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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Global warming: not science, but mass neurosis |
| 2008-07-01 |
| Brett Stephens, Wall Street Journal . . . The real place where discussions of global warming belong is in the realm of belief, and particularly the motives for belief. I see three mutually compatible explanations. The first is as a vehicle of ideological convenience. Socialism may have failed as an economic theory, but global warming alarmism, with its dire warnings about the consequences of industry and consumerism, is equally a rebuke to capitalism. Take just about any other discredited leftist nostrum of yore – population control, higher taxes, a vast new regulatory regime, global economic redistribution, an enhanced role for the United Nations – and global warming provides a justification. One wonders what the left would make of a scientific "consensus" warning that some looming environmental crisis could only be averted if every college-educated woman bore six children: Thumbs to "patriarchal" science; curtains to the species. A second explanation is theological. Surely it is no accident that the principal catastrophe predicted by global warming alarmists is diluvian in nature. Surely it is not a coincidence that modern-day environmentalists are awfully biblical in their critique of the depredations of modern society: "And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart." That's Genesis, but it sounds like Jim Hansen. And surely it is in keeping with this essentially religious outlook that the "solutions" chiefly offered to global warming involve radical changes to personal behavior, all of them with an ascetic, virtue-centric bent: drive less, buy less, walk lightly upon the earth and so on. A light carbon footprint has become the 21st-century equivalent of sexual abstinence. Finally, there is a psychological explanation. Listen carefully to the global warming alarmists, and the main theme that emerges is that what the developed world needs is a large dose of penance. What's remarkable is the extent to which penance sells among a mostly secular audience. What is there to be penitent about? As it turns out, a lot, at least if you're inclined to believe that our successes are undeserved and that prosperity is morally suspect. In this view, global warming is nature's great comeuppance, affirming as nothing else our guilty conscience for our worldly success. In "The Varieties of Religious Experience," William James distinguishes between healthy, life-affirming religion and the monastically inclined, "morbid-minded" religion of the sick-souled. Global warming is sick-souled religion. |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #5 Everyone remember the real ending to Chicken Little? Yes, yes I do. |
| Posted by: Lt. Col. Harlan Sanders 2008-07-01 20:13 |
| #4 And mass bureaucracy. The Warmers make money off the scam. Gore is approaching $40,000,000. Why tell the truth, when lying is more profitable. |
| Posted by: McZoid 2008-07-01 15:24 |
| #3 Everyone remember the real ending to Chicken Little? |
| Posted by: swksvolFF 2008-07-01 12:41 |
| #2 They are also giving us the Obamassiah to save us from our sins. |
| Posted by: DoDo 2008-07-01 12:10 |
| #1 The religious parallels go very deep. Examples include the "final goal" of environmentalism being "The State of Nature", synonymous with socialist theory, and identical to "The New Jerusalem" in its intermediate form and "The Garden of Eden" in its final form. The Asceticism of environmentalism goes beyond the self-denial, moral inhibition and sexual repression well known to medieval religion, it even extends into "The Mortification of the Flesh" And, of course, environmentalists are very focused on "End Times" and the final battle between "Good and Evil" (which gets funny because they are moral relativists as a rule, so define good as ideological purity, and evil as everything else.) And the hypocrisy is too thick to cut with a knife, like the wealthy priest who tells the poor how they are more righteous than the rich, so should give their wealth to his church. In this case, the wealthy countries should feel guilty about the poor countries, yet give their wealth to the environmentalists. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2008-07-01 09:05 |