We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day It is, I suspect, no accident that it is in Europe that climate change absolutism has found the most fertile soil. For it is Europe that has become the most secular society in the world, where the traditional religions have the weakest popular hold. Yet people still feel the need for the comfort and higher values that religion can provide; and it is the quasi-religion of Green alarmism and what has been termed global salvationism – of which the climate change issue is the most striking example, but by no means the only one – which has filled the vacuum, with reasoned questioning of its mantras regarded as a form of blasphemy.
– Nigel Lawson, former Chancellor of the Exchequer, quoted today by Guido Fawkes
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Quite. Ecological correctness provides the new puritans the chance to express their virtue without recourse to dreaded religion.
At orphaned altars, demons dwell.
(Ernst Jünger)
Read the whole magisterial lecture by Nigel Lawson, available as a PDF at
http://www.cps.org.uk/latestlectures/?
David, the Lawson lecture is excellent. I can criticise some of the things he did as Chancellor (the whole business of shadowing the Deutschemark was a disaster, and his tax treatment of pensions was in retrospect, a mistake) but on the big issue of tax and the role of the state, Lawson is miles ahead of his peers, not that I would call an obsessive bully like Gordon Brown a peer.
Compared to the current bunch at the Tory Party, Lawson is in a different class.
David Roberts
Thanks for that link. It is now in the original posting.
So I guess climate change won’t matter to the god-fearing folk since they’ll be raptured up in the godcopter of armageddon or something? You know, a lack of religion can be filled in other ways: television, books, sex, porn, beer, smoking, exercise, and even knitting stupid hats. One doesn’t have to resort to environmentalism any more than resort to blogging about reality television programs and photos of underpantless starlets getting out of cars.
Of all the reasons to explain scientific illiteracy, I would have to put a lack of belief in religion near the bottom of the list.
You need to dig deeper… a lack of religious belief is in my view not a bad thing per se, provided it has been displaced by the ability to think critically.
However as most people seem not to be able to think critically, they crave the certainty and freedom-from-complexity that Religious Truth brings and if traditional religion has been discredited, they seek the same reassurances elsewhere via secular religions, such as in Mao’s Little Red Book or Environmentalism.
I think Lawson is spot-on.
jon
As you seem to be, I am a total atheist, but I think you are missing Lawson’s point. Which is that people who seem to NEED religion and in particular its certainties and extremities, as lots do, will find it, one way or another. We can both of us be right about God, as I obviously think we are, and Lawson could also be right in his (partial – not total) explanation for the success of extreme environmentalism in Europe. He is not necessarily saying: be Christian! Just: we’re dealing with a lot of ex-Christianity here.
If it is true that people who need religion abound, and I think it is, then maybe Europe’s regular old religion, which believes in dotty things like God, God having a son who lived amongst us etc., is less harmful than, e.g., Islam (which is rather less dotty than Christianity, I think – but far nastier), or fascism, communism, etc. Or extreme enviromentalism.
Enviornmentalism provides lots of comrades, an excuse to hate the rich and powerful, moral certainty, moral superiority, all manner of things traditionally associated with the battier kinds of religion. (And yes, I do know some libertarians who are very “religious” about their libertarianism.) None of which can be plugged into merely by blogging about reality TV or starlets getting out of cars. That’s a mere hobby.
Perry
Snap.
It is worth remembering that the attitudes and moral certainties of Old Labour were shaped as much by Methodism as Marxism.
Genesis 2:15. “And the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.” (King James version). Living Bible: “The Lord God placed the man in the Garden of Eden as its gardener, to tend and care for it.”
This verse implies that humanity has a God-given duty to care for the world in which He put us. We are stewards who will eventually be called to account for our stewardship. However, God gave us dominion over the animal kingdom and the responsibility to care for it. What the more fanatical environmentalists want is dominion over other people without responsibility to man or God.
Suffice it to say Statism itself is quasi-religious, and Greenism is merely one manifestation. I don’t know much about Baron Blaby of course, I would be interested to know what brand of Statism he keeps in his closet.
Nigel Lawson isn’t the first to pick up on the ideology of environmentalism being the new-age “quasi-religion” of our post-Christian times. Michael Crichton has written about it too, some time ago. It’s relevant to this discussion and worth a read.
(“Environmentalism as Religion” – by Michael Crichton)
Children need fairly tales, and stupid people need religion. Now if that is the environment, political zealotry or deity worship — it doesn’t matter, but the one unifying thing about this all is that it is neither a logical construct nor a logical course of action to follow. In fact, the tragedy is that such hysterics harm the actual cause those people are trying to pursue.
If smart people like yourselves do not believe in religion, there is no chance of your being able to rebuild a religious society. The non-smart aren’t stupid when it comes to understanding when they are being consciously lied to. Since all smart people in the media are irreligious types whose faith rests on the existence and universality of the not-yet-determined laws of physics, the masses are going to base their ideas of what is virtuous on that – hence environmentalism, etc. Unfortunately, unlike our erstwhile Christian leaders, none of the current lot have any idea what it takes, in terms of public virtue, to make a functioning society. Thus, unsurprisingly, we have the rise of the underclass.
I have read some obscure postings but that one above by Abelard beats them all. What is he saying? I have no idea what that is about and I read it 3 times. Is he pro religion or what?
The discussion is about environmentalism becoming a religion for some people who now are unable to believe in traditional religions, for whatever reason.
Why have any religion? What are the facts? That is the only question with any meaning.
I, as I’m sure most people, have heard many utter the mantra ‘global warming is a proven fact’, or some such, yet very few can provide a single reference to such evidence other than random anecdotes. They are merely repeating dogma they’ve heard elsewhere. That, pure and simple, is religion and nothing else.
What was most worrying about the whole hysteria this week is the treatment metted out on those who do not buy into the “concensus”. People like Monbiot came close to calling us evil.
As far as I am concerned the earth has been around for quite a long time and will be for quite a long time after our particular species is a distant memory. Gaia, mother earth or terra can take care of herself/himself/itself perfectly well without our help.
Surely it would be a better idea to develope systems to defend against meteors after all there is history of them hitting the early and wiping species out.
People like Keir Hardie and Aneurin Bevan may have been wrong, but they were decent human beings; that’s a lot more than one can say about the Left spawned in the 1960s.