The gods must be angry
Many bright people have written that Global Warming functions in much the same way as a religion. Michael Crichton has an entertaining piece to that effect that we’ve written about before in this space. Richard Lindzen, professor at MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, has said the same thing. So have many others. Standing as its own kind of proof of this thesis is the Wahhabi-like intensity that some believers (Ellen Goodman for example) have toward the crime of apostasy. Al Gore’s statement — really, a command — that “the debate…is over” conjures up an image of Torquemada, not of Galileo or Newton.
We are not here today to debate the merits of Global Warming. Frankly, we don’t care about the issue all that much. And to the extent there may actually be some global warming — manmade or otherwise — we’re all for it. As we have said, we plan to cash in big by buying muskeg in western Canada and hoping it becomes the New California someday.
Our question today is this: is there an survival purpose to the religious madness that grips the most fervent Global Warming adherents, turning them into harpies and hysterics? We think the answer is probably yes. The ancient story of Pharaoh’s dream tells us that the affluent and powerful have always had a little internal alarm bell warning them about the saven years of lean following the seven years of fat. Preparing for the lean times, and, as importantly, trying to ward them off, has been important for human survival — then and now.
Most people in America today have absolutely no idea how we became so rich over the last 130 years. They have no idea about the nexus of laws, an enterprising spirit of the people, available capital, good accounting, an expanding market, low cost resources, technology and engineering, and an adequate monetary policy that created the relative paradise that is capitalist America — a point we have made over and over again.
Moreover, the harpies and hysterics from the entertainment and political worlds are not only ignorant about how this prosperity came to be, they have themselves done almost nothing to create it — hence, in our opinion, they do not feel within themselves that they have earned the riches with which they have been showered. Thus, they seek, through magical incantations, to expiate their guilt at living, undeserved, in the seven years of fat, and hoping, through their professions of unworthiness and promises of self-abnegation, to ward off the anger of the gods. This kind of magical thinking should have become attenuated in the age of science and engineering, but these are people who haven’t the slightest clue about how an electric motor works, or why bad monetary policy causes inflation or depression. They are as kids in a candy store.
We comprehend the survival usefulness of an internal warning system for those who live lives of excess, but it is less clear why this has resulted in such hysteria, when a more appropriate response would simply be to consider better planning measures for the seven years of lean, in the event they arrive. Perhaps that comes from our ancient human history, when man had no technology to do any meaningful planning beyond a season or two into the future. Perhaps also the emotional agitation was a warning in the ancient days to be on the lookout for usurpers.
We note a final, amusing, parallelism from the time of Pharaoh to the modern potentates of our political and entertainment world. In both ages men worried and felt guilty about their privileged status, and wanted to ward off the seven years of lean by ritual incantations and professions of sorrow, penance, and self-abnegation. But when it came time for the actual ritual of human sacrifice, it was the little guy, not they, who paid the price to appease the gods.
UPDATE
Curt at Flopping Aces has a nice piece on all this flapdoodle.