Osgiliath666

From the Asian times.

It's not the end of the world - it's the end of you

Last week's London snowstorm was the last straw. With no particular scientific evidence in hand, I have come to the conclusion that global warming is a looney cult. Londoners may have frolicked on the frozen Thames in the days of famous diarist Samuel Pepys in the mid-17th century, but today's Britons cannot reconcile this disruption of their lukewarm climate with the notion that temperatures are steadily rising.

The scientific controversy is beyond me, but I can recognize the fixed stare, the strained voice-throb and the rigid jaw of a madman at a hundred paces. The Greens hector us about the impending end of the world. I put it to them: perhaps it is not the end of the world, but just the end of you. Analysis of global temperature is a subtle issue about which reasonable men might in good faith reach different conclusions. The evangelical zealotry that motivates the global-warmers has a different source than the facts.

Human beings cannot bear their own transient existence without some hope of immortality. Except for the Americans, whom Europeans dismiss as bovine about such things, the children of the West long ago abandoned the promises of religion. The childless Europeans lack even the consolation of physical continuity. They have no future; other people will occupy the lands where they dwell, and their languages will be entombed in libraries. The myriad amusements available to them cannot forever distract them from the horrible advent of their own disappearance. Europeans: As a matter of demographic fact, it is indeed the end of you (Why Europe chooses extinction, April 8, 2003).

That settled, let us consider the minor matter of the end of the world. For the same reason that men cannot live without the hope of immortality, they cannot bear their gray, miserable lives without some sense of exaltation - religion, art, music, poetry, sex, drugs, violence, whatever. With the decline of Christianity and its bodyguard, the high culture of the West, sex, drugs and violence predominate. These devices eventually leave the user all the more anxious.

By living on the underside of popular culture, the young people of the West make themselves feel worthless and insignificant. In the cartoon Ants , an insect (with Woody Allen's voice) complains to an ant psychiatrist: "I feel so insignificant," to which the ant psychiatrist replies: "That's a breakthrough. You are insignificant." That is a creepy thought; if human beings truly felt themselves to be insignificant, the suicide rate would be much higher. In fact, cultures who truly come to feel insignificant, eg, Stone Age peoples who come into unwanted contact with the modern world, sometimes register suicide rates of 25 percent to 50 percent (Live and let die, April 13, 2002). We do not typically observe very high rates of suicide because the human mind resists its own destruction by wishing away its sense of insignificance. Paranoia is one such device. In the United States, many African-Americans believe that evil white doctors invented AIDS to wipe out the black population. Adolf Hitler believed that syphilis was a Jewish plot to poison Aryan blood. Egyptian high school textbooks teach that American pilots and spy technology secretly won the 1967 war for Israel, and so forth.

Today's educated Westerners do not normally believe in such bizarre ideas, but they are susceptible to subtler forms of the same thing. The sense of the transcendent they derive from contemplating nature is of desperate importance. "It is not that I will pass from the earth without leaving so much as a grease spot to mark my stay," thinks the Green. "It is the earth herself who is in danger. The rain forests will vanish! The whales will become extinct! The German forest is dying! The ice caps are melting!"

Anxiety about the irreversible disappearance of some feature of the natural world substitutes for the death-anxiety of the individual. In the extreme case, the Green becomes the enemy of industrial civilization in general. Of course I do not oppose sensible measures to protect rain forests, prevent over-fishing, and so forth, but I am weary of the fanaticism that distinguishes the conservationist from the environmental fanatic who has turned against civilization. It is worth observing that the US returns farmland to the wilderness every year, because rising agricultural productivity concentrates more output on a smaller number of square kilometers. Wandering the forests of New Hampshire one continuously stumbles on stone fences that long ago enclosed small farms.

Perhaps that explains why Americans showed insufficient concern over global warming to support the 1997 Kyoto Treaty (not even Howard Dean would sign it as currently presented). In their experience, the wilderness is growing not shrinking. Something deeper may be at work, however. Unlike the Europeans, most Americans cling to the old Judeo-Christian religion, according to which the sun and moon simply are lamps and watches set in the sky for the use of humankind. For them, what is transcendent is a creator who is not himself part of nature. Celestial bodies merely sit on the display cases of the creator's shop window. Far fewer Americans confound their own sense of mortality with the vulnerability of the natural world, because they have chosen other means to address the matter of mortality.

Otherwise, I shall continue to collect recipes for endangered species. An acquaintance in the Pacific Northwest of the United States assures me that spotted owl tastes just like chicken.

Winterworg

I saw this today also. Thought provoking. A lib friend of mine told me that the cooling trend was due to the warming at the equator causing cold air to be pulled down. So when we are locked into an ice age the global warming folks will tell us... see I told you.

Gulor Gularin

Never mind that ice ages are a naturally occuring cycle of the earth and that we are nearly due for another if past patterns are any indication. My guess is it's been speeded up a bit but was coming anyway.

Lleauric

Fear is a great motivator.

If you want to get people to act, send you money, vote for you, strap dynamite to themselves....

Liberals scare you with enviromental collapse and catastrophe, conservatives scare you with (now) Terrorists blowing you up.. it used to be street crime. (/wave Willie Horton)
People in power WANT you scared, they want you frightened and easy to control.

Your greatest act of Patriotism would be to make your politicians work harder. Dont buy any of their bullshit, demand real answers and results.

akipt

conservatives scare you with (now) Terrorists blowing you up..

Yeah, funny that terrorism is a real problem though, unlike global warming. You know, 9/11, Moscow subways blowing up today, and that whole ricin thing this week were just figments of my imagination.

Ruthey

Odd that folks go to such an extreme level over what is just plain common sense. Dump poison in the environment you live in, you will be poisoned. We're all so carried away by our grasping after things and money and power that we choose to avert our eyes from this simple fact.

hartmut

aptek obvouisly its your focused perception which makes you think there is a serious problem with terrorism ... just check how many people died today in carcrash or by lungcancer or just hunger due lack of food worldwide .... if you put it in the right spotlight you could make also a story of the new mysterius lungcancer epedemy which is ramaging in the world or the danger of using a certain householdtool because one out of 1000 people cutting their finger off with it and like 100 !!! fingers cut off per year OMG what a serious threat ...

like l2 said , people who like to gain power use mainly fear to control other people ...and if you have control over massmedia , you have the perfect tool to reporgramm peoples brains .... that a typical learning process , repeat and repeat the bullshit until the peoples ears almost bleeding and its just a matter of time and everyone believe that george bush had anal sex with mickey mouse and it was the only way to stop saddam hussain.


in either way no matter if left or rightwing ideology or any kinds of relegions FEAR rules and it can be very motivating .
christians fear the hell , since centuries ... which is really stupid since nothing is proven ...
hindi people fear reincarnation as a cockroack due bad karma etc ...

.... but infact most western people have nothing really much to worry ... if you compare their lives with people from really pisspoor countries in africa, south america and asia where people cannot affort food and basic security for themselfes ...

Ibudin

Hartmut,

That was by far the best thing iv'e seen you post. Have to say I totally agree with you. Fear is a powerful tool. I see it with my parents when they spend way to much time watching the nightly news. They are so gulable.

akipt

.... but infact most western people have nothing really much to worry ... if you compare their lives with people from really pisspoor countries in africa, south america and asia where people cannot affort food and basic security for themselfes ...
And what exactly seperates us from those people? Why are they so piss poor and can't feed themselves? Why aren't they secure?

Feuerfaust

Odd that folks go to such an extreme level over what is just plain common sense. Dump poison in the environment you live in, you will be poisoned.

Let's start with a point we can all agree on - gas, fluid and solids ejected out of volcanos are probably all bad for humans to ingest, get in their eye, breathe, soak in, use as a suppository, or drink. Poison, if you will. I think we can also agree that it is emitted into the atmosphere, no? Volcanos have been around longer than man. We're still here. How can we still be alive after thousands of eruptions per year, for several billion years?

We're all so carried away by our grasping after things and money and power that we choose to avert our eyes from this simple fact.

What logic or chain of evens lead you (Not the "Ruthey" version of "you", but the "chicken-little" "yous" out there) to believe that we're going to all die and the world is going to end due to greenhouse effects, or super-floods, or some other silly scenario? Please don't show silly facts and figures from some scientist that gets money from the govn't to keep irrational hand-wringers scared and voting for the politicians that pretend to hear their plea. I just used a specific example of something that any rational person could deduce, and certainly cannot deny. I think you're probably more stating that there can certainly be catastrophic damages in small regions due to carelessness or irresponsibility. This I agree with, but we are in no way, shape or form going to "destroy the planet", even with our best efforts. (These are the ones that I take exception to, and like to infuriate.) The earth is a lot more durable than most give it credit for.

PS - Fuck the Kyoto Accord. Fuck it in its stupid ass. We didn't sign it, we don't have to listen to it, and there ain't shit anyone can do about it. Ha-fucking-ha ha! (That was merely a gratuitous stab for the effect of entertainment and raising blood-pressure.)

Off to work where we happily pollute the environment, and laugh as we drink our evil martinis, wearing our evil corporate uniforms, with our evil pinkies lifted while plotting evil things in a polluted (smoke-filled) room that is lit by burning trees fresh-cut from the Amazon, dipped in oil and burned in inefficient generators to produce electricity that fuels the one bare lightbulb in the room. Y'all have a nice day, y'hear?