Things I don’t understand ||

Just a note on an essay from George Mason University’s History News Network blog, on the symmetry between organized religion and environmentalism (or at least the catastrophic kind getting the headlines at the moment):

• Both are highly moralistic and use the language and strategies of “sinfulness.” This also involves an implied and often explicit claim to have monopolized the moral high ground.
• Both involve the idea that one must sacrifice now for some undetermined future reward. This makes the Lent connection very logical.
• Both have historically been very quick to label and condemn as “heretics” those who disagree with them.
• Both have a tendency toward irrationalism and mysticism, e.g. the Gaia strand of environmentalism.

Of course this has been noted before by Michael Crichton:

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it’s a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.

Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday—these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don’t want to talk anybody out of them, as I don’t want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don’t want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can’t talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.

And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren’t necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It’s about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them. [my emphasis]

I recommend both essays.

I remember Steve McIntyre noting that when Al Gore spoke at the AGU, he noted that the style of communication was that of a revivalist preacher - a remark which got him some flak at the time, until other commentators noticed it as well.

Steve wrote:

Al Gore was welcomed by a standing ovation from about 4,000 scientists from the AGU convention in the Salon 8 Ballroom at the Marriott San Francisco. He spoke for an hour and was a far more accomplished speaker than one remembers from Presidential debates, glancing only occasionally at notes. It was like a Southern Baptist orator had seamlessly changed texts. His speech was a type of sermon: a few well-practised jokes to start, a commentary on selected verses followed by a call to commit. Gore himself has gotten a little stout over the years (not that I can throw stones on this count) and a little jowly, so his presentation and appearance resulted in a type of secular avatar of Jerry Falwell.

And just to show that that observation is entirely valid, Al Gore went to the New Baptist Covenant Celebration in Atlanta on January 31st and produced fire and brimstone:

“This is not a political issue,” Gore told a crowd of approximately 2,500 paying attendees. “It is a moral issue. It is an ethical issue. It is a spiritual issue.”

Gore quoted Scripture several times in his speech and repeated his views that increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere are causing a global climate crisis. Gore produced an Academy Award-winning documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which also dealt with global climate change and is being shown at the New Baptist Covenant meeting.+

In an introduction of Gore, Robert Parham, executive director of the Baptist Center for Ethics, called the former Democratic presidential nominee a “Baptist prophet” and criticized the Southern Baptist Convention for its failure to commend Gore for his achievements. He also presented Gore with a “Baptist of the Year Award.”

Al Gore is “Baptist of the Year”. Whatever.

Back to the fire and brimstone:

Gore, citing Luke 12:54-57 for scriptural support, argued that it is dishonest for anyone to claim that global warming is merely a theory rather than a scientific fact.

“The evidence is there,” he said. “The signal is on the mountain. The trumpet has blown. The scientists are screaming from the rooftops. The ice is melting. The land is parched. The seas are rising. The storms are getting stronger. Why do we not judge what is right?

“I think there is a distinct possibility that one of the messages coming out of this gathering and this new covenant is creation care — that we who are Baptists of like mind, in attempting in the best of our human abilities to glorify God, are not going to countenance the continued heaping on contempt on God’s creation.”

Now I had to look up that passage that Gore quoted. In the New American Standard Version, it reads like this:

54 And He was also saying to the crowds, “When you see a cloud rising in the west, immediately you say, ‘A shower is coming,’ and so it turns out.

55 “And when you see a south wind blowing, you say, ‘It will be a hot day,’ and it turns out that way.

56 “You hypocrites! You know how to analyze the appearance of the earth and the sky, but why do you not analyze this present time?

57 “And why do you not even on your own initiative judge what is right?”

Now that passage looks like it was ripped from its context. The context is Jesus telling the crowds about his divine mission:

49 “I have come to cast fire upon the earth; and how I wish it were already kindled!

50 “But I have a baptism to undergo, and how distressed I am until it is accomplished!

51 “Do you suppose that I came to grant peace on earth? I tell you, no, but rather division;

52 for from now on five members in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three.

53 “They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”

So the signs quoted by Gore are not about the weather, but about the divisiveness of Jesus’ message and the coming Judgment of sinners (that’s the context of the 12th Chapter). Real fire and brimstone stuff.

Gore concludes:

Gore said some Baptist spokesmen deny the reality of global warming because they are locked in a coalition with rich and powerful people who take advantage of the poor for economic profit.

“When did people of faith get so locked in to an ideological coalition that they got to go along with the wealthiest and most powerful who don’t want to see change of the kind that’s aimed at helping the people and protecting God’s green earth?” Gore asked

Now that’s rich coming from Gore, a man whose family fortune came from the oil industry and whose second fortune is being made by selling indulgences carbon credits to rich people to assuage their environmental guilt.

The article ends with something bizarre - who does Gore blame for this catastrophe?

Among the effects Gore cited of increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are floods, tornados, hurricanes and droughts. Global warming affects the poorest people of the world most. He cited three factors responsible for recent increased levels of Greenhouse gases — population growth, the science and technology revolution and errant thinking by humans.

So Gore is in favour of ignorance and superstition after all. Science and technology are the problem, not the solution.

In order to explain the following correspondance, I’m going to have to give the preamble that I sent to Benny Peiser’s CCNet sometime last year:-

Something caught my eye that I couldn’t resist replying to. In the article in New Scientist that you [Benny Peiser] quoted we read:

“Many environmental groups were pleased with the outcomes. Steve Sawyer of Greenpeace International called the meeting “historic” and said it had delivered “just about everything” the pressure group wanted.

But others were more sceptical, saying the meeting had done nothing more than agree to keep talking. They point out that the US signed up for talks only after a clause was added stipulating that the dialogue “will not open any negotiations leading to new commitments”. For many, this made the dialogue pointless.

“In Kyoto in 1997, Greenpeace argued that the world could emit at most another 270 billion tonnes of carbon before we hit dangerous and even chaotic rates of climate change. Since then we have travelled a quarter of the way to that figure,” points out Aubrey Meyer of the Global Commons Institute in London, UK. “This agreement does not change anything, so to call it a triumph is crazy. We are still on a one-way trip to disaster.”

As a admirer of Orwell, I appreciate the twisting of language like the use of “sceptical” to mean “disbelieving because its not pessimistic enough”

I have a little more information about this Aubrey Meyer. I’ve just recently wasted some money on Amazon (well, more than usually just wasted it on more books than I actually need). I bought a book on the basis of an Amazon Recommendation because I genuinely wanted to find out what this particular doctrine meant. The book is called “Contraction & Convergence - The Global Solution to Climate Change” by Aubrey Meyer. The Amazon reviews are equally glowing. See here

Here is the first three paragraphs of the Author’s Note:

“I’ve never anything other than a musician. How I ended up devising a global policy concept at UN climate negotiations for the last ten years is a bit of a mystery to me. [JA - you’re not the only one] But a clue is that both writing and playing music are largely about wholeness and the principled distribution of ‘effort’ or practice. Responding to the climate challenge seems much like writing or playing music, where balance on the axes of reason and feeling, time and space, can only come from internal consistency. If practice is unprincipled there is no coordination and there is discord. When it is principled, there is balance, harmony and union. Perhaps all life aspires to the condition of music.

Ten years ago, I was feeling crushed and frightened by the realisation that humanity’s pollution was destroying the future by changing the global climate. A sympathetic friend told me I wasn’ being ‘Zen’ enough. I didn’t know what he meant, had a good laugh and decided he must be right.

So I went to the UN just as the negotiations began to create the climate convention. There I discovered tensions between Taoists, Marxists, economists, musicians and other human beings. This was only just funny enough, often enough, to rescue me from the powerlessness and despair that otherwise captures those who are not Zen enough at the UN, or anywhere else. ‘Being Zen’ probably means caring, but enough to grasp reality by letting go of ‘duality’….”

OK Aubrey, I’m going to back away very very slowly….

The book is full of Aubrey’s beliefs on Taoism and Zen Buddhism with complicated diagrams on greenhouse emissions that, to my amateur scientific eye, look pretty unreadable, interspersed with Taoist pictograms and exortations on Zen and New Age spirituality. On these occasions, you’ve got to wonder if the reviewers on Amazon are reading the same book, or smoking something that isn’t from the tobacconists and reading Aubrey’s aura remotely.

Now it appears that Aubrey is speaking on behalf of the “Global Commons Institute”, the well known environmentalist group and jazz combo. It’s truly an amazing academic path that Aubrey has managed to get himself quoted as an environmental authority in “New Scientist”. Clearly the publishers have expanded the definition of scientist quite a lot more than the Oxford English Dictionary takes account of.

So for all you budding scientists out there, the message is clear: Don’t sweat the math stuff with all of that hard grind of calculus and statistics.

Use the “Aubrey Meyer Musical Zen Method”. All you have to do is learn your instrument and turn up at the UN.

A couple of months pass after this and then Aubrey writes to me:

John A

Please don’t stop - if you’re going to die laughing, you gotta
practice every day!

Cracked up laughing when your critique turned up . . .
http://antigreen.blogspot.com/2005_12_01_antigreen_archive.html#113508746662284171

Aubrey

Aubrey Meyer
Director
Global Commons Institute [GCI]
37 Ravenswood Road
LONDON E17 9LY
UK

Now obviously Aubrey thinks that I am John Ray, the author of “Greenie Watch” cited above. So I set him straight (and cc: John Ray as well)

Dear Aubrey

I am not John Ray.

Your grasp of reality is as tenuous as ever. You really should stick to music.

John A

PS When I need a laugh I read your book on global warming. Only a few paragraphs has me in hysterics. Sometimes I read it out at parties, where its a big hit (although a few have asked whether you’re really serious - I have to confess that you appear to be)

I don’t really read it out at parties, but I do find it very funny. However Aubrey tries to engage my intellect thus:

Dear John A [who is not John Ray] . . .

Thank you for your homily. Reality grasps us rather than, as you suggest, the other way around. Music teaches one that.

So it seems possible to me that you could more happily confess what you have been grasped by, than that which you imagine has been grasped by you [or me for that matter].

As Ronald Reagan once said: - “Just cos a thing is simple doesn’t mean its easy.” As Donald Rumsfeld later said, ” . . . . and then there are things that you don’t know you don’t know.”

Maybe the de-construction of your certainties will become as funny for you as it has obviously already been for some of your friends.

May you have many - I know nothing.

Aubrey

Never a truer word spoken, and I don’t think he’s in jest.

Dear Aubrey

You make as much sense as always

best regards

John A

You see? I try not to encourage them. Aubrey closes the conversation like this:

John

No - as I feared - not a ray in view - reality grasps you and this is
demonstrated when you can explain it . . .

Your move - but please don’t make it straight away - the reactive
tendency is clearly already well-developed and the animus in it
already well-demonstrated in your various statements to the internet.

Let’s call a pause and let this dog lie, lest it bark . . .

Aubrey

I’m in two minds as to whether to reply. Probably not.

The book is a hoot though…