SPENGLER 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. Asia Times
Online readers may send their favorite recipes for
authentically endangered species to letters@atimes.com.
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Feb 3, 2004
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