It's come to my attention that one of my most visited posts is
"Pascal Bruckner's "Fanaticism of the Apocalypse" - A Citizen's Response" dated June 18, 2013 which still receives a surprising number of regular viewings. This prompted me to google his name and see if anything special was going on these days, doesn't seem to be, but I did read another article based on his book "Fanaticism of the Apocalypse". It turned out to be an example of getting so wrapped up in one's own mind and love affair with words that he loses sight of the actual world he's claiming to report on.
Worst is his seeming insistence that all this concern about what's happening to our climate is some frivolous fad and that it's our worries that are all we have to worry about. Most disconnected from the reality of global trends and quite frankly begging for a rebuttal, which I am providing, until someone with more intellectual horse power has the nerve, or interest, to take on Mr. Pascal Bruckner.
I reprint the full text, neither having, nor asking for permission, because Pascal puts himself out there as a great thinker trying to influence the masses, also considering this was posted at The Chronicle of Higher Education, it seems only proper that they allow his words to be examined with a skeptical eye.
=========================
June 17, 2013
Against Environmental Panic
Copyright © 2014 The Chronicle of Higher Education
http://chronicle.com/article/Against-Environmental-Panic/139733/
By Pascal Bruckner (4280words)
¶1 In Jesuit schools we were urged to strengthen our faith by spending time in monasteries. We were assigned spiritual exercises to be dutifully written in little notebooks that were supposed to renew the promises made at baptism and to celebrate the virtues of Christian love and succor for the weak. It wasn't enough just to believe; we had to testify to our adherence to the Holy Scriptures and drive Satan out of our hearts. These practices were sanctioned by daily confessions under the guidance of a priest. We all probed our hearts to extirpate the germs of iniquity and to test, with a delicious thrill, the borderline separating grace from sin. We were immersed in an atmosphere of meditative reverence, and the desire to be good gave our days a special contour.
¶2 We knew that God was looking down on us indulgently: We were young, we were allowed to stumble. In his great ledger, he wrote down each of our actions, weighing them with perfect equanimity. We engaged in refined forms of piety in order to gain favors. Regarded from an adult point of view, these childish efforts, which were close to the ancients' spiritual exercises, were not without a certain nobility. They wavered between docility and a feeling of lofty grandeur. At least we learned the art of knowing ourselves, of resisting the turmoil of puberty.
~ ~ ~
It seems such a cloistered background might create deep seated life long conscious and subconscious conflicts. I know that some guidance counselors are so wrapped-up within their own struggles that they too easily transfer their own situations onto the patient, never "seeing" their patient's actual issues - and wonder how much of that is going on here.
It is fair to ask Pascal how much of this missive might be him struggling with early childhood resentments towards the church, only now transferring those internal struggles into the more lucrative realm of attacking science?
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
¶3 What a surprise to witness, half a century later, the powerful return of this frame of mind, but this time under the aegis of science.
~ ~ ~
What "powerful" are we talking about here? Media tycoons? Pundits? Who?
Please note Pascal never defines what he's referring to "under the aegis of science" simply leaving it hanging in the air and returning to what's going on in the public dialogue.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Consider the meaning in contemporary jargon of the famous carbon footprint that we all leave behind us. What is it, after all, if not the gaseous equivalent of Original Sin, of the stain that we inflict on our Mother Gaia by the simple fact of being present and breathing? We can all gauge the volume of our emissions, day after day, with the injunction to curtail them, just as children saying their catechisms are supposed to curtail their sins.
~ ~ ~
Perhaps for a religious person "original sin" is as substantial as water - but they are mistaken. Original sin is a plot point in a metaphysical myth, an imaginary construct just the same.
The Carbon Footprint is another kind of construct, one that has a very real physical component, namely a measure of the amount of carbon dioxide that a person or activity produces with the fossil fuels being burned for said activity. It is substantive and it has a cumulative physical impact on this planet.
In other words, Pascal doesn't seem to recognize the difference between the "substantial" and "insubstantial".
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
¶4 Ecologism,
the sole truly original force of the past half-century, has challenged the goals of progress and raised the question of its limits. It has awakened our sensitivity to nature, emphasized the effects of climate change, pointed out the exhaustion of fossil fuels. Onto this collective credo has been grafted a whole apocalyptic scenography that has already been tried out with communism, and that borrows from Gnosticism as much as from medieval forms of messianism. Cataclysm is part of the basic tool-kit of Green critical analysis, and prophets of decay and decomposition abound. They beat the drums of panic and call upon us to expiate our sins before it is too late.
~ ~ ~
Oh gosh this is going to be rough.
What does that paragraph even mean?
"challenging the goals of progress"
What are the goals of progress pray tell?
All I see is consume as much as fast as possible, with nothing beyond that.
Pascal what more is there to this "progress" you speak of ?
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"Onto this collective credo has been grafted a whole apocalyptic scenography"
~ ~ ~
What's Pascal trying to do here? He starts out as though he wants to critique the scientific effort, yet within the first paragraphs he's switched to what's happening in the public media, politics and other under-informed venues.
If he want's to discuss the public media and public perceptions then he should be clear that's what he's doing but instead he's trying to insinuate this situation onto everyone. I find it deceitful.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
¶5 This fear of the future, of science, and of technology reflects a time when humanity, and especially Western humanity, has taken a sudden dislike to itself. We are exasperated by our own proliferation and can no longer stand ourselves. Whether we want to be or not, we are tangled up with seven billion other members of our species. Rejecting both capitalism and socialism,
~ ~ ~
It seems to me what Pascal is overlooking here is that since time immemorial humanity has had a wide open horizon available, the world truly was a cornucopia for those willing to go for it. I remember as a young child in the early 60's still being able to believe in Terra Incognita and a world wide open and waiting for the adventurer. As I grew up I learned that wonderful world had actually passed into history somewhere during the two World Wars.
Since then we've been producing hungry mouths as fast as we can, our planet's resources have been exploited and consumed as fast as possible and Pascal seems to be surprised that consequences are being felt.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
ecologism has come to power almost nowhere. But it has won the battle of ideas. The environment is the new secular religion that is rising, in Europe especially, from the ruins of a disbelieving world. We have to subject it to critical evaluation in turn and unmask the infantile disease that is eroding and discrediting it: catastrophism.
~ ~ ~
It's as though Pascal is incapable of seeing the world outside his religious shackles. Furthermore, there's a real disconnect going on here, all he sees is human drama and politics and mythology. For example he mentions 7,000,000,000 consuming people without a second thought to their collective impact on our finite planet, instead reducing it all to political doctrine and a war of beliefs.
Ecologism is about recognizing what is happening on our planet.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
¶6 There are at least two ecologies: one rational, the other nonsensical; one that broadens our outlook while the other narrows it; one democratic, the other totalitarian.
~ ~ ~
one "rational" one "nonsensical"
one "broadens" one "narrows"
one "democratic" one "totalitarian"
Think about that,
Pascal says "rational-broadens-democratic"
as opposed to "nonsensical-narrows-totalitarian"
What does understanding our planet's geo-physical system have to do with democracy? Serious science may be easier in a truly democratic society (none exist these days) but science has never and can never be a "democratic system"
The observations and evidence stands supreme!
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
The first wants to tell us about the damage done by industrial civilization; the second infers from this the human species' guilt. For the latter, nature is only a stick to be used to beat human beings. Just as third-worldism was the shame of colonial history, and repentance was contrition with regard to the present, catastrophism constitutes the anticipated remorse of the future: The meaning of history having evaporated, every change is a potential collapse that augurs nothing good.
~ ~ ~
No, no, no! You are talking about games being played in the media/political dialogue, it has nothing to do with the state of the scientific community, nor the science, why does Pascal try to conflate those? And how does poking fun at the result of humanity's handling of our life sustaining biosphere help move anything along?
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
¶7 Catastrophism's favorite mode of expression is accusation: Revolutionaries wanted to erase the past and start over from zero; now the focus is on condemning past and present wrongs and bringing them before the tribunal of public opinion. No leniency is possible; our crime has been calculated in terms of devastated forests, burned-over lands, and extinct species.
~ ~ ~
Empty cascade of words, meaningless except for whipping up the crowd.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
¶8 The prevailing anxiety is at once a recognition of real problems and a symptom of the aging of the West, a reflection of its psychic fatigue. Our pathos is that of the end of time. And because no one ever thinks alone, because the spirit of an age is always a collective worker, it is tempting to give oneself up to this gloomy tide. Or, on the contrary, we could wake up from this nightmare and rid ourselves of it.
~ ~ ~
What about actual reality, seven billion consuming people, on a finite and battered planet, how do we wake up and walk away from that Mr. Bruckner?
Distasteful as it is, we can't rid ourselves of our collective history, nor the various wreckages it has left us, pretending it ain't real don't make it a dream.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
¶9 It happened in 1989, and that seems centuries ago. The world was emerging from the cold war; the Soviet Union, exhausted, was allowing subject peoples to escape its rule and preparing for its transition to a market economy. Euphoria reigned: Western civilization had just won by a knockout. Twice, in the course of the past century, it had triumphed over its worst opponents, fascism and communism, two illegitimate children to which it had given birth and which it was able to suffocate.
When the Soviets bowed out, enthusiasm vied with fear: An adversary is security against the future, a permanent competitor who forces us to reshape ourselves. Though we can never be sure of the affection of those closest to us, we can always count on the hatred of our enemies. They are the guarantors of our existence; they allow us to know who we are.
¶10 Who will claim, as communism did, to substitute another system for our values? Who will challenge us on such a large scale? Fundamentalist Islam? Even if it is gaining ground in many countries, accompanying the growth of a secular mentality like its shadow, it is directed primarily against Muslims themselves, whom it considers lukewarm and complicit with the modern world. There are useful enemies that make you fertile and sterile enemies that wear you out. Islamic terrorism is a cancer that teaches us nothing except paranoia. Combined with the work of the secret services and the police, sang-froid and prudence are the best responses to the bombers' barbarity.
~ ~ ~
Bruckner's drifting again, seems more like another word association game than any constructive idea he's trying to convey.
{Pascal it's all been said before.}
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
¶11 It is difficult to reconstruct a credible adversary that is dispersed to the four corners of the earth and that can have all sorts of faces. We have to go further, to the roots of the problem. And the problem is our aggressiveness, our relentless attack on nature. We are told by the philosopher Michel Serres, for example, that people stupidly fight one another without realizing that the real battle is not where they think it is. For centuries, we have waged war on the world by trying to dominate it; now we have to wage war on war, sign an armistice with water, trees, stones, the oceans. As Serres writes:
¶12 The damage we have inflicted up to now on the world is equivalent to the ravages that a world war would have left behind it. Our peacetime economic relationships are arriving, continuously and slowly, at the same results that a short global conflict would produce, as if war no longer belonged to soldiers alone. ... We so-called developed nations are not fighting among ourselves anymore, we are all turning against the world. This is a war that is literally a world war, and twice over, because everyone, in the sense of human beings, is inflicting losses on the world, in the sense of things.
~ ~ ~
Philosopher discussing philosopher,
flowery words all around,
missing point by miles.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
¶13 How can this malaise be transformed into a justified anger? How can its target be identified? By designating human beings as the danger par excellence. Rousseau already did so, in Émile, contrary to all the optimism of the Enlightenment: "Man, seek no longer the cause of the evil; you yourself are the cause. There is no evil other than the evil you do or suffer, and both of them come from you."
¶14 Numerous authors tell us that humanity as a whole has gone off-course, and that it has to be understood as an illness that must be immediately treated: "Man is a cancer on the earth, ... a throwaway species, like the civilization he invented," writes Yves Paccalet. And Nicolas Hulot, the French environmentalist, writes: "The enemy does not come from outside, it resides within our system and our consciousnesses."
¶15 For the past half-century we have, in fact, been witnessing a slide from one scapegoat to another: Marxism designated capitalism as responsible for human misery. Third-worldism, upset by the bourgeoisification of the working classes, substituted the West for capitalism as the great criminal in history and the "inventor" of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism.
~ ~ ~
Drifting to personal struggles that belong to the realm of religion and psychology, but useless in understanding the actual situation our planet is in. Furthermore, without grasping the physical situation, solutions are impossible.
An analogy to Bruckner's cascade of words popped into my head, it's like trying to understand the news through reading tabloid headlines.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
¶16 With ecologism, we move up a notch: The guilty party is humanity itself, in its will to dominate the planet. Here there is a return to the fundamentals of Christianity: Evil is the pride of the creatures who are in revolt against their Creator and who exceed their prerogatives. The three scapegoats can be cumulated: Ecologism can reject the capitalism invented by a West that preys on peoples and destroys the earth. It is a system of Russian dolls that fit one inside the other until the final synthesis is reached. That is why so many old Bolsheviks are converting to ecologism in order to broaden their palette of accusations. This amounts to recycling anticapitalist clichés as one recycles wastewater: Ecologism adds a supplementary layer of reprobation, claiming to be the culmination of all earlier critiques.
~ ~ ~
Pascal depends on drawing a caricature to fit his story line, but again not matching the real world. For those interested in a less theatrical introduction to "Ecologism", here's a start
http://press.georgetown.edu/book/georgetown/ecologism
Ecologism | An Introduction
Brian Baxter
Ecologism is a new political ideology based on the position that the non-human world is worthy of moral consideration, and that this should be taken into account in social, economic, and political systems. This innovative book provides the first comprehensive introduction to this philosophy, which is recognized as a major development in environmental politics.
Brian Baxter probes the metaphysical, moral, political, and economic facets of ecologism. Bringing the central themes of contemporary political theory into contact with green political theory, he compares ecologism to such mainstream ideologies as utilitarianism, Rawlsian liberalism, libertarianism, Marxism, and feminism. An innovative contribution to environmental ethics and political philosophy, this book provides new insights into and solutions to the problematic relationship between society and nature.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
¶17 Thus a whole segment of the South American left has seized upon this hobbyhorse to reinforce its credo: "We have two paths: either capitalism dies, or Mother Earth dies," said Evo Morales, president of Bolivia. The globe becomes the new proletarian that has to be saved from exploitation, if need be by reducing the human population to 500 million, as some opponents of "speciesism" proclaim. Consider the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (Vhemt), a group of individuals who have decided not to reproduce themselves:
~ ~ ~
Seems childish to poke fun at folks who understand human population matters?
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
¶18 Each time another one of us decides to not add another one of us to the burgeoning millions already squatting on this ravaged planet, another ray of hope shines through the gloom. When every human chooses to stop breeding, earth's biosphere will be allowed to return to its former glory.
~ ~ ~
I notice not one word about the situation in Bolivia or why President Morales might be more worried then a fella in a cozy Parisian apartment filled with books and food.
Here's peek into what these folks are living with:
http://www.boliviabella.com/11-ways-in-which-our-forests-are-being-destroyed.html
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
¶19 In the 19th century, the French historian Hippolyte Taine already said, "I love my children too much to give them life." Even Jared Diamond, who has written a magisterial study of the disappearance of societies, gives voice to a strange dream: "If most of the world's six billion people today were in cryogenic storage and neither eating, breathing, nor metabolizing, that large population would cause no environmental problems."
~ ~ ~
So what, this is quote mining and what does Pascal mean by including this?
The statement itself is pretty simple and obvious and meant to highlight the fact of humanity's immense impact on our planet - and it's about the least enlightening Diamond quote one could come up with {akin to, 'the team with the most points wins.'}
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
¶20 The despondency is striking, given that our lives are still extraordinarily pleasant.
~ ~ ~
Not a note of recognition for the real down to Earth conditions driving this despondency among huge and increasing populations .
Yes, "our" lives, including my own are extraordinarily pleasant - but it doesn't take much looking around to discover we are the lucky minority, are we to ignore all others?
U.N. Reports Sharp Increase in Refugees as Civil Wars Cripple Nations
By SOMINI SENGUPTA JUNE 20, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/21/world/refugees-at-levels-not-seen-since-second-world-war.html?_r=0
- - -
Famine Early Warning System
http://www.fews.net
- - -
As The Planet Warms, Scientists Say More People Will Go Without Food And Water
BY EMILY ATKIN | POSTED ON JULY 28, 2014
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/07/28/3464687/chinese-farmland-drought-hunger/
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Everywhere the culture of lament prevails. We have to wear grave expressions on our faces and wrinkle our brows: The perils are so numerous that we can hardly choose among them. Sounding the death knell is our viaticum (the Eucharist to a person near or in danger of death).
Saving the world requires us to denigrate everything that has to do with the spirit of enterprise and the taste for discovery, especially in the field of science. We have ceased to admire; we know only how to denounce, decry, whine. The capacity for enthusiasm is dying out.
~ ~ ~
Here it is again, Pascal Bruckner can't escape his baseline religious mythical world outlook. Flowery prose and snappy metaphors don't help explain anything about our "environmental crisis".
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
¶21 That is because at the turn of the 21st century a paradigm change took place: The long list of emblematic victims—Jews, blacks, slaves, proletarians, colonized peoples—was gradually replaced by the planet, which has become the paragon of all the wretched. It is not a specific community that we are asked to identify with, but rather a small spaceship that carries us and groans. It is no longer a question of transforming the world but of preserving it.
~ ~ ~
Oh for gosh sake, that's plain pathetic. Besides, who's Pascal trying to kid, Jews, blacks, slaves, proletarians, colonized peoples continue feeling more victimized than ever!
And yes some are desperately trying to convey the notion that on a grand scale all of us humans are one species on this one and only finite planet of ours. Ridiculing that is silly, if not malicious.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
¶22 An example? Sir Martin Rees, an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge, published a book with a resounding title—Our Final Hour—in which he gave humanity a 50 percent chance of surviving the 21st century, because of its proliferation and its wicked inventions.
¶23 This sort of literature is proliferating and turning into clichés. The litany of failure is endless. Ecologism has become a global ideology that covers all of existence. In it are found all the faults of Marxism applied to the environment: the omnipresent scientism, the appalling visions of reality, the admonishing of those who are guilty of not understanding those who wish them well.
~ ~ ~
Not a single mention of the trends going on in our oceans, or mountain glacial areas, the way changing weather patterns are 'challenging' farmers and transportation agencies. Not a mention that our coastal cities really and truly are going to see rising sea levels increasingly invade them. These things are underway, trends and cumulative math guarantees it.
FYI: Climate Change / Ocean Impacts Blog
This is real stuff, overwhelming even, but it can't be vanquished with a bunch of intellectual perfume.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
¶24 All the foolishness of Bolshevism, Maoism, and Trotskyism are somehow reformulated exponentially in the name of saving the planet. Authors, journalists, politicians, scientists compete in announcing the abominable and lay claim to a hyperlucidity: They alone see things correctly, whereas others vegetate in the slumber from which they will someday awaken, terrified. They alone have emerged from the cave of ignorance in which the human herd mills around, deaf and blind to the obvious.
~ ~ ~
Pascal once again conflates scientists with pundits and reporters. Besides, if scientists offer what he wants to coin "hyperlucidity" it's only because most of the rest of world seems to be under the spell of 'Hollyworld' ( the Hollywood/Reaganomics weltanschauuing) and too apathetic about our life sustaining home planet Earth to care to learn about it.
Sad fact is, because most folks these days have climbed into ancient religious books for their reality, it's left to the scientists and other rational observers, to objectively strive towards understanding what we are witnessing upon our actual physical planet... as opposed to spending all our attention on the machinations playing out within our fertile minds.
Deriding their attention to the physical planet we depend on, doesn't diminish it's importance. If only more people were interested in a lucid understanding of our physical planet we'd all be way ahead of the game.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
¶25 Why do we in the West take such pleasure in predicting our own disappearance? In situations of all-out war, foreseeing the worst is proof of lucidity: "You've got optimists and pessimists. The first died in the gas chambers. The others have swimming pools in Beverly Hills," Billy Wilder remarked in 1945. There can be a desperate optimism and an active pessimism, a source of energy. But defeatism is also the second home of privileged peoples, the contented sigh of big cats purring in comfort. A tragedy that strikes far away transforms the platitude of our everyday lives into a high-risk adventure: We are living on the edge of the abyss! To sound the alarm is to re-enchant the routine under the sign of danger.
~ ~ ~
I'm not a philosopher but if this is what philosophy has to offer, what good is it?*
All humans have always lived on the edge of the abyss, and passing through our lives is like dancing on a sword's edge - your point Pascal?
Nowhere here does Pascal acknowledge that on our planet there are some real show stopper trends building up a head of steam.
- - - - - - - - -
* Fortunately I've discover a serious philosopher recently, so I retain hope.
Human Knowledge, Reliability and Fallibilism by Mariano Artigas
http://whatsupwiththatwatts.blogspot.com/2014/08/human-knowledge-reliability-and.html
Falsify T