A Necessary Apocalypse
AmericanThinker.com | 2 Feb 07 | J.R. Dunn
The apocalyptic vision of global warming serves a deep need of the environmentalist credo, the dominant pseudo-religious tendency of our age in the prosperous West.
For good or ill, human beings are constructed to believe, and faith has its demands.. Along with the concrete elements that demand belief (that fire burns and that it's not wise to walk off cliffs, for example) there exists an apparent necessity for a belief in "the rock higher than I" - a belief in a superior entity that can inspire awe and gratitude, that can be turned to in hard times, that can act as witness to injustice and dispenser of mercy.
Despite the claims of our current crop of militant atheists such as Dawkins and Harris, this is not simply brain-dead foolishness. Religious belief is hard-wired into human beings, by what means and for what purposes we don't yet understand. (A much wiser atheist, the biologist Edward O. Wilson wrote in On Human Nature that he intended to demonstrate that religious belief played an evolutionary role and could thus be explained by Darwinism. That was thirty years ago - if he ever succeeded, I haven't heard about it.)
When religious belief is subverted, it does not, as Chesterton implied, simply vanish. It is almost immediately replaced by another set of beliefs on a similar level of abstraction and serving the same purpose. Sometimes it's an import, such as Buddhism or TM. Sometimes it's a creed deliberately created to serve a political agenda, as we see in Nazism and Communism. Sometimes it's the goofy SoCal syncretism currently expressed in Wicca and Neopaganism. ("If people seriously want to be pagans," the late Joe Myers, a Christian brother of my acquaintance once said. "They'd become Roman Catholics.") And sometimes they're a combination, a weird melange of ideas picked up from various sources that (and usually not coincidentally) also serve a political purpose. Which brings us to environmentalism.
That environmentalism is in fact a pseudo-religion goes without saying. Like all such, it possesses every element of contemporary legitimate belief. It has a deity, in this case the goddess Gaia, the personification of the living Earth, (first envisioned by James Lovelock, whom we can slot in as high priest). It has its holy books, most changing with the seasons, and most, as is true of the Bible with many convinced Christians, utterly unread. It has its saints, its prophets, its commandments, religious rituals (be sure to recycle that bottle), a large gallery of sins, mortal and otherwise, and an even larger horde of devils. (Let me pause here to sharpen a horn.)
Another item that a pseudo-religion must have is an apocalypse - and that's what global warming is all about.
In fact, the apocalyptic is the major fulcrum of environmentalism, the axis around which everything else turns. It's environmentalism's major element of concern, its chief attraction, and the center of discussion and speculation, in much the same way that some Protestant variants of Christianity are obsessed above all with sin. So crucial is the apocalypse to environmentalism that there has been a whole string of them, one after the other, covering every last aspect of the natural world. If one don't git ya, the next one will.
Green emphasis on the apocalyptic appeared early, accompanying the introduction of mass environmental awareness itself. Silent Spring, published in 1962, represents the first environmentalist scripture -- nothing other than a modern book of Revelations. Rachel Carson, a popular nature writer, was dying of cancer while writing the book, and Silent Spring became an outlet for her rage and grief. Carson predicted the imminent coming of a stricken world, a world poisoned by the synthetic products of the chemical industry, in which no birds sang and human children would not be immune. The early 60s were marked by fears of the consequences of atmospheric nuclear tests, and the suggestion that chemicals were just as deadly found a willing audience.
Pollution - a word that itself bears many religious connotations -- became a byword of the era. That fact that the phenomenon encompassed virtually every aspect of technical civilization including car exhausts, household plastics, and power generation, guaranteed it a good long run. Truly grotesque stories, ranging from dioxins eating sneakers from children's feet to hushed-up epidemics of cancer, made the rounds. None were anything more than grist for Snopes.com, and the promised chemical doomsday never arrived. But Carson's work set the pattern for all the environmental apocalypses to come.
The next example was overpopulation, its prophet the notorious Paul Ehrlich. His set of tablets was titled The Population Bomb and if anything, it was even more popular than Silent Spring. Ehrlich's thesis was that relentlessly burgeoning population would overstress the earth's "carrying capacity", use up all available resources, and lead to the collapse of civilization before the 20th century was out. The argument seemed irrefutable to those not familiar with the uncertainties surrounding demography (Thomas Malthus had made similar series of predictions early in the 19th century).
Countless offshoots of Ehrlich's book appeared, and overpopulation became one of the standard ideas of the late 60s, embraced by the counterculture, policymakers, academics, and the media. Even today, an era in which deflating national populations are the problem, it's by no means unusual to come across people still living in Ehrlich's nightmare world, much the same as the Amish or Mennonites have preserved their far more pleasant way of life into modern times. Ehrlich became quite wealthy, and the master of his own foundation devoted to the study of the "overpopulation threat". To this day, he contends that his thesis is correct. The whole episode is begging for a detailed historical study.
A variant combining aspects of both theories had a brief run in the early to mid 70s: the doctrine of universal famine. Pollution would poison croplands and stunt agricultural production, and overpopulation would do the rest. The problem here was the fact that proponents insisted that doom was imminent, with famine appearing as early as 1975 or 1980 at the latest. The experience taught the Greens to be a little more vague with dates.
The early 1980s saw a reprise of earlier fears of nuclear destruction (a workable definition of an "advanced civilization" could well read "one in which there is sufficient leisure time for large numbers of people to worry about doomsday"). The nuclear freeze campaign, largely engineered by the KGB, took up much of the public attention devoted to environmental crises. But even this effort was given an environmental gloss when scientific impresario Carl Sagan put together a road show of "mainstream scientists" to promote the concept of a "nuclear winter".
The firestorms generated by a nuclear strike would generate smoke so thick as to block out the sun across much of the northern hemisphere, causing a collapse of the terrestrial ecology. Nuclear winter never quite caught on outside of certain elite circles, in part due to flaws in the theory. Sagan's specialty was exobiology, the study of possible extraterrestrial life-forms, and it developed that the climate model he'd used was based on the atmosphere of Mars, a planet locked in an ice age for the past billion years. Nuclear winter faded with the nuclear freeze movement. All the same, just before his death Sagan made it known that he'd willingly accept a Nobel for his role in preventing World War III.
(continued...)
AmericanThinker.com | 2 Feb 07 | J.R. Dunn
A man who ceases to believe in God does not believe in nothing; he believes in anything.
- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
The apocalyptic vision of global warming serves a deep need of the environmentalist credo, the dominant pseudo-religious tendency of our age in the prosperous West.
For good or ill, human beings are constructed to believe, and faith has its demands.. Along with the concrete elements that demand belief (that fire burns and that it's not wise to walk off cliffs, for example) there exists an apparent necessity for a belief in "the rock higher than I" - a belief in a superior entity that can inspire awe and gratitude, that can be turned to in hard times, that can act as witness to injustice and dispenser of mercy.
Despite the claims of our current crop of militant atheists such as Dawkins and Harris, this is not simply brain-dead foolishness. Religious belief is hard-wired into human beings, by what means and for what purposes we don't yet understand. (A much wiser atheist, the biologist Edward O. Wilson wrote in On Human Nature that he intended to demonstrate that religious belief played an evolutionary role and could thus be explained by Darwinism. That was thirty years ago - if he ever succeeded, I haven't heard about it.)
When religious belief is subverted, it does not, as Chesterton implied, simply vanish. It is almost immediately replaced by another set of beliefs on a similar level of abstraction and serving the same purpose. Sometimes it's an import, such as Buddhism or TM. Sometimes it's a creed deliberately created to serve a political agenda, as we see in Nazism and Communism. Sometimes it's the goofy SoCal syncretism currently expressed in Wicca and Neopaganism. ("If people seriously want to be pagans," the late Joe Myers, a Christian brother of my acquaintance once said. "They'd become Roman Catholics.") And sometimes they're a combination, a weird melange of ideas picked up from various sources that (and usually not coincidentally) also serve a political purpose. Which brings us to environmentalism.
That environmentalism is in fact a pseudo-religion goes without saying. Like all such, it possesses every element of contemporary legitimate belief. It has a deity, in this case the goddess Gaia, the personification of the living Earth, (first envisioned by James Lovelock, whom we can slot in as high priest). It has its holy books, most changing with the seasons, and most, as is true of the Bible with many convinced Christians, utterly unread. It has its saints, its prophets, its commandments, religious rituals (be sure to recycle that bottle), a large gallery of sins, mortal and otherwise, and an even larger horde of devils. (Let me pause here to sharpen a horn.)
Another item that a pseudo-religion must have is an apocalypse - and that's what global warming is all about.
In fact, the apocalyptic is the major fulcrum of environmentalism, the axis around which everything else turns. It's environmentalism's major element of concern, its chief attraction, and the center of discussion and speculation, in much the same way that some Protestant variants of Christianity are obsessed above all with sin. So crucial is the apocalypse to environmentalism that there has been a whole string of them, one after the other, covering every last aspect of the natural world. If one don't git ya, the next one will.
Green emphasis on the apocalyptic appeared early, accompanying the introduction of mass environmental awareness itself. Silent Spring, published in 1962, represents the first environmentalist scripture -- nothing other than a modern book of Revelations. Rachel Carson, a popular nature writer, was dying of cancer while writing the book, and Silent Spring became an outlet for her rage and grief. Carson predicted the imminent coming of a stricken world, a world poisoned by the synthetic products of the chemical industry, in which no birds sang and human children would not be immune. The early 60s were marked by fears of the consequences of atmospheric nuclear tests, and the suggestion that chemicals were just as deadly found a willing audience.
Pollution - a word that itself bears many religious connotations -- became a byword of the era. That fact that the phenomenon encompassed virtually every aspect of technical civilization including car exhausts, household plastics, and power generation, guaranteed it a good long run. Truly grotesque stories, ranging from dioxins eating sneakers from children's feet to hushed-up epidemics of cancer, made the rounds. None were anything more than grist for Snopes.com, and the promised chemical doomsday never arrived. But Carson's work set the pattern for all the environmental apocalypses to come.
The next example was overpopulation, its prophet the notorious Paul Ehrlich. His set of tablets was titled The Population Bomb and if anything, it was even more popular than Silent Spring. Ehrlich's thesis was that relentlessly burgeoning population would overstress the earth's "carrying capacity", use up all available resources, and lead to the collapse of civilization before the 20th century was out. The argument seemed irrefutable to those not familiar with the uncertainties surrounding demography (Thomas Malthus had made similar series of predictions early in the 19th century).
Countless offshoots of Ehrlich's book appeared, and overpopulation became one of the standard ideas of the late 60s, embraced by the counterculture, policymakers, academics, and the media. Even today, an era in which deflating national populations are the problem, it's by no means unusual to come across people still living in Ehrlich's nightmare world, much the same as the Amish or Mennonites have preserved their far more pleasant way of life into modern times. Ehrlich became quite wealthy, and the master of his own foundation devoted to the study of the "overpopulation threat". To this day, he contends that his thesis is correct. The whole episode is begging for a detailed historical study.
A variant combining aspects of both theories had a brief run in the early to mid 70s: the doctrine of universal famine. Pollution would poison croplands and stunt agricultural production, and overpopulation would do the rest. The problem here was the fact that proponents insisted that doom was imminent, with famine appearing as early as 1975 or 1980 at the latest. The experience taught the Greens to be a little more vague with dates.
The early 1980s saw a reprise of earlier fears of nuclear destruction (a workable definition of an "advanced civilization" could well read "one in which there is sufficient leisure time for large numbers of people to worry about doomsday"). The nuclear freeze campaign, largely engineered by the KGB, took up much of the public attention devoted to environmental crises. But even this effort was given an environmental gloss when scientific impresario Carl Sagan put together a road show of "mainstream scientists" to promote the concept of a "nuclear winter".
The firestorms generated by a nuclear strike would generate smoke so thick as to block out the sun across much of the northern hemisphere, causing a collapse of the terrestrial ecology. Nuclear winter never quite caught on outside of certain elite circles, in part due to flaws in the theory. Sagan's specialty was exobiology, the study of possible extraterrestrial life-forms, and it developed that the climate model he'd used was based on the atmosphere of Mars, a planet locked in an ice age for the past billion years. Nuclear winter faded with the nuclear freeze movement. All the same, just before his death Sagan made it known that he'd willingly accept a Nobel for his role in preventing World War III.
(continued...)
