Industrial Revolution in the mid-18th century, human society faced another problem. Due to the rapid increase in the social temperature of the thermodynamic system of the entire human society, compared with the global temperature, it means that more energy will flow from human society to the earth’s environment, resulting in an increase in the global temperature. Of course, this is the inevitable result of the industrialization and informationization of human society.

Historically, in response to rising or falling global temperatures, ancient human societies were mainly done through large-scale population migration. But after the Industrial Revolution, this rise in global temperatures was largely caused by human activity itself. In this case, human beings may not be able to avoid various natural and man-made disasters through large-scale population migration as ancient societies did. This means that more mutual cooperation between human societies is needed to achieve the goal of global harmony. Human society must find a path of green peace development to promote the comprehensive economic, political and cultural development of human society. The past approach of relying on a clash of civilizations to promote the development of human society must be abandoned.

From the history of human industrialization and informatization development in the past 200 years, it can also be seen that although the clash of various civilizations and wars have indeed promoted the emergence of many new technologies, these technologies are likely to be harmful to human society. It is likely that these technologies are the root cause of the rise in global temperatures. For example, the emergence of two world wars has led to different countries and cultures having to strengthen their scientific and technological strength. And this extensive scientific and technological development is entirely aimed at how to confront other civilizations. For this purpose, very inefficient diesel engines that release large amounts of greenhouse gases and heat are developed and installed in tanks. Kerosene engines with increased efficiency were installed in the aircraft. Although this gave humans greater power to conquer other civilizations and even the earth’s ecosystem, it was clear that it also brought a very large amount of greenhouse gas and heat emissions, laying the foundation for the rapid rise in global temperatures in the following decades.

And the emergence of war not only led to the development of a large number of inefficient technologies. As a result of the short-term decline in population caused by the war, in turn to compensate for these declines after the war, countries around the world began to strive to increase fertility. This is the emergence of the baby boom in the sixties and seventies after World War II. Rapid population growth in turn means that this inefficient technology supports the need to obtain more energy, release more greenhouse gases and heat, and exacerbate the rise in global temperatures.

The World Today

Unfortunately, there are still a few countries in our world that hold this very bad idea of using war to promote their own development. This will only undermine global efforts to collectively resist rapidly changes in the Earth’s climate. The limited scientific, technological and cultural resources of the development of human society are consumed in a meaningless war.

These are only a small aspect of the challenges facing human society, but they have shown that climate change has a huge impact on the development of human society and civilization. However, the existing sociological theories are still limited to the microscopic interaction between people at the research level, and less consideration is given to the impact of global climate and environmental changes on human society.

The book “Social Thermodynamics” was written in the hope of exploring the laws of social development from a more macroscopic perspective of global change. By introducing the quantitative calculation method of thermodynamics, some important social thermodynamic parameters, such as social temperature, social pressure, social space, etc., can be quantified. This allows conclusions to be drawn with the help of rigorous mathematical derivation. The advantage of using this mathematical derivation is that we can focus mainly on simple axiomatic assumptions, and as long as these axiomatic assumptions are correct, then the conclusions obtained are also correct. Otherwise, we can revise the hypothesis in order to finally reach the correct conclusion in line with the laws of social development.

Zhi Cheng, Author of Social Thermodynamics. An Interdisciplinary View
https://www.peterlang.com/document/1326006