Can Parental Sacrifice Train Us to Think Differently About Climate Change?

Abstract

This paper postulates that personal actions to avert climate change can potentially be raised to the iconic status that parental sacrifice in general has come to have in our societies and that this can in effect play a significant role in changing our collective attitudes and behavior to favor future generations as a group. Moreover, because parental sacrifice is so deeply rooted in our collective psyche as a basic human value across cultures, I argue that we can indeed all be socialized, even as non-parents, into feeling generous toward the interests of children and their peers. That is to say, even those of us who do not have the personal experience of being engaged with parental effectivity with our own children can potentially feel sympathetically inclined toward future generations, simply because of the residual symbolic power of parental sacrifice in most societies.

Keywords: climate change, sacrifice, liminality