IT'S NOT THE HEAT, IT'S THE HUBRIS:

It's not the end of the world - it's the end of you (Spengler, 2/03/04, Asia Times)

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). [...]

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.

The susceptibility of Western intellectuals to the global warming hoax (and to the Ice Age, Nuclear Armageddon, Population Explosion, Nuclear Winter, and GM Food hoaxes) is likewise a function of the need to believe that we aren't insignificant, that, indeed, we are so massively significant that we can change the very biosystem of the planet or destroy it completely. Such apocalyptic nonsense is in its own deranged way quite comforting for men who wish to believe themselves powerful.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 4, 2004 8:48 AM