There's a thing that often happens in fiction, and I don't like it. We'll be presented with a dilemma: for example, John loves Mary, but Mary is happily married to Tom, who is John's best friend and a really nice bloke. How can this end happily?
It turns out that Tom is not a nice bloke - he's awful! And he doesn't love Mary, in fact, he's been having flings behind her back. And Mary doesn't love him. So she ends up with John. The end.
Someone happily munching along might not notice that the dilemma was never resolved, rather, the original terms of the dilemma were shown to be false. Which isn't the same thing at all. You can exchange the above for other plots: an unattractive girl falls in love with a popular boy, but then it turns out actually she is attractive, she just needed to tidy herself up a bit.
Weirdly, this is an even stronger trope in politics. There will be a dilemma: animal testing, say. On one hand, we need to test new medicines. On the other, animals are sentient and suffer. Groups opposed will claim that animal testing isn't necessary or helpful, thus disappearing the dilemma that way. Groups supportive will refuse to acknowledge that animal suffering is similar to our own, and disappear it that way.
Economic growth is still tied to CO2 emissions increases. People who believe we need to abandon economic growth rarely acknowledge the social and political implications of doing so; and likewise, promoters of growth won't acknowledge that there is currently no reason to believe we can decouple it from emissions.
The best debate programme I've ever listened to has to be Agree to Differ, from BBC Radio 4. Because, rather than stoke up dramatic, polarizing rows, Matthew Taylor got his guests to simply acknowledge each other's true positions.
I think, unsatisfying as it is, admitting conflicts of interest, or real dilemmas, is the only way to make the best of them. The only real solution to animal testing - I think - is biomedical engineering, like the creation of lab-grown skin. Animal Free Research UK (formerly the Dr Hadwen Trust) focus on funding research in this area. Other ways of minimising the need for testing exist - the All Trials campaign, that seeks to get all trials registered, has the side effect of allowing researchers to identify dead-ends, experiments that have been tried without yielding benefits, avoiding pointless replication. You can support the campaign here by signing the petition or donating.
Acknowledging the problems of both degrowth and growth would allow us to try and find ways to deal with them or, more realistically, minimise them. Kate Raworth's book, Doughnut Economics, is a great exploration of this.
Sometimes, there's no perfect answer to dilemmas. But we still need to admit they exist. Unlike in fiction, we can't rewrite the facts.
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