From Spiked-online.com
(h/t to Trevor Gunter)
NOTE FROM ANTHONY: this topic is rather contentious, even though temptation abounds and emotions will run high, please refrain from playing climate gutter ball. Comments will be snipped that stray far from decorum.
Wednesday 4 March 2009
Pathologising dissent? Now that’s Orwellian
Brendan O’Neill
A few months ago, for a joke, I set up a Facebook group called ‘Climate change denial is a mental disorder’. It’s a satirical campaigning hub for people who think that climate change denial should be recognised as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association, and that its sufferers – who probably engage in ‘regular chanting and intensive brainwashing sessions in cult-like surroundings’ – should be offered ‘eco-lobotomies’ to remove ‘the denying part of their brain’. The group now has 42 members. Yes, some have signed up because they get the joke, but others are serious subscribers to the denial-as-insanity idea. ‘Thank God I’ve found this group’, says one new member, who is sick of other Facebook groups being ‘hijacked’ by unhinged eco-sceptics.
The idea that ‘climate change denial’ is a psychological disorder – the product of a spiteful, wilful or simply in-built neural inability to face up to the catastrophe of global warming – is becoming more and more popular amongst green-leaning activists and academics. And nothing better sums up the elitism and authoritarianism of the environmentalist lobby than its psychologisation of dissent. The labelling of any criticism of the politics of global warming, first as ‘denial’, and now as evidence of mass psychological instability, is an attempt to write off all critics and sceptics as deranged, and to lay the ground for inevitable authoritarian solutions to the problem of climate change. Historically, only the most illiberal and misanthropic regimes have treated disagreement and debate as signs of mental ill-health.
This weekend, the University of West England is hosting a major conference on climate change denial. Strikingly, it’s being organised by the university’s Centre for Psycho-Social Studies. It will be a gathering of those from the top of society – ‘psychotherapists, social researchers, climate change activists, eco-psychologists’ – who will analyse those at the bottom of society, as if we were so many flitting, irrational amoeba under an eco-microscope. The organisers say the conference will explore how ‘denial’ is a product of both ‘addiction and consumption’ and is the ‘consequence of living in a perverse culture which encourages collusion, complacency and irresponsibility’ (1). It is a testament to the dumbed-down, debate-phobic nature of the modern academy that a conference is being held not to explore ideas – to interrogate, analyse and fight over them – but to tag them as perverse.
Leading green writers have welcomed the West England get-together to study the denying masses. One eco-columnist says the conference might generate ideas for dealing with those who are ‘pathologically’ opposed to the environmental movement (pathology, according to my OED, is the study of ‘morbid or abnormal mental or moral conditions’) (2). Environmentalists recognise the inherent elitism of saying that, while they brave few can see things clearly, the rest of us are somehow disordered (greens are the ‘watchful ones amongst the slaves’, according to one environmentalist writer); yet they seem unashamed. The eco-columnist says this weekend’s conference will be useful because where ‘mainstream politics now largely “gets” environmentalism’, there is still a sceptical mass, ‘a baying and growing crowd, largely consisting of people resistant to the prospect of ever having to alter their lifestyles’. Apparently this crowd ‘gathers to hurl invective’ at environmentalist ideas, such as recycling and low-energy lightbulbs (3).
In a sense, this vision of elite, brainy environmentalists on one side and a baying, insult-hurling crowd on the other speaks, however accidentally and however crudely, to an underlying truth: environmentalism remains a largely elitist project, beloved of politicians, priests and prudes keen to control people’s behaviour and curb our excessive lifestyles, and it rubs many ‘ordinary people’ up the wrong way. Of course much of the public goes along with the environmentalist ethos, bowing to the central idea that mankind is destructive and observing such rituals as sorting their rubbish, but they do so half-heartedly, recognising that, fundamentally, greens’ anti-consumerist, anti-reproduction, anti-travel arguments run counter to their own personal aspirations. Yet rather than recognise this frequently hidden divide between the green elite and the ‘baying crowd’ as one built on differences of opinion, on clashing aspirations, even on rational assessments by sections of the public that recycling is a waste of time, increasingly environmentalists pathologise it, turning it into evidence of their wisdom in contrast to the public’s mental instability.
University departments, serious authors, think-tanks and radical activists are embracing the ‘psychological disorder’ view of climate change scepticism. At Columbia University in New York, the Global Roundtable on Public Attitudes to Climate Change studies the ‘completely baffling’ response of the public to the threat of climate change, exploring why the public has been ‘so slow to act’ despite the ‘extraordinary information’ provided by scientists. Apparently, our slack response is partly a result of our brain’s inability to assess ‘pallid statistical information’ in the face of fear (4). The Ecologist magazine also talks about the ‘psychology of climate change denial’ and says the majority of people (excluding those ‘handfuls of people who have already decided to stop being passive bystanders’: the green elite again) have responded to warnings of global warming by sinking into ‘self-deception and mass denial’ (5). An online magazine called Climate Change Denial is dedicated to analysing the public’s ‘weird and disturbed’ response to climate change (6).
John Naish, the celebrated author of the anti-consumerism treatise Enough!, says our consumerist behaviour, with its promise of ‘ecological disaster’, ultimately springs from the fact that we’re all using the ‘wrong brain’. Our culture, all those flashy ads and temptations to buy, buy, buy and be fat and happy, is aimed at stimulating our ‘primordial instinct’, our ‘reptilian brain, which is responsible for arousal, basic life functions and sex’, says Naish. It neglects and makes lazy our ‘neocortex, the intelligent brain we evolved in the Pleicestocene era’. In short, we’re behaving like animals rather than intelligent beings; indeed, says Naish, our consumer culture is sending us ‘knuckle-dragging into ecological disaster’ (7). In a less hysterical and monkey-obsessed fashion, Al Gore, the king of climate change activism, says the media are warping people’s minds and actively encouraging thoughtlessness and climate change denial, giving rise to a public response to ecological disaster that is not ‘modulated by logic, reason or reflective thought’ (8).
The labelling of those who question certain scientific ideas or green ways of life as ‘deniers’, ‘addicts’ and ‘reptiles’ with a ‘baffling’ inability to understand The Science and act accordingly has a deeply censorious bent. If ‘climate change denial’ is a form of mass denial and self-deception, a fundamentally psychological disorder, then there is no need to engage in a meaningful public debate; instead people just need to be treated. Thus the Ecologist says ‘denial cannot simply be countered with information’; indeed there is apparently ‘plentiful historical evidence that increased information may even intensify denial’ (9). The respected British think-tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research, goes so far as to insist that ‘the task of climate change agencies is not to persuade by rational argument but in effect to develop and nurture a new “common sense”’ (10). This is the logical conclusion to treating disagreement as ‘denial’ and dissent as a ‘disorder’: no debate, no real information, just an insidious demand to change The Culture in order to relax the wrong side of our brains or to inject us with a new commonsensical outlook.
The psychologisation of climate change denial – even the very use of that term: denial – reveals how utterly aloof and cut off are the environmental elitists from mass society. They cannot comprehend, indeed are ‘baffled’ by, our everyday behaviour, our desire to have families, our resistance to hectoring, our dream of being wealthier, better travelled, our hopes of living life to the full. For them, such behaviour is irresponsible and it runs counter to the ‘extraordinary information’ provided by scientists. They seriously expect people to make life decisions on the basis of pie charts and graphs drawn up in laboratories in Switzerland, rather than on the basis of what they and their families need and, yes, what they want. That the green lobby is so perturbed by our failure to act in accordance with scientific findings shows the extent to which, for them, The Science is a new gospel truth and religious-style guide to life, and anyone who disobeys it is a sinner, heretic or deranged individual, a moral leper of the twenty-first century.
Psychologising dissent, and refusing to recognise, much less engage with, the substance of people’s disagreements – their political objections, their rational criticisms, their desire to do things differently – is the hallmark of authoritarian regimes. In the Soviet Union, outspoken critics of the ruling party were frequently tagged as mentally disordered and faced, as one Soviet dissident described it, ‘political exile to mental institutions’ (11). There they would be treated with narcotics, tranquillisers and even electric shock therapy. In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, O’Brien, the torturer in Room 101, offers to cure our hero Winston Smith of his anti-party thinking. ‘You are mentally deranged!’ he tells him. Today the word ‘Orwellian’ is massively overused, to describe everything from fingerprint library cards to supermarket loyalty cards, but treating your dissenters as deranged? That really is Orwellian, and we should declare permanent war against it.
Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked. Visit his website here. His satire on the green movement – Can I Recycle My Granny and 39 Other Eco-Dilemmas – is published by Hodder & Stoughton in October. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)
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I am both proud and dismayed to report that my friends and colleagues in Texas saw this coming almost a year ago.
Every gun shop within 50 miles has been stripped-clean of semiautomatic weapons. Ammo sales are up over 50%. Every time there’s another wacky leftist pronouncement (like this one), there’s yet another flurry of activity. E-mails fly, guns get bought, folks get even more edgy. Nobody’s getting a “carry permit” or joining the NRA, as those activities “put your name on a list.”
There are likely more AR-15s (the civilian M-16) in my county that in the entire country of Mexico. And that doesn’t count the AKs.
When I asked an old Texan why everyone was over-reacting, he referred me to the flag that the Texicans carried at the Battle of San Jacinto; in the middle is the silhouette of the small cannon that the Texicans “liberated” from a Mexican armory. Around the cannon it says in big letters “COME AND TAKE IT”.
He said that all the talk was fine, folks had a right to be as stupid as they wanted. However, he said, “just don’t cross that threshold.”
To paraphrase Rick Blaine (Bogey) in Casablanca, “Mr. President, there are parts of this country I wouldn’t advise you to invade.”
Well, I don’t agree that environmentalists are all elitist, authoritarian, snooty school marms. It does, however, have a religious element that attracts people like that, and they are out in force on the AGW debate. I prefer to keep to the science and let the political ranters have their own space.
Nevertheless, in a lengthy debate over AGW on another blog, I found myself tagged as a victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect] AMAZING. The fact that I disagreed meant that I was not competent to understand the issue. The Inquisition would have been amused!
Skepticism is just a personality trait that requires more proof of a proposal before it is considered fact. The antonym of skeptical is gullible. Gullible people are more trusting and accept proposals as fact readily.
Consider a bell curve of all people with the leftmost low end of the chart representing gullible people who believe those e-mails from Nigeria, and on the rightmost low end the most skeptical who when hearing that their mother loves them, check out the story. Of course the high end of the bell represents most of the population who need some proof of a new idea but are still somewhat trusting.
Keeping in mind that skepticism is a requirement of critical thinking, mark on the chart the creative people who have invented and built the technology that we rely on today.
I’m proud to be on the right side of that bell curve.
I regard the dismissal of “climate deniers” as a form of racism. Milgram showed that those most likely to totally abuse human rights could well be mild, gentle, want-to-be-liked people – when told what to do by some kind of “authority”. I know the truth of this from personal experience quite apart from climate skeptics. But at the same time, I’m aware of the capacity of human beings to do good as well as bad, and I always want to hold up for the highest potential, without being blind.
We may have tough years ahead, as growing population, and diminishing non-renewable resources, eventually affect us, even though Ehrlich was badly wrong regarding numbers and dates,and I don’t like his attitudes either. But just as rats go crazy with “overpopulation” at a certain point, we may have to look at the same driving forces in our collective unconscious. Yet we are not animal but human, and we also have abilities to invent, create, improve, discover, reorientate, and seek integrity. We owe so much to the power of plentiful energy and technology – but see how dependent we have become. Clearly there are takeover bids for the planet, in the name of environmentalism, that seem to harness good reasons in the service of extremely dubious reasons. But there are also good people everywhere. And there is Great Spirit who can bring miracles to help situations of distress, to those who ask for help. I’m not a creationist or evolutionist because I find elements of truth in all points of view. Today’s urban population have largely lost connection with the seasons, the roots of sustainability, and the sense of wholeness taught by the best Native American wisdom. People try to recapture that lost sense by fair means and foul.
Nothing is as simple as it seems.
However, it is interesting that Big God in the Sky who Sent You to Hell if you did not Believe his Priests, has had a makeover.
We are seeing the end game of big government.
The only question is whether their final thrashing about in all directions will take us all down with them for a short time or for a long time.
The biggest risk is the type of people who get elected out of desperation in the minds of the electorate.
It’s weird to hear so many bleating about the evils of globalisation when they really only mean free market entities with global interests.
There seems to be no problem with globalisation if it is in the hands of an overweening global governmental organisation.
All our current problems arise from the attempts of past and present governments and intergovernmental organisations to themselves become global players and, in the course of those attempts, corrupting and abusing several hundred years of checks and balances that enabled the free markets to prosper for the benefit of people worldwide.
It is those who have destroyed the global economy who think that more of the same is the proper solution and while they are about it they pretend they can control climate as a cover for their dash for undemocratic power.
This is nothing to do with left and right. Stalin and Hitler were supposedly left and right respectively but shared strategies and governing styles.
It is a matter of authoritarianism or freedom for the entire globe.
The Chicken Little Complex
Your task, should you be courageous enough to accept it, is to document and evaluate the causes and consequences of global warming activists embracing global warming models without statistical validation.
This climactic phobia is driving these global warming activists to prohibit use of stored solar energy (coal and oil) without providing alternative transport fuels or reliable electrical energy. Such efforts are projected to divert $45,000,000,000 away from productive efficient use into higher cost less efficient systems controlled by central governments.
The unimpeded consequences of such actions are likely to cause catastrophic reductions in global economies resulting in hundreds of millions of deaths by famine from irrational political action induced by fear.
By the way, the Siberia of the US will be Wallowa County in Oregon. Which works great for me. I already live there AND I have a sign on my door that says, “Welcome to the Nut House”.
One more thing. I hate being painted as a conservative, just because I question the underlying science of AGW, as much as I hate being painted as a religious neanderthal. I also hate the constant drumbeat of the “left”. I am a democrat. A democrat has as much brain matter as a conservative. Our labels are not capable of being descriptive. They are used by people who think in stereotypes instead of doing the work of reasoned examination. We can all think for ourselves and take it upon ourselves to question mainstream ANYTHING! Our political labels don’t describe us. So don’t paint me this color or that.
Rant off
Suggesting sending people to re-education ‘camps’ for being a ‘denialist’? Good grief, that concept is so old fashioned, as well as being very poor English.
Paranoia of the nature exhibited and the neoligisms emanating from some members of the ‘eco’ faction could possibly be construed as evidence of schizophrenia. People should be very careful before slinging accusations of ‘denialism’ being a form of mental illness. That metaphorical sword has two edges.
Meanwhile Lake Superior is freezing over. Evidence of predicted warming effects failing to appear as previously announced. Noooo! I’m innocent I tell you!
Anthony.
I wish you would not grant them the semblance of sensicality by using their terminology.
Why not title your article something akin “Conference labels proponent of proper data analysis and scientific integrity as having mental disorder”
This is truly what is at the core of the debate; twisting science, the destruction of knowledge, for favoring their little for-personal-profit ideas.
Bruce Cobb (05:52:22) :
Orwell was indeed prescient, just off by about a quarter century.
In fact he was spot on. In 1984 Margaret Thatcher had parliament pass the ‘Public Order Act’ and centralised the police force in the UK. In it’s provisions were included the powers to end the right to free assembly.
The act was used against striking coalminers and the new agers at Stonehenge by cadres of army personnel dressed in black police boiler suits carrying riot batons and shields.
For an encore, she cooked up the co2 warming agenda to undermine the coal miners and push the nuclear and gas industries in which her supporters had invested. – Sound familiar?
She was the leader of the ‘right wing’. This is not a right-left confrontation, do not be fooled by obsolete political categories. As the band Gong put it back in 1971:
They talk about the right wing
They talk about the left wing
For me and you it’s getting pretty frightening
All I can say is “Wow!”
If that isn’t the pot calling the kettle black, then I don’t know what is!
Ayn Rand tried to warn us that there would be people like this….
Correction: That should read Trillion $:
“Such efforts are projected to divert $45,000,000,000,000 away from productive efficient use into higher cost less efficient systems controlled by central governments.”
See: International Energy Agency projects $45 trillion
The problem with this whole issue is that you have two sides who each have ulterior motives – the same one actually. The acquisition and maintenance of power.
The ‘greens’ were all untrained in science or scientists living off an ever-growing gravy train.
The ‘deniers’ were initially in the oil camp, who saw a threat to their profits and power base.
The truth is this: at some stage we will need to diversify our energy supplies. Not today, not tomorrow, but within 50 years.
At the moment, we can’t replace oil in an economic way, so there is a fight going on to control the process of replacement by those who either want to maximise dividends (private interests) or taxation revenues (‘lefties’, ‘greens’).
Sooner or later the two will have to be reconciled.
But right now, what you have are two groups who use their own self-serving websites where it is easy to chide and deride the other lot.
Because it’s far too difficult to actually have to engage with the other lot and challenge all those cherished assumptions which, horror of horrors, may be wrong.
This endless PR stunt of name calling and libel of scientific dissent reminds me of the Nazis labeling of scientists who disagreed with them as Jewish Scientists, and the Soviets practice of sending thier disidents to mental hospitals. I think it was the Nazis who labeled physchology as a “Jewish Science”. It later expanded to physics where Jews played a significant role in developing quantum physics.
Today’s Alarmists find themselves in a similar position in that they cannot defend thier AGW ideas without reverting to name calling and personal attacks.
As a delusional mentally deranged skeptic and lukewarmer I have a brilliant idea that of course is a smentally deranged and delusional as I am.
Why don’t manufacturers and corporations who will be punished by Cap and Trade perform their own acts of civil disobedience and refuse to participate. The CEO’s of said companies do not have to actually be deranged themselves, they just have to be willing to go to jail.
But, really, why should civil disobedience be limited to Greenies?
Syl:
But, really, why should civil disobedience be limited to Greenies?
Indeed.
I propose a ‘fun in the sun’ day when we all head to the Capitol’s parks and gardens to splash in the fountains and swim in the ornamental lakes in flagrant violation of ‘Da Roolz’ 🙂
Followed by a punks picnic involving the consumption of beer in public and even (horror of horrors) the smokig of cigars and cigarettes.
If you don’t take your liberty, they will.
Growing up in the 50’s I remember the bad ‘ol Soviet Union. Stories abounded about mental hospitals that served those that dared to disagree with the state approved political orthodoxy. No sane person would question such authority!
A couple of days ago I had to go to the U of W Medical Center. In the waiting area there was a consciousness magazine that I likened to a lint ball of various causes and therapies all thrown into the blender of those pages. It involved yoga, green living, vegan, crystal therapy, and global warming. I had to pinch myself that I was truly at a scientific medical center. The experience would have been complete if Dr. Steig had walked through the door.
Stephen Wilde (07:00:56)
“This is nothing to do with left and right. Stalin and Hitler were supposedly left and right respectively but shared strategies and governing styles.”
Hitler’s National Socialist (Nazi) party was to the right of Stalin. But in the context of today’s discussion Hitler was far left.
http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761560927/national_socialism.html
Recall that communist regimes use the “psych ward” to control dissidents, where they can drug them and confine them.
Steady now, the treatment for this disorder is a colder climate.
So recovery is imminent.
People! I’m shocked that no one has posted the obvious yet. Your friendly psychologists may or may not believe the hype, but they do realize the millions or billions available to them from taxpayers to study CDS (Climate Derangement Syndrome).
I can hear pens scrawling out grant request right now!
In this world we live.
We all live in a world where without demonization and labeling of enemies, the system stops. You cannot enforce and control without a common purpose so sinister as to threaten all equally. Without it people naturally move to the center on the political spectrum. Most live in the middle and simply move enough left or right to tip the balance. Nowhere is this more evident than in American politics. When things are good and there is no enemy or threat the country drifts to the middle,( some will argue this but please understand that periods of prosperity naturally do this) now when confronted with a real enemy the party in power always gains support short term especially if action is taken, thus moving people in their direction .
The opposition must then create a new or frame an existing enemy that is not being confronted and marginalize the enemy that is (the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are an example here). They then must elevate the new threats above all others. This will move the middle enough to tip the scale.
It is how party politics works including democratic parliamentary multi party systems it is then not a see-saw but a rounded bottom saucer, the only solution is for the middle to become more engaged and elect people with more moderate positions on both sides and if possible Independent candidates that can vote conscience instead of party. Unfortunately that has never happened in human history because we have a system based on the confrontational party of power or coalition of power instead a Administration made up of elected representatives based on skills.
This study is an example of the social-scientific suck-up. Sorry to all scientists that actually do real scientific research in hard sciences. The fields regarding the behavioral and psychological studies of mankind always align themselves with the political landscape because of the little or no value they supply to the civilizations in which they live relies on political funding and support. This research is used for what? To sell us a softer tissue, or create a desire for something you had no idea you needed in the first place, and to influence our voting patterns and create non-existent lines of social seperation. Nice line of work.
Jim Steele,
You may be spot-on with your assessment of the AGW believers as driven by the need to make man the center of the universe. I’ll have to think about it. My assessment of them, from a theological perspective (I am both a Christian and a scientist) is that they are manifestly evil. They are submitting to what I would call a sinful lust for power and control. All of us are prone to lust for something, even if it is only chocolate. When those with political power are consumed with lust for control of others, however, it is Evil writ large. I know many of this site are not religious; I am offering my perspective on what efforts like this truly are. I think my perspective has this value: it prevents me from “misunderestimating” the purposes and intent of these people. We can find them horrifyingly comedic, but we must not take lightly their maniacal and deliberate intention to play God to the rest of us.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism