Whenever I write about climate change, I try to write about justice. Climate change is science, economics, politics, and many other things — but at its core it’s a matter of justice.
Heatwaves are a problem for everyone, but the people who suffer most live in working-class neighborhoods with no green spaces, in homes without air conditioning, or work outdoors in the hottest hours of the day. In Bologna, the photographer Michele Lapini used a thermal camera to show two flats in the same building: one, renovated for energy efficiency, stays around 21 degrees; the other, with no air conditioning, goes above 33. Heatwaves are also a problem for animals, and even more so for plants, which cannot move.
When droughts and floods push up food prices, it’s ruinous for low-income households, a burden for the middle class, and barely noticeable for the wealthy. The same goes for energy bills and fuel prices: people with high incomes can work from home, afford an electric car or, at least in Europe, live in neighborhoods with efficient public transport. And the bill is split the wrong way round: according to estimates by the economist Lucas Chancel, in 2019 the richest 10% of the world’s population was responsible for 48% of global emissions, the poorest half for just 12%.
I recently wrote about an apparent paradox: the people most exposed to climate change seem to be the least worried about it. Spoiler: they’re not. They simply have other, more pressing worries, and the apparent gap shrinks as soon as we break the false choice between, say, the climate and job security. I call it a false choice, but it’s often closer to blackmail: keep the smokestack or lose your job.
In that piece I used an old image to hold the argument together: «we’re all in the same boat». Despite all these inequalities, global warming is, well, global, and sooner or later it will reach everyone. It’s a rather obvious metaphor, I admit. But while writing I realized how much history this nautical frame carries — Western history, at least, though I wouldn’t be surprised to find it in Asian or African thinkers too. So this time I want to look not at a physical boat but at the metaphor itself: the old habit of picturing our shared life as a boat or a ship. What does each version of it show, what does it hide, and what does it say, often without saying it, about inequality? Which, in the end, always comes down to power: who is at the helm, who has a say in the course, and who is just along for the ride.
Where and when does the idea that our society is a ship begin? I think the first elaborate version of this metaphor is in Plato — he didn’t invent it: we find earlier examples in lyric poems and tragedies. In Sophocles' Antigone, for instance, Creon tells the elders of Thebes that «the vessel of our State, after being tossed on wild waves, hath once more been safely steadied by the gods» (I quote Jebb’s 1917 translation: dated, but in the public domain). But in the sixth book of the Republic it evolves from a figure of speech into an argument.
Imagine a ship, Socrates says. The shipowner is bigger and stronger than anyone on board, but he is a little deaf, a little shortsighted, and knows little about sailing. The sailors quarrel over who should steer, though none of them has ever learned how; they even claim it can’t be taught. They crowd around the owner begging for the helm, throw their rivals overboard, dull him «with mandragora or strong drink», take command, and feast on the cargo. Meanwhile the one who really knows the art, who pays attention to «year and seasons and sky and stars and winds», is dismissed as a «sky-gazer» and an «idle babbler».
The meaning is quite transparent (partly because Plato’s Socrates has already argued that philosophers should rule). The ship is of course the city, the shipowner is the people gathered in assembly (which Plato treats as a single person), the sailors are the politicians, the true pilot is the philosopher. The drugs used to dull the shipowner are less obvious. The philosopher David Keyt, in his essay «Plato and the Ship of State» (in The Blackwell Guide to Plato’s Republic, 2006), reads them as rhetoric: one more attack on the art of persuasion taught by the sophists — and perhaps, I would add, on poetry too.
Keyt also points out something lost in translation. The Greek kubernêtês was captain, helmsman, and navigator at once — the one who knows where to go, how to get there, and holds the tiller. Through the Latin gubernare, it’s the word that gave us «government». He also spots one more character in the story. At the very end, Plato implicitly admits that there are passengers on this ship too: women, children, slaves — people who travel on the ship but will never be asked where it should go.
The political meaning of the shipowner and the sailors is easy to grasp — not only because Plato is a good writer who repeats the point several times, but because we think through metaphors, as the linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher Mark Johnson explain in Philosophy in the Flesh: metaphors are not ornaments added to a thought already formed. Much of our thinking rests on a few basic metaphors rooted in bodily experience, and moving through space is one of the most basic: purposes are destinations, action is motion, difficulties are obstacles. Put them together and you get a metaphor so familiar we no longer notice it: «a purposeful life is a journey». We plan a route, anticipate obstacles, check whether we are on schedule; we pity those who have «missed the boat». Even the curriculum vitae is, literally, «the course of life».
A ship is a journey we make together. And «we’re all in the same boat», Lakoff and Johnson explain, means that «we are all subject to the same external forces that move the boat this way and that». If the boat sinks, nobody reaches their destination, so «it is to our collective advantage to help keep the boat afloat». That’s how I used the phrase in my previous piece — nothing new, as I said.
It goes without saying that, read with today’s political sensibility, Plato’s ship is an authoritarian image. Of course we want competent people at the helm: nobody would board a ship steered by someone who has never learned to sail. But should they also decide, on their own, where to go and which route to take? That’s a classic objection, at least in the twentieth century: Plato treats a question about ends as if it were a question about means. A navigator knows how to reach a port, not which port to sail for: we delegate the ship’s governance after the (collectived?) decision on where to go.
Keyt, though, defends Plato. In the story the true pilot doesn’t pick a destination of his own: he seems to want to take the shipowner exactly where the shipowner wanted to go. The problem is that the owner, drugged and drunk, has forgotten, so the true pilot has to interpret his real intentions — which leaves him plenty of room to choose the destination himself. And here lies the real problem. How can anyone — a ruler, an expert, an activist, or the person writing these lines — be sure of being the true pilot, and not just another overconfident sailor? Keyt raises the question himself: who could certify that Plato’s first philosopher-king really is one?
Keyt also notices where Plato’s image turns against Plato. On a real merchant ship, the shipowner hires the pilot and can dismiss him at the end of the voyage, or whenever he likes. Plato’s metaphor for an authoritarian, technocratic government thus becomes a good image of democracy — far from Plato’s ideal city, where the people cannot replace their rulers.
Long before Keyt, Karl Popper went further. In The Open Society and Its Enemies he argued that, by asking «Who should rule?», Plato had created «a lasting confusion in political philosophy». Since nobody can guarantee good and wise rulers, the real question is a different one: «How can we so organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?». Democracy, for Popper, is simply a government «of which we can get rid without bloodshed». Whether it can really stop bad or incompetent rulers is another matter: perhaps, when he wrote the book, Popper had more reasons for optimism than we have today.
In a later dialogue, Plato himself came halfway there. In the Statesman he admits that, without a true pilot, the best a city can do is make sure that no one — neither an individual nor the many — breaks the law (wherever those laws come from).
What we have seen with Plato’s ship, which can be read as an argument for technocracy or for democracy, shows how plastic metaphors are. Roughly speaking, a metaphor lets us understand one aspect of a thing in terms of another, by mapping one domain (the ship) onto another (the government). Lakoff and Johnson, in Metaphors We Live By, explain that in doing so we highlight some elements or relations and hide others. We have some freedom in choosing which elements we project (other scholars prefer to speak of a blending of the two domains) and which we leave behind.
Plato’s ship, as we read it in the Republic, shows the need for skill, and the fact that a ship can follow only one course. It hides who chooses the port, and the passengers traveling in the hold.
And what does the idea that «we’re all in the same boat» highlight, and hide, when it comes to climate change? It highlights a shared fate: if the boat sinks, we all go down. It hides the fact that some people are safer than others — the two flats in the same building in Bologna, one at 21 degrees, the other above 33.
And there is one more thing a boat can hide: a rule about who is allowed on board.
The same boat can change its meaning completely if, instead of a ship, we picture a lifeboat that is already crowded. For a Swiss person like me, the image brings back bad memories. On August 13, 1942, the government of neutral Switzerland, by then almost entirely surrounded by the Axis powers and the territories they controlled, effectively closed the border to Jewish refugees: those fleeing «on racial grounds» were not considered political refugees. The decision sparked protests, and on August 30 Eduard von Steiger, the conservative justice minister, answered them in a speech in Zurich-Oerlikon: «Whoever commands a small life boat that is already quite full, of limited capacity, and with an equally limited amount of provisions, while thousands of victims of a sunken ship scream to be saved, must appear hard when he cannot take everyone. And yet he is still humane when he warns early against false hope and tries to save at least those he had taken in.»
Von Steiger never actually said «the boat is full», but that is how the speech was portrayed by the press and remembered, and the phrase became a proverb — and, in 1981, the title of a film by Markus Imhoof. According to the Bergier commission, a panel of historians appointed by the Swiss government to investigate Switzerland's conduct during the Second World War, about 24,500 refugees were turned away at the Swiss border during the war, although more recent research suggests a lower figure. And from the summer of 1942 at the latest, it was widely known that those turned back would almost certainly be deported and killed.
Back to von Steiger’s speech and its metaphor. What do we see? A commander, a limited capacity, people in the water who need help, and a catastrophe for everyone if the commander tries to take them all on board. What don’t we see? What happened before: why some people are in the water and others in the lifeboat. Whether there are other ways to help those people. And there is no room to question the real capacity of the lifeboat, or the real amount of provisions.
Thirty years later the lifeboat came back, at the center of a curious clash of metaphors.
We are in the 1960s, the decade of the Apollo program. Before the «small step for a man» and the «giant leap for mankind», astronauts went around the Moon — and Apollo 8’s William Anders spoke what are perhaps the second most famous words of the whole program: «we came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth». In December 1968 Anders took Earthrise, the photograph of our planet rising over the lunar horizon that, for many, marked a turning point for the environmental movement.
Against this background, upgrading the ship to a spaceship was natural — after all, that is (almost literally) what the Earth is. The economist Kenneth Boulding contrasted the wasteful «cowboy economy» of the past with the frugal economy of a spaceship, and Buckminster Fuller wrote an Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969), reminding his readers that «we are all astronauts».
In 1974 Garrett Hardin answered with «Living on a Lifeboat» — yes, the same image von Steiger had used during the war. This time, though, it doesn’t come from a political speech full of rhetoric (which, I agree with Plato, can work as a drug that clouds our ability to think). Hardin was a scientist, an ecologist who in 1968 had popularized a very influential concept: the tragedy of the commons. When a resource is open to everyone — a pasture, a fishery, the atmosphere — each user gains by taking a little more, while the cost is shared by all; without rules, the resource ends up ruined.
Yet Hardin and von Steiger have something in common: both took a hard line on who gets in, and the Southern Poverty Law Center describes Hardin as a white nationalist. His solution to the tragedy of the commons was private property, or control imposed from above. He didn’t consider a set of rules discussed and enforced within the community to prevent overuse: a solution that works in many places, as the Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom showed by studying, among others, the alpine pastures of Törbel, in Switzerland, which the villagers have managed in common for centuries. Ironically, the country of von Steiger’s lifeboat also offers a very different model.
So what does Hardin set against the idea of a frugal use of resources because we live on a spaceship? He opens his article with a reflection on metaphors, quoting George Eliot: «All of us get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them» (a fine quote — I could have used it instead of Lakoff). The spaceship metaphor, he argues, doesn’t work: «A true ship always has a captain», and the Earth has none. That’s true: it’s a limit of the metaphor — or perhaps an invitation to strengthen the United Nations. But for Hardin, without a captain we are neither a ship nor a spaceship: we are a bunch of lifeboats, and by «we» he means the rich nations. The rest is very close to von Steiger: fifty people on board, room for ten more, a hundred swimming around: take them all and the boat sinks. «Complete justice, complete catastrophe», wrote Hardin. Better to keep the empty seats as a safety margin, and to watch out for «boarding parties».
Hardin admits, or at least doesn’t deny, that this is unjust. He even admits that it is the result of past injustice: «Americans of non-Indian ancestry are the descendants of thieves» who took the land from its native inhabitants. But that was long ago, and there is the statute of limitations. So this is the situation now: some people are safe in lifeboats, others are at the mercy of the elements, and those in the lifeboats are entitled to do nothing.
Hardin doesn’t question his metaphor. So I’ll do it for him.
First of all, Hardin does see that the lifeboats are unequal and decides that it doesn’t matter. But he doesn’t see, or doesn’t want to see, that the rich lifeboats are not innocent. They carry few people but weigh a lot: according to Chancel’s estimates, the richest tenth of humanity produces almost half of global emissions. Hardin himself writes that we have been living on «stored petroleum and coal», without asking who burned them, or what that does to the sea in which everyone else is swimming.
Second, the capacity is not fixed. How many people a lifeboat can carry depends on what they consume. And Hardin’s demographic arithmetic — the poor doubling every 35 years, the rich every 87 — has not aged well: the growth rate of the world population has roughly halved since the late 1960s.
Third, and most important for climate change, the lifeboats float on the same sea. A lifeboat can refuse to take on swimmers; it cannot refuse the storm (a storm the apparently safe occupants helped cause). Rising temperatures and rising seas don’t stop at borders — and here the spaceship, for all its limits, sees further than the lifeboat.
There is one more thing Hardin does with his lifeboat, and it brings us back to the passengers of Plato’s ship — those who don’t have a voice. Hardin justifies his selfish recommendations in the name of those who are not on board yet. «To be generous with one’s own possessions is one thing; to be generous with posterity’s is quite another», he writes, and he closes his essay like this: «For the foreseeable future survival demands that we govern our actions by the ethics of a lifeboat. Posterity will be ill served if we do not.» Hardin is not wrong to think about future generations. But I’m not sure he has really considered the posterity of the poor. He says he has: food aid today, he argues, only means more hunger tomorrow. Quite convenient — and it helps me understand why he has been accused of being a white nationalist. The future generations that really count for him are those of the wealthy, in the lifeboats.
To be fair to Hardin, the intergenerational question is a challenge for the «we’re all in the same boat» version of the metaphor too. Back to Plato’s ship — the autocratic or the democratic version, take your pick — the question becomes: who is the shipowner? Plato, if you remember, condensed all the citizens into a single person, and I think we can all agree that this is a problematic, and weird, choice. But who is entitled to count as a shipowner, and to decide the ship’s course? What about marginalized groups? Future generations, who don’t exist (yet)? Non-human animals, who exist but cannot speak?
There is an asymmetry here. Marginalized groups need a space where their voices can be heard (or, if the group is fragmented or disorganized, a space where they can first work out what to say, find the words, and develop their vision). Non-human animals and future generations cannot have such a space: the only way to hear their voices is through representatives — whom, again, they cannot vote for, as we do in a representative democracy. It’s part of what the philosopher Stephen Gardiner calls the «tyranny of the contemporary»: those living today can shape the lives of those who will come, but never the other way around.
Some institutions try to give at least some of them a voice: Wales, for example, has had a Future Generations Commissioner since 2016. Of course, the commissioner is chosen by the present generation. But it’s a start.
Can technology help? To my surprise, the idea that a computer can have an unbiased view and offer impersonal, objective solutions is not the dream of some contemporary AI visionary or AI czar. It was proposed by Buckminster Fuller in the already-mentioned Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, published in 1969 — a year after HAL 9000 killed almost the entire crew of the fictional spaceship Discovery in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In Fuller’s view political leaders were hopelessly biased, and the world would be unified by «the utterly impersonal problem solutions of the computers», to which «all political, scientific, and religious leaders» could «face-savingly acquiesce». Seen today, his hoped-for acquiescence looks naive, if not gullible; but I can’t blame Fuller for not foreseeing all our worries about epistemic autonomy.
Nevertheless, generative AI could fulfill a version of Fuller’s dream, if used in a certain way (and with many safeguards). In a recent comment in Nature Climate Change, Masahiro Ryo, Timon McPhearson, and Victor Galaz suggest an interesting use of AI, both to give a voice to marginalized people and to imagine one for future generations. AI could translate technical language, point out the voices missing from a debate, summarize different positions, and even create conversational agents living in a given climate scenario.
The authors don’t hide the risks: simulated voices can reproduce stereotypes and erase the very identities they are meant to represent, and whoever controls the synthesis controls the agenda. They also propose a few precautions: participants write down their own views before using AI, syntheses must be traceable and open to challenge, and the final authority stays human. Back to the ship: AI can be at the oars, perhaps, or on watch. Not at the helm.
I want to conclude by going back in time to the civil rights movement, which turned the same-boat metaphor into a proverb, variously attributed to Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson, and others: «We may have come on different ships, but we’re all in the same boat now.» The different ships are our personal histories and privileges: the metaphor no longer hides inequalities. And we are in the same boat: whatever happens, we will share the outcome.