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).)
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Jeff L (07:36:32) :
“All I can say is “Wow!” If that isn’t the pot calling the kettle black, then I don’t know what is!”
Perhaps this:
“Repeated use of it [skepticism] has led to mental weakness, dullness and an insanity either of a violent sort in which the victim is pursued by terrible sense-illusions, with insomnia and acute mania, or of an imbecile-lethargic kind, resulting in incurable dementia. . . . .Children of [skeptics] are said to be inferior; in some parts of India, where [denial] has long been used to excess, whole communities are imbecilic and morally degraded.” The American Scholar (Phi Beta Kappa Society) Winter 1938/39
Note: ‘skeptic/denial’ replaced ‘marijuana’ – From U.S. gov’t “Reefer Madness”
There is a pleasure sure in being mad which none but madmen know. John Dryden.
The real problems come when open dissent and civil disobedience is carried out with the support of a government rather than against it.
In effect a government making use of such support for it’s own purposes places itself above the law and before long has to take increasingly assertive steps to maintain control, often involving the suspension of the rule of law or a dilution or cessation of democratic constraints.
In that context I am concerned that some of President Obama’s representatives are involved with climate and environmental activists at a high level.
Does he know what he is doing ?
We shall see.
Bernie
“Perhaps we should come up with a button or some other visible marker that would allow us climate skeptics “
How’s about a yellow armband with “CO2” writ large?
Whatever malady the AGW skeptics have, it is slowly becoming a near epidemic as more and more Americans are catching it. They now represent a majority or 44% and their numbers are growing fast. It must be the scientific truth that is making them behave the way they do.
According to Angus Reid Global Monitor dated January 29, 2009 many people in the United States regard climate change as a real challenge, according to a poll by Rasmussen Reports. 64 per cent of respondents say global warming is very or somewhat serious.
While 41 per cent of respondents say global warming is caused mostly by human activity, 44 per cent believe it is part of long-term planetary trends.
Is global warming caused primarily by human activity or by long term planetary trends?
Jan. 2009 Dec. 2008 Apr. 2008
Human activity 41% 43% 47%
Long term planetary trends 44% 43% 34%
Some other reason 7% 6% 8%
Not sure 9% 8% 11%
Source: Rasmussen Reports
Methodology: Telephone interviews with 1,000 American adults, conducted on Jan. 15 and Jan. 16, 2009. Margin of error is 3 per cent.
I believe part of the problem is the increased isolation of urban populations from nature. They imagine that food comes from grocery stores, and gasoline from the gas station, and don’t see how dirty and dusty and smelly any true natural resource extraction is. Thus people say we should just stop cutting trees, as if this would have no consequences. Or try to stop all oil extraction activities, as if it was something we don’t really need. Or sue farmers for dust and smells when they build out in the country. I further note that many of those (maybe most of them) who make extreme statements like this work in jobs where you don’t have to make a profit and where tradeoffs are not obvious, such as being a college professor or artist or famous musician. They don’t see how doubling energy prices would put a business under, or that energy is even needed for things. It is the disneyfication of public sensibilities (animals are cute and talk, and dust and smells don’t exist).
Stephen Wilde: “In effect a government making use of such support for it’s own purposes places itself above the law and before long has to take increasingly assertive steps to maintain control, often involving the suspension of the rule of law or a dilution or cessation of democratic constraints.
In that context I am concerned that some of President Obama’s representatives are involved with climate and environmental activists at a high level.”
Well said. This is part of the four stages of Marxist subversion of democracy as revealed by ex-KGB defector Yuri Aleksandrovic Bezmenov. He said Marxists in elite positions would support protests and activists which appear to the public to be grassroots revolutions but are completely controlled from positions of authority.
Nearly every dictator has also manipulated sections of the public to perform popular uprisings against his detractors and competition or to help him to force an agenda on the rest of the population.
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=66245842658CE1AF
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=4CDAB99FAB5980BA
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=A6C3EE7F4E9EFB07
Let us consider one type of true believer, those who go to church because they believe (and not just because they are lonely). They will tend to think that non-believers are lost, and are sinners and feel sad for them, but do NOT think they are crazy. In the green church, the level of belief is also high, but there is a difference from religion which is based on a concept called Faith. The green church is based on Science (supposedly) which is “logical”. To fail to believe something so “logical” can only be the result of mental defect. Thus all of this follows from the simple fact of the choice of God one has. The religious God allows one to choose to believe or not (though you’ll get punished later), but if your lack of belief can only be understood as a mental disorder, well….we have treatments for that. And clearly you don’t debate with crazy people or allow them to give interviews on television. It all makes perfect sense, in a really really disturbing way.
Craig Loehle (10:26:32) :
Exactly! And there’s probably no solution, except devastatingly hard times. Maybe things will actually get bad enough that some tenured professors get laid off!
I recognized that the yellow star parallel would immediately come to mind. However, I believe there is a huge difference between those who self-identify and those who are branded. Wearing a small national flag lapel pin would work fine — if we chose to do it. The point is that one can always marginalize what is claimed to be a small group. It becomes much harder to marginalize a group that appears to be both large and normal-looking. The PR battle is a battle. SImply to get people in the media to seriously look at the data is going to take more than a a few blogs.
I am not sure about you, but I actually do not know where a significant number of my 30 or so colleagues stand on this issue. SInce I am in Massachusetts I can hazard a guess – but I certainly do not know.
Craig Lohle,
You make a point which few people bring up. The Alarmists can get away with what they do for the simple fact that many Americans haven’t a clue what is involved in sustaining our standard of living. From the supply chain manager who finds the most effiecient way to supply an industry to the trucker who drives his refrigirated rig to the local market, fossil fuels are the backbone of our nation. Just think how much oil and natural gas are burnt in San Jose just to run the thousands of server farms located there. However, the current governing body may just educate the populace yet. Between the President’s coming war on CO2 to the approaching collapse of our financial sectors, we may all get a crash course in austerity very soon. Question: how long will people in Burlington Vermont tolerate life in the winter without California grown lettuce or Florida oranges? How long could brewers in Virginia continue to sell ales without hops? (hint: 90% of the hops grown in the US come from Washington-Oregon-Idaho). How many Americans are prepared to buy $150 per month for internet access?
A year ago such talk was confined to Art Bell’s late night radio show. But a year ago the Dow sat at 11,000 and there were 5 million more people employed. The dire warnings of our anointed climate experts are becoming less and less important. Suddenly, spending trillions of dollars on yet unearned future wealth in order to achieve a quarter degree drop in global temperatures doesn’t seem like such a hot idea. Yesterday on my way home from work I passed an empty RV plant where hundreds of forelorn RV chasis sat rusting in the yards. This should bring tears of joy to the Climate Alarmists. Call me insane, but I put the 2500 workers and thier families who once worked at that RV factory before some abstract notion of climate disaster.
wow all this hysteria for only 42 members? Time to relax guys, don’t take yourself too serious…
Global warming could just have been a technical problem, but it has for many people come to signify a new moral and ethical culture, a new movement.
The basic pattern is: We freed ourselves from racism, and now we must free ourselves from environmental criminals.
People’s comments here are sometimes snipped or discouraged for describing AGW supporters as being “religious”, but bear in mind that the environmental movement is making ethical and moral demands of everyone on the planet, and ethical moral issues are essentially the domain of religion, in the sense that religion is often about teaching people how they should live their lives for the common good (with variations on this theme throughout the diverse religions of the world).
Al Gore supports this, as he openly says that global warming is an ethical and spiritual matter. Many people who are not religious, in the traditional sense of belonging to a church or mosque, nonetheless describe themselves as “spiritual”. I even see it as a option on dating websites, you can tick to describe yourself as
“spiritual but not religious”.
Spirituality —- as in, how should I live? what is of most value in life? what should my values be? what philosophy should I adhere to in life? how should I regard my fellow men and women? and how should I act? what is an ethical action? —- spirituality in that sense is at the core for people who are fervently and passionately desiring to see progress in global warming legislation, and in culture at large.
I guess that the fact that your friend simply stops talking to you, and decides that you are too unacceptable to be aquatinted with anymore, is an example of people taking the moral ethical spiritual issue of global warming to heart. You have shown yourself to be a very “bad” person. A person of very dubious moral character.
Whilst WUWT is essentially a science site, which is great because first and foremost we need to know if global warming is real or not, we will continue to run into these ethical spiritual conflicts whilst looking at AGW supporters, because that is for many people the core concern; ie. many people believe climate change because they are most concerned with the spiritual aspects, not the scientific aspects. Science be damned, if it turns out that AGW is a false theory, these people would rather keep it quiet so they can keep using AGW as a convenient means of pushing people towards that new spiritual outlook where we are all one connected and united planet. Many people desire a united world, and if AGW can serve that purpose, then why not? (The power of myth has historically united many disparate tribes in ancient times).
Anyway, there is nothing wrong with people becoming ethically and spiritually more connected to the whole world. That is a good thing in general. The problem is, most people are not genuinely able to really do that. Some estimate that 20% of Westerners are capable of holding in their hearts a united world ethical vision, and meanwhile most of the world, from Zimbabwe to North Korea to Egypt to Russia to China to Poland, most people of the world are just trying to build their own country and their own power base and their own economy and carve out their own place in the world. They are 50 years away from any sort of united world vision. Some places are barely able to function as countries, let alone as global communities.
The Greens who keep urging us to “think globally” really need to get out there and see what the globe is really like. They need to see that the vast majority of humanity does not share their ethical green vision. These climate protesters who, as in the case the other day, walk up to our politicians and throw custard in their face, these protesters seem unable to imagine that actually other people don’t see the world the way they do. OK, so the protester wants to save the world. Fine. Most of the world doesn’t want to be saved in that way. And it is a highly egocentric stance to imagine that nobody else could have any concerns that are also important. I’m going to save the world and you have to listen because I am right and my issue is bigger than anybody else’s issues and you had all better listen or you are all evil!
The peculiar thing about these commentators who write about climate change deniers, and describe them as people locked in “cultural ignorance” is that the same criticism could equally well be applied to the climate activists themselves. And yet they never seem to stop to question themselves. None of us can see our own shadows–that’s why they are called shadows, because they can’t be seen–but we can at least keep trying to question ourselves. Question, am I really right? How can I be so sure? What if other people also have something to say?
The most damning thing about the climate change movement, for me as a non-scientist, is their apparent self-assuredness. I would trust someone who spoke about problems with data, doubts, and question the whole thing. They can still in balance say that climate change is real, but at least show some open mindedness to self-questioning. “The debate is over” signaled that it most certainly was not.
Well, I’m thinking of heading for Texas, with an axe, a long rifle and a lot of ammunition.
I’m a keen reader of Spiked on Line, I dont always agree with it but it does provoke debate.
Sadly climate change is not a subject which seems capable of debate for the AGW supporters. Anyone who disagrees is either mental/ evil / or in the pocket of big business. Strangely they envoke the term ” denier” as in Holocaust denier, but actually it is they who freqently use Nazi/ Stalin ( as pointed out by Aaron) techniques to avoid any debate on the subject. What are they so frightened off?
They scream foul, that we are being misinformed , but where are we getting this from. Here in the UK the BBC / SKY sing AGW in unison and I would Image the same is true elsewhere in US & Europe.
All I ask for a a proper debate , without spin , and correct facts
From the article, “As Proctor argues, when society doesn’t know something, it’s often because special interests work hard to create confusion”
This is typical.
My English Literature student friends used to do that; deconstruct your argument and references and facts to expose your underlying greed, racism, or hypocrisy. Never mind dealing with the merits of the argument on a logical or rational basis, they could simply assume that the only reason for your “reason” was your own underlying nefarious motivation.
Racists in South Africa used to claim that they needed Apartheid for the economy to work and now you AGW skeptics say you need oil for the economy, blah blah we’ve heard that reasoning before blah blah you’re just greedy and we know it.
It is a really hard person to deal with, because they don’t feel they need to listen to anything you say. “Yeah, well, you would say that…”
Now I’m not claiming to be pure in spirit. But the problem with their argument is that they assume that they are pure in spirit—-that they are free of nefarious “special interests.”
Somehow all the AGW skepticism is due to disinformation from special interests, whilst all AGW support is from people who have no special interest….?!
Well, they certainly don’t ACT like they don’t have an interest.
“The basic pattern is: We freed ourselves from racism, and now we must free ourselves from environmental criminals.”
Calling people climate criminals for supplying you with the energy that fuels your productivity, prosperity and freedom is nothing short of disgusting vitriol. They use the best technology they can at any given moment to get that energy to you and they invest billions to make it happen. Are you jealous that they get paid well for their work? How about the millions of working class shareholders and employees who directly benefit? How about the massive taxes they pay at the pump?
Stop demonising energy and the suppliers.
Sorry Stefano, discard my previous post re: climate criminals. I had only read your first paragraph before replying and thought you were using the term that Greens and Marxists have been using to attack managers at energy utility companies.
Aron, no problem, I was talking as if I was in their voice. I agree with your comment. They don’t appreciate what they have been given. They are trying to saw off the branch which they are sitting on.
Timbrom,
Come on down. We’re gonna need all the help we can get.
Aside from the risk that cap-and-trade could devastate our economy, there are already costs being incurred from merely the fear of GW. A large percentage of articles in conservation and ecology journals is devoted to what if studies about effects of climate change. This is instead of furthering understanding of ecosystems, saving endangered species, increasing clean water, or anything useful. Resources are being diverted. Second, international aid agencies are diverting money from development into carbon sequestration and talk about sustainable development, which means I think not really allowing development to proceed far enough that the people can afford a car and TV. It is costly to take your eye off the ball.
pft–
Do you have links for those quotes? They are absolutely fantastic!
Here are a few quotes:
http://infowars.wordpress.com/2009/02/13/enviroment-eugenics-quotes/
Here’s another quote I like. I posted it on another thread:
“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Tricky to be happy if you can’t stay warm by burning stuff!
This is actually a fairly typical response. If you don’t have a logical argument, you claim your opponent in the debate is crazy. Should they present a conclusion and you ask to see the data from which that conclusion derived and the method of reaching that conclusion, you are branded as some kind of troublemaker for not simply “believing”.
I could probably produce a mathematical computer model that shows that intelligent life lives on Titan and can even estimate the population. Considering the atmosphere is some 1.5% methane, there must be intelligent life that that mostly eats beans. Considering how much methane a human would produce if given a diet of mostly beans, and considering how much methane is in the atmosphere, we can then determine how many such bean eating beings there must be in order to produce that much methane. See, simple! And I can run that model and it will show that given that many bean eaters, I will have exactly as much methane in the atmosphere as observations show … which would be much more accurate than the climate models we currently have which are not in sync with actual observed data.
The problem the “warmers” have is that they continue to adhere to “the models” which have not in a single case that I am aware of been validated with observed data.
Now you tell me who is “crazy”,