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| -Signs, Portents, and the Weather- |
| Environmentalism and the death of the West |
| 2009-03-24 |
Somehow, we need to get the "developing" countries to quit copying our disasters in the first world. Showing real respect for the quiet life in villages would be a help. How about a Discovery Channel series on "The Truly Sustainable" - showing village life wherever it can be found, and not focused on "gosh, no plumbing", but on - "this clan has lived here for 1,000 years...' - and showing community dynamics. Obviously, the writer has never had cholera. The scary thing about this comment is that it showcases a school of thought more common than not on the far Left (25% most left). Here we see the culmination of the Left's evolution from technophiles to technophobes. Only a politically driven collective delusion could cause an educated person to believe that 1,000 years of cultural stagnation is more important than preventing the enormous suffering and death caused by sewage-borne illnesses. We now have a powerful segment of our mainstream Left that seems to sincerely believe that the point of existence is mere stasis and stability. Gone is the desire to create, explore and improve. The pre-'60s Left that thought only in terms of onward and upward is dead. Science fiction tells us little about the future but it tells us a lot about the cultural milieu in which any particular story is written. When Gene Roddenberry wrote the original Star Trek in the Sixties, he articulated the mainstream American-leftist vision of a future in which socialist-created, -managed and -distributed technology would eliminate poverty, disease, crime, ignorance and internal strife. In the original Star Trek, humans seeking adventure had to journey to the farthest stars because life at home was so good as to be boring. Such a future seemed quite plausible to a country then engaged in a great project to send men to the moon just to prove that it could. No leftist would write a technological-paradise story like Star Trek today, nor would they support any adventure like the Apollo program. The Left today wants us to view ourselves as a failed civilization, one that needs to be crippled and reduced to a static and stagnant culture that never dreams of a better and greater future. They want us and the rest of humanity to keep our heads down and accept the lives of drudgery and the pain of preventable death that a lack of technology brings. Fortunately for humanity as a whole, the leftists will fail. The poor of the planet have no romantic notions of what it is like to live without industrial technology. They will improve themselves and will wage war against us should we try to stop them. The leftists can, however, cripple the West, locking us into a downward spiral in which we starve for energy and fear any technological change. Should they triumph, the West will have no future and the rest of the world will pass us by as we enter cultural senescence. There won't be a future Captain Kirk, but rather a Captain Singh or a Captain Lu Cho. Not bad from the perspective of the entire species, but did we and our forbearers undertake the experiment of America to be left on the sidelines of history? |
| Posted by:mom |
| #3 What on earth would the Left do if something were invented that significantly reduced Western energy use? One of their memes is that we are only x% of the world population, but uses y% (some unfairly high number) of the world's energy. What would they do if y sub 1 were considerably lower than those bucolic and peaceful peasants? |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2009-03-24 21:19 |
| #2 The Left today wants us to view ourselves as a failed civilization ... With apologies to the fans, their supposed future is a lot like Battlestar Galactica -- on the run, hounded, struggling just to stay alive and riven with faction. |
| Posted by: Steve White 2009-03-24 19:49 |
| #1 The hard left's hero is Rober Mugabe. They would love to see us like Zimbabwe with themselves as big Bob. |
| Posted by: AlanC 2009-03-24 19:38 |