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But,
omne bene, say I, being of an old father’s mind,
Many can brook the weather that love not the wind.
Love’s Labour’s Lost, IV, ii
No one doubts
that the environment has been heating up; the controversy it
has engendered has to do less with an indubitable fact than
with isolating its supposed causes. The trouble is that the
“science” involved is highly debatable insofar as
it has been commandeered by a political crusade whose underlying
purposes are distressingly suspicious. Some of the movement’s
proponents, to put it bluntly, are more concerned with saving
their wilting careers than saving the planet; others are building
new careers at the expense of public credulity, the perks and
salaries being just too good to give up. We might note that
Mars is also warming at present, though it seems there are no
SUVs chugging along the planet’s surface or light bulbs
flicking on in its kilowatt communities. And not so long ago,
we might recall, we were all getting ready to freeze: in 1971,
the Global Ecology network forecast the “continued rapid
cooling of the earth,” and in 1975 the New York Times
brooded that the earth “may be headed for another ice
age,” and in the July 1975 issue of National Wildlife,
C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization warned
that “the cooling since 1940 has been large enough and
consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.”
Naturally,
charges of fraud, incompetence and self-interest will fly Right
and Left. Those who are resisting the official vogue will be
suspected of ulterior purposes, as for example Canadian geographer/climatologist
Timothy F. Ball whom the Calgary Herald, in a legal
defence statement (filed December 7, 2006), viewed as “a
paid promoter of the agenda of the oil and gas industry.”
(Ball had launched a libel suit against the Herald
for printing a letter by Dan Johnson, a professor of Environmental
Science at the University of Lethbridge, impugning Ball’s
credentials—a suit he later and rather suspiciously withdrew.)
But the argument can cut both ways. Thus William Gray, professor
emeritus of the Atmosphere Department of Colorado State University,
laments that “fellow scientists are not speaking out against
something they know is wrong. But they also know that they’d
never get any grants if they spoke out” (Investor’s
Business Daily, October 15, 2007). Gray has also shown
that Al Gore’s Exhibit A, hurricane intensity and frequency,
plays fast and loose with the available data which imply the
very opposite of his conclusions. (“There were 101 hurricanes
from 1900 to 1949, in a period of cooler global temperature,”
Gray writes, “compared with 83 from 1957 to 2006.”)
That Ball and Gore are both rather dubious characters suggests
that neither side can claim total purity for all of its adherents,
but this should not prevent us from trying to assess where the
greater harm is done. We should also stay alert for purpose-built
mendacity, as when ABC news reporter Dan Harris conducts a smear
campaign against atmospheric physicist and Nobel Laureate Fred
Singer, one of the world’s most eminent scientists (ABC
News, March 23, 2008). In seeking to rebut Singer’s
anti-alarmist position, Harris relies on the opinions of Singer’s
“fellow scientists,” all unnamed (and whom
Singer has offered to debate), and trots out the personal animadversions
of Greenpeace eco-activist and “global warming specialist”
Kert Davies who, as an Internet search reveals, appears to have
no scientific qualifications.
As
has been remarked more than once, the Global Warming Movement
has filled the vacuum left by the flight of the Transcendent.
Its high priests are Al Gore and David Suzuki, the former with
a carbon footprint of Sasquatch proportions and the latter buying
carbon credits—another swindle—to run his super
sized tour bus. The Live Earth concerts sponsored by Gore and
featuring celebrity performers whose greenhouse gas emissions
rival their bombast in volume and output has provided the Rock
liturgy for this quasi-religious movement. The hypocrisy of
these new-age evangelists has been preserved in amber in Sinclair
Lewis’ Elmer Gantry. Interestingly, shortly before
it was announced that Gore would be awarded the Nobel Peace
Prize, a UK court ruled that his global warming movie, An
Inconvenient Truth, contained at least nine salient falsehoods,
in particular with respect to his claim that Hurricane Katrina
was caused by global warming, and that the film was little more
than a form of “political indoctrination.”
As
we have seen, hurricane frequency is one of Gore’s central
arguments in prosecuting his case. He would have taken comfort
in a later, supporting study sponsored by the University College
of London (Nature, January 30, 2008). Unfortunately,
as Steven Millroy, adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, pointed
out in an article in JunkScience.com (January 31, 2008),
the researchers in question left out several important variables
from their computer model, such as atmospheric humidity, sea-level
pressure and long-range cycle activity, which severely damaged
their thesis. The researchers themselves admitted that their
analysis “does not identify whether greenhouse gas-induced
warming contributed…to the increase in hurricane activity.”
But the real nail in the coffin of the Gorean hypothesis comes
from the hammer of the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration), which published a study in Geophysical
Research Letters (January 23, 2008) positing a recent decrease
in such activity. Adding to Gore’s embarrassment, the
NOAA in its February report, relying on satellite data, showed
that so-called “lost” ice had been restored to nearly
its original levels, and a report in the London Daily Express
(February 18, 2008) revealed that Antarctic levels had risen
by a factor of one third.
The
scientific consensus today is slowly beginning to shift away
from the catastrophism of Gore, Suzuki and the United Nations
IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, to suggest that the human
contribution to global warming is far less than originally assumed
and that a meteorological calamity is highly unlikely. (The
IPCC, which certified and entrenched the so-called “scientific
consensus,” is essentially a political body with an agenda
of its own.) See Inhofe EPW Press Blog, Daily Tech
online, and the journal Energy and Environment, whose
findings are based on a survey of the ISI (Institute for Scientific
Information) Web of Science database covering almost 9000 scientific
publications. Similarly, a study published in Nature
(January 2, 2008), entitled “Vertical structure of recent
Arctic warming,” co-authored by Rune Graversen, Thorsten
Mauritsen, Michael Tjernström, Erland Källén
and Gunilla Svenson of Stockholm University’s Department
of Meteorology, while not categorically ruling out human intervention
in climate warming, places the emphasis elsewhere. In attempting
to explain the phenomenon known as “Arctic amplification,”
the study cites “changes in oceanic atmospheric circulation”
as one of the main drivers of observed temperature increases
in the high North. In other words, periodic “atmospheric
energy transport into the Arctic” from the equatorial
latitudes, via currents and storms, “may be an important
cause of the recent Arctic temperature amplification.”
Other
reports conclude that “solar variability” is the
major component in climate change and will run its course regardless
of human intervention. As David Douglass writes in the International
Journal of Climatology of the Royal Meteorological Society
(December 2007), in a peer-reviewed article co-authored
with several prominent scientists, “The observed pattern
of warming . . . does not show the characteristic fingerprint
associated with greenhouse warming. The inescapable conclusion
is that the human contribution is not significant and that observed
increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases make
only a negligible contribution to climate warming.” According
to the aforementioned Fred Singer, co-author with Dennis Avery
of Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, who
also contributed to the journal article, the effect of the terrestrial
magnetic field is an equally important element. (Singer also
indicates that “The ice sheets of Greenland have not melted
in historic times at all, even though it was much warmer 1,000
years ago and very much warmer 5,000 years ago.”) The
Douglass study, which is as authoritative as it gets, concludes
by rejecting “the proposition that greenhouse model simulations
and trend observations can be reconciled.”
The
most sophisticated climate models indicate an undeniable discrepancy
between surface and tropospheric temperature changes, which
points to the sun as the primary agent in the long-term, fluctuating
temperature curve. John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel,
patiently explains that the sun, which contains 99.8% of the
mass of the solar system, in its hydrogen-fueled atomic fusion
process, “consumes more mass in a second than all the
fossil fuel ever burned on Earth,” the terrestrial impact
of which reduces the human input to global warming to a level
of insignificance. Though Coleman doesn’t cite actual
figures, the fact is that the sun pours in excess of a million
billion megawatt-hours annually on the earth. But he does quote
the highly respected Australian mathematician and former carbon
consultant for the Australian government, David Evans, who argues
that “carbon emissions don’t cause global warming.”
According to Evans, the IPCC models are wrong and the mathematics
show that the human signature in the atmosphere is missing (KUSI
News online, November 8, 2007). Indeed, H. Sterling Burnett,
a senior fellow at the nonprofit National Center for Policy
Analysis, has shown that the famous “hockey stick”
image used by the IPCC (also wielded by Gore) to support its
conclusion about an unprecedented spike in global warming, is
entirely flawed. The UN researchers “used the wrong time
scale to establish the mean temperature to compare with recorded
temperatures of the last century,” which accounted for
the sudden vertical shaft rising from the blade of the hockey
stick. Another recent NCPA study found that the ICPP violated
60 of the 127 principles governing prediction assessments and
strictly followed only 17 of these forecasting principles (Washington
Times, March 14, 2008). A panel of statisticians at George
Mason University corroborated the NCPA results. Bjorn Lomborg’s
two books on the subject, The Skeptical Environmentalist
and Cool It, although advancing an economic rather
than purely scientific argument, are also needed correctives
to current reflex thinking. For an equally refreshing perspective
on these contentious issues, one might consult Daniel Botkin’s
Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-first
Century. Botkin, whose work is predicated on separating
soothsaying from science, is the former Chairman of Environmental
Studies of the University of California at Santa Barbara and
the current president of the Center for the Study of the Environment;
his qualifications are impeccable.
The
Keeling Curve, named after Charles David Keeling, a professor
at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, measures the gradient
levels of CO2 in the atmosphere from ice core samples. It has
become the standard construct on which the Global Warming Movement
relies. At the top of the graph representing the year 2002/3
we find a value of close to 380 molecules of CO2 per one million
molecules of air, grossly insufficient to trigger the catastrophic
effects of global warming that our climate zealots have been
announcing. Scientists favourable to the thesis have had to
fall back on the hypothesis of “CO2 forcing,” or
a chemical chain reaction producing a multiplier effect, to
justify their projections. It is precisely this theory that
has come under fire and ultimately been dismissed as unconvincing
by a growing number of cutting-edge scientists, mathematicians
and climatologists, including those mentioned above as well
as experts such as Lord Christopher Monckton who specializes
in exploring scientific frauds and New Zealand climate researcher
Vincent Gray who has been reviewing IPCC drafts from 1990 to
the present. In addition, as Holly Fretwell, in an interview
with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (January 19, 2008)
indicates with respect to rising CO2 levels, “correlation
is not causation.” Moreover, there is no reason to believe
that CO2 is the causative agent in temperature change, she continues,
since if we “look at the data that shows CO2 levels and
temperature changes over the last 650,000 years, what we find
is that temperature actually changes first and CO2 in the atmosphere
follows…CO2 lags the temperature change.” Her quip
about forecasting is also well-taken. “Think about how
well we are at predicting the weather tomorrow or next week
and now try to extend that out 100 years. We really are no better
at predicting long-term climate change than we are at predicting
short-term climate . . . ” Tim Patterson, director of
the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Center, concurs: “C02 variations
show little correlation with out planet’s climate on long,
medium and even short time scales.” But he and his team
have found “excellent correlations between the regular
fluctuations of the sun and earthly climate” (Financial
Post, June 20, 2007).
The
US Climate Change Science Program introduces an equally sober
note into the current hysteria over global warming. Its 2004-2005
report asserts that the droughts of 1998-2002 “were part
of a persistent climate state that was strongly influenced by…unusually
cold sea surface temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific.”
It goes on to isolate other influences for observed differences
in temperature readings, including a “natural weather
pattern called the North Atlantic Oscillation/Northern Annular
Mode.” Anthropogenic forcing is only one determinant in
the complex dynamic of weather patterns, one that is yet far
from being properly understood. And there is still, the report
makes clear, a “large uncertainty about the precise effects
of aerosols on Earth’s radiation balance.”
But
the crucial issue, as I have suggested, has to do with the profound
human predicament posed by the Deus Absconditus, the
evacuation of the Divine and of the resulting consecration of
moral principle from the conduct of modern life in the Western
world, leaving a vast abyss in consciousness that must be filled
by a substitute pseudo-celestial, a new species of pietism.
In his recent book A Secular Age, philosopher Charles
Taylor argues that the experience of transcendence is not obsolete
and opts for an “exclusive humanism” to re-energize
our “social imaginary,” but this effort at re-enchanting
a desiccated world seems dubious. A strange inversion has occurred
in which the Earth itself, a Divinity called Gaia, has arisen
to sit upon the empty throne of Heaven. But Gaia is a false
god (or goddess). It cares nothing for human activity, whether
reverent or invasive, will absorb our depredations as it has
metamorphic natural disasters over the evolutionary time scale,
is utterly devoid of values, and confers neither obligation
nor love upon us. We idealize that which has no interest in
us whatsoever and which cannot open and sustain a dialogue with
the human soul. We have come to revere a cold, deterministic
and solipsistic deity, attributing our own values, ideals and
sentiments to that which cannot feel or respond to them. The
irony latent in such an upheaval is that, in effect, man is
now worshipping himself; and the sense of his own planetary
nobility is fueled by a kind of quasi-religious hysteria that
operates in defiance of critical facts.
But
can so twisted a collective response to the spiritual vacancy
of modern Western life be characterized as the expression of
a genuine religious impulse? Religion, properly
understood and when it is not itself perverted,
is about the enhancement of human life; the global warming regime
envisages the impoverishment and even the destruction of human
life under the sign of saving the earth. Don Feder, writing
in GrassTopsUSA.com, considers the Global Warming Movement
nothing less than “a suicide cult whose prophets and priests
warm to the idea of the mass extinction of humanity.”
Thus the spectacle of “warming alarmists” who are
“content to repeal the industrial revolution, and others
[who] favor the end of civilization through gradual de-population.”
Feder quotes many examples of such degenerate contemporary shamans
for whom self-love is the paradoxical equivalent of self-hate,
of which I reproduce a selection here from his text:
• “Given
the total, absolute disappearance of Homo sapiens, then not
only would the Earth’s community of Life continue to
exist, but in all probability, its well-being enhanced. Our
presence in short is not needed,” Paul Taylor in “Respect
for Nature, A Theory of Environmental Ethics.”
• “We
have no problem in principle with humans reducing their numbers
by killing one another. It's an excellent way of making humans
extinct,” a spokes-creature for the Gaia Liberation
Front.
• “Human
beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs,”
John Davis, editor of the journal Earth First.
• In the
book The World Without Us, Alan Weisman celebrates
what he sees as the inevitable extinction of humanity, as
vine and branch, deer and bear, reclaim our cities.
• There’s
even a Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, which describes
itself as “the humanitarian alternative to human disasters.”
VHEMT explains that “the hopeful alternative to the
extinction of millions of species of plants and animals is
the voluntary extinction of one species: Homo sapiens . .
. us.”
Feder
might also have mentioned Paul Watson, Greenpeace co-founder
and head of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, who famously
described human beings as the “AIDS of the Earth.”
One
wonders what Arne Naess would say about all this. Are such abysmal
depths of sheer imbecility implicit in the Deep Ecology movement,
untenably extending, in Naess’ words, “the equal
right to live and blossom”? But from whatever angle we
look at this species of “painful thinking,” we might
reasonably conclude that it’s all becoming a bit much.
As William Logan says of Robert Hass’ eco-poetry (a thriving
genre lazily piggybacking on current fashion): “by the
time he’s done preaching about the destruction of the
ozone layer” and “droning on about chlorofluorocarbons
. . . you’re counting the tiles on the floor” (The
New Criterion, December 2007). This state of dementia can
take many different forms. Witness the nonsense spouted by Clare
Short, former Secretary of State for International Development
in Britain’s Labour Government. Speaking at the United
Nations International Conference of Civil Society in Support
of Israeli-Palestinian Peace, held in Brussels at the end of
August 2007, Short declared that Israel may cause the “end
of the human race” since it represents a serious distraction
from the weather—another of Israel’s unforgivable
crimes. According to this eminence, Israel “undermines
the international community’s reaction to global warming.”
No less bananas, Penn State University law professor Regina
Austin teaches a course on “Environmental Racism”
in which the question of race is coupled with environmental
activism and which is intended to support something called “the
environmental racism claim” (DiscoverTheNetworks.org).
There is, so to speak, a lot of hot air in the mental atmosphere.
Consider
the sheer authoritarian looniness of David Suzuki who, addressing
the McGill University Business Conference on Sustainability
on January 31, 2008, stated: “What I would challenge you
to do is put a lot of effort into trying to see whether there’s
a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail”
for not acting more quickly on environmental issues. It is becoming
increasingly difficult not to regard Dr. Suzuki as the Fu Manchu
of the environmental movement. Or perhaps the Old Man of the
Mountains, whose dogmatism resists the influx of fresh data.
Dr. Suzuki predicted some 20 years ago that we had only 10 years
to go before suffering environmental collapse. In the meantime
what has collapsed is Dr. Suzuki’s credibility, though
his authority remains intact among the naïve and impressionable
since he offers a perfect example of theocracy at work in the
scientific domain. For that matter, Dr. Suzuki does look a bit
like God in His Sistine incarnation, a resemblance which no
doubt facilitates his attempt to remake the world in his own
image. But to give him his due, he is surely more sincere than
Al Gore who, in essence, buys his carbon offsets from the company
he co-owns and chairs, Generation Investment Management, in
which Gore is heavily invested and whose stock values have skyrocketed
(Canada Free Press, March 13, 2007; The Citizens
Journal online; WorldNetDaily.com, etc.).
And
what is one to make of the Greenpeace report, Cool Farming,
released on January 7, 2008, which recommends a vegetarian diet
to reduce the level of greenhouse gas emissions? Greenpeace
is quite serious, solemnly deponing, in the language of the
report, that “For individuals wishing to reduce their
GHG footprint, adopting a vegetarian diet, or at least reducing
the quantity of meat products in the diet, would have beneficial
GHG impacts.” But this is not the least of it. Among other
pollutants, Greenpeace is concerned with the amount of methane
produced by ruminants, whose digestive systems work overtime
to bring us ever closer to the end of days. Based on kg CO2
equivalents on a 100 year time scale, beef and sheep alone,
the SUVs of the animal world, generate a whopping amount of
CO2 per kg. of product, according to the “Global warming
potential” tables used in the report (page 36). There
is no doubt that we must work quickly to avert an impending
catastrophe while there is still time. The bovine fart-and-dung
ratio is evidently imperilling the planet.
No
one is suggesting that humans have not had a pejorative effect
of the earth’s ecosystems, an exigency that should be
addressed and corrected sooner rather than later. But this is
not tantamount to an around-the-corner ecological implosion
and certainly not to a latter-day, man-made climatic holocaust.
There is clearly a popular fascination with the prospect of
imminent human extinction from “natural” causes,
an obsession with cultic overtones generally signifying a hunger
for spiritual nourishment that goes otherwise unsatisfied. How
else explain the best-seller status of a book like Alan Weisman’s
The World Without Us with its depiction of the human
ripple effect on the environment, the restoration of the soil
following upon our disappearance, and the epiphany of a “redesigned
atmosphere.” Weisman’s book is perhaps not quite
as off the wall as Don Feder thinks, but it does tap into the
current frenzy inspired by an apocryphal religious groundswell.
Even
so, one need not focus on the more disastrous scenarios and
slap shot recommendations of what may or may not be the lunatic
fringe of the Movement—those who, according to Steven
Milloy, are responsible for “global smarming.” Indeed,
these facile doomsayers are propelling us, in Walter E. Williams
apt phrase, into “the wild green yonder” (Washington
Times, May 13, 2008). It has been reliably estimated by
many researchers into the subject that in fulfilling the draconian
prescriptions of the Kyoto Accord or its successors, millions
of jobs will be lost in the developed world, the quality of
life will sink to substandard levels, and the inhabitants of
the Third World will be even more severely punished as they
are deprived of the minimal immunities, comforts and amenities
of modern life to which they aspire. The NCPA’s Burnett
concludes his above-mentioned report with an apposite warning
to policy makers. Recommendations based on “flawed statistical
analyses and procedures that violate general forecasting principles”
should be taken “into account before enacting laws to
counter global warming—which economists point out would
have severe economic consequences.”
Czech
President Vaclav Klaus, author of the soon-to-be-translated
Blue Planet in Green Chains, is on the mark when he
warns of the irrationality of the bullish “global warming”
industry: “As someone who lived under communism for most
of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat
to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now
in ambitious environmentalism . . . Let us not scare ourselves
with catastrophic forecasts, or use them to defend and promote
irrational interventions in human lives” (Financial
Times, June 14, 2007.) Klaus quotes Richard Lindzen, Alfred
P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, to good effect.
Lindzen wrote: “future generations will wonder in bemused
amazement that the early 21rst century’s developed world
went into a hysterical panic [that] on the basis of gross exaggerations
of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible
chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of
the industrial age” (Wall Street Journal, June
26, 2006). Ultimately, we should agree, at the very least, that
an enormous amount of research still needs to be done before
the science is sufficiently stabilized to yield results that
are not perennially contestable. We might also remember that
the warmest year of the 20th century was 1934, an anomaly, perhaps,
in a period of global cooling.
“Caring
for nature,” as Bruce Thornton reminds us in Decline
and Fall, “is the luxury of those who aren’t
worried about eating for another day.” Not that caring
for nature is contra-indicated—far from it—but the
manner in which we now comport ourselves is actually narcissistic,
cold-hearted, witless and incontinent. The prognosis is indeed
a dismal one, not for the planet but for human reason. And all
this to accomplish what, on the best evidence to date,
may not even be necessary, a fact which would become increasingly
obvious as the climate begins once again to cool following the
abatement of solar activity. Indeed, climatologists Kenneth
Tapping of the National Research Council of Canada and Oleg
Sorokhtin of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences have both
concluded that sunspot activity has diminished to the point
of presaging the onset of colder winters and leading to a period
of widespread cooling (Investor’s Business Daily,
February 7, 2008 and RIA Novosti, February 25, 2008,
respectively). In other words, global warming is a temporary
phenomenon. Similarly, geophysicist Phil Chapman, basing his
findings on analyses from the four major weather-tracking agencies—the
Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute
for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University
of Alabama and the Remote Sensing Systems Inc. in California—reports
that global temperature is “falling precipitously,”
having decreased by .7 C in 2007, and that drastically reduced
sunspot activity heralds a new approaching ice age for which
we are wholly unprepared (The Australian, April 23,
2008). Global Ecology, the New York Times and
the World Meteorological Organization may have been on the right
track after all, though the track leads to a destination many
thousands of years in the future.
Certainly,
while aiming to clean up the natural environment and improve
living conditions on the planet, we should not act from hysteria
and panic blended with a generous amount of self-righteousness
and puritanical conviction, falling into what Klaus has called
the trap of “salutary flagellation” in the service
of an imagined deity. The state of affairs we wish to rectify
would then only continue to deteriorate. The “trap”
is also one of lazy self-obliviousness, a refusal to understand
how we “work” as human beings. The religious impulse,
Christopher Hitchens not withstanding, will not go away; it
will only be diverted into other, covert and non-traditional
channels—the brotherhood of man, the dictatorship of the
proletariat, the Kantian dream of universal peace, the super-filial
relation to Gaia—in effect, raising politics to the level
of theology.
This
deep-seated impulse may even exert a kind of back-channel or
detour effect, offering to reinvigorate religious belief by
circling back and substituting for its withering doctrinal base.
As Thornton says, the church has begun to shift “its mission
from saving souls and ministering to its flock, to changing
the world and agitating for ‘social justice.’ ”
The Reverend Joan Brown Campbell, former General Secretary of
the National Council of Churches (of “What Would Jesus
Drive” fame), stressed that climbing aboard the Global
Warming buggy and participating in the Church’s “Eco-Justice
Program” should be a “litmus test for the faith
community.” Judging from a statement issued by the Program’s
director, Cassandra Carmichael, religious worship is now only
one factor among many, equated with “education, lifestyle
changes, or public dialog.” She seems to have forgotten
that St. Paul did not write about prison conditions when incarcerated
by the Romans. He had other things on his mind.
Amongst
the Western public at large, as well as many of the “experts,”
global warming is more of a social and political issue than
a scientific one. But because politics is now all we have, it
is inevitably transfigured into a religion—or a cult with
religious trappings—bringing to bear upon the empirical
sphere of human life practices and attitudes that properly apply
to the spiritual dimension. Far too many of these experts and
activists are not so much dispassionate scientists or rational
thinkers as they are instinctual religious crusaders. NASA Administrator
Michael D. Griffin, who has professed some skepticism about
certain aspects of global warming research, especially with
regard to theoretical computer models that tend, as he says,
to run before they have learned to walk, was startled to realize
that “you can’t express any sort of contrary opinion
or a comment without it being treated almost as a religious
issue” (Newsmax.com, March 17, 2008). The doxastic
progression here is: science?politics?religion. To use Irving
Kristol’s word, human beings are, whether we like it or
not, “theotropic” beings.
Indeed,
the metamorphosis of politics into a debased form of religion
may be the bedrock definition of that otherwise debatable term,
“fascism,” further specified as “ecofascism”
by Janet Biehl and Peter Staudermaier in their book of that
title. This would be true in many different spheres of human
endeavour as an entire cultural world is gradually emptied of
its marrow and vitality and rendered unsustainable in the long
run. In our present context, as Jonah Goldberg observes in Liberal
Fascism, “environmentalism gives license to the sort
of moral bullying and intrusion that, were it couched in terms
of traditional morality, liberals would immediately denounce
as fascist.”
In
particular, when the dictates of faith are allowed to impinge
upon the need for understanding a range of events in the natural
world and to validate solutions to problems which are either
inherently ambiguous or dauntingly complex, we end up doing
far more harm than good. In striving to supplant the City of
God by the City of Man, the result is that we generally find
ourselves living in the City of the Devil. Genuine spirituality
then gives way to a profusion of cults, fads, idolatries, social
rituals and hero-worship. “When men stop believing in
God,” G.K. Chesterton is alleged to have said, “they
don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything.”
Serious conviction is replaced by earnest frivolity, self-transcendence
by self-infatuation masking as self-transcendence. Such are
the wages of the religious sensibility when it goes off the
rails and does not recognize itself as the affective and psychic
distortion produced by the vestigial terror of abandonment.
It is the weather of the soul that has changed for the worse.
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