Between the Crisis Ladder and the Utopia of Frugality: Negotiating Exemplarity in Current Imagined Futures

Abstract: This article studies personal texts related to one of the great threats of our time: human-made climate change. The aim is to better understand how people engage with and are affected by the public discourse on this topic by applying a combined analysis of narrativity and exemplarity on a set of data consisting of responses to a qualitative questionnaire issued by the institute of Norwegian Ethnological Research. Along the way, features of current utopian and dystopian imagery will be unfolded and notions about cultural progress and the direction of history will be observed. Utopias of frugality are identified as reactions to the prospect of climate change and interpreted as translations of the dominant but vague concept of sustainability onto values and actions that people can recognize and perform in their daily lives.

Keywords: climate change; imagined futures; narrative analysis; exemplarity; qualitative questionnaires

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Introduction

To turn something into an example, is to link a particular and temporal phenomenon to qualities assumed to have more permanent and universal nature—but still, to a degree, leaving the connections implicit and open for interpretation. The literary scholar Larry Scanlon has characterized the example as an “enactment of cultural authority” (Scanlon 1994, 34). This characterization expresses a play of social interactions that generates the power to maintain, adapt, or change prevailing cultural standards. The authority played out through exchanges of exemplarity is sourced both from the persona of the performer, from the content of the performance and from the recognition, evaluation, and (hopefully) appreciation of an audience. Exemplarity exists by being performed, and performing exemplarity is a fundamental meaning-making activity. In many social settings, it will not be sufficient for a participant to merely reproduce information. We also expect from our communicative partners that they convey messages. To do this, they must link their specific observations to notions that are more general, by formulating, commenting on or alluding to norms, rules or values. Thus, sometimes as by-products and sometimes as their main objectives, they then also contribute to reproducing and recreating the public notions of the qualities their performances pre-suppose.

This study examines imagery produced in responses to the threat of human-made climate changes. More directly, the about 150 texts that constitute its core material, were written as answers to a qualitative questionnaire (Kjus and Grønstad 2014) issued by the Norwegian Ethnological Research institute (NEG) for a research project on people’s ideas about daily life in the future.¹ The respondents were asked to imagine being transported thirty years forward in time. What would their lives be like? The questionnaire was designed not to guide the responses in any specific direction. Four overarching questions asked for: 1) first associations, 2) unwanted futures, 3) desired futures, and 4) how to achieve a desired future. The respondents were told they could write as long or as short as they wished, and the texts vary in volume, style, and content. The shortest contain only a few sentences and the longest are many pages long. The bulk of the collection consists of responses that are from 300 to 700 words, which equals between a half and a full page. The respondents tended to develop their themes and ideas across the response fields, and this encouraged a narrative approach to the initial sorting process (Kjus et al. 2023). Here, we worked from the assumption that narratives are problem oriented (Brooks 1992; Amsterdam and Bruner 2002, 129; Bruner 2002, 50; Kjus 2010, 18–21) and identified the kinds of problems emphasized by the narrators, thus providing a rough outline of extant narrative types. Then, we analyzed how each type was addressed in structurally different manners, a sifting that yielded sets of variants within each type. There were four problem complexes that stood out: 1) war, 2) the gap between the rich and the poor, 3) rapid technological development, and 4) climate change. The problem of climate change was special in how it often incorporated the other themes and in how it seemed to dominate the discussion about the future.

This article aims to explore how the topic of climate change was shaped and employed in some of the questionnaire responses. The study combines the aim of examining some of the ideas that currently are circulating with regard to this topic, with the more specific aim of probing how exemplarity is negotiated in articulating those ideas. Here, I find it necessary to make a distinction between two different formats for articulating exemplarity. In the first format, the example is already provided. The text’s production of exemplarity is not about producing new examples, but about interpreting a phenomenon on which it is assumed that everyone’s gaze is already fixed. The centrality of the phenomenon is given, but its significance is debated. This kind could be called ontological exemplarity, as it addresses the question: What is human-made climate change? In comparison, the other kind could be called ethical exemplarity. Here, the texts are addressing the question: How should I behave in a world dominated by human-made climate change? This question encourages more distinctly narrative performances, often introducing the narrator as protagonist. Despite the distinction, necessitated by my approach, the two formats blend freely, and I find that they share the function of offering humanoid interiors—containing elements such as will, emotion and virtue—to external and possibly objective courses of events.

The Paradoxes of Exemplarity

The example is one of the most common rhetorical figures. It is so frequently used that it easily can go under the radar and appear, not as oratory, but as plain and simple speech. However, on closer examination, one may find that the example stands out as speech that is carefully shaped to be noticed and judged. The example appears to be found, but to function in the context of the current performance, it is, by necessity, also molded (Lyons 1989, 33; Noyes 2016, 81). Contradictions and ambiguities are often perceived as weaknesses in rational discourse, but I suspect that the rhetorical power of the example rests largely in its inherent paradoxes,² and before I move on to readings and analysis, I will mention some of them.

Examples can function both descriptively and normatively. (Gelley 1995, 1–4; Eriksen, Krefting and Rønning 2012, 12–14; Noyes 2016, 77, 90). An example that is geared for the descriptive examination of certain phenomena can be called a case. An example in the normative mode, embodying standards against which other instances are measured, can be called a model . However, when an example is introduced in a story or an argument, it will often have the dual function of both case and model, a trait that corresponds with how people often will harmonize their ideas about what is and what should be.

It is intrinsic to the function of an example to be remarkable, to catch people’s attention and spur their imagination. But, though unique and perhaps outstanding, for the example to be a vehicle for more general principles, one should be able to imagine that similar things have happened before and that they may happen again. Thus, the example is both singular and iterative (Lyons 1989, 26–28).

The example may appear as an argument put forth by a speaker, but, as Aristotle pointed out, it constitutes an incomplete argument. Necessary premises are left out and the conclusion tends to be implicit (Aristotle 2006, 29–33, 165–167). Eventually, the audience must draw their own inferences, by adding the general principle to which the case should be subsumed – or, if relevant rules, norms or ideals actually are articulated, the performance of the example puts them to some sort of test, inviting the audience to share in the judgment of how the rule fits the case (Lyons 1989, 33–34; Kjus et al. 2011, 59–63). I would suggest that the example is a convincing argument precisely because those who allow themselves to be convinced, convince themselves. With the introduction of an example, the speaker outlines an argument, trusting the listener’s ability to complete it. For this to work, the listener must be able to fill in the missing parts from previously accumulated and internalized discourse (Kjus 2010, 26–28, 46, 78). In other words, the introduction of an example in practical argumentation will be based on a pre-existing culture of exemplarity, that both speaker and listener can draw from. Thus, one could say that the example is always old and always new.

Much of the literature on exemplarity builds on Aristotle and classical rhetoric, and, because of this, one is easily led to imagine exemplarity in a model situation for persuasive speech, where a speaker instrumentally tries to convince an audience. Contrary to this, one should note that the speaker’s use of an example also can be imaginative, with the example serving as a basis for open ended creative exploration. What’s more, the typical rhetorical setting, with speaker, recipient and message, falls short of describing the communicative situations where one does not create new examples, but rather comment on, interpret and position oneself in relation to presupposed authoritative figures or phenomena. In this mode, the exemplary figures tend towards the singular and the normative, their exemplarity serving as models to be copied or even as institutionalized social control mechanisms (Noyes 2016, 85). A prime example of this kind is royalty, with the connectivity between the temporal enactments and the eternal principles of the sacred kingdom performed through public displays, and the king appearing as the source and the executor of the laws of the realm (Kjus et al 2011; Kjus 2012; Bjørnstad 2021). While the king is both a singular and serial figure—there have been previous kings and there will be successors—the figures and acts of the grounding myths of royalty are perceived of as singular and paradigmatic. For instance, in the ideological groundings of medieval Christian kingship, the mythological stories of the beginning and the end of the world, the Genesis and the Apocalypse, were constantly referenced (Kjus 2013, 272–74).

Today, the expulsion from Eden and the final judgement are no longer as dominant in political discourse, but one could ask if their exemplary functions, to a degree, have been transposed to the imageries and performances of history and progress. Even if these discourses are perhaps more abstract and possibly more fluid and contested, it would be naïve to think that, in the centuries when they were ardently observed, the practices and principles of holy kingship were not also fluid and contested.

I will suggest that the topic of climate change in our day and age has reached a degree of public attention, filling the newspapers, the social media, and the streets, that has granted it a paradigmatic exemplary status in current debate. To elaborate on this topic, to shape it or comment on it so that it reflects where you stand and what you see, are means of being present in this debate, which has become global in the sense that you cannot easily avoid it. In this situation, people may experience a moral obligation to take a stance and to do one’s part, or at least to have an opinion. Thus, the story of the climate crisis becomes a framework that other elements are incorporated in and measured against—and a battleground for the performance of exemplarity.

Introducing the Crisis Ladder

With reference to the performativity of exemplarity, it should be observed how dominant cultural references are altered through their use, as people climb up on them, paint them in various colors, or try to tear them down. When going through the questionnaire responses, I found that many of them—more than two thirds—discuss climate change through a narrative pattern I have labeled the crisis ladder. This narrative pattern has an interesting history, and, in light of the discussion of the fluidity and contestability of exemplary figures, I would like to briefly outline it. The storyline in question could also be called the Malthusian narrative , after the British writer Thomas Malthus. In 1798, he published his Essay on the Principle of Population where he argued that human populations will tend to grow towards the limits of their available resources, and because of this, they will be haunted by periodical crises. The Malthusian thesis has been widely discussed and it continues to resurface in different shapes. Through the 20 ^th century, Malthusian traditions can be discerned within academic research, literary fiction, and political discourse. Among the literary contributions are science-fiction classics such as the novel The Caves of Steel (Asimov 1953), which describes an over-populated and thoroughly technologized world where the exploitation of resources is nearing its limits, and the short story The Tunnel Ahead(Glaser 1961), which portrays grotesque and radical measures brought in to control excess populations. A non-fiction contribution that received much attention was the American biologist Paul R. Ehrlich’s alarmist book The Population Bomb (1968), where the writer followed the world’s increasing population into a series of crisis scenarios that included ecological breakdown, famine disasters, and armed international conflicts. For a long time, population growth was the core element of Malthusian thinking. In the 1970s, the story took a new turn when over-consumption in the Western world was added as a cause for an expected breakdown. Central in this turn was the MIT research report The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972), which was produced as a cooperation between natural and social scientists to build models able to predict if/when the growth in global population and consumption would face limits given by the world’s available resources. In the original report, pollution was described as an amplifying effect of increased population and consumption, but the damages caused by man-made climate change were not really considered. In the follow-up report, published some 30 years later, global climatic developments had become an important consideration (Meadows et al. 2004). On the political scene, the narrative of the climate-driven crisis ladder has been elaborated, for instance by the report by the UN World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (1987) which appropriated the concept of sustainable development for the UN (e.g., Ødemark 2019), by the gradually more alarming reports by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (1990 –), and by the School Strike for Climate movement headed by the child activist Greta Thunberg (2018 –).

How then, is the topic of climate change introduced in the recently collected qualitative questionnaire responses? Many of the texts open with descriptions of a negative development where problems accumulate. Most often, they start by describing highly generalized courses of events. The following description resembles the prologue to a dystopian television series that sets the scene before the main actors are introduced and the more concrete and personal action begins:

I believe the world [30 years from now] is very much marked by the destruction of nature and the climate, and by hundreds of millions of people migrating from the south to the north, primarily because of drought, ruined crops and lack of clean water. I also think many eco systems will collapse, with drastic ripple effects (death of bees, corals, fish etc.), causing famine and humanitarian disasters. The summers of Southern Europe will be characterized by great fires, lasting dryness and malfunctioning agriculture. Giant refugee camps will be established in Central Europe, containing both Southern Europeans, Africans, and people from other continents. I imagine Northern European countries building fences at their southern borders. The European Union will be dissolved because of disagreements about how to deal with the situation. There will be a massive growth of right-wing populism and extreme social differences, as the rich become even richer and the poor grow in numbers and misery. (NEG 277/58)³

Another respondent, who tells a similar story, has chosen a more sensuous and expressive opening:

The tired, the hungry, and the poor wander towards countries where the groundwater reservoirs still provide access to the most basic of human needs. They face borders closed by fascist political currents within the populations of the countries that still have secure supplies of resources, even if this means that the workers in those countries will have to pay to drink water. Like the fisheries, this previously common and shared resource has been privatized. (NEG 277/87)

Here, we follow the victims of the future crisis wandering towards a boundary that coincides with what the writer finds to be the core of the problem: the growing gap between the rich and the poor, the greed of the rich, and the unfair social order. The crisis ladder may also be expressed in fewer words. It can even be done with just a selection of keywords. One response begins with this list of words:

Climate crisis, civilization collapse, nuclear winter, tribal communities, suffering, hunger. (NEG 277/85)

These words are not ordered randomly. They express a sequence of events, in fact a chain of causes and effects: The climate crisis leads to the collapse of civilization, which again causes the arsenals of nuclear weapons to be used in escalating conflicts. People end up living in tribal communities marked by suffering and hunger. For all of this to be communicated through a mere list of words, the writer is dependent on readers who are familiar with the story that the words are indexing. Texts may assume a similar macro-narrative familiarity (Kjus 2010, 80) when they skip the description of the problem and move directly to the causes:

We are in a development similar to the mass extinctions in the Permian period, and WE are the cause. But now, the changes happen within the span of a couple of hundred years, not over thousands of years. We are doomed – by ourselves … All the choices we make these days have a horizon of at most 3–4 years. And the more power and influence people have, the shorter their foresight. (NEG 277/48)

One may assume that the changes referred to are both man-made climate changes and the mass extinction of species, but the actions that are spelt out take place in the inner, ethical field of action. The causes of immanent disaster are human denial, lack of understanding, and greed. Because of these bad qualities, the respondent predicts the remaining human history to be short and painful.

The climate-change narrative is given flexibility by how it is structured as a development of interwoven and escalating problems. It may contain steps such as these: the destruction of eco-systems, lack of resources, mass migration, political polarization/collapse. In the questionnaire responses, this type of pattern is employed with many variations. For instance, there are differences in how people perceive the causes and the consequences of the problems, and also in what they suggest as appropriate counter measures. The respondents cited above describe dramatic changes, but the crises they outline all have different scopes. NEG 277/48 imagines the extinction of mankind, while NEG 277/85 believes that humans will survive in tribal societies. NEG 277/87 expects a social collapse also within the Norwegian state, while others anticipate that northern countries like Norway will survive relatively intact, though strongly affected by the lack of resources.

Although it varies how serious the respondents imagine the future crisis will become, it is obvious that the crisis ladder scenario includes the end of civilization as we know it as a possible outcome. This resonates with how several recent studies have noted the presence of eschatology—stories and practices concerning the end of the world—in contemporary discussions about environmental action and climate change (e.g., Keller 1999; Foust and Murphy 2009; Buell 2010; Nielsen 2013). I will suggest that the vivid utopic and dystopic imagery and the sharpened discussions of human virtues and vices, that will be examined below, are motivated by this threatening horizon. This is similar to how eschatology functions in religious contexts. At the end of times, the strings of history are re-united, and the endings are related back to the beginnings, creating a framework to which other incidents and motifs may be integrated. Only when the heroes meet their ends, can they truly be recognized as stable types (e.g., Steinsland 2005, 121–132). In short, eschatology strengthens and sharpens the narrative patterns.

In the next section, I will explore this kind of patterning, as I concentrate on one single questionnaire response where the topic of climate change evokes an imagery of dystopia and utopia, that is used for claiming ethical and political authority. I use the reading of this text to open a range of analytical themes, that afterwards are pursued with further discussions.

The Myopian Avant-Garde

Some respondents point to capitalism as the more fundamental problem, causing both social injustice and climate change. In responses of this kind, climate change may be presented as an argument for disposing of the capitalist system, while at the same time climate change can be seen to create the political preconditions for such a change, since the transition from global capitalism to small-scale production and more locally lived lives is made possible when the current exploitative and over-consuming social order collapses. The respondent NEG 277/37 predicts such a collapse to be imminent, perhaps happening already in the 2030s.

The over-consuming lifestyle and the predation on people and nature will lead to a sharp fall ... The exploitation of people and nature will increase as the population’s ability to protest and express themselves is limited ... The bulk of humanity will be indoctrinated to become servants of the digital and automated society under the oligarchic leadership that we are presently allowing to develop ... Those of us who have seen where this is heading try as best we can to encourage people to make better choices – so that in the future you may experience a world with a deeper sense of community, healthy and clean food, and access to a living and rich nature. (NEG 277/37)

The text shows a developed narrative structure involving three different actor categories: we, you, and they. We are the small-scale activists who show a path out of the quagmire. They are the international money mafia, always trying to gain more power and currently luring the politicians and the public with the green industry, which is not going to solve the world’s problems. You are the docile majority, who have not yet understood that you are being deceived. The we-category is described as an historical avant-garde—a growing group of people who have realized where our society is heading and are preparing for the consequences. With the confusion and suffering caused by the forthcoming upheaval, it is important that some people take it upon themselves to lead the way through the transition.

A recurring theme in the text is the long-term need to repair both nature, people, and society from the damage caused by industrial capitalism. On the external level, this is about repairing eco-systems and recycling man-made artifacts. The problems of landslides, floods, and droughts will be reduced through the rehabilitation of natural areas. Global cooperative projects will clean the oceans from rubbish, which can in turn be reused as building materials, while the seas will once again be teeming with marine life. Workshops will be established to maintain and repair clothes and other objects that can be reused. Equally important, however, is the repair of people. After a long period of cynical and alienating exploitation, people need to re-establish their ties with both nature and their fellow human beings. Education will be reformed by voluntary and engaging methods that foster individual creativity. The energy thus liberated will ensure that cultural expressions flourish, in contrast to the conformity and mass production of the present. By reconnecting with nature, stress levels will be reduced and the body’s ability to regenerate will be strengthened.

When going into the details of this response, it becomes apparent that the writer is addressing a paradox concerning the direction of social development. Regarding transportation, the respondent writes: “Shorter distances of distribution have opened up for deliveries by bicycles, draft animals, and new mechanical solutions.” In another paragraph the author elaborates further:

[Thirty years from now] most of the food production has been moved to local communities and private homes, using agro-ecological principles such as permaculture and food forests, with the exception of a few mega-corporations that still overexploit easily cultivated areas and populations. Togetherness, collaboration, and personal development characterize the everyday life of most people, where the technological dependency that was the norm in 2022 has been balanced with practical and natural methods complemented by high-tech aids. In Norway, cluster farms have enjoyed a renaissance, with collaborations and communities around local food production, maintenance, self-sustainability, creative arts, child rearing, education, and care. (NEG 277/37)

Here, the overexploitation of the mega-corporations represents a backward position, while returning to cluster farms is innovative and forward-looking. In the respondent’s mindset, industrial capitalism is viewed as a historical dead end. Society is like a train that needs to be backed out of a track leading to the abyss and be redirected to a track that can lead to a viable future. It should be noted that, in this new lifestyle, ancient and natural technologies are complemented by high-tech aids, and agriculture follows updated agro-ecological principles. Deliveries by draft animals are accompanied by new mechanical solutions.

This ideal future society is characterized by nearness in so many ways that it is tempting to label it a myotopia. The alienation of international capitalism is replaced by the nearness between production and consumption, the cooperation between the participants of the local community, and the re-established union between people and nature. Myopia is a medical term that denotes near-sightedness. Here, the term myotopia is used to refer to imagined futures that idealize proximity (Kjus et al. 2023, 10–11). The we-category in this respondent’s narrative can be seen as a myotopic avant-garde, in that they take the lead in re-establishing lost proximity.

The folklorist Dorothy Noyes has characterized the performance of exemplarity as a gesture toward utopia (Noyes 2016). It is an act that invokes the imagery of a more ideal world, and, in direct or indirect manner, is aimed at bringing it about. In the present case, to invoke utopia and to ward of dystopia appear as two sides of the same coin, structurally similar to how, in a religious context, achieving heaven and avoiding hell could be seen as twin aspects of the same Christian act.

Groundings of Human Agency in the Virtus of Modernity

In the interior field of action of NEG 277/37, the good qualities of the activists mirror the bad qualities of the capitalists. While the capitalists want access to all the Earth’s resources, the activists want the resources to be managed locally and collectively and exploited only to a limited extent. While the capitalists strive to control the majority of the world’s population and turn them into humble servants, the activists wish to liberate them and give them back control over their lives and societies. While the capitalists’ science is a false glare, most strongly expressed through the so-called green technology, the activists act from an understanding of humanity’s connection to nature. In sum, the text mirrors greed and selfishness with frugality and altruism, slavery with freedom, and false understanding with true insight. A structuring principle for this mirroring of vices with virtues is the notion that improvement in knowledge and understanding is what drives history forward and brings humanity to higher levels: It is the activists’ greater understanding and the possibility of spreading this understanding to the population at large that provides hope for the future.

Historian of ideas Ronny Ambjörnsson has suggested that the ideas of modernity can be studied as a mythological complex (1990). According to Sara Iles Johnson (2018, 92–96), mythology should not be perceived of as a set of authoritative texts, but rather as a slowly evolving discussion about human virtues and predicaments, where each reproduction of a key narrative element is an act of interpretation. It is interesting to note how issues of modernity are intrinsic to the tradition of utopian and dystopian literature. The pairing of knowledge with progress is one of the persistent themes. The utopian nation described by Francis Bacon in his New Atlantis (1627) is undergoing a rapid development promoted by its central institution, the knowledge-nursing House of Solomon, which has made the cultivation of empirical natural science the ideology of the state. The Father of the House of Solomon explains: “The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible” (Bacon 2018 [1626], 31). Allegedly, Bacon’s description of the House of Solomon inspired the founding of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge (ca 1646). From a literary perspective, one of the most successful contributions to the early modern utopian literature was Gulliver’s Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift. Especially the two last books of this tetralogy contain razor sharp mockery of the ideas of modernity, such as the ideas of a natural European cultural and racial world domination, and ideas of how humanity would improve through scientific advances. To cut a long story short, I take it that the imperialist European progress narrative is a utopian complex that, in its different forms, have been countered both with corresponding dystopias and with competing utopias. In this political turmoil and debate, it is remarkable to see to what extent the grounding virtues of modernity remain relatively shared and stable.

Imagined futures that idealize human progress can result in optimism or pessimism, depending on how humanity’s inner qualities are assessed. NEG 277/59 emphasizes that we must develop a new understanding of mankind’s role in the world and believes that the climate crisis will force the rise of such an understanding.

There will be many exciting debates about the very foundations of civilization, there will be discussions on every street corner, in schools, and in the media, a development I think we have already seen the beginning of with the book releases and debates of recent years. We should avoid letting fear guide us too much in our decisions, and instead meet what comes with openness and faith in the goodness of life and of people. (NEG 277/59)

In contrast to dark forecasts, a picture of bright modernity is painted, with people choosing to work together to solve common problems and achieve common goals. If we shift our gaze to the pessimists, the historical pattern may be similar, but the balance of opposing forces is assessed differently:

The last 50 years show how much resistance to change people have ... I dream of an everyday life where people can use their creativity without too much disturbance from cultural and historical bias, which unfortunately we are still very much characterized by ... I am seriously worried that the brake pads that listen to the fossil and capital forces will continue to have too much influence. We need to put an end to that. Renewal, research, idealism to achieve what is new and better for everyone is the only option. (NEG 277/60)

For NEG 277/60, too, renewal through research and idealism can lead to a better society, but cultural and historical prejudices are formidable counterforces, especially because the forces of capital pull in the same direction. It may seem paradoxical that many of the pessimistic texts in the collection are characterized by modernist viewpoints, but these writers suggest that humanity would move forward and upward, if only the obstacles of irrationality were removed.

Such a position recurs in one of the most common counter-narratives to the story of the climate-driven crisis ladder. Counter-narratives are critical responses to dominant notions and ideals. Against institutionally supportive key narratives, sceptics tend to outline alternatives that may in time become troupes with their own traditions (Kjus 2010, 93–4; Amsterdam and Bruner 2002, 137). A handful of the collected texts present an alternative crisis ladder, which presents the climate policies as leading to war, conflict, and famine (e.g., NEG 277/65, NEG 277/54, NEG 277/16). Of these responses, NEG 277/16 is the one that has the greatest emphasis on the possibilities for improvements. First, it paints an optimistic picture of the future, wherein humanity has moved forward in many areas:

Increased prosperity has brought population growth to a halt. Hunger has been eradicated, enabling people to care about things like traditional ecology and waste management. Illiteracy is completely eradicated. This, combined with a continued increase in the flow of information, people are now able to make better choices. All this is leading the world in a democratic direction, with less oppression, war, and dictatorship. (NEG 277/16)

But this bright future is only available under certain conditions. First, we must:

… stop scaring young (and older) people with imaginary crises and the end of the world (e.g., the so-called climate crisis). This will give people faith in the future and make politicians stop acting in panic. It will enable us to make well-considered, rational and wise decisions so that we can build a better future for all. Today’s scaremongering is causing us to dismantle community values and limit the freedom of expression. This development must be stopped by allowing all critical voices to be heard. We must protect independent research and ensure that political and economic forces do not tamper with it. When it is claimed that there is a scientific consensus, we are on a dangerous path. Research should always challenge and question. Where there is consensus, there is no science. And where there is science, there is never consensus. (NEG 277/16)

While the text opens with an optimistic view on future developments, where it is deemed right and natural for the world to improve for the better, this only holds as long as people think and behave rationally. When activists and politicians scare the population with crisis scenarios, they make people behave irrationally. Fear and panic are the fundamental internal problems that give greedy capitalists the elbowroom to usurp our shared resources. The problem must be addressed through freedom of expression and independent research, where critical voices challenge and question.

NEG 277/16 presents an alternative by means of proposing a different crisis ladder that portrays climate policy not as the solution, but as the problem. The respondent also launches alternative interpretations of the virtues of reason, freedom, and justice. Reason is threatened by the public fear that politicians create through their false crisis prophecies. Justice suffers when capitalists are given free reins to usurp the community’s resources. Research must be free, but today it is subjected to political agendas. The ideals of freedom, justice, and knowledge are ambiguous. They do not have stable and neutral definitions (even if people acting from supposedly superior positions may claim that they do). They are qualities that can be experienced subjectively and emotionally, but if these qualities are to be communicated and discussed, they must be expressed verbally and aesthetically.

On the one hand, the climate change discourse appears like a rhetorical battleground, where people with different intentions are finding arguments that allow them to draw authority from the virtues of modernity. But at the same time and on the same field, people also carry out more open and creative explorations, of what might be valid interpretations of the current difficult situation. In these interpretive crossroads between enduring frameworks and new events, the virtues and vices that speakers appeal to, are not derived from any explicitly formulated doctrine. They are mobilized from how the speakers know that they have previously been expressed and applied, in similar but different performances, available to the would-be speaker in what I previously labeled a culture of exemplarity. The rules, values and ideals remain largely implicit, as they cannot truly be detached from the narratives through which they are articulated.

Utopias of Frugality

Frugality is an old virtue in utopian literature. When the Athenian writer Xenophon (ca 430–354 BC) idealized frugality (Xenophon 1890 [ca 370 BC]), it was located among the rivals of neighboring Sparta. This could be seen as a call to the Athenians to get their act together. Thomas More went to great lengths to describe the frugality of the Utopian citizens, including their use of plain but functional clothing (More 1982, 74), their collective households (More 1982, 80), and their simple means of transportation (More 1982, 84). In Ludvig Holberg’s novel Niels Klim’s Journey to the Underworld (2017 [1741]), the idealized tree-people of the country of Potu show frugality in, for instance, their preference for plain and nutritious food (Holberg 2017, 49), and in how agricultural work is held in high esteem (Holberg 2017, 36). More examples could be added.

The descriptions of frugal living in the recently collected questionnaire responses constitute passages in the texts where ideas about climate change and sustainability find an outlet through real or imagined actions performed by the narrated characters. The scientific concept of climate change is highly abstract and not immediately accessible to experience, as it is produced through extensive statistical procedures (Kaijser 2019; Kverndokk and Eriksen 2021, 6). Sustainability is also an abstract concept, but one that is more easily linked to everyday experiences, since it carries strong elements of older doctrines of virtue. The concept of sustainable development, as it was promoted by the World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987, is very much about the art of balancing. According to the commission, sustainable development is achieved by striking a balance between prosperity and the development of poor and rich countries (78–79), between humanity’s utilization of resources and the conditions for upholding the natural biological environments (113–126), and between the interests of the present and the future populations of the Earth (42). This multivocal moral ideal lends itself to being concretized in everyday activities and thematized as virtues such as moderation, wisdom, and justice—in opposition to vices such as greed, ignorance, and selfishness. Lars Kaiser has observed this form of translation in contemporary museum enactment and described the result as banal sustainability(Kaijser 2019). In my opinion, the term banal implies an unfortunate downgrading of the narrative work of translating abstract concepts into meaningful action. Eriksen and Kverndokk have studied a similar process that took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, regarding the concept of risk (Eriksen and Kverndokk 2023). They emphasized how translation work of this kind needs to take place, and that the humanities and social sciences should study how it is done.

The respondents who thematize frugality all assume that we are heading for a climate crisis, but the highlighting of frugality can have different temporal positions: before, during or after the culmination. Frugality may be something you resort to in an attempt to prevent or mitigate the damage. NEG 277/76 thinks that the crisis is coming and that it will be serious. Yet, even if it cannot be avoided, the problem can be minimized if people change their consumption habits, as she has done. She already lives a locally oriented life with a vegetable garden, bicycle transport, and low consumption. On the other hand, frugality can also be something that arises with the lack of resources brought on by the crisis. NEG 277/50 imagines a future characterized by scarcity. When food, transport, and textiles become significantly more expensive, the majority will have no choice but to tighten their belts. But when the respondent begins to examine his family’s daily life in a climate-changed future, he finds much that can be abandoned without life becoming significantly worse. Taking better care of your clothes and eating the seasonal vegetables might not be such a big loss. In any case, what crystallizes as the essence the good life is family, friends, health, and nearness to nature. Finally, a society characterized by frugality can be the outcome of the crisis. If society collapses into war and food shortages, people will be forced to return to a more self-sufficient way of life. NEG 277/11 imagines a world where disaster has driven people back to a more disorganized and natural lifestyle, and he thinks that this could be positive. In such a life, the problems are more immediate and social relations are experienced face-to-face.

In addition to the three locations of before, during, and after the crisis, the frugal society can be described as a purely hypothetical ideal. Frugality may be a condition that the author desires but cannot imagine how to bring about. The ideal situation thus described stands outside of time and place, as a u-topia in the literal sense. NEG 277/68 makes it clearer than most that she does not consider the desired ideal society likely, but at the same time she gives a rich and emotional description of it:

I would like us to live more self-sufficiently and frugally. That we made do with what we had, rather than living as we do now, with seemingly perpetual consumption. We would have travelled by train, and had railway networks all over the country, with good contact between the European countries, and greater understanding between different ethnic groups – greater tolerance. I would wear clothes that lasted, that I repaired and cared for and appreciated, rather than buying new cheap clothes that are quickly ruined. I imagine that fewer new homes would be built, and that we would instead utilize redundant cabins and already empty houses – and renew them and fill them with people ... In fact, I’m quite pessimistic about the future, but that’s only because I don’t dare to be optimistic about this, because then I’ll only be more disappointed than I already am. (NEG 277/68)

The author pictures a utopia of frugality as a contrast to climate crisis, resource crisis, refugee crisis, and war. She herself treats the idea as a utopia, which she does not believe can be achieved. She writes that she chooses to be pessimistic so as not to be disappointed. At the same time, she has a clear idea of what a better world would be like, and this idea seems to be important to her, like a kind of moral compass.

Marching Forward— and Backward

In a progress narrative, the performance of ideals and virtues is accompanied by the display of a temporal development. These aspects are connected so that, through the temporal movement, the ideals are to be realized. From this, it follows that a redefinition of the ideals has the potential for re-organizing the temporal scheme.

There is a tendency to portray the future frugal society not only as a society in which travel and consumption have slowed down, but also as a society in which development is in some sense reversed. In the reading of NEG 277/37 in the previous section, I touched on how some of the respondents imagine that it may be possible to move forward and backward at the same time. It is interesting to observe how the respondents express the paradox of the combined backwards and forwards movement in their texts.

When NEG 277/21 writes about “finding our way back to” how we used to live, it seems like the respondent is not primarily referring to experiences from his own life, but to the experiences of previous generations. For many who think this way, the exact time to which they wish to return goes unspecified. However, NEG 277/4 identifies the targeted past more closely, namely as the grandparents’ youth:

I would like to try and live as many people did in the Norwegian countryside in the post-war period, with faith in the future, a spirit of co-operation and willingness to work, but also with material sobriety. Without glorifying the past, because there were many challenges even then, I wish that we, as a society, could resume aspects of the way of life from when my grandparents were growing up. (NEG 277/4)

To NEG 277/26, a future loss of material goods does not seem particularly dramatic, as people will then have become less concerned with money and status. In a less materialistic society, the reduced access to consumer goods is more than compensated for by increased cohesion, creativity, and contact with nature:

[There will be a] counter-reaction to today’s society: People want to go back to nature, have faithful partners with long term relationships, and smaller but inclusive communities. People will live dispersed and not on top of each other in grey cities. Schools and universities are no longer homogenizing but allow for creativity and freedom of expression. Lifelong learning rather than memorization. Jobs are meaningful. We value free time, minimal screen time, and creative expression more than money and status … I dream of living on some kind of high-tech farm by the sea. The farm is full of life, both people in the local community, farm employees, and animals. Even so, I still work in a large organization, where I am transported in a capsule between locations. (NEG 277/26)

The author emphasizes that she wants to work on a high-tech farm by the sea and adds that she would like to work for a large organization where she is transported around in a capsule. In this way, she shows that she wants a more frugal and natural lifestyle without giving up cosmopolitan socialization and new technology. When she adds the aspect of being transported in a capsule, this can be interpreted as a reinforcement of the message that she generally wants to move forward in time and development.

In the ideal future world of NEG 277/59, the expressions used for moving forwards and backwards are closely interwoven:

I want to travel on newly constructed sailing vessels that quietly chug along at a comfortable pace driven by the wind, just as humans have travelled for centuries before us. Long car-free road networks connect people and nations with happy travelling companions on solar-powered electric bikes with and without roofs, horses, camels, dog sleds, and hikers, and along the way there are nice, environmentally friendly campsites and hostels where people and animals can rest and meet each other. The newly constructed sailing ships are part of a large, sustainable, and worldwide chain of infrastructure at sea and on land, where they transport goods between countries. Modern technology provides opportunities for small producers of various goods to sell their products directly to people elsewhere. A family in South America that grows and dries mangoes and coffee can put their goods up for order on a website, so my family can order 4kg of delicious fruit and coffee well before Christmas with a very low carbon footprint. From my small seaside farm on the coast of northern Norway, I ship stockfish, wool products, and other local specialities to buyers in other countries. (NEG 277/59)

Sailing ships are basically a thing of the past, but these sailing ships are newly constructed and belong to a new worldwide infrastructure. The new-old way of travelling becomes an allegory for the road to the future, as the informant describes the happy and colorful caravan of camels, dog sleds, and solar-powered electric bicycles pushing forward at a comfortable and human pace. The informant herself wants to run a small farm in northern Norway where she produces old-fashioned products such as stockfish and woolen goods, but through modern technology she trades directly with a family in South America that produces mangoes and coffee.

Images of the future that address the paradox of moving forward and backward at the same time unite modern ideas of history as a reason-driven forward movement with the crisis ladder’s warnings of a possible abrupt failure of the world’s ecological and economic systems. The texts attempt to solve the puzzle of combining a return to greater frugality with the desire for a good life. Growing your own vegetables, buying fish on the pier, harvesting wild plants, travelling by train and bicycle, repairing and producing your own clothes equals sustainability translated into action. These are things the narrators can do, which form a counterweight to the threats of climate crisis.

Frugality is about producing more for your own sustenance, but also about consuming less. You buy fewer clothes, but of better quality, and you take better care of them, so they last longer. Meat intake is reduced. The journeys made by both people and goods become fewer and shorter. As a logical extension of travelling less and spending more time on horticulture and growing vegetables, life becomes more local. The respondents tend to see this in a positive light. They imagine that a strengthening of local communities and of social and interpersonal values will more than compensate for the loss of material goods. Although a closer and more local community can obviously bring both advantages and disadvantages—it is not only positive to become more dependent on family and neighbors—no one points at the potentially negative dimensions. The reason is perhaps that, when the respondents describe more localized ways of living, they are in the process of imagining possibilities for a good life in a world with fewer resources.

Utopias of Green Abundance

While the previous responses explore ways of understanding sustainability as frugality, we should also take in account another set of narratives that depict sustainable futures in which frugality plays no particular role. These futures are characterized by green abundance, where cities are brimming with “rooftop gardens, chickens on the porch, mushroom cultivation in every tunnel, small-scale fish farming with a subscription to fry ... regenerative agriculture, food forests, and forest gardens (NEG 277/106).”

NEG 277/41 takes the theme of abundance the furthest. Here, we encounter a sustainable future society with abundance on all levels. It seems as if the author’s agenda is to argue that a sustainable way of life does not have to be characterized by deficiencies. First, we encounter the botanical abundance of green cities:

I imagine large, urbanized cities with lots of green spaces, parks, and communal vegetable gardens. I imagine tall, modern apartment blocks, with lots of flowers, grass, and green plants on the roofs, walls, and balconies. I think there will be beehives on top of these roofs, where bees pollinate the flowers and green plants around the city. (NEG 277/41)

In the stores, absence and lack is not the main impression, but color and diversity:

I think grocery stores will change completely and be full of sustainable, colorful vegetables and fruits, as well as ready-made healthy, sustainable dinner dishes instead of all the ultra-processed ready meals we see in the stores today. (NEG 277/41)

And in the city’s many neighborhoods, social life will flourish:

If there are more cafés, food shops, and activity facilities such as fitness centers, miniature golf courses, and green parks right next to the apartment complexes, both the elderly, young singles, and families with children will become more active ... I hope and believe there will be more neighborliness and a greater sense of community in the cities, and that younger and older generations will live in the same apartment complexes and help each other more. (NEG 277/41)

The respondent predicts that the political support for a sustainable lifestyle will gain momentum once the health-benefits of such a transition become evident. People’s physical health will improve once they eat more vegetables and get daily physical exercise. Even more to the point, their mental health will also improve once they slow down their pace of life and get to know their neighbors. Thus, the transition to a sustainable lifestyle will not give people a sense of loss, but a sense of gain, as health is the most important prerequisite for a good life.

The stories about green abundance can be interpreted as counter-narratives—offering alternative and contrast—to the stories of frugality. In NEG 277/41, the emphasis on abundance is so pervasive that it can be viewed as a deliberate strategy. The respondent may have thought that such a consistently positive vision of the future was needed for people to join the transition to a sustainable lifestyle. On the other hand, it may also be that the writer personally was trying to imagine how a good future society could be structured. In fact, I find it reasonable to assume that these two processes, the display of an attractive model and the exploration of a plausible case, were happening at the same time.

Vivid Visions

My scope so far has mainly been on how different respondents have interpreted the threats from a perceived climate driven crisis ladder in terms of utopian and dystopian imagery. While moving on this macro narrative level, I have also touched on how human acts have been idealized as good or bad—as virtues or vices. Now, I will shift focus from the macro narrative ontological exemplarity onto micro narrative ethical exemplarity. In this last section of the article, I will narrow in on the descriptions of idealized human acts. In doing this, I wish to make the point that stories are inherently exemplary because, on the level of content, they combine the narration of strips of concrete events with ideas of typical and ideal actors, actions, and settings, and on the level of performance, they invite audience evaluation.

At least since Labov and Waletzsky did their groundbreaking studies (e.g. Labov and Waletzsky 1967), the invitation to evaluate has been recognized as a necessary aspect of personal narratives and as a fruitful point of entry for narrative analysis. The mandatory aspect of inviting audience evaluation will tend to turn the content elements of a story into instances of their narrative functions. Actors, actions, means, scenes, and problems will never be truly novel. They will be recognizable as variants—or exemplars—of comparable, already applied types, and this is what makes them available for evaluation.

In previous works, I have studied how causal chains within narratives alternate between exterior and interior fields of action and how the narrators’ evaluations are accentuated at the places where subjective and objective causes and effects are being synchronized (Kjus 2005; Kjus 2010). At these intersections, while centering attention on how some human (or human-like) actors were shaping and were shaped by the events, the narrators position themselves and offer their perspectives on the stories they relate. Now, I will pinpoint passages in the texts where this kind of narrative work is intensified. I will identify places where the synchronization between the inner and the outer fields of action is sharpened. Here, I expect to find the writers offering their evaluations and inviting the evaluations of the readers. With reference to Labov and Waletzky (1997), I have previously characterized such passages as dramatizations and internalized evaluations (Kjus 2005, 314). These terms imply that the narrator offers assessment of the narrated events within the framework of the story—without stepping out of the action. Such dramatizations can be seen as attempts to give the story’s internal and moral action an external and manifest form, and thus as intensified efforts at exemplification.

In the last case (NEG 277/41), labelled by me as a utopia of green abundance, the most vivid part of the text is the opening section with its description of the future green city. We are taken on a tour through a city that is colorful, busy, and optimistic, and this image is the initial conveyer of the writer’s attitudes and feelings towards the future. The image introduces and unites the three key values that the author goes on to elaborate on in the following sections: 1) sustainable consumption, 2) improved health, and 3) improved sense of community. Of these values, it is the strengthened sense of community that is most fundamental, because this is the factor that makes to the other two possible, and this quality is contrasted with the selfishness and greed of the bad politicians. While the writer’s interest in technological inventions is moderate, the interest in research-driven reform is strong. The areas where research is called for are: 1) Nutrition science, to shift diets to more local, unprocessed, and plant-based foods, 2) urban planning, to create health-promoting and vibrant local environments, and 3) jurisprudence, to introduce fast-fashion laws and stop the overproduction and overconsumption of clothing. The respondent calls for a new level of progress and reason for the totality of mankind. The potential positive future is global and cosmopolitan, and the key to the transition is the green development of the big cities.

While NEG 277/41 (green abundance) holds that the crisis could lead to closer cross-party cooperation that could invigorate an existing-but-threatened development towards a future with more reason and justice, NEG 277/37 (the myotopian avant-garde) holds that we are living in a failed society, currently heading further into dystopia. This negative development will eventually come to an end and give way to a fundamental revision of the values on which society is based. The open question is how long it will take before the collapse happens and how brutal the transition will be. The answer depends on how successful the myotopian avant-garde is in redefining the core values of society. The most concrete storytelling, and at the same time the most detailed explanation of the activist perspective, is found in the description of food forests. The creation and management of a food forest is explained as a collective project that utilizes arable land close to where people live. The unemployed, pensioners, children, and young people can be invited to participate and be given the opportunity to re-establish ties with nature while learning to grow their own food. The collaboration to cultivate a food forest can by extended by also establishing a shared kitchen, further collectivizing the household, and the participants can be encouraged to help each other with other forms of repair and maintenance. The respondent emphasizes that the exchanges around the food forest must take place in kind, so that the production is not absorbed into the commercial money economy. Around the food forest, a micro-utopian anarchist community is built, where knowledge and produce are exchanged freely and directly between participants.

The dramatized passages above have taken the form of allegories. The description of how the food forest is established provides a picture of how man and nature are repaired. The walk through the green city provides a picture of the many benefits that can be reaped if health and sustainable consumption are placed center stage on the political agenda. To add a couple of cases:

NEG 277/59 (colorful caravan) refrains from describing a politically controlled process of change. Instead, she envisions that the individual persons, through their choices and attitudes, directly influence the development of society. She combines a bright and optimistic view on human progress with myotopic ideals of slowness, small-scale production, and locally lived life. Such connections occur most clearly in her description of the slow and colorful caravan and the story of the small but globally connected farm on the coast. These are condensed images of her ideal future society.

NEG 277/16 (don’t scare the children) produces allegory in a different manner. Her goal is to expose the fraud of scaremongering climate policies. This can only be done through the intervention of properly informed critical voices, and her contribution to the questionnaire collection is an example of one such critical intervention.

Narrators can dramatize in a number of ways: through quotes of direct speech, through passages in the dramatical present tense, through the open-hearted sharing of personal experiences, or through other kinds of descriptions that engage the narrator and hopefully move the listener. Such passages imply familiarity with a world that stretches beyond the presented strip of action and, to some extent, they need to be semantically open, allowing for the interpretations of different readers. In terms of exemplarity, such strips of intensified action are places where the narrator calls abstract concepts and values into play. Rhetorically, the aim is to authorize connections between the narrated events and more abstract notions and concepts – constituting what may be termed the point of the story—through audience engagement and evaluation. However, the abstract concepts thus called upon do not, in fact, solve or replace the stories they are derived from, because the abstract notions need to be founded on repeated exemplifications. Only a continued process of interpretation can lend form to abstract values and offer them some sort of lasting presence in the world of human affairs.

Is this the End?

A narrative evaluation of human actions will have to depend on variables and standards. Our present-day discourse on virtues and vices is far from explicit. Apparently, we prefer to leave the proverbial proof in the pudding, and it may seem like an embarrassment to have the virtues of wisdom, altruism, and moderation, as opposed to the vices of folly, hatred, and gluttony, undressed and pointed out in the texts. But in terms of narrative reasoning, when the qualities of human actions are to be addressed, some kind of grounding in virtues and vices must be carried out. I would suggest that the urgent eschatological backdrop makes this kind of reasoning accentuated, both for making a diagnosis and for prescribing medicine.

While ideals of wisdom and of communal attitudes are strongly represented in the corpus of questionnaire responses, the ideal of modest living is even more prominent. The idealization of a frugality is not hard to understand. Over-consumption has been described as a driving force on an exterior/objective level in countless scientific reports and policy documents. Frugality is a countermeasure that is initiated on the interior/subjective level. It should be noticed that frugality is a means that can be applied without elevating it to a utopian principle. It can be conceived of as a safe measure for the individual, to strengthen one’s ability to cope in a future characterized by lack of resources. However, a fair number of the respondents do raise the ideal of frugality to the level of a social utopia, perhaps because the global threat of climate change appears to demand a global response.

The readings above have shown how the questionnaire responses address ideas about the progress of knowledge, freedom, and material prosperity from a range of angles. The tendency is clearly that the notions of progress are being adapted rather that dismissed. The literary utopian tradition originated in the junction between commentary and activism. Since Thomas More’s famous novel, which juxtaposed social critique with fable and satire, this has been a consistent feature of the genre. When people wholeheartedly advocate utopian ideals and dedicate their lives to realizing them, they have enrolled in religious and/or political movements. But more fundamentally, utopian discourse is a way of commenting on the social order, and the tradition of literary dystopias evolved as commentary on not only the social order, but also on current utopian trends. Jonathan Swift’s novel about the high-tech and thoroughly scientific island country of Laputa displayed an inverted image of the science-driven ideal societies portrayed by the likes of Francis Bacon. The fables of H. G. Wells showed future worlds where capitalism had developed to its brutal extreme. Orson Welles explored the grotesque reverse of the communist ideal. When authors such as Harry Harrison and Phillip K. Dick in the 1960s imagined how capitalist industrialism might bring about its own demise, it was as a contrast and comment to dominant notions about the continued success of Western civilization. The everyday utopias of the questionnaire responses are also debating, positioning, and commenting, but now with the bleak dystopia of the climate-driven crisis ladder as a backdrop.

Most of the texts studied above have utopic/dystopic tendencies, and I am intrigued by the fact that they are not either utopic or dystopic, but rather both at the same time. In its general outline, the crisis ladder is not a happy story. On the contrary, it heralds misery for large parts of the world’s population. Nonetheless, many respondents perceive that the crisis may eventually lead to a better world. According to NEG 277/37 (the myotopian avant-garde), we presently live in a ruined society and are heading further into dystopia. But the collapse of global capitalism will open the prospects for healing. In NEG 277/41 (green abundance), vibrantly healthy and fertile cities are envisioned, but against them stands the alternative of a world collapsing into war and selfishness. NEG 277/16 (don’t scare the children) suggests that the world is, in fact, developing towards prosperity, literacy, and democracy, but that this development is threatened by the scaremongering of climate activists, which in turn makes the politicians panic into disastrous decisions.

The utopian allegories of the questionnaire responses have affinity to the concept of micro-utopias, as suggested by design professor John Wood (2007): They give small scale examples of solutions to big problems. And similar to how Carol Becker (2017) observed social activists performing micro-utopias in public places, the utopias of the questionnaire responses are narratively performed: They are provided in vivid and sensuous descriptions of actions that the protagonists—or other persons—may carry out. A considerable amount of fatalism can also be traced in the corpus of collected texts. Many respondents think that it is already too late to stop climate emissions or that the problems have grown so big that the individual person can do nothing to help. Against this potentially paralyzing scenario (e.g., Friberg 2022, 2) the narratively performed micro-utopias open cognitive rooms for action and can be seen as oases where people can live good and moral lives—even in the future.