Environmentalism As Religion

We risk entering the Internet version of the dark ages, an era of shifting fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don't know any better

by Michael Crichton 

We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we're told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems. Every one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given to us by what other people and society tell us; in part generated by our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part by our genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears. 

As an example of this challenge, I want to talk today about environmentalism. And in order not to be misunderstood, I want it perfectly clear that I believe it is incumbent on us to conduct our lives in a way that takes into account all the consequences of our actions, including the consequences to other people, and the consequences to the environment. I believe it is important to act in ways that are sympathetic to the environment, and I believe this will always be a need, carrying into the future. I believe the world has genuine problems and I believe it can and should be improved. But I also think that deciding what constitutes responsible action is immensely difficult, and the consequences of our actions are often difficult to know in advance. I think our past record of environmental action is discouraging, to put it mildly, because even our best intended efforts often go awry. But I think we do not recognize our past failures, and face them squarely. And I think I know why. 

I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can't be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people---the best people, the most enlightened people---do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious. 

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths. 

There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe. 

Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday---these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don't want to talk anybody out of them, as I don't want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don't want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can't talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith. 

And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren't necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It's about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them. 

Am I exaggerating to make a point? I am afraid not. Because we know a lot more about the world than we did forty or fifty years ago. And what we know now is not so supportive of certain core environmental myths, yet the myths do not die. Let's examine some of those beliefs. 

There is no Eden. There never was. What was that Eden of the wonderful mythic past? Is it the time when infant mortality was 80%, when four children in five died of disease before the age of five? When one woman in six died in childbirth? When the average lifespan was 40, as it was in America a century ago. When plagues swept across the planet, killing millions in a stroke. Was it when millions starved to death? Is that when it was Eden? 

The IMF Proposes A 10% Supertax On All Eurozone Household Savings

It all hangs on the IMF's notion - or hope - that it can be implemented by stealth, before people have the chance to put their money somewhere else

by Raul Ilargi

This is a story that should raise an eyebrow or two on every single face in Europe, and beyond. I saw the first bits of it on a Belgian site named Express.be, whose writers in turn had stumbled upon an article in French newspaper Le Figaro, whose writer Jean-Pierre Robin had leafed through a brand new IMF report (yes, there are certain linguistic advantages in being Dutch, Canadian AND Québecois). In the report, the IMF talks about a proposal to tax everybody's savings, in the Eurozone. Looks like they just need to figure out by how much.

The IMF, I'm following Mr. Robin here, addresses the issue of the sustainability of the debt levels of developed nations, Europe, US, Japan, which today are on average 110% of GDP, or 35% more than in 2007. Such debt levels are unprecedented, other than right after the world wars. So, the Fund reasons, it's time for radical solutions.

The Science of Politics and the Conquest of Nature

Some Questions with No Very Good Answers

By Patrick J. Deneen

For the ancients, man was bound by but not wholly defined as part of nature. The studies of natural phenomena and human affairs had to be distinct disciplines, for all of the reasons that nature and man are distinct in kind. On this view, “political science” was a distinct form of study from that of natural phenomena, requiring very different assumptions and approaches. The inauguration of the modern period was marked, among many other things, by the belief that human beings could be wholly understood through the same methods as natural things; thus, a new “science of politics” based upon the ideals of predictability and even control and manipulation of human beings was seen not only as possible but greatly desirable. The modern period also saw the reason for scientific inquiry shift from merely understanding how nature was governed to understanding how human beings could master it. Nature became not subject but object; and human inquiry was set not only in service of understanding politics, but manipulating nature for political ends.

It ought to come as no surprise, then, that these ideas might be carried further, so that human beings, as merely part of nature, could also be regarded as natural objects for manipulation. Man, too, could become no longer just subject but object. Many of the great horrors of the last century — from economic failures of all sorts to eugenics and worse — arose from this understanding. But a new movement today, calling itself transhumanism, carries these notions to their logical conclusion: human beings are not only manipulable objects, but raw, manipulable material; man himself, his very form, might be tinkered with, enhanced, and “reengineered,” like a species of crop or livestock. What becomes of the political animal when politics seeks not to meet his ends but to unravel them — not to serve him but to remake him?

Classical Political Science

Science, by the dictionary’s reckoning, has several meanings. One of those is very familiar: “the observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena.” This is the kind of science we associate with men and women in lab coats, wearing thick glasses and surrounded by test tubes. Another definition reads that science means “knowledge, especially that gained through experience.” This latter definition does not preclude the first, but it seems to be more comprehensive, including experience that we might gain in settings outside the laboratory, and settings that are less than entirely controlled. In both these meanings — which are similar but distinct in crucial ways, as we will see — the stress is upon knowledge. This emphasis reflects the etymological root of our word science in the Latin word scientia and its forebear, the Greek word episteme, both of which mean knowledge. The meanings of both words embrace acomprehensiveness of human knowing: human inquiry of every kind is said to aim at scientia orepisteme. Thus, broadly speaking, for the ancients, philosophy, theology, history — even the study of politics — were all forms of scientia.

They’re Coming For Your Savings

After 2000 years, the "Proscription" rule is making a comeback

by John Rubino

Another of history’s many lessons is that governments under pressure become thieves. And today’s governments are under a lot of pressure.

Before we look at the coming wave of asset confiscations, let’s stroll through some notable episodes of the past, just to make the point that government theft of private wealth is actually pretty common.

Ancient Rome had a rule called “proscription” that allowed the government to execute and then confiscate the assets of anyone found guilty of “crimes against the state.” After the death of Julius Caesar in 44 BC, three men, Mark Anthony, Lepidus, and Caesar’s adopted son Octavian, formed a group they called the Second Triumvirate and divided the Empire between them. But two rivals, Brutus and Cassius, formed an army with which they planned to take the Empire for themselves. The Triumvirate needed money to fund an army of its own, and decided the best way to raise it was by kicking the proscription process into overdrive. They drew up a list of several hundred wealthy Romans, accused them of crimes, executed them and took their property.

In the mid-1530s, English king Henry VIII was short of funds, so he seized the country’s monasteries and claimed their property and income for the Crown. As historian G. J. Meyer tells it inThe Tudors: The Complete Story of England’s Most Notorious Dynasty:

“By April fat trunks were being hauled into London filled with gold and silver plate, jewelry, and other treasures accumulated by the monasteries over the centuries. With them came money from the sale of church bells, lead stripped from the roofs of monastic buildings, and livestock, furnishings, and equipment. Some of the confiscated land was sold – enough to bring in £30,000 – and what was not sold generated tens of thousands of pounds in annual rents. The longer the confiscations continued, the smaller the possibility of their ever being reversed or even stopped from going further. The money was spent almost as quickly as it flooded in – so quickly that any attempt to restore the monasteries to what they had been before the suppression would have meant financial ruin for the Crown. Nor would those involved in the work of the suppression … ever be willing to part with what they were skimming off for themselves.”

Soon after the French Revolution in 1789, the new government confiscated lands and other property of the Catholic Church and used the proceeds to back a new form of paper currency called assignats. The resulting money printing binge quickly spun out of control, resulting in hyperinflation and the rise of Napoleon.

During the US Civil War, Congress passed laws confiscating property used for “insurrectionary purposes” and of citizens generally engaged in rebellion.

In 1933, in the depths of the Great Depression, president Franklin Roosevelt banned the private ownership of gold and ordered US citizens to turn in their gold. Those who did were paid in paper dollars at the then current rate of $20.67 per ounce. Once the confiscation was complete, the dollar was devalued to $35 per ounce of gold, effectively stealing 70 percent of the wealth of those who surrendered their gold.

In 1942, after entering World War II, the US moved all Japanese citizens within its borders to concentration camps and sold off their property. The detainees were released in 1945, given $25 and a train ticket home – without being reimbursed for their losses.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, various kinds of capital controls and asset confiscations have become common. A few examples:

Iceland required that firms seeking to invest abroad get permission from the central bank and that individual Icelanders get government authorization to buy foreign currency or travel overseas.

The Italian Job

The path of perpetual violence, perpetual war, and perpetual insecurity

By David Vine

The Pentagon has spent the last two decades plowing hundreds of millions of tax dollars into military bases in Italy, turning the country into an increasingly important center for U.S. military power. Especially since the start of the Global War on Terror in 2001, the military has been shifting its European center of gravity south from Germany, where the overwhelming majority of U.S. forces in the region have been stationed since the end of World War II. In the process, the Pentagon has turned the Italian peninsula into a launching pad for future wars in Africa, the Middle East, and beyond.

At bases in Naples, Aviano, Sicily, Pisa, and Vicenza, among others, the military has spent more than $2 billion on construction alone since the end of the Cold War -- and that figure doesn’t include billions more on classified construction projects and everyday operating and personnel costs. While the number of troops in Germany has fallen from 250,000 when the Soviet Union collapsed to about 50,000 today, the roughly 13,000 U.S. troops (plus 16,000 family members) stationed in Italy match the numbers at the height of the Cold War.  That, in turn, means that the percentage of U.S. forces in Europe based in Italy has tripled since 1991 from around 5% to more than 15%.

Last month, I had a chance to visit the newest U.S. base in Italy, a three-month-old garrison in Vicenza, near Venice. Home to a rapid reaction intervention force, the 173rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team (Airborne), and the Army’s component of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), the base extends for a mile, north to south, dwarfing everything else in the small city. In fact, at over 145 acres, the base is almost exactly the size of Washington’s National Mall or the equivalent of around 110 American football fields. The price tag for the base and related construction in a city that already hosted at least six installations: upwards of $600 million since fiscal year 2007.

There are still more bases, and so more U.S. military spending, in Germany than in any other foreign country (save, until recently, Afghanistan). Nonetheless, Italy has grown increasingly important as the Pentagon works to change the make-up of its global collection of 800 or more bases abroad, generally shifting its basing focus south and east from Europe’s center. Base expert Alexander Cooley explains: “U.S. defense officials acknowledge that Italy’s strategic positioning on the Mediterranean and near North Africa, the Italian military’s antiterrorism doctrine, as well as the country’s favorable political disposition toward U.S. forces are important factors in the Pentagon’s decision to retain” a large base and troop presence there. About the only people who have been paying attention to this build-up are the Italians in local opposition movements like those in Vicenza who are concerned that their city will become a platform for future U.S. wars.

Base Building

Most tourists think of Italy as the land of Renaissance art, Roman antiquities, and of course great pizza, pasta, and wine. Few think of it as a land of U.S. bases. But Italy’s 59 Pentagon-identified “base sites” top that of any country except Germany (179), Japan (103), Afghanistan (100 and declining), and South Korea (89).

Frankenstein in Havana

Fidel's Cuba is a case study in the tragic waste of opportunity and life that is inevitable under a Caudillo Messiah with a paternalist utopian domestic agenda

By William Ratliff

Is Raúl Castro simply a clone of his elder brother Fidel? Answering that question is a step toward ending what may be the most prolonged and divisive dispute in the history of modern U.S. foreign policy.

During the Cold War, trying to isolate Cuba served American security interests since Cuba was an ally of the Soviet bloc. But since the fall of the Soviet Union, U.S. policy toward Cuba has focused on "nation building" and mild agitation to eliminate the Castros. Analysts who reject these as adequate grounds for foreign policy can also critique the current policy on its own terms. In other words, has it been successful in nation building? And more importantly now, have Raúl's reforms since taking the top office in 2006 really begun to change conditions in the country?

Distinguished analysts differ on the merits of Raúl's reforms. Economist Carmelo Mesa-Lago calls them "the most extensive and profound" changes on the island in decades, though still inadequate, while Carlos Alberto Montaner calls them "token gestures." In May, I made a two-week visit to Cuba, my sixth since 1983 as a journalist and lecturer, to see what I could learn on the ground. I found the prospects for meaningful reforms were encouraging but preliminary.

Conditions and Changes

I surveyed Raúl's specific responses to Cuba's challenges last January in an essay titled "Cuba's Tortured Transition," so here I will focus on the individual, cultural, and institutional factors that now complicate substantive reform on the island.

Raúl and the Cuban Communist Party speak of "updating the economic model," which is either a feel-good phrase devised to mask criticism of Fidel's economic failures while changes are slipped through, or an admission that those in charge are not serious reformers. Changes are explicitly made in the service of "socialism," which begs the question: Despite some promising new policies, will change still be inhibited by Cuba's official ideology and ideologues?

Former high-level Cuban officials who worked closely with Raúl and coauthored articles with me note his early interest in serious, systematic, long-term economic reforms like those that have been undertaken under authoritarian regimes in China and Vietnam. If Cuban leaders were free to think outside the socialist box, their best reform model would be Taiwan, which is a democratic market economy. Realistically, however, Cuba will not now move toward democracy and thus it's more likely China and Vietnam are models for its future. Raúl's current presumptive heir apparent, Vice President Miguel Diaz-Canel, visited both China and Vietnam in June.

The Castros have never respected individual rights, though they claim to do so with education and preventive health programs for all. But in these and other socio-economic fields, Cuba ranked high among the Latin American nations before the Castros hit the scene, and this was despite an imbalance between urban and rural sectors. Since then, Cuba has fallen in the rankings. The United Nations Development Programme's 2013 Human Development Index rates Cuba fifty-ninth in the world and sixth in Latin America, a respectable but not stunning record. The 2013 Human Rights Watch World Report concluded that Cuba "represses virtually all forms of political dissent." Economic freedoms are just beginning to sprout.

Frankenstein in Havana

Cuban professor Carlos Alzugaray has underlined the gravity of Cuba's economic problems today by using what he calls the "Frankenstein metaphor." Speaking recently at Stanford University, he said Fidel's economic policies were meant to be a gift to mankind, like Frankenstein's creature. But like the scientist's creation, they turned out to be "monsters." Though Alzugaray did not openly criticize "Father" Fidel, he noted the latter's flawed insistence on state control of all economic policy and his long opposition to the free market, individual initiative, and entrepreneurship.

St. Yellen’s Ascension to the Throne

The Road to Ruin

by Pater Tenebrarum

Most stories about central banking and central bankers in the mainstream financial press follow a certain pattern. For instance, the idea that these central planning institutions may not only be superfluous but may be downright harmful is considered utterly beyond the pale of debate. The only topics falling within 'allowed' discourse are discussions about various plans (should there more money printing?  More forward guidance? Bla, bla, bla…), while the literal impossibility of central planning is simply ignored.

In the US, the economics profession has been thoroughly bought off by the Fed to boot (for details, see this article), so not a peep of fundamental critique will ever emanate from it, with proponents of the Austrian school representing the lone exception to this rule.

As the age of unanchored pure fiat money has progressed, central bankers, instead of being tarred and feathered and run out of town for the ever greater boom-bust cycles, the growing inequality, and the stagnation of real incomes their policies have produced, have increasingly begun to be hailed as the equivalent of superheroes in the media propagating the statist quo.

Once they were thought of as gray bureaucrats, whose main job it was to 'take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going', as former Fed chairman William McChesney Martin put it. However, once the system had been set on a course of unfettered growth in credit and fiduciary media following Nixon's gold default (the 'temporary' suspension of the dollar's gold convertibility that has become permanent without an announcement to that effect), it soon became impractical and impolitic for them to 'take away the punch bowl'. 

Even Paul Volcker, whose job it was to rescue and preserve the fiat money system, implemented a tight policy for only about two years as measured by developments in the true money supply. Once those two years had passed, money supply growth received its biggest year-on-year goosing of the entire post WW2 era – yes, under the 'tough' Mr. Volcker. However, the medicine of high interest rates he had prescribed for a while, did succeed in rooting out malinvested capital and as a result, the economy was on a fairly sound footing at the time. Unfortunately, on account of credit expansion starting to run wild thereafter, this situation didn't last long. 

Cristina Fernández, Argentina’s fading populist

The country’s president has drawn little sympathy in spite of ill-health

By John Paul Rathbone and Benedict Mander

When Pope Francis held an audience with Cristina Fernández in March, his first with any head of state, the meeting of the two Argentines was a study in contrasts. While the former was serene and dressed in white, Ms Fernández wore widow’s weeds and appeared coquettish, her eyes circled in kohl.

“Oops, can I do that?” she said, touching his sleeve and giggling like a schoolgirl. “I never imagined I would meet the Pope,” she mumbled, crossing her hands across her chest.

It was an unusual show of humility from a politician known for her imperious style and sharp tongue. As she once said: “The only thing to fear is God – and me a little, too.” But this week Ms Fernández was cast in another unfamiliar role: that of invalid.

Following a bump to her head two months ago, Ms Fernández, 60, was diagnosed with blood on the brain and rushed to hospital. Although this is a routine procedure, her forced exit has provoked a near constitutional crisis and brought Argentina’s problems to a climax worthy of an Almodóvar movie.

Ms Fernández’s populist model, part of the region’s “pink tide”, is receding. The Asian-driven boom in commodity prices, which has powered Latin America’s third-biggest economy for a decade, is ending. Ignored by world leaders – delegates at last month’s Group of 20 leading nations meeting in St Petersburg unplugged their headphones as she spoke – her popularity has also slumped at home. Ms Fernandez’s frequent migraines and delicate health have led some to wonder if she is a “woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown”.

The debut of this bus driver’s daughter on the world stage, when her husband, Néstor Kirchner, unexpectedly won the 2003 election, was almost as dramatic. They met as law students, and before entering politics shared a legal practice recovering foreclosed properties – the perfect background in a country that had defaulted on $100bn of bonds.

America’s default on its debt is inevitable

How can a creditor cry foul when the government to which he is lending has repeatedly said that the value of the money he lent will shrink?

By James Grant

“There is precedent for a government shutdown,” Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs, remarked last week. “There’s no precedent for default.”

How wrong he is.

The U.S. government defaulted after the Revolutionary War, and it defaulted at intervals thereafter. Moreover, on the authority of the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, the government means to keep right on shirking, dodging or trimming, if not legally defaulting.

Default means to not pay as promised, and politics may interrupt the timely service of the government’s debts. The consequences of such a disruption could — as everyone knows by now — set Wall Street on its ear. But after the various branches of government resume talking and investors have collected themselves, the Treasury will have no trouble finding the necessary billions with which to pay its bills. The Federal Reserve can materialize the scrip on a computer screen.

Things were very different when America owed the kind of dollars that couldn’t just be whistled into existence. By 1790, the new republic was in arrears on $11,710,000 in foreign debt. These were obligations payable in gold and silver. Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the Treasury, duly paid them. In doing so, he cured a default.

Hamilton’s dollar was defined as a little less than 1/20 of an ounce of gold. So were those of his successors, all the way up to the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. But in the whirlwind of the “first hundred days” of the New Deal, the dollar came in for redefinition. The country needed a cheaper and more abundant currency, FDR said. By and by, the dollar’s value was reduced to 1/35 of an ounce of gold.

By any fair definition, this was another default. Creditors both domestic and foreign had lent dollars weighing just what the Founders had said they should weigh. They expected to be repaid in identical money.

Language to this effect — a “gold clause” — was standard in debt contracts of the time, including instruments binding the Treasury. But Congress resolved to abrogate those contracts, and in 1935 the Supreme Court upheld Congress.

The “American default,” as this piece of domestic stimulus was known in foreign parts , provoked condemnation in the City of London. “One of the most egregious defaults in history,” judged the London Financial News. “For repudiation of the gold clause is nothing less than that. The plea that recent developments have created abnormal circumstances is wholly irrelevant. It was precisely against such circumstances that the gold clause was designed to safeguard bondholders.”

The lighter Roosevelt dollar did service until 1971, when President Richard M. Nixon lightened it again. In fact, Nixon allowed it to float. No longer was the value of the greenback defined in law as a particular weight of gold or silver. It became what it looked like: a piece of paper.

Yet the U.S. government continued to find trusting creditors. Since the Nixon default, the public’s holdings of the federal debt have climbed from $303 billion to $11.9 trillion.

A Corrupt System That Rewards Stupidity

Paying no price for being wrong is a stupid way of making decisions

by Marc Faber

For the greater part of human history, leaders who were in a position to exercise power were accountable for their actions. If they waged wars or had to defend their territories from invading hostile forces, they frequently lost their lives, territories, armies, power and crowns. I don’t deny that some leaders were irresponsible, but in general, they were fully aware that they were responsible for their acts and, therefore, they acted responsibly.

The problem we are faced with today is that our political and (frequently) business leaders are not being held responsible for their actions. Thomas Sowell sums it up well:

“It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”

When political leaders or economic policymakers are seen to fail, the worst that will happen to them is that they won’t be re-elected or reappointed. They then become a lobbyist or an adviser or consultant, and give speeches, earning in the process a high income on top of their pension.

Similarly, many corporate executives and fund managers who have no personal stake in the business that employs them will receive generous pensions even if they fail to do their job properly and are dismissed. (This doesn’t apply to hedge fund managers, most of whose wealth is invested in their funds.) In other words, probably for the first time in history, we have today a system where leaders are not only not punished for their failures, but are actually rewarded…

Recently, Warren Buffett said that the Fed was the world’s largest hedge fund. He is wrong. The world’s largest hedge funds are owned by people who are risk takers with their own money, since they are usually the largest investors in their funds. The academics at the Fed are playing with other people’s money.

However, if we consider that the Fed, led by its chairman, is the most powerful organization in the world — because by printing money, it can finance the government (fiscal deficits) and wars, manipulate the cost of money (interest rates), directly intervene in the economy by bailing out failing institutions (banks) or countries (Greece, etc.), intervene in the foreign exchange market and even influence elections — then the question arises whether it makes sense that so much power should be given to Fed members, who are “group thinking” academics and most of whom have never worked in the private sector. In my opinion, the enormous power of the “academic” Fed is a frightening thought. My friend Fred Sheehan recently quoted from Johann Peter Eckermann’s conversation with Goethe, Feb. 1, 1827. We talked about the professors who, after they had found a better theory, still ignored it. From Eckermann and Goethe:

“‘This is not to be wondered at,’ said Goethe; ‘such people continue in error because they are indebted to it for their existence. They would have to learn everything over again, and that would be very inconvenient.’ 

“‘But,’ said I, ‘how can their experiments prove the truth when the basis for their evaluation is false?’ 

“‘They do not prove the truth,’ said Goethe, ‘nor is such the intention; the only point with these professors is to prove their own opinion. On this account, they conceal all experiments that would reveal the truth and show their doctrine untenable. Then the scholars — what do they care for truth? They, like the rest, are perfectly satisfied if they can prate away empirically; that is the whole matter.’”

Environmentalism as Religion

Carbon Calvinism and the Theology of Ecology

By Joel Garreau

Traditional religion is having a tough time in parts of the world. Majorities in most European countries have told Gallup pollsters in the last few years that religion does not “occupy an important place” in their lives. Across Europe, Judeo-Christian church attendance is down, as is adherence to religious prohibitions such as those against out-of-wedlock births. And while Americans remain, on average, much more devout than Europeans, there are demographic and regional pockets in this country that resemble Europe in their religious beliefs and practices.

The rejection of traditional religion in these quarters has created a vacuum unlikely to go unfilled; human nature seems to demand a search for order and meaning, and nowadays there is no shortage of options on the menu of belief. Some searchers syncretize Judeo-Christian theology with Eastern or New Age spiritualism. Others seek through science the ultimate answers of our origins, or dream of high-tech transcendence by merging with machines — either approach depending not on rationalism alone but on a faith in the goodness of what rationalism can offer.

For some individuals and societies, the role of religion seems increasingly to be filled by environmentalism. It has become “the religion of choice for urban atheists,” according to Michael Crichton, the late science fiction writer (and climate change skeptic). In a widely quoted 2003 speech, Crichton outlined the ways that environmentalism “remaps” Judeo-Christian beliefs:

There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.

In parts of northern Europe, this new faith is now the mainstream. “Denmark and Sweden float along like small, content, durable dinghies of secular life, where most people are nonreligious and don’t worship Jesus or Vishnu, don’t revere sacred texts, don’t pray, and don’t give much credence to the essential dogmas of the world’s great faiths,” observes Phil Zuckerman in his 2008 book Society without God. Instead, he writes, these places have become “clean and green.” This new faith has very concrete policy implications; the countries where it has the most purchase tend also to have instituted policies that climate activists endorse. To better understand the future of climate policy, we must understand where “ecotheology” has come from and where it is likely to lead.

From Theology to Ecotheology

The German zoologist Ernst Haeckel coined the word “ecology” in the nineteenth century to describe the study of “all those complex mutual relationships” in nature that “Darwin has shown are the conditions of the struggle for existence.” Of course, mankind has been closely studying nature since the dawn of time. Stone Age religion aided mankind’s first ecological investigation of natural reality, serving as an essential guide for understanding and ordering the environment; it was through story and myth that prehistoric man interpreted the natural world and made sense of it. Survival required knowing how to relate to food species like bison and fish, dangerous predators like bears, and powerful geological forces like volcanoes — and the rise of agriculture required expertise in the seasonal cycles upon which the sustenance of civilization depends.

Our uniquely Western approach to the natural world was shaped fundamentally by Athens and Jerusalem. The ancient Greeks began a systematic philosophical observation of flora and fauna; from their work grew the long study of natural history. Meanwhile, the Judeo-Christian teachings about the natural world begin with the beginning: there is but one God, which means that there is a knowable order to nature; He created man in His image, which gives man an elevated place in that order; and He gave man mastery over the natural world:

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. [Genesis 1:28-29]

In his seminal essay “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” published in Science magazine in 1967, historian Lynn Townsend White, Jr. argues that those Biblical precepts made Christianity, “especially in its Western form,” the “most anthropocentric religion the world has seen.” In stark contrast to pagan animism, Christianity posited “a dualism of man and nature” and “insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends.” Whereas older pagan creeds gave a cyclical account of time, Christianity presumed a teleological direction to history, and with it the possibility of progress. This belief in progress was inherent in modern science, which, wedded to technology, made possible the Industrial Revolution. Thus was the power to control nature achieved by a civilization that had inherited the license to exploit it.

To White, this was not a positive historical development. Writing just a few years after the publication of Rachel Carson’s eco-blockbuster Silent Spring, White shared in the concern over techno-industrial culture’s destruction of nature. Whatever benefit scientific and technological innovation had brought mankind was eclipsed by the “out of control” extraction and processing powers of industrial life and the mechanical degradation of the earth. Christianity, writes White, “bears a huge burden of guilt” for the destruction of the environment.

White believed that science and technology could not solve the ecological problems they had created; our anthropocentric Christian heritage is too deeply ingrained. “Despite Copernicus, all the cosmos rotates around our little globe. Despite Darwin, we are not, in our hearts, part of the natural process. We are superior to nature, contemptuous of it, willing to use it for our slightest whim.” But White was not entirely without hope. Even though “no new set of basic values” will “displace those of Christianity,” perhaps Christianity itself can be reconceived. “Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious.” And so White suggests as a model Saint Francis, “the greatest spiritual revolutionary in Western history.” Francis should have been burned as a heretic, White writes, for trying “to substitute the idea of the equality of all creatures, including man, for the idea of man’s limitless rule of creation.” Even though Francis failed to turn Christianity toward his vision of radical humility, White argued that something similar to that vision is necessary to save the world in our time.

The Press and Dr. Faustus

Too late, American journalists realize their mistake

By  Victor Davis Hanson

In the old Dr. Faustus story, a young scholar bargains away his soul to the devil for promises of obtaining almost anything he wants.

The American media has done much the same thing with the Obama administration. In return for empowering a fellow liberal, the press gave up its traditional adversarial relationship with the president.

But after five years of basking in a shared progressive agenda, the tab for such ecstasy has come due, and now the media is lamenting that it has lost its soul.

At first, the loss of independence seemed like a minor sacrifice. In 2008, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews sounded almost titillated by an Obama speech, exclaiming, “My, I felt this thrill going up my leg.” Earlier, New York Times columnist David Brooks had fixated on Obama’s leg rather than his own: “I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant, and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president, and b) he’ll be a very good president.”

For worshiper and former Newsweek editor Evan Thomas, Obama was divine: “Obama’s standing above the country, above the world, he’s sort of God.” TV pundit and presidential historian Michael Beschloss ranked the newly elected Barack Obama as “the smartest guy ever to become president.”

For a press that had exposed Watergate, Iran-Contra, and the Monica Lewinsky affair, and had torn apart George W. Bush over everything from the Iraq War to Hurricane Katrina, this hero worship seemed obsessive. The late liberal reporter Michael Hastings summed up a typical private session between President Obama and the press during the 2012 campaign: “Everyone, myself included, swooned. Swooned! Head over heels. One or two might have even lost their minds. . . . We were all, on some level, deeply obsessed with Obama, crushing hard.”

Sometimes the media and Obama were one big happy family — literally. The siblings of the presidents of ABC News and CBS News are both higher-ups in the Obama administration. The White House press secretary’s wife is a correspondent for ABC’s Good Morning America.

Venezuela running out of time

Inflation Spikes in Venezuela

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro doesn’t understand inflation, apparently. Whenever the leader is asked why his country’s inflation rate is soaring at over 49 percent, he delegates a government official to give the typical response: because of speculators, saboteurs, and America, that’s why!

Like many leftist regimes before it, Venezuela spends heavily on social welfare, stifles private industry and fixes its exchange rate so as to not reflect the true value of its currency. Meanwhile, the Central Bank pumps more currency into circulation to artificially maintain the rate of inflation. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be working anymore. The AP:

Venezuela’s Central Bank says prices have risen nearly 50 percent since last September as the country struggles to rein in a quickening rate of inflation and widespread shortages….

Officials say speculators are to blame for soaring prices and shortages.

This has eerie echoes of past Latin American socialist regimes, most notably Chile’s Salvador Allende. The Allende regime’s overzealous agenda of redistribution, wage increases and fiscal stimulus drove the country deep into debt and drove inflation to a peak of 86 percent before Chile defaulted on its loans (at which point inflation rose above 600 percent). Earlier this year Venezuela devalued its currency, the fifth time it has done so since 2003. As is often the case with distorted currencies, a prominent black market for dollars has emerged.

While Hugo Chavez mostly evaded blame for his country’s problems, Maduro doesn’t enjoy the same uncanny adoration as his predecessor. Currency manipulation and the official runaround can’t obscure the ugly facts of economic ruin, and the Venezuelan people are learning some unpleasant truths about the path their country has chosen.