THE MATERIALISM OF ENVIRONMENTALISM

Daniel Greenfield: THE MATERIALISM OF ENVIRONMENTALISM 

There is no understanding environmentalism without also understanding the function of religion as a means of infusing spirituality into the material. The politicization of consumerism is an attempt to mimic the religious dimension of life without a guiding deity.

Environmentalism provides the believer with the grandiosity of a human centered existence, in which the actions of individuals can lead to massive catastrophes, floods, extinctions and hurricanes. It’s the old biblical epic of Noah set in what pretends to be a rational scientific universe, but actually borrows the religious significance of human ethics placed at the center of life.
Sin and the Lord will bring a flood, says the Bible. Drive to work and the icebergs will melt and bring a flood, say the environmentalists. The only difference between the two narratives is that the latter has taken G-d out of the equation and replaced Him with a couple of think tanks.
Environmentalism rationalizes the “flood” as a purely scientific phenomenon and elevates it to dogma, driving out the heretics with stones and namecalling. The sin is no longer disobedience of G-d, but disobedience of the left. The new sinners are industrialists, SUV owners and large families. But the true nature of the sin is not in deed, but in faith. They who believe may fly jet planes around the world and be exempt. They may enter into cap and trade schemes to pass on their sinful pollution on to others because it is the dogma that matters, more than any supposed climatic effects. If you believe then you may ride in as many limos as you like.

Adding an ethical dimension to consumerism is meant to be a secular religion, substituting moral labels for moral precepts. But whose revelations is it following? The politicization of consumerism comes from the anti-capitalist left, which has an innate dogmatic opposition to middle-class prosperity. Its science comes from a field that had always been overlooked when it came to funding and whose PhD’s had a weakness for sandals and hikes. The thing they had in common was a dislike of industry and a need for a cause.

The fusion of science and politics gave the left what it had always been lacking. An apocalypse. Marx had warned that the specter of class warfare was haunting Europe. But the revolution he had been predicting never came. Instead the Burghers and their bureaucracy successfully stole his thunder to create comfortable welfare states funded by industry that even the left had trouble objecting to.

Human apocalypses, wars and revolutions, had been the left’s stock in trade. It predicted them and than rallied its followers to come to power so it could ward them off. Environmentalism gave it its own apocalypse. Its old arguments against capitalism depended on the oppressed rising up. Its new argument was that capitalism would destroy the world.

The old left had borrowed social justice from religion, while discarding everything but the moral imperative. The new left combined it with the grandiose spectacle of apocalypses while replacing the deity with the mechanics of consumerism as a vehicle of climate change. What the left created was an irreligious religion with a moral imperative encompassing every aspect of life.

The left’s economics had been based on a pseudo-science. Its flood was equally pseudo-science. Pseudo-science was its substitute for miracles and its own thinkers were the new prophets. Their god was the mechanics of their pseudo-sciences which made things happen through the inevitable force of their own constructs. Once Marx or Gore posited the inevitability of an event, then it was bound to happen. Their constructs had become massive towering idols of dogma to which everyone bowed.

The problem of the idol-makers was that their gods had clay feet. Their predicted apocalypses had not happened and their ideological solution states were revealed to be horrifying societies. But their real problem was that their challenges to materialism were not based on any meaningful values.

The old left had the nub of a legitimate argument when it came to the treatment of the working class, but their solution was to replace a hierarchy and oligarchy with a much more repressive hierarchy and oligarchy. The solution was appealing only to fools and those who hoped to be at the top of the new system. And when the oligarchies and hierarchies were done with their internal purges, they proved to be even bigger fools.

Their societies did not elevate materialism by making its distribution more just, they rationed it for the benefit of their own hierarchy, and ran the output through an inefficient industrial system, creating poverty on two different levels.

The environmentalist critique of materialism depended on a philosophy that saw human influence as malignant. If the old left had fired up the steel mills, celebrating industry as a means to a better life, the environmentalists were not concerned with a better life, but a more moral one. And their morality was defined in terms of a philosophy in which human beings were only one species among many.

The posthuman left, with its planetary grandiosity, had already taken a godlike view of human affairs. The endless evocations of the small blue marble came from men who were aspiring to a more than human view of the world– and a more than human power to go with it. Men who spoke for the planet, whose constituencies were the polar bear and the sea turtle, and they were funded by wealthy men and women who cared about these animals, than they did about people.

If the old left’s critique of materialism was that it was unfair to other human beings, the posthuman left’s critique of materialism was that it was all too human. That it was a way for human beings to enjoy material comforts at the expense of other species and the entire planet.

The posthuman left’s paradox lay in its grandiose condemnation of human grandiosity. Men and women who arrogantly presumed to speak for the planet were condemning the arrogance of their fellow human beings for driving SUV’s. But that philosophical arrogance had always been the high ground of the left. Like prophets they presumed to speak for more than themselves, and if they were not speaking for the planet and the universe, then that was their final step on the road to godhood.

Having arrogated to themselves the powers and privileges, the omnipotence and infinite wisdom of religion, and its power to offer redemption or damnation to the human race– the left made use of it. The irreligiosity of an irrational modern society in which assertion counted for more than truth and passion was the same as sincerity meant that few counterarguments could be made against it.

The left’s predictions game had always been played for big stakes. Either the modern industrial society was headed for a complete crack-up or it wasn’t. Either the oceans would rise and swallow the world or they wouldn’t. The very grandiosity of the prediction meant that it could not be ignored. And once it was noticed, then it had to be debated. Opponents were put into the position of atheists, forced to deny a belief that a growing number of people asserted was true.

Because even its opponents would end up adopting items from its agenda, it could never properly be disproven. And so even in losing, it still won by getting a sizable portion of its agenda through. Through the apocalypse never happened, it still gained power.

What the left understood was that a society without religious conviction could be convinced of religious ideas if they were passed off as irreligious ones. A secular priesthood could rise to power by acting as shamans of social justice and protectors of the planet. The trappings of the thing would do.

Modern industry had made production cheaper by making it more efficient. The beneficiaries of that life believed that manna came down a conveyor belt and innately trusted what the scientific progress that had made so much of their society possible. And that same belief could be twisted into a hatred of the conveyor belt, into the view that the conveyor belt was sinful.

The left had an innate distrust of practical solutions, because it eliminated the need for ideological ones. It despised religion, because it sought to take its place. The strange Luddite faith built on the pseudo-science of environmentalism was a strange thing, but also an inevitable one. It challenged the prosperity by demonizing it and offered a solution in its own form of the sin tax.

The Communists had not made life more just, they had made it more deprived and more expensive and the trick repeated itself with the environmental movement which used the advertising language of consumerism and its up-branding to associate their more expensive and worse products with a higher moral standard. The more money passed into their hands, the more moral the product was.

Passing universal regulations would mean a larger cut from every product and service for them, and lower expectations for consumers. The increasing efficiency of industry had given consumers more for less. They sought to reverse that trend by taking from them more for less. It was a successful counter-revolution to the materialistic bounty of the industrial revolution, a counter-revolution founded on dubious science in the name of abstract theories and polar bears.

The phony priesthood of the posthuman left had catastrophe mongered its way to being a green mafia claiming its share of everything. This time around fairness wasn’t even really on the table as the left was leaving behind its egalitarian roots and revealing the nakedness of its elitism. There was no longer any pretense that life would get better for most people. On the contrary it would get worse. That was one of the selling points. Those with the most money would take the least hit to their living standard. Especially if they donated to the green mafia and the phony priesthood.

The religious vacuum of the modern era had not made it any less susceptible to arguments of sin and guilt, only less able to recognize them. Materialism had helped create the vacuum along with the seeds of its own destruction. Material welfare had bred apathy and unease, with the latter born from the former. And these were violins that the left knew how to play. The less there was to worry about, the more people welcomed something to worry about.

Materialism was comfort and worry both. The left fed the worry and took away the comfort, making people pay for the privilege, giving their seal of approval to materialism in exchange for money and power. Its “ethical dimension” was nothing more than it and its many organs getting paid. And we are the ones forced to do the paying to the phony priesthood of the flying thermometer.

DOJ Finds A Cause

By Dorothy Rabinowitz in The Wall Street Journal

In the end it couldn't have come as any great shock when the Department of Justice intervened on behalf of a Muslim school teacher who claimed that the board of her Illinois school district was guilty of religious bias. Nor could it have come as any surprise that the Board of Education, Berkeley School District 87 Cook Country Illinois, was finally forced to settle the case brought against it by the DOJ. Still, even Americans accustomed to the relentless -- more precisely the relentlessly selective -- political correctness of the Obama Justice Department had to have been startled at the facts of this case and the deranged notions of equity that had impelled Eric Holder's DOJ to go rushing into battle against the school district.

The school teacher in question, Safoorah Khan, a middle school math lab instructor, had worked at the school for barely a year when she applied for some 19 days unpaid leave so that she could make a pilgrimage to Mecca. The school district denied the request: She was the only math lab instructor the school had, her absence would come just at the period before exams, and furthermore, the leave she wanted was outside the bounds set for all teachers under their union contract.

Charging religious discrimination, Ms. Khan resigned and filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The Justice Department took it from there, filing a lawsuit in December 2010, claiming the teacher's civil rights had been violated. Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez noted at the time that a great wave of intolerance was being visited on Muslims in America, and this was one of the reasons for taking the case.

In Mr. Perez's view and that of the DOJ apparently, the school district's refusal of 19 days leave for Ms. Khan at a time when her presence was vitally needed -- a leave available to no other teacher under the union contract -- sufficed as proof that the district was guilty of bias against Muslims, and of violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Last week the terms of the settlement were announced. The Berkeley School District was to pay the teacher $75, 000 for her trouble -- back pay and lawyers fees. The District is now also required to establish mandatory training in religious accommodation for all personnel.

One of the more impassioned responses to this bizarre affair comes from Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, devout Muslim and founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy. "Lamentable" is how he describes the involvement of the DOJ and "their choir of Islamist groups" and this lawsuit which he says, so lowers "the threshold for what merits action for civil rights abuse."

It will be left to a federal court to approve of the settlement. With any luck, that court will take note of just what it is they are approving.

America's Children Come Home to Roost

By Stella Paul in The American Thinker

Do you think the young gent from Occupy Wall Street who defecated on the cop car got an A in "Dialectics of Hegemony"?

The hordes of pathetic, dead-eyed pagans pustulating through our cities with Occupy Wall Street are the crowning achievement of America's academy.

Thousands of vampires with PhDs labored for decades to perfect the art of sucking the souls from America's trusting young, and then hustling them into the slavery of terminal stupidity.

How obedient these foul-smelling young wretches are! How touchingly eager they are to please! They sit on the ground in kindergarten formation, obligingly parroting whatever hellish nihilism oozes from the "microphone leader's" lips: "Everything is possible! You can have sex with animals!" Up go the "happy hands" in dutiful response. They so want to be good!

A British paper informs us that Bard College students are gracing the Occupy Wall Street throngs in New York, playing hookey on their $57,000 a year classes. Or are they? I suspect they're apple-polishing for extra credit. Last year, that towering intellectual, Bard's Leon Botstein became the first college president to welcome the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) as an official campus organization.

Attention Bard parents, who thought you were shelling out a fortune to put a little artsy sheen on your precious darlings! Actually, you were thrusting them into the hands of the ISM, a terrorist-enabling group awarded a gold medal by Hamas for all their lovely help.

President Botstein now explicitly funnels campus funds and resources to ISM, which trains students on Bard's idyllic grounds to take "direct action" against Israel. "The training was led by 3 Bard students. 14 trainees were present," notes Bard's ISM website. "Many were headed for December's Gaza Freedom March to break the Israeli siege of Gaza."

Those eager, painfully naive Bard students smelling up the streets of New York aren't being transgressive! They're trying to be virtuous like their hero, student activist Rachel Corrie, who was ferreted to her death in Gaza by the very same ISM. After all, "direct action" is what all those lavishly credentialed grown-ups keep telling them to do.

In case you're worried about Leon Botstein's paying a price for his outrageous antics, let me assure you that destroying young people's souls is lucrative work. George Soros -- imagine that! -- just donated $60 million to Bard College for international work under the aegis of the brand-new Bard College Center for Civic Engagement.

Civic engagement, indeed!

Let us now place an urgently needed cordon sanitaire around the pigsty of New York's Zuccotti Park, where Occupy Wall Street holds forth, and fly to Occupy Boston.

There, in America's college town, we'll find our dewy-eyed innocents rallying on behalf of accused terrorist Tarek Mehanna. But of course! Who better to pour out their sympathies to than a PhD pharmacist who allegedly plotted to machine gun shoppers in New England malls? No one can accuse Tarek Mahenna of lacking "civic engagement."

Perhaps the Occupy Boston mob feels a collegial warmth for Mahenna, who's one of five New England Muslim college graduates either arrested for or convicted of terrorist acts. For the record, alumni donors, their colleges were Northeastern, MIT, U Mass, Boston and Brandeis University. Holy Che Guevera, what are they teaching there?

Oh, just the usual "America is an imperialistic war-monger in thrall to the ethnic cleansing Zionists" shtick. Just look over to the Big Campus in Town where Harvard's Stephen Walt is patiently explaining the evils of America's Jews in his legendary effluvia, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy.

(Does anyone else find it disconcerting that the German translation works out as Die-Israel Lobby?)

The $20 million the Saudis gave to Harvard goes a long way to buying young minds. You need a strong academic infrastructure to get students so inspired they surge through the streets on behalf of terrorists planning to kill them. But Allah willing, with the help of "scholars" like Sara Roy of Harvard's Center for Middle East Studies, all is possible. The tireless Dr. Roy specializes in instructing impressionable youngsters on the moral beauty of Hamas and other terror groups, in her unofficial capacity as "the ringmaster of Harvard's bash Israel circus."

The nationwide scenes of robotic debauchery, moral confusion and nihilistic violence are searing my heart. This Yom Kippur, I read a tale of a Hasidic master whose disciples asked him, "What is the worst thing a person's evil impulse can achieve?" His answer: "to make him forget that he is the child of a King."

America's children were born into the blessings of Constitutional freedom and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness should be theirs for the taking. Instead, they obediently wallow in the muck of anarchy, as their academic pagan priests taught them. May this tragic farce playing out on our campuses and main streets mark the bottom of our descent, before we begin to rise again.

Chemistry's Cinderella Story

The Wall Street Journal

When it comes to scientific discovery, the world loves a Cinderella story: The lone genius, from Galileo to Darwin to Wegener, who bucks the received wisdom of his field and makes us see the world anew. The scientific community, however, would often prefer to keep its Cinderellas in the attic. Just ask Israel's Dan Shechtman.

Mr. Shechtman, who last week won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, is credited with the discovery in 1982 of quasicrystals, patterned but nonrepeating atomic structures that resemble the mosaics found in medieval Islamic art. For observing under an electron microscope what the scientific community held to be a physical impossibility, Mr. Shechtman was accused of "bringing disgrace" on his lab. Linus Pauling, the chemistry (and peace) Nobelist, called the discovery "nonsense" and denounced Mr. Shechtman as a "quasi-scientist." It took two years before a scientific journal would deign to publish his findings.

Today, Mr. Shechtman's observations have been fully validated and quasicrystals are beginning to have commercial applications. But his story is a reminder that a consensus of scientists is no substitute for, and often a bar to, great science. That's especially so when the consensus hardens into a dogmatic and self-satisfied enterprise.

Isn't there another field in which a similar kind of consensus has taken hold, with similarly unpleasant consequences for those who question its core assumptions? Take a guess. Meantime, it's worth noting that, as with Cinderella, Mr. Shechtman's story has a happy ending. No doubt this will turn out to be true for others who dare to think different.