“There was an Old Testament ring to the forewarnings, an air of plague of boils and deluge of frogs that suggested a deep and constant inclination enacted over the centuries to believe that one was always living at the End of Days, that one’s own demise was urgently bound up with the end of the world and therefore made more sense or was just a little less irrelevant.”
Yes! Great! Tick in the margin! Here is a great novelist at the height of his powers summing up perfectly the atavistic impulse which leads generation after generation to believe it is the chosen one: the generation so special that it and it alone will be the one privileged to experience the end of the world; and the generation so egotistical that it imagines itself largely responsible for that imminent destruction.
The Aztecs thought it; Medieval peasants thought it; green doom-mongers think it today. But the fact that generations of credulous berks believed these things does not make their guilt-laden, quasi-religious convictions any more valid now than they were a thousand years ago. The end of the world is not nigh. We will go on evolving and adapting as we have always done. The richer we get, the more advanced our economies, the more money we shall have to spend on conserving our environment. This is how the real world works as opposed to the fantasy one devised by Millenarians, eco-loons and other frothing nutcases.
Now contrast those wise words at the beginning, with that of an AGW-believing celebrity author recently interviewed on the BBC who rather ridiculously claimed, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, that:
“The world of science is not at loggerheads. The consensus is colossal.”
(Not just “settled”, note. Actually “colossal”, don’tcha know?)
Now here’s the weird part. The clever, wise author who wrote the sentence at the beginning and the rather silly chicken licken one quoted by the BBC are one and the same. Ian McEwan, author of a new global warming novel Solar. I must confess that I haven’t yet read the novel, so I can’t be sure quite how far down the path of climate scepticism McEwan’s book dares to venture. But I do know that certain deep Greenies have been slightly miffed at the way McEwan satirises their antics on a pleasant freebie – sorry, important scientific mission – he took up to the Arctic Circle on an agreeable sailing boat with the Cape Farewell project.
Could it be that McEwan is suffering a severe case of cognitive dissonance, with the achingly PC, AGW-believing, public version of Ian McEwan battle for supremacy with his inner creative genius which seems to have a much, much more insightful understanding of the real issues at stake with AGW?
Some of these issues are discussed on the BBC’s Review Show – which I urge you to watch before it gets taken off the BBC website, partly so you can admire the heroic defence of empiricism and commonsense by the New Culture Forum’s Peter Whittle, partly so you can discover the true meaning of rhyming slang courtesy of libtard historian Tristram Hunt.
James – being in Australia, I couldn’t view the Review Show. But the feather-ruffling provoked by this book and by the Canadian meanie-greenie study both point to important truths about warmism, which I see as merely the fairy on a whole Christmas tree of fashionable “apocalysm” (if that isn’t a proper word, it should be).
The meanness of greenies revealed in the study has been ascribed, I’m sure correctly, to greenies feeling that their green habits “license” them to behave badly. I think that only tells half the story, though. I believe a lot of greenies are subconsciously buying indulgences for sins they may never have committed, and are never likely to commit.
Until about a hundred years ago life anywhere contained real and palpable hazards. During, say, the plagues in 13th century Europe, people had perfectly good reason to believe that they might be the last to walk the face of the earth, and you can’t really blame them for concluding that the plague was a sign that God was upset with them. So their irrational devotional responses, flagellism, and so on, make sense, even if they weren’t very effective at stemming the plague.
But when I grew up in Britain in the 50s and 60s, all the traditional hazards to everyday life were thought to be removed. We had penicillin, inoculation, the Welfare State, and we had Supermac and his never-had-it-so-good economy. The number of people who would instinctively turn to God, rather than to the government, to deliver them from evil was dwindling. On the other hand, though, we sincerely believed that we could very well be turned to a crisp in a pre-emptive Soviet attack, at 4 minutes notice, tops. Importantly, I think, our vision of this obliterating event did not include suffering; just instant oblivion. I think this dichotomy of expectation produced some strange psychological conflicts, which in earlier times would have been resolved through religion.
I clearly remember, although I was about eleven, the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was probably the closest we came to a real catastrophe, and, in the same year, the publication of “Silent Spring”, and the acclaim it received. I wonder if a book like this would have provoked such a response (which included the appalling Gore’s first conviction for global vandalism, the DDT pogrom, and the malaria mortality that resulted) had it been bublished a quarter of a century earlier, with the Spanish Civil War on the go, and WW2 in the offing, and when you could lose your life from a septic finge-cut? I think Silent Spring spawned the modern green movement by pointing to a means of expiation which appeared secular, rooted in “science”, and therefore perfect for the post-Christian citizen nagged by.
Since those times, the weird threat of unannounced immolation by nuclear attack has been replaced by the weird threat of unannounced obliteration by IED, while the everyday experience of Western life has got ever safer, so I don’t see the angst that drives fashionable causes, from LiveAid to AGW, being resolved soon. AGW might be on the skids, but the market for secular indulgences looks as healthy as ever, and something will be found to replace it. Question is, what?
Sorry that should have been “….post-Christian citizen nagged by unvoiced feelings of guilt at the decadence of the life he leads”.
Spot on James – particularly on the arrogant bourgeois dismissiveness of Tristram Hunt. If the vacuousness of his comments and the lack of evidence he provided to back his ignorant assertions are typical of his opinions, then his opinions of history are obviously on a par with those of the North Korean Board of Education.
So what does Tristram Hunt rhyme with then ?
The nearest I can get is Tristram Cunt but that can’t possibly be right because the C-word is very nasty and not allowed…
Bunt, Dunt, Funt, Gunt, Junt,
YES you mean Tristram Kunt, the well-known German herring processor.
I think the photo in the link tell you all you need to know about this utter Tristram.
Sorry:
http://img.dailymail.co.uk/img/pix/tristram070102_290×450.jpg
I’m just at the bit in the book where the ‘hero’, physicist Michael Beard, chairs a science committee on which sits a postmodernist professor of ‘Science Studies’, who believes that genes are ‘culturally-inscribed narratives’ and that rationalism in science is ‘hegemonistic’.
At a press conference, Beard mentions in passing that the reason that there aren’t more women in physics might be due to the fact that men and women tend to think differently and have different interests, with women preferring life sciences and men physical sciences. At which the professor announces that she feels ‘violently sick’ at what she has heard, and announces her resignation. There follows a witch-hunt against Beard, with an audience at the ICA booing him and placard-waving demonstrations outside protesting against his ’sinister claims about human nature’ and his ‘neo-liberal attack on collectivity’. There are suggestions that he is, in fact, a Neo-Nazi. He is hounded out of his job.
Interesting stuff