From our perspective as a modern society, the actions of the Xhosa would seem foolhardy, even insane. First let me say, I’m not at all against alternate energy, or improved or even different technology. Heck, I drive an electric car myself and have done two solar power projects. But Waxman-Markey, if enacted, will be the equivalent of killing all our cattle at once. It took us over 100 years to get where we are now, we can’t expect change overnight, it must be gradual.
If NASA’s James Hansen can be an advocate, then I may as well suggest that you send this story to your elected federal representatives and to your local letters to the editor, as is our right in the US Democracy constititional republic – Anthony
Death of a Civilization
by David Deming
Over the past several years we have learned that small groups of people can engage in mass suicide. In 1978, 918 members of the Peoples’ Temple led by Jim Jones perished after drinking poisoned koolaid. In 1997, 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult died after drugging themselves and tieing plastic bags around their heads. Unfortunately, history also demonstrates that it is possible for an entire civilization to commit suicide by intentionally destroying the means of its subsistence.
In the early nineteenth century, the British colonized Southeast Africa. The native Xhosa resisted, but suffered repeated and humiliating defeats at the hands of British military forces. The Xhosa lost their independence and their native land became an English colony. The British adopted a policy of westernizing the Xhosa. They were to be converted to Christianity, and their native culture and religion was to be wiped out. Under the stress of being confronted by a superior and irresistible technology, the Xhosa developed feelings of inadequacy and inferiority. In this climate, a prophet appeared.
In April of 1856, a fifteen-year-old girl named Nongqawuse heard a voice telling her that the Xhosa must kill all their cattle, stop cultivating their fields, and destroy their stores of grain and food. The voice insisted that the Xhosa must also get rid of their hoes, cooking pots, and every utensil necessary for the maintenance of life. Once these things were accomplished, a new day would magically dawn. Everything necessary for life would spring spontaneously from the earth. The dead would be resurrected. The blind would see and the old would have their youth restored. New food and livestock would appear in abundance, spontaneously sprouting from the earth. The British would be swept into the sea, and the Xhosa would be restored to their former glory. What was promised was nothing less than the establishment of paradise on earth.
Nongqawuse told this story to her guardian and uncle, Mhlakaza. At first, the uncle was skeptical. But he became a believer after accompanying his niece to the spot where she heard the voices. Although Mhlakaza heard nothing, he became convinced that Nongqawuse was hearing the voice of her dead father, and that the instructions must be obeyed. Mhlakaza became the chief prophet and leader of the cattle-killing movement.
News of the prophecy spread rapidly, and within a few weeks the Xhosa king, Sarhili, became a convert. He ordered the Xhosa to slaughter their cattle and, in a symbolic act, killed his favorite ox. As the hysteria widened, other Xhosa began to have visions. Some saw shadows of the resurrected dead arising from the sea, standing in rushes on the river bank, or even floating in the air. Everywhere that people looked, they found evidence to support what they desperately wanted to be true.
The believers began their work in earnest. Vast amounts of grain were taken out of storage and scattered on the ground to rot. Cattle were killed so quickly and on such an immense scale that vultures could not entirely devour the rotting flesh. The ultimate number of cattle that the Xhosa slaughtered was 400,000. After killing their livestock, the Xhosa built new, larger kraals to hold the marvelous new beasts that they anticipated would rise out of the earth. The impetus of the movement became irresistible.
The resurrection of the dead was predicted to occur on the full moon of June, 1856. Nothing happened. The chief prophet of the cattle-killing movement, Mhlakaza, moved the date to the full moon of August. But again the prophecy was not fulfilled.
The cattle-killing movement now began to enter a final, deadly phase, which its own internal logic dictated as inevitable. The failure of the prophecies was blamed on the fact that the cattle-killing had not been completed. Most believers had retained a few cattle, chiefly consisting of milk cows that provided an immediate and continuous food supply. Worse yet, there was a minority community of skeptical non-believers who refused to kill their livestock.
The fall planting season came and went. Believers threw their spades into the rivers and did not sow a single seed in the ground. By December of 1856, the Xhosa began to feel the pangs of hunger. They scoured the fields and woods for berries and roots, and attempted to eat bark stripped from trees. Mhlakaza set a new date of December 11 for the fulfillment of the prophecy. When the anticipated event did not occur, unbelievers were blamed.
The resurrection was rescheduled yet again for February 16, 1857, but the believers were again disappointed. Even this late, the average believer still had three or four head of livestock alive. The repeated failure of the prophecies could only mean that the Xhosa had failed to fulfill the necessary requirement of killing every last head of cattle. Now, they finally began to complete the killing process. Not only cattle were slaughtered, but also chickens and goats. Any viable means of sustenance had to be destroyed. Any cattle that might have escaped earlier killing were now slaughtered for food.
Serious famine began in late spring of 1857. All the food was gone. The starving population broke into stables and ate horse food. They gathered bones that had lay bleaching in the sun for years and tried to make soup. They ate grass. Maddened by hunger, some resorted to cannibalism. Weakened by starvation, family members often had to lay and watch dogs devour the corpses of their spouses and children. Those who did not die directly from hunger fell prey to disease. To the end, true believers never renounced their faith. They simply starved to death, blaming the failure of the prophecy on the doubts of non-believers.
By the end of 1858, the Xhosa population had dropped from 105,000 to 26,000. Forty to fifty-thousand people starved to death, and the rest migrated. With Xhosa civilization destroyed, the land was cleared for white settlement. The British found that those Xhosa who survived proved to be docile and useful servants. What the British Empire had been unable to accomplish in more than fifty years of aggressive colonialism, the Xhosa did to themselves in less than two years.
Western civilization now stands on the brink of repeating the experience of the Xhosa. Since the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century, Europe and North America have enjoyed the greatest prosperity ever known on earth. Life expectancy has doubled. In a little more than two hundred years, every objective measure of human welfare has increased more than in all of previous human history.
But Western Civilization is coasting on an impetus provided by our ancestors. There is scarcely anyone alive in Europe or America today who believes in the superiority of Western society. Guilt and shame hang around our necks like millstones, dragging our emasculated culture to the verge of self-immolation. Whatever faults the British Empire-builders may have had, they were certain of themselves.
Our forefathers built a technological civilization based on energy provided by carbon-based fossil fuels. Without the inexpensive and reliable energy provided by coal, oil, and gas, our civilization would quickly collapse. The prophets of global warming now want us to do precisely that.
Like the prophet Mhlakaza, Al Gore promises that if we stop using carbon-based energy, new energy technologies will magically appear. The laws of physics and chemistry will be repealed by political will power. We will achieve prosperity by destroying the very means by which prosperity is created.
While Western Civilization sits confused, crippled with self-doubt and guilt, the Chinese are rapidly building an energy-intensive technological civilization. They have 2,000 coal-fired power plants, and are currently constructing new ones at the rate of one a week. In China, more people believe in free-market economics than in the US. Our Asian friends are about to be nominated by history as the new torchbearers of human progress.
May 13, 2009
David Deming [send him mail] is associate professor of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oklahoma.
Copyright © 2009 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.
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It was FlavorAid™, not KoolAid™.
Mass cognitive dissonance struck the Xhosa. Now it is afflicting otherwise normal Westerners. Even as contrary evidence has mounted, proponents of the AGW hypothesis have begun to display the unmistakable signs of cognitive dissonance.
The famed social psychologist Leon Festinger, developer of the concept of cognitive dissonance, conducted early studies of the phenomenon. Cognitive dissonance explains that their odd belief system must become part of the afflicted person’s identity, their self, and that information at odds with that belief system is viewed as an attack on the self. Thus, anger and hostility arise when it is pointed out to those afflicted with CD that the planet’s temperature has been declining even as carbon dioxide levels steadily rise — thereby falsifying the central, core belief of the AGW hypothesis.
This explains why the CD-afflicted can be so completely resistant to any information that contradicts their adopted belief system. Festinger’s book, When Prophecy Fails, tells of a group of doomsday believers who predicted the end of the world on a particular date; but the believers would be saved by a UFO. When those events didn’t occur as predicted, the believers became even more determined they were right. They become louder and proselytized even more aggressively after the disconfirmation of their belief. So we can expect ever more extreme, opaque, strange and irrational defenses from AGW proponents as evidence against AGW continues to mount. For example, we are now told, in all seriousness, that the current global cooling is caused by global warming.
Those afflicted with CD take the verifiable fact of declining temperatures, not as a reason to re-think their hypothesis, but as a personal attack on their self, their ego, and their public status in society. They have taken an irrevocable stand, and they have pinned everything on their hypothesis being verified. But when the hypothesis is falsified, they loudly proclaim that the end is even more nigh, and they ratchet up their alarming scenarios… while the planet itself is falsifying their belief: as CO2 rises, the climate is cooling.
Rather than re-thinking their hypothesis, the AGW believers dig in and become as closed-minded as Dr. Fetsinger’s UFO believers, who, when the UFO didn’t arrive as predicted, simply moved the goal posts by changing the date of the UFO arrival, rather than coming to the obvious conclusion that no UFO will arrive as predicted. Like the Xhosa, AGW believers can not admit they were wrong.
Instead, AGW believers simply move the goal posts again. We see it all the time. First, it was “global cooling,” which then became “global warming.” Then, “climate change.” Now, the goal posts are moved again: mysterious and undetected “heat in the pipeline” explains why the planet is cooling, as CO2 steadily rises. The fact that no such heat has been found only makes the CD-afflicted look for other ways to move the goal posts. The one thing that the CD-afflicted will never do is to arrive at the obvious conclusion: that CO2 has much less effect on temperature than their hypothesis allows. And because of their affliction, taxes will rise many thousands of dollars higher per person per year. But to the CD-afflicted, that very expensive outcome is preferable to admitting that they were wrong about the minor, beneficial effect of CO2.
The modern equivalents of Nongqawuse can be seen in movie’s like “2102”, “The day after Tomorrow”, and “An Inconvenient Truth”.
‘Stop producing, stop being prosperous and it’ll all be wonderful’ is their message. Not true.
Best article I have read in years.
This story hits the nail right on the head.
AGW alarmism is the modern equivilent of Cattle Killings, with one difference.
AGW alarmism is worse.
NO TAX OR EMISSION REDUCTION OF CO2, THE GAS OF LIFE, FREEDOM AND PROSPERITY!
Great article. But forgive me for having to point out an error in the introductory paragraph. We are not a Democracy. We are a constititional republic. Democracy, also known as mob-rule, is two wolves and a sheep deciding what’s for lunch.
REPLY: Point taken.
From Harpers magazine – Anthony
I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.
Hey! I’m dressed like a turnip!
Dee de dee…
I guess I’ve finally blown my cerebral cortex.
I’m a left-wing European atheist, as far from Professor Deming politically and culturally as I could be, and I’d like to say that this is the best thing on Global Warming hysteria I’ve read for ages. This movement can’t be understood in conventional left-right terms.
Professor Deming’s historical parallel re-introduces the humanist dimension to the debate which Mike Hulme, ex-Met Office climatologist, has been pleading for. This was thrown out when Mann’s hockeystick was used effectively to abolish the Mediaeval Warming Period. By saying “My statistical games with tree rings are wiser than your history books” Mann enacted a minor Cultural Revolution, which, like Chairman Mao’s, was aimed at abolishing the past the better to manipulate the future. We need historians as much as scientists to counter this menace.
REPLY: Well said sir, and thank you. – Anthony
Count me as one of the few who seriously believes in the superiority of Western society. But Prof. Deming is right; we are few. Almost all of my European friends (and many of my American acquaintances) vehemently reject the view of Western exceptionalism. It makes it very difficult to hold a rational discussion with them about anything, when they begin from the premise that the last 200 years of western civilization have been the greatest evil humankind has known in its history. It’s difficult to find common ground when your opponent insists, without hope of comprimise, that we must destroy, in the name of ‘saving the planet’ all I hold dear. Like Dr. Deming, I am pessimistic about our future.
As a professional historian, I must disagree with your basic premise comparing the 19th century Xhosa with the 21st century climate change advocates. The key difference that you gloss over is the degree of cultural powerlessness and destruction faced by beach entity. In the 1850s, the Xhosa had witnessed their culture face near complete destruction at the hands of the Boer and English colonists. They had met multiple defeats with a resulting loss of autonomy and of lands – most importantly, their religious worldview was called into question.
It anything, the opposite applies to climate change advocates. They inherit education and political power from the wealthiest and most powerful societies on earth. Both individually and organizationally, they represent those with power and affluence, not the dispossessed. A far more apt comparison would be with millennial movements in American history that attracted the more affluent – such as Millerism. In the case of Millerism, people who were among the advantaged cast off their worldly vices in the expectation of the immediate Second Coming. Unfortunately, October 22, 1844 came and went without the return of the Messiah – an event now known as the Great Disappointment.
Google “Great Disappointment” – the comparisons are far more apt.
Chris (09:32:27) :
” We are not a Democracy. We are a constititional republic. ”
“I thought we were an autononous collective” (Monty Python and the Holy Grail.)
Seriously though, thanks for an interesting and thought provoking article.
The whole of Western society is thusly afflicted.
One has to wonder how many other instances there are of civilizations imploding themselves.
And, there are always ‘other’ countries and civilizations more than happy to step into the gap left. Nature abhors a vacuum.
I can hear the roars of laughter and picture the faces smirking in wild-eyed glee around the fireplaces in the East, as the West proceeds to fall upon its sword.
I blogged that piece last month and it was amazing how many people attacked it. Bottom line…. some people just don’t see beyond political spin and agendas.
One of the things that I harp about is that will all of the focus on CO2 / Global Warming / and a mad rush for alternative energy the populace is being done a great disservice. Man has been blessed with a fairly stable climate during the Holocene, the current interglacial. We were blessed during the 20th century with a very, very, stable climate. But, that not the nature of earth’s climate. Sooner or later it will once again become more volatile and place grave challenges before man. Deep cooling would be the worst scenario, but, regardless of the direction climate takes man needs to be learning to adapt and prepare for that adaptation.
Alternative energy does play a role. However, the technology that is given the most focus must be capable of functioning not only in great warmth and sunlight but also in frigid conditions. Further, though some improvements have been made, much of the worlds electrical grid systems are susceptible to failure due to ice storms, etc. Few care because they are being assured of a warmer climate. A dangerous oversight and reliance on the climate warming.
Food production, transportation, and industry are all at risk whether we warm or cool. Cooling again being the worst scenario. Yet, most programs in the mix fail to adequately address the complications which may arise. Other potential issues are not addressed at all. There is no contingency plan for human survival. Everyone thinks that life is always going to progress and thrive as it always has. It can, but only if we work on adaptation to climate changes in either direction.
On my blog I have a video series titled Stories From The Stone Age. Not only does this documentary provide and insight into the advancement of man it also shows early civilizations adapting to an ever changing climate and regional conditions. Something that we really should be aware of and prepared for. They faced an ever changing climate. Can modern man?
Many feel that ‘modern man’ is better suited to adapt than early man was. We are, however, in some ways less capable. We are dependent upon modern technology for heat, for cooling, for water, for food, for transportation. If any one, or combination of those, is compromised we have a very serious problem. We are so tied to them that our societies would quickly crumble without them. Where early man could quickly adapt, we cannot.
Modern man has been most fortunate, lucky. But, geologic history indicates we cannot expect to live in our current utopia forever. It is time for man to focus on adapting to the climate. Attempting to control it, to change it, is futile and irresponsible. Part of the science community, and most of the political community are failing to maintain ethic and pursuit of the moral responsibility they have to mankind. They have been seduced by ill gotten fame, power, and money.
Al Gore and others promise a great deal. The problem is; their track record as prophets is dismal.
The American philosopher Ken Wilber identified what he calls the “Pre-Trans Fallacy”.
This is where people take an interest in radically new ideas, which go beyond conventional thinking, but along the way end up mistakenly believing pre-conventional ideas.
For example, people in the West have taken up Buddhism. A book on Zen may talk about freeing oneself from the mind and dualistic thinking. Students try to do this and end up in a state where they just go with their gut feelings, even when those gut feelings are nothing more than selfish impulsivity.
When I read Hansen talking about “saving Creation”, I can’t help but wonder that there is a great deal of confusion going on in a similar fashion.
There is indeed a lot to be said for post-conventional ideas–new ideas, radical thinking, outside the box, and progressive, but PRE-conventional stuff takes us back to pre-rationality, to beliefs, to blind faith, to magical thinking, which is what those people of that tribe were stuck in.
I am greatly concerned that the earth’s rotation is slowing and feel as a precaution we should introduce human sacrifices at noon to lower inertia and ensure that the sun will go down each day.
There was a 2 hour long line up for the new iPhone si. Yet we are told that we have to stop industry and growth and revert to a “simpler” way of life. We cannot have it both ways. We need technology to develop cleaner and more efficient energy sources. This has been happening. We need to be strong economically for this advancement to take place. The youth of today want all the conveniences that tech will afford, but do not seem to understand that this stuff doesn’t just “appear” out of the blue. Great article and I have always been shocked by what people will fall for when under stress. Is this what the fear-mongering is for? To create stress (where there is none) so that people will do anything to be relieved of the false threat? Me thinks it is so.
Love the article.
The idiocy of us westerners will become apparent very soon as we spend money to make money and tax to give prosperity.
I’m sorry my son will live through it because while I can’t predict the future, we aren’t being left with an option to avoid it. What will the pretty liberal college girls eat when we’re all starving. All this just to give greedy politicians more of the power they already abuse.
And we’re only talking about a couple degrees C.
Interesting piece, I always thought that Eugenics, and perhaps Prohibition, were reasonable parallels to AGW, at least in the US, maybe worldwide though.
Popular movements with the political and science “elite”, scientific “consensus” on the overall benefits to humanity (ignoring the costs), Main Stream Media onboard, ground swell of public support, laws are enacted, popular support dwindles, and then a long period to recover from mass hysteria and assess the overall damage done.
Some of the Eugenics laws did not come off the books until the 60’s/70’s, so much for a short period of cap and trade eh?
John Egan (10:08:50) :
While the Millerites might be deemed to be more akin to modern day doomsayers in that they were not disenfranchised or culturally dislocated, the movement was not culturally important to Western civilization as a whole. Most people thought these people were nut cases and most of these cases in Western history are merely interesting vignettes into human nature but not historically important. The story of the Xhosa is one of complete self immolation of a people due to a faulty world view. If it is slightly further removed from AGW catastrophism as an analogy, in its results I fear it may be closer to the mark because of its prevalence throughout Western civilization.
The analogy breaks down. Alarmists can’t say it has gotten colder because we didn’t stop burning CO2.
Chinese… have 2,000 coal-fired power plants, and are currently constructing new ones at the rate of one a week.
If only the US would do this. The people who are suffering the most from the US not doing this is the elderly. Their monthly heating bills in the winter would be lowered if we would build more coal power plants. They have to cut all costs to the bone already to make it month to month.
Do James Hansen and Darryl Hannah know how much suffering they could cause with higher energy bills?
Mass Hypochondriac Disorder driven by Greenhouse Gas Sensitivity!
I generally appreciate stone monuments to causes lost, won – celebrated or mourned.
This one featuring the bovine horns is creepy. Can’t say just why.
So one wonders. What shapes and symbols will future monuments commemorating the AGW scam feature?
Maybe the other end of the cow?
Suggestions welcome.
REPLY: Probably some artistic variation on a spiral light bulb – Anthony
Hannah, Hansen, Gore and the rest of them all belong in a padded room.
None of this is accidental and all of it is according to plan.