More than a decade ago, the philosopher Harvey Mansfield noted that “environmentlaism is school prayer for liberals.” The scientist Freeman Dyson would not, I’d wager, agree with Harvey Mansfield about much, but he recognizes Mansfield’s point about the nature of environmentalism: “There is a worldwide secular religion,” Dyson wrote in a recent review about the “global warming” (my scare quotes),
which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. The ethics of environmentalism are being taught to children in kindergartens, schools, and colleges all over the world.
Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion. And the ethics of environmentalism are fundamentally sound. Scientists and economists can agree with Buddhist monks and Christian activists that ruthless destruction of natural habitats is evil and careful preservation of birds and butterflies is good. The worldwide community of environmentalists—most of whom are not scientists—holds the moral high ground, and is guiding human societies toward a hopeful future. Environmentalism, as a religion of hope and respect for nature, is here to stay. This is a religion that we can all share, whether or not we believe that global warming is harmful.
Unfortunately, some members of the environmental movement have also adopted as an article of faith the belief that global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet. That is one reason why the arguments about global warming have become bitter and passionate. Much of the public has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global warming is an enemy of the environment. The skeptics now have the difficult task of convincing the public that the opposite is true. Many of the skeptics are passionate environmentalists. They are horrified to see the obsession with global warming distracting public attention from what they see as more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet, including problems of nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice. Whether they turn out to be right or wrong, their arguments on these issues deserve to be heard.
There is a lot to conjure with in those paragraphs from the conclusion of Dyson’s review essay. My own view is that 1) Dyson is right that environmentalism really is a secular religion, more particularly a species of paganism but 2) that the “moral high ground” he identifies is an illusory elevation achieved by a gaseous mixture of self-righteousness and political correctness. Yes, waste is bad; yes, we are stewards not only of the earth, but also of civilization, and it is incumbent upon us to regard both with just solicitude. Attending to both may sometimes pull us in different directions: it is a sign of maturity to ignore neither. But something profoundly damaging occurs when habits of regard harden into ideological animus. We then move for intelligent regard for the environment–three cheers for that–to environmentalism. And as with most isms, this hankering after utopia is as eager to identify and segregate heretics as it is impervious to suasion by facts. Environmentalism is the new opiate of the intellectuals.
Digg This
del.icio.us
PJM Home
The New Criterion
The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art
Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse
Art’s Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity
Experiments Against Reality: The Fate of Culture in the Postmodern Age
Tenured Radicals, Revised: How Politics has Corrupted our Higher Education
Counterpoints: 25 Years of The New Criterion on Culture and the Arts
The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America
Against the Idols of the Age
Lengthened Shadows: America and Its Institutions in the Twenty-First Century
The Survival of Culture: Permanent Values in a Virtual Age
Physics and Politics, by Walter Bagehot, edited with an
Introduction by Roger Kimball
8 Comments
John N. Frary:After the Soviet economy imploded and the PRC went hurtling down the capitalist road, Prof. Robert Heilbronner acknowledged the Friedrich Hayek had been right all along in his diagnosis of the intractable problems of the planned economy.
BUT he found solace in the Environmentlist Mission, i.e., socialism had failed to deliver prosperity, but it is ideally suited to manage scarcity.
Like the patent medicines of old, Dr. Marx’s Snake Oil Tonic is the ideal cure for every ailment currently in fashion.
May 25, 2008 - 12:37 pm Paul:The environmentalist religion is not, in fact, a paganism. There are vast numbers of hylophilic monotheists, or at least of theists who THINK they’re hylophiles and insist they’d be happy living in small villages, close to the trees, performing local arts and crafts, placing the smallest possible “footprint” on nature (the scare-quotes are mine). Atheist extreme environmentalists may or may not have FAITH about their convictions, depending upon how much science they know. Theist environmentalists of the same degree of passion, however, in the midst presumably of faith, are misreading, misquoting, and mis-interpreting on these questions the scriptures of their religion. Either way, Dyson is right: there is no longer any possibility of rational discussion (or of action, if we ever arrive as honest and really practical initiatives) on global warming and the anthropogenic contribution thereto. The curse has come mostly from politics, not from the religious impulse. It’s politics where one can really identify all those bad people.
May 25, 2008 - 1:28 pm 11B40:Greetings:
Two quick comments:
1) Moral superiority is the cocaine of the 21st Century.
2) People seem to have forgotten that an ideology is more than just a set of beliefs.
May 25, 2008 - 2:36 pm don L:It is a set of beliefs organized for the accumulation of political power.
Environmentalism has not replaced socialism as the lefts new religion -environmentalism is just a euphamism for socialism. It is aimed at government control of people and how they shall be allowed to live. Panthistic crusaders do not believe in freedom and have no control over you without the aid of a power like a government-hence socialism. Obama’s speech about overeating etc. is just another chapter in the long history of leftism. Gorbachov, mind you, the unabashed and unreformed communist chose to be head of Green Cross for a reason. Global warming is merely a more effective tool to accomplishg their goals that are ICBMs.
May 26, 2008 - 5:24 am Troy Camplin:We need to come up with a better set of terms to distinguish among the groups. There are the Ecotheists, for whom Earth is God(dess) — they, like the Environmentalist Left, are socialists who are using environmentalism as a way to get socialism, since socialism has shown itself to be such an obviously dismal failure. The Left are all deeply, fundamentally atheist, though, which distinguishes them from the Ecotheists. Then there are free market greens. like you find among libertarians. We base our environmentalism on property rights and free market principles.
May 26, 2008 - 11:55 am Kevin:Dyson is dangerously close to striking a nerve with intellectuals who consider themselves too intelligent to believe in “God”. (keeping up the tradition, the scare-quotes are mine).
May 26, 2008 - 12:20 pm Sissy Willis:With evidence mounting daily on how the new-age intellectual approach to moral relativism is creating a really messed-up society, the mother-earth worship is a natural result. When the life of a microbial species is more important than human life lost to abortion, genocide and “cultural tradition”, (yup, more scare-quotes), we have seen Cro-Magnon go full circle, back to Homo ergaster. Asking for scientific support of the hypotheses proposed by the new Environmentalist Priests is blasphemous. Asking for tolerance in the belief of a Supreme Being, the same enlightened intellectuals laugh and require scientific proof. Membership does indeed seem to have its privileges!
Good stuff. I’m reminded of what Czech Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus said last year, that fighting global warming has turned into a religion that replaced the ideology of communism and threatens to clip basic freedoms.
May 27, 2008 - 2:29 pm Cato:Paul, I would argue that monotheists who embrace radical environmentalism may be violating the First Commandment. I think perspective is the key here. It is laudable to respect the Earth and one’s environment, and to avoid wanton waste and animal cruelty when possible. But taken too far, to the point of elevating the environment and animals above Man, it can veer into paganism. Worshipping the Earth is a form of idolatry.
May 28, 2008 - 12:37 am