The Decade of the Green Meanies
Extreme environmentalism has become a harsh secular religion, writes Robert Sibley
BY ROBERT SIBLEY, THE OTTAWA CITIZEN
DECEMBER 30, 2009
As the television cameras panned the enviro-riots in Copenhagen earlier this month, I couldn't help but remember a post-apocalypse movie from the early 1970s.
The Omega Man tells the story of Robert Neville, one of the few to avoid succumbing to a worldwide biological disaster that turned survivors into vacant-eyed albino zombies. Neville, played by Charlton Heston, is besieged by a cult of homicidal mutants known as The Family. Dressed in ragged, hoodie-like garments, the mutants lay siege each night to Neville's fortified apartment, which he defends with an arsenal of weaponry. The mutants want him dead because he represents the old technological culture that destroyed the world.
I haven't seen the movie in a long time, but as I recall, the mutants want to burn Neville at the stake, or something like that, to appease the nature gods they now worship.
Watching the thousands of demonstrators with their cowl-like hoodies, face masks and green banners, marching through the streets of Copenhagen to lay siege to the gathering of world leaders, it struck me that the protesters not only shared the movie mutants' fashion sense, but also a similar fanaticism. If the protesters had broken through the police lines around the conference centre, some world leaders may well have found themselves in Neville's predicament.
Do I exaggerate? I think not. Many who wave the environmental banner, denouncing "climate change" and demanding an end to "global warming," slip dangerously close, if not across, the line that separates the reasoned mind from the irrationalism of totalitarian psychology.
Consider, for example, the children who snuck into a conference room -- waving American flags, no less -- where British politician Christopher Monckton was speaking about the flaws in the would-be Copenhagen Agreement. The children started yelling and shrieking like well-programmed robots. Monckton, however, refused to be intimidated. He denounced the protesters as Nazi-like goons who win debates by shouting rather than through reasoned argument. The unruly children slunk away, flags between their legs, so to speak.
Comparing the "Green movement" to the Nazis is likely to be dismissed as an irrational argument in itself, but from a certain perspective Monckton's remarks aren't out of line. As some observers argue, environmentalism, like fascism and communism, two secular religions of the 20th century, has become another secular religion.
"With the collapse of Marxism and, to all intents and purposes, other forms of socialism, too, those who dislike capitalism and its foremost exemplar, the United States, with equal passion, have been obliged to find a new creed," says Nigel Lawson, a former British cabinet minister. Environmentalists have "turned climate change from being a political issue into a secular religion. Green is the new Red."
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The making of environmentalism into a secular religion replete with its own Green prophets -- Al Gore and David Suzuki come to mind -- has been a long time coming. Nearly three decades ago, sociologist Robert Nisbet warned that "environmentalism is now well on its way to becoming the third great wave of the redemptive struggle in Western history, the first being Christianity, the second modern socialism. The dream of a perfect physical environment has all the revolutionary potential that lay both in the Christian version of mankind redeemed by Christ and in the Socialist, chiefly Marxist, prophecy of mankind freed from social injustice."
To understand this 'return of religion' requires recognizing our own misunderstanding of modernity. It's been widely thought -- and widely taught -- that since the Enlightenment, as the world became more prosperous and better educated, the need for religion has slowly disappeared. This was the theory of secularization, which held that as history "progressed," science would replace religious doctrine and reason would replace dogmatic belief.
It hasn't happened quite that way. Certainly, secularization has taken hold in much of the western world. And supposedly we live in a secular society in which enlightened people reject religious belief.
But only a relatively small portion of the population can claim to be completely secularized. Mainstream Catholic and Protestant churches may be losing priests and parishioners in Europe and urban North America, but polls consistently show that a significant majority of Americans and Canadians still retain an allegiance to otherworldly beliefs and practices and that many believe in biblical end-of-the-world prophecies.
Of course, the resurgent religion with which most westerners are sadly familiar is extremist Islam, or Islamism. But Orthodox Judaism also has an increasingly greater say in Israeli politics, and is attracting a considerable number of young Jews. Orthodox Christianity enjoys a major revival in Russia, where religion and nationalism are finding common cause. Fundamentalist Hinduism is gaining adherents in India. Evangelical Protestantism is expanding around the world, making it the fastest-growing sect within Christianity. The Christian Right, which has long been influential in the United States, is gaining adherents in Europe, where its opposition to Muslim immigration is an increasingly popular response to the multicultural banalities of secular elites.
How is it that in an age of unprecedented scientific and technological achievement, the religious impulse has proven so resilient?
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One answer, says Tom Darby, a political theorist at Carleton University, resides in recognizing "the spiritual crisis of our times." We experience spiritual crises when the categories that traditionally help us make sense of our lives -- Left and Right, conservative and liberal, for example -- are no longer sufficient to account for our experience. Arguably, that's what is happening today.
The "return of religion," including a new secular religion like environmentalism, reflects a crisis of meaning in the sense that many people have turned to religion because the modern project, the Enlightenment project of scientific progress and material betterment, no longer satisfies our desire for meaning and purpose.
Behind our "spiritual dis-ease," says Darby, are all the anxieties and uncertainties of our time. "People always have difficulty with change and uncertainty, and in a technological age there is a lot of change and uncertainty. So people tend to latch on to whatever promises to make sense of the world. This can take the form of religion."
Environmentalism is one of the multifarious forms by which the religious impulse has, as it were, "returned" to the modern world. As novelist Michael Crichton once sardonically remarked, "Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists."
The Green ethos certainly shares much the same psychology and spiritual longing evident in religious movements. The Green prophets and all those true believers who just know that global warming is due to man's greed and rapacity (read capitalism and the United States) show all the symptoms of perfervid religious fundamentalists. Like other secular religions, environmentalism wants to remake the world according to its understanding of perfection.
In response to the spiritual crisis of our time, the Greens want to recover a lost paradise where mankind can redeem itself through the salvation of the planet, and, thereby, be restored to a state of grace. And, like every religion, environmentalism possesses a priestly elite (Bono and Cate Blanchett, for example), holy texts such as the Kyoto Accord, rituals like recycling and organic eating, and forms of public worship such as Earth Day and Earth Hour. Environmentalism also includes eschatological claims, its certainty of the end-time to come, although this end-time is referred to as catastrophic climate change rather than the Apocalypse or Judgment Day.
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In this light, then, the Green movement clearly manifests the contemporary 'return to religion.' Environmental ideology is to the early 21st century what political ideology was to the 20th century; that is to say, environmentalism has become, in Tom Darby's words, "a crypto-religious fundamentalism." It has stepped far beyond practical and intelligible goals of lessening pollution, cleaning up rivers and saving forests. Now it is into the salvation and redemption business.
One result, though, is that environmentalists have little tolerance for those who question their beatific vision of the new world to come. Indeed, faith-filled environmentalists display many of the tendencies often attributed to religious extremists in their hostility to non-believers. "Whatever the truth about our warming planet," says British columnist Brendan O'Neill, "it is clear there is a tidal wave of intolerance in the debate about climate change which is eroding free speech and melting rational debate."
Indeed, scientists who question the orthodoxy of global warming are anathematized as apostates. As the Climategate scandal demonstrates, scientists who don't share the global-warming faith have difficulty getting their research findings published in prestigious journals. Australian columnist Margo Kingston went so far as to propose outlawing climate change denial.
"Perhaps there is a case for making climate change denial an offence," she wrote. "It is a crime against humanity, after all."
Fundamentalist environmentalism has also been described as a threat to liberal democracy. "When we look at it in a proper historical perspective, the issue is -- once again -- freedom and its enemies," writes Czech President Vaclav Klaus. "Those of us who feel very strongly about it can never accept the irrationality with which the current world has embraced climate change (or global warming) as a real danger to the future of mankind, as well as the irrationality of (anti-global-warming) measures because they will fatally endanger our freedom and prosperity." Arguably, this hostility goes even deeper, exposing a disturbing psychology hostile to human existence itself.
Imagine the results of the "green revolution" envisioned by the most extreme environmentalists. All the food is organic and the atmosphere is in pristine condition. Sounds idyllic, doesn't it? But the world you're imagining is pre-modern, around the 17th century and before. In this world, babies regularly die at birth (along with their mothers), childhood diseases are rampant, life expectancy for most is maybe 40, and a good portion of the human race lives on a starvation diet. Obesity is a problem for only a few. The only reason there's so little pollution (on a worldwide scale) is because there are far fewer people, and industrialization has only just started. Food is organic because pesticides and herbicides don't exist, which means a lot of it doesn't get eaten.
This is the pre-industrial, pre-technological world the Green fundamentalists imagine, a world where humans are one with nature. But to be "one with nature" is to be non-human. By the fact of our self-consciousness, we are "aliens in the cosmos," to borrow novelist Walker Percy's phrase. Only animals, which lack self-awareness, are one with nature. The environmental radicals, in effect, want to return to a pre-human, or animal-like, existence.
Some are explicit on this point. "The ending of the human epoch on Earth would most likely be greeted with a hearty 'Good riddance!' " philosopher Paul Taylor wrote. "Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along," biologist David Graber once said.
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This anti-human attitude, this apparent willingness to endorse the deaths of fellow human beings as a necessary good, is a disturbing element in the environmental catechism. I've occasionally interviewed committed environmentalists, and have been particularly intrigued by those who think the world would be a better place with 20- or 30-per-cent fewer people. Maybe it would, but when I was able to ask what people they have in mind, and what method of disposal they preferred -- starvation? sterilization? biochemical plague? gas chamber? -- I was left with the impression that I'd be one of those they'd happily remove.
Of course, most people who think themselves environmentally aware, those who recycle, donate to wildlife organizations, or cast ballots for "green" politicians, don't think this way. Still, perhaps all of us should be a little more circumspect about going Green. Perhaps we should heed the advice of that great environmentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson: "That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming."
Environmentalism, when taken to the extreme, can be disturbingly anti-human. Environmentalism as a secular religion may preach the sanctity of the planet, but it is the West's hard-won modern civilization that is too readily laid out for sacrifice on the Green altar -- a sacrifice that would strip away those conditions that have allowed more people than ever before to enjoy longer, healthier and more satisfying lives than they might otherwise have done.
Robert Sibley is a senior writer with the Citizen. This essay concludes his look at some of the topics that emerged in the first decade of the new century.
Selected Sources
- Michael Crichton, "Environmentalism as Religion," 2003.
michaelcrichton.net/speech-environmentalismasreligion.html
- Margo Kingston, "Himalayan lakes disaster," The Daily Briefing, Nov. 21, 2005. http://webdiary.com.au/cms/?q=node/986
- Nigel Lawson, "What Climate Change?: Interview," BNN.com., http://watch.bnn.ca/squeezeplay/december-2009/squeezeplay-december-1-2009/#clip241633; An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming, 2008; "The REAL inconvenient truth: Zealotry over global warming could damage our Earth far more than climate change," Daily Mail, April 5, 2009; and "Time for a Climate Change Plan B," Wall Street Journal, Dec. 22, 2009.
- Robert Nisbet, Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary, 1982.
- Brendan O'Neill, "Global warming: the chilling effect on free speech," spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/1782/
- YouTube.com, "Lord Monckton on the invasion of Obama's Nazi Youth"
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