MODERN MANICHEANS

Red with Green should never be seen (Charles Moore , The Spectator, April 1st, 2006)

Once upon a time, pollution was something the Left almost approved of. New dams and factories and mines gave more power to the organised working class, and had to be rushed forward to replace the feudal societies which socialism overthrew. Worker control of the means of production was good; therefore production itself was good, and pollution was ignored on the you-can't-make-an-omelette-without-breaking-eggs principle.

In the Eighties, it was Margaret Thatcher, of all people, who was attracted to the theory of global warming. She saw it as a justification for the development of nuclear power. Her experience with the oil crises of the 1970s and the coal strikes of the 1970s and 1980s made her keen to get away from fossil fuels.

But with the end of the Cold War, and therefore the collapse of heavy-industry-for-socialism, the Left began to find in Green issues a new unifying theme. If the workers were not going to get their hands on the means of production, the theory had to shift. Now those means themselves were wicked. Capitalist greed, especially American greed, was destroying the planet, they decided.

Once this wickedness was established, the Left could advance another of its causes - the need for the government to take control of the private and the international to squash the national. And the beauty of it is that everything can come under the rubric of "saving the planet". Whether it's speed limits or disposable nappies or second homes or cheap flights or old fridges or how many babies you have, you can be told not to do whatever it is you are doing. And if you complain, you can be marked out as a selfish pig, one who has what the archbishop calls a "lifestyle that doesn't consider those people who don't happen to share the present moment with us".

To those who like the idea that the state can control everything, it must have been a constant source of irritation that the weather could not be subject to five-year plans and government targets. If you accept climate change theories, it can be, indeed it must be. Without global governmental action, the doctrine teaches, we shall all perish.

At this point, the religious impulse forms an unholy - or rather, a holier-than-thou - alliance with the political. In every age, religions have tended to relate extremes of climate to sin. It was because the people were bad that God sent floods upon the earth, and it was because Noah was a just man that he was allowed to build the Ark, and put the leading representatives of creation into it.

Today, rising sea levels threaten to punish our greed and selfishness, say the Greens. Frightened by this sort of thing, rich men with uneasy consciences who, in the Middle Ages, would have endowed monasteries, today spend fortunes on sacrifices to the goddess Gaia. Johan Eliasch, whose success in life (selling sporting equipment) has been all to do with activity, movement, velocity, has just bought 400,000 acres of rainforest with the intention of doing nothing with it. The modern equivalent of the Ark is the Kyoto Conference.

Many on the traditional left were motivated by compassion for their fellow man and a genuine desire to improve the human condition, but so badly did they miscall the reality of human nature that they ultimately turned on the objects of their charitable impulses and delivered them into varying degrees of slavery. The modern version seems to skip the part about caring for humans at all.