A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics

Anthropogenic Global Warming – “surely the biggest exercise in totalitarian thought-reversal and reality-denial since Stalinism” May 27, 2010

I must buy this book.  A British author, Melanie Phillips, author of The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power, was interviewed by Kathryn Lopez at National Review.   What a heavyweight of right reasoning and identification of the great evils that afflict the West – evils of paganism, scientism, ‘progressivism,’ and the tendency of all the above and more towards totalitarianism.  With regard to anthropogenic global warming cooling climate change, she stated that the notoriously poor and biased “sciencyism” revealed by the East Anglia Climate Research Unit fiasco, and the subsequent unwillingness of radical environmentalists among the elite of western society to recognize the utterly flawed nature of the “research” revealed the religious fervor with which progressives hold their views:

One of the striking aspects of mass ideological delusion is a refusal to acknowledge even the clearest evidence of the intellectual and moral corruption at its core. The gerrymandering of scientific evidence by the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, in order to uphold the theory of anthropogenic global warming in the face of evidence that the earth was not warming at all, has been pushed aside as either an artificially created uproar or, at worst, an error of judgment by one hard-pressed scientist.

It was far worse than that, of course, because the various scientists involved had been for years absolutely central to the promulgation of AGW theory; and what the leaked emails revealed was their instinctive impulse to wrench the facts to fit their prior assumptions. Most chilling of all was their unshakeable certainty that they had a duty thus to wrench that evidence — in order to demonstrate the truth of the theory, because it was simply impossible that there could be evidence to the contrary.

What was also glossed over or missed altogether in the uproar over East Anglia was that AGW theory has been sustained on the back of one scientific fraud or sloppy and flawed research exercise after another. Yet astonishingly, it is still being promoted quite shamelessly by those for whom there can simply be no contradiction to the theory, and who thus project in turn all the falsehoods and frauds onto the skeptic side of the argument. It is surely the biggest exercise in totalitarian thought-reversal and reality-denial since Stalinism.

While Phillips is not a religious person, she recognizes the fundamental role that Catholic mores and doctrine have played in shaping Western culture:

You don’t have to be a religious believer to understand that if religion — more specifically, the Hebrew Bible and the Christianity that built upon it — underpins Western civilization and the codes of right and wrong — putting others above yourself, freedom and equality, and belief in reason — that form the bedrock of that civilization, then eroding or destroying that religion will erode or destroy those virtues and the civilization they distinguish.

In describing the unlikely alliance between  progressives, Islamists, environmentalists, fascists, militant atheists, and sexual deviants, Phillips answers:

It may seem strange to lump all these ideologies together since they are all so different. But, when you look at them, it is immediately apparent that they are all at root utopian, millenarian visions of the perfection of the world through human agency — the age-old recipe for totalitarian terror. The idea that fascism is in a wholly different place from the Left is in my view quite misplaced: Although conventionally one is described as “right” and the other as “left,” this is historically and philosophically inaccurate; they share common roots in the repudiation of individual reason and liberty.

One of the mysteries of the age is the way “progressives” who fetishize sexual freedom, gay rights, female equality, and the like march shoulder to shoulder with Islamists who stone adulterers, kill gays, and subjugate women. They share a common desire to destroy the cultural traditions and normative values of the West — all in the cause of creating the perfect society, which creates in turn a totalitarian mindset, which links religious fanatics and the political tyrannies of both Communism and fascism.

To some of us, this is very apparent — but many who are in the grip of these delusions are frighteningly incapable of understanding what it is that they don’t understand.

Phillips also notes that self-described ‘progressives’ are nothing of the sort – they tend to make up the most regressive, reactionary elements of current society, seeking to undo Western culture and replace it with a form of neo-paganism ordered entirely towards the self.  Go read the whole thing.

I hope the author also delves into the link between socalist economic and government and the kind of super narcissism that fuels this radical leftism. 

The Catholic Church built Western civilization.  That civilization is presently more threatened than it has been in centuries because the Faith that once underpinned that civilization has been discarded as a relic of the past, and offered up on the altar of hedonistic self-pleasure.  Those who fight the culture wars instinctively know this – it is why they fight.  But we have been losing, not because we lack numbers – in the US, at least we have the numbers.  We simply must make ourselves heard, and no longer allow the cultural elites intent on blowing up Western culture to be dominant.