Fire beyond the end of the world
My literary collaborators and I have been working on a series of novels about a post-nuclear war world, which was, at the time the Two-Day War broke out, already horribly wounded as a result of certain industrial and agricultural practices, global warming, and a number of other horrors. Here's what one of the central characters, a nice lady about 90 years old, has to say about global warming (And see http://polaris93.livejournal.com/751345.html for more on this):
Excerpt from the novel:
At a party, I asked a fundamentalist why she refused to believe that global warming was even a possibility, let alone be already happening, and why she refused to even look at any evidence to support the claim that it was happening. She said that the Devil was responsible for putting the idea of global warming in people’s minds, and making them believe in it. More questions elicited her statement that global warming was simply another pagan faith - that global warming itself was a pagan faith, not just the science that described and predicted it - and that God was testing the faithful by giving all the signs of global warming to see if they would fall to believing it (“fall to believing it” was her term for it, not mine). I asked her, since recent firestorms in Southern California had come about due to record long-term aridity in the areas where the fires had broken out, and that that aridity was highly abnormal, something that only global warming could account for, if fundamentalist friends of hers who still lived in that area got caught in yet another such firestorm and perish of it, would they go to Hell for being roasted alive by that fiery illusion, as she called it? Her response was to storm away, screaming that everyone present was going to Hell and that she didn’t want anything more to do with any of us.
At another such gathering, I asked a libertarian why he refused to believe that global warming was even a possibility, let alone be already happening, and why he refused to even look at any evidence in support of those ideas. He said that it was all due to a conspiracy on the part of scientists to con people into supporting their Socialist agenda or get grant money for useless, worthless research projects because they were too lazy to do real work. I asked him what substantive evidence he had in support of the existence of such a conspiracy. His response included a long dissertation about Ayn Rand, and quotes from Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine that were blatantly inaccurate, but hey, our memories do strange things as we age, don’t they, and the statement that global warming was just another product of quack science. I pointed out that he himself lived in Southern California, about ten miles from where firefighters had brought an egregiously powerful firestorm to its knees and then, in spite of its last pitiful struggles to survive, killed it dead, an event that took place just a year before. I asked him, “Ted, if you get cremated alive by the next firestorm in that area because you can’t get out in time, does that mean you are a Socialist?” His response was to mumble something about having to tend to some urgent business and wander out of the room, presumably leaving the scene of his intellectual crime for good.
The Greens, of course, don’t deny the reality of global warming. But when it comes to effective measures that might work to keep it from getting worse, they are either unable to agree on which of those measures might be acceptable, or even what those measures might be, acceptable or not. Desalinate seawater? Well . . . maybe. But no fair using nuclear reactors to do so - in spite of the fact that nuclear reactors are one of the few things that can be used to desalinate seawater fast enough, in sufficient quantities, to do the job, and that doing whatever is possible to restore groundwater levels to something that can support plant life and cool large areas down to bearable temperatures has an immediate priority far higher than avoiding the long-run risks of nuclear power. If you die of thirst because you refuse to use electricity generated by nuclear power to desalinate enough water for your survival, it’s your own damned fault - and if huge numbers of people and wildlife of all kinds die of thirst because you won’t let them use nuclear power to desalinate seawater, you’re guilty of mass murder. Well, how about acquiring vast amounts of power from the Sun using orbital collectors, and using it to generate enough electrical power to do all that electricity can do for the whole world, power that is virtually free, affordable even for the very poorest of families in the developing world. It wouldn’t add anything to the atmosphere’s burden of carbon dioxide, and in fact would eliminate almost all sources of CO2, especially if electric cars and electrically-driven mass transit became widely used. But no, said various Greens I got to know around the campus, that would pollute space, and anyway, the collectors would be made of plastic, and plastic is bad for the environment. I tried to explain that you can’t pollute space - you’re talking about polluting the entire universe, which is at least some 26 billion light-years across, with whatever Earth might put into outer space, which simply isn’t possible. To which they said that anything more than zero pollutants in space was simply unacceptable, as was any plastic whatsoever. And so on and on and on. In other words, environmental deterioration is bad, but doing anything effective to reverse environmental deterioration of any kind is far worse, no matter how high a priority the latter may be. Remember, many Greens are the same people that believe that burning down Mother Earth to save her is the best way to show one’s love of her. And nothing anyone can say to them makes a dent in their attitudes and resistance to learning anything new.
If such arguments as my opponents in those verbal interchanges gave on this subject sound irrational, join the club: that’s exactly what they are. Numerous people who are eminently sane in any other aspect of their lives are completely irrational when it comes to arguments against doing something effective about any dire environmental peril. The fundamentalists believe they are going to heaven when they die - but only if they refuse to “believe in” (as opposed to believe that, i.e., that there is enough evidence to show that such-and-such is real, as demanded by rules of evidence acceptable to a court of law or the scientific community) such things as global warming; otherwise God will send them to Hell. They can do anything they want in life, perpetrate any crime, act like barbarians, and be forgiven by God; they are, they say, pre-forgiven of all sins (i.e., crimes, violent or otherwise) once they have been baptized, with the exception of modifying any of their beliefs, whether those beliefs have to do with the Bible or not. Science is just a conspiracy cooked by scientists to promote their religion of science and con the world into accepting the “mark of the Beast, 666,” that’s all. The libertarians and the Greens have their own versions of this sort of resistance to acquiring new concepts, testing them against previously acquired evidence and models and theories that have been satisfactorily proved out, and working up practical applications for what they have used. Most of them, each in his or her own scary way, has turned their beliefs concerning the environment and the planet as a whole into very real religions, and are out to proselytize those religions any way they can - with the sword and/or the torch, if need be. As for the rest . . . Well, if you check the stock portfolios of the wealthiest of them, you will discover the most amazing things, such as investments in industries and properties whose continued financial well-being depends on quashing all legislation and private efforts to protecting and healing the environment. In other words, make money until the world ends, because by then, you’ll have long since died and gone to whatever your Beforelife reward might be, and who gives a damn about their descendants?
To be fair, most of those who either refuse even to look at evidence supporting the reality of global warming, or effective ways to do something constructive about it before it’s too late, really mean what they say about such issues. They are victims of ideational systems (i.e., philosophical systems, to the well-educated, which most people aren’t any more) which, though they proved helpful in many ways, also have serious drawbacks, especially when it comes to trying to come to terms with reality, whether we like our universe or not. Such systems give those who believe in them common cause with other believers, make them feel important (though often, unfortunately, at the cost of seeing all those who don’t believe in them as well as the natural world as so much trash, to be ignored or even murdered out of hand), a way to get together with like-minded people for social events as well as such things as political meetings, and numerous other social and personal benefits. But when it comes to objective reality, they fall down horribly, teaching adherents to ignore all objective evidence opposing any part of the belief system in question, even just one tenet, as utterly evil (of the Devil, Communistic, anti-environmental, etc.).
One example of this can be found in the teachings of Scientology, according to which, 75 million years ago, the evil Galactic Overlord Xenu had dissidents protesting his rule thrown into the volcanoes of Hawaii to rid himself of them. Guess what? Any rock-hound worth his salt, not to mention a host of geologists, ecologists, tourists, and those living on the Islands know that the Hawaiian Islands are only two million years old. Way to go, L. Ron! Let's hear it for twisted ignorance! A number of Scientologists who had had decent educations in the physical sciences voluntarily became ex-Scientologists, simply walked away from it and never came back, over that very issue. Unfortunately, given the damage Scientology did to so many people, most Scientologists didn’t have that educational background, or were so mesmerized by its teachings that nothing short of a nuclear bomb could have made a dent in their embrace of their faith. So, united by a collective delusional system, most Scientologists remained among the faithful right up until the War, when just about all of them perished, either because they were too close to one or another ground zero, or contracted one or another of the new and viciously virulent pestilences set loose on America’s East Coast by the incoming asteroid that started the War, or were prevented by rigid adherence to Scientological beliefs from acting in their own best interests.
Similarly, in the year after the Two-Day War, numerous fundamentalists committed suicide because they had become convinced by what they imagined to have been Armageddon and the fact they hadn’t been Raptured away to heaven that they were damned for eternity. Now, just why being damned should prompt someone to commit suicide is a puzzle - in that case, most of us would want to go on living for as long as possible, to put off that eternal hellfire for as long as possible. But psychologists who have worked with such fundamentalists and their families, trying to keep the former from committing suicide and giving grief counseling to the latter when all their efforts go for naught, say that suicidal fundamentalists were so distraught over, as they conceived it, the loss of God’s love that unbearable despair pushed them over the edge of the Abyss. The same sort of thing because of which rejected lovers and parents whose children have been killed kill themselves, to end the very real agony of love and the objects of love lost.
Libertarians are now somewhat less prone to suicide, save over the loss of family and friends from the many catastrophic changes in the world as a result of the War, which is something the entire planet-wide human zoo has been prone to since probably forever. They are also much more likely to survive than a lot of people sharing none of these belief systems were even before the War. The rampant consumerism, passive watching of spectacles and sports events on TV, and other behaviors and behavior patterns that left no room for exercise of any kind and promoted junk food above any sort of health-giving meals sealed their doom. Many libertarians, however, dipped into Survivalist literature and discovered ways to make life good without a killing cost of one’s health and well-being, such as how to survive in the wild, what herbs and vegetables and fruits you could grow in your own back yard, and how to protect yourself and others with weapons of all kinds as well as unarmed combat. Because those keeps that have come into existence and survived since the War, with the exception of Fresno keeps and others like it here and there, promote the same survival-positive ideas and behavior that such libertarians espouse, most of today’s libertarians don’t have many problems with non-libertarians, though they do keep insisting that “global warming is just a scheme cooked up by pre-War scientists to get grant money.” That, in spite of all the evidence for global warming, which they refuse even to consider for a moment. Their collective belief system doesn’t allow for that, so therefore there’s no point at looking at the evidence for its reality.
As for the Greens . . . well, I certainly can’t say they didn’t believe that global warming is real. They did. The few that seem to have survived to the present - or, at least, haven’t emerged from hiding - are still trying to proselytize their Luddite philosophy, and do so in the face of the fact that technology, the more advanced the better, is absolutely necessary not only for human survival on our ruined world, but the survival of what’s left of Earth’s nonhuman life. They share with the fundamentalists and libertarians the trait of confusing belief in with belief that, of confusing religion and its analogs with science. From everything that has come out about the phenomenon since well before the War, they are not able to learn how to “do” science and, in many cases, mathematics. It’s not willful ignorance on their part - they genuinely lack whatever inherent mechanism, whether genetic or cultural, it is that throws up giant, uncrossable roadblocks before their intellects that scream, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” concerning study of objective reality, not to mention those areas of social studies that don’t accord with their belief-systems. Either something genetic is missing from their genes, or nutrition while they were in the womb was somehow deficient, or the way they were raised did not allow for development of the requisite skills. Whatever it is, most of them cannot learn those skills and the viewpoint which regular, ongoing exercise of those skills gives rise to. As for the rest, it’s likely that even if they once had those skills, they let them rust away due to lack of use as mandated by their religious and philosophical beliefs.
To this day, all three groups - adherents of certain religious beliefs; those who have embraced what, in all justice, should be called “strict libertarianism,” as opposed to more open-minded versions of that philosophy; and Greens - are still resistant to anything that contradicts any part of their beliefs. And, from time to time, some of them go so far as to show just how lively that resistance is, by causing trouble of various kinds and degrees of severity. As far as they’re concerned, it’s the same old world it always was, perhaps with a lot fewer people where they are than there used to be, all other people residing somewhere over the hills where they can’t see them. Yet. Collective psychoses like these have been responsible for a great deal of the woes of the world. Their adherents may be perfectly sane in every other way - but when it comes to their belief systems, they talk and act as if they were quite mad.
Such people are unable to grasp the philosophy of science or much else about it, especially when it comes to planetology, ecology, and other biological systems sciences. The same is true of mathematics. It’s not that they just never wanted to study these fields - they cannot grasp their basic principles. Nothing else accounts for their weird explanations as to why they don’t just reject the idea of global warming, but actually turn away from any and all substantive evidence to support its reality, as if they were about to vomit at the very idea of looking at it; attack anyone who claims it is real as being a member of some enormous and impossible conspiracy to con the public into believing it, for reasons ranging from religious (demonic possession, Satan’s inspiration, etc., etc., all in the name of sending souls to hell), political (e.g., to gull people into accepting total Communism), and so on; and otherwise behave in ways that, to someone familiar with the psychology of addictions, are for all the world classic examples of denial.
Excerpt from the novel:
At a party, I asked a fundamentalist why she refused to believe that global warming was even a possibility, let alone be already happening, and why she refused to even look at any evidence to support the claim that it was happening. She said that the Devil was responsible for putting the idea of global warming in people’s minds, and making them believe in it. More questions elicited her statement that global warming was simply another pagan faith - that global warming itself was a pagan faith, not just the science that described and predicted it - and that God was testing the faithful by giving all the signs of global warming to see if they would fall to believing it (“fall to believing it” was her term for it, not mine). I asked her, since recent firestorms in Southern California had come about due to record long-term aridity in the areas where the fires had broken out, and that that aridity was highly abnormal, something that only global warming could account for, if fundamentalist friends of hers who still lived in that area got caught in yet another such firestorm and perish of it, would they go to Hell for being roasted alive by that fiery illusion, as she called it? Her response was to storm away, screaming that everyone present was going to Hell and that she didn’t want anything more to do with any of us.
At another such gathering, I asked a libertarian why he refused to believe that global warming was even a possibility, let alone be already happening, and why he refused to even look at any evidence in support of those ideas. He said that it was all due to a conspiracy on the part of scientists to con people into supporting their Socialist agenda or get grant money for useless, worthless research projects because they were too lazy to do real work. I asked him what substantive evidence he had in support of the existence of such a conspiracy. His response included a long dissertation about Ayn Rand, and quotes from Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine that were blatantly inaccurate, but hey, our memories do strange things as we age, don’t they, and the statement that global warming was just another product of quack science. I pointed out that he himself lived in Southern California, about ten miles from where firefighters had brought an egregiously powerful firestorm to its knees and then, in spite of its last pitiful struggles to survive, killed it dead, an event that took place just a year before. I asked him, “Ted, if you get cremated alive by the next firestorm in that area because you can’t get out in time, does that mean you are a Socialist?” His response was to mumble something about having to tend to some urgent business and wander out of the room, presumably leaving the scene of his intellectual crime for good.
The Greens, of course, don’t deny the reality of global warming. But when it comes to effective measures that might work to keep it from getting worse, they are either unable to agree on which of those measures might be acceptable, or even what those measures might be, acceptable or not. Desalinate seawater? Well . . . maybe. But no fair using nuclear reactors to do so - in spite of the fact that nuclear reactors are one of the few things that can be used to desalinate seawater fast enough, in sufficient quantities, to do the job, and that doing whatever is possible to restore groundwater levels to something that can support plant life and cool large areas down to bearable temperatures has an immediate priority far higher than avoiding the long-run risks of nuclear power. If you die of thirst because you refuse to use electricity generated by nuclear power to desalinate enough water for your survival, it’s your own damned fault - and if huge numbers of people and wildlife of all kinds die of thirst because you won’t let them use nuclear power to desalinate seawater, you’re guilty of mass murder. Well, how about acquiring vast amounts of power from the Sun using orbital collectors, and using it to generate enough electrical power to do all that electricity can do for the whole world, power that is virtually free, affordable even for the very poorest of families in the developing world. It wouldn’t add anything to the atmosphere’s burden of carbon dioxide, and in fact would eliminate almost all sources of CO2, especially if electric cars and electrically-driven mass transit became widely used. But no, said various Greens I got to know around the campus, that would pollute space, and anyway, the collectors would be made of plastic, and plastic is bad for the environment. I tried to explain that you can’t pollute space - you’re talking about polluting the entire universe, which is at least some 26 billion light-years across, with whatever Earth might put into outer space, which simply isn’t possible. To which they said that anything more than zero pollutants in space was simply unacceptable, as was any plastic whatsoever. And so on and on and on. In other words, environmental deterioration is bad, but doing anything effective to reverse environmental deterioration of any kind is far worse, no matter how high a priority the latter may be. Remember, many Greens are the same people that believe that burning down Mother Earth to save her is the best way to show one’s love of her. And nothing anyone can say to them makes a dent in their attitudes and resistance to learning anything new.
If such arguments as my opponents in those verbal interchanges gave on this subject sound irrational, join the club: that’s exactly what they are. Numerous people who are eminently sane in any other aspect of their lives are completely irrational when it comes to arguments against doing something effective about any dire environmental peril. The fundamentalists believe they are going to heaven when they die - but only if they refuse to “believe in” (as opposed to believe that, i.e., that there is enough evidence to show that such-and-such is real, as demanded by rules of evidence acceptable to a court of law or the scientific community) such things as global warming; otherwise God will send them to Hell. They can do anything they want in life, perpetrate any crime, act like barbarians, and be forgiven by God; they are, they say, pre-forgiven of all sins (i.e., crimes, violent or otherwise) once they have been baptized, with the exception of modifying any of their beliefs, whether those beliefs have to do with the Bible or not. Science is just a conspiracy cooked by scientists to promote their religion of science and con the world into accepting the “mark of the Beast, 666,” that’s all. The libertarians and the Greens have their own versions of this sort of resistance to acquiring new concepts, testing them against previously acquired evidence and models and theories that have been satisfactorily proved out, and working up practical applications for what they have used. Most of them, each in his or her own scary way, has turned their beliefs concerning the environment and the planet as a whole into very real religions, and are out to proselytize those religions any way they can - with the sword and/or the torch, if need be. As for the rest . . . Well, if you check the stock portfolios of the wealthiest of them, you will discover the most amazing things, such as investments in industries and properties whose continued financial well-being depends on quashing all legislation and private efforts to protecting and healing the environment. In other words, make money until the world ends, because by then, you’ll have long since died and gone to whatever your Beforelife reward might be, and who gives a damn about their descendants?
To be fair, most of those who either refuse even to look at evidence supporting the reality of global warming, or effective ways to do something constructive about it before it’s too late, really mean what they say about such issues. They are victims of ideational systems (i.e., philosophical systems, to the well-educated, which most people aren’t any more) which, though they proved helpful in many ways, also have serious drawbacks, especially when it comes to trying to come to terms with reality, whether we like our universe or not. Such systems give those who believe in them common cause with other believers, make them feel important (though often, unfortunately, at the cost of seeing all those who don’t believe in them as well as the natural world as so much trash, to be ignored or even murdered out of hand), a way to get together with like-minded people for social events as well as such things as political meetings, and numerous other social and personal benefits. But when it comes to objective reality, they fall down horribly, teaching adherents to ignore all objective evidence opposing any part of the belief system in question, even just one tenet, as utterly evil (of the Devil, Communistic, anti-environmental, etc.).
One example of this can be found in the teachings of Scientology, according to which, 75 million years ago, the evil Galactic Overlord Xenu had dissidents protesting his rule thrown into the volcanoes of Hawaii to rid himself of them. Guess what? Any rock-hound worth his salt, not to mention a host of geologists, ecologists, tourists, and those living on the Islands know that the Hawaiian Islands are only two million years old. Way to go, L. Ron! Let's hear it for twisted ignorance! A number of Scientologists who had had decent educations in the physical sciences voluntarily became ex-Scientologists, simply walked away from it and never came back, over that very issue. Unfortunately, given the damage Scientology did to so many people, most Scientologists didn’t have that educational background, or were so mesmerized by its teachings that nothing short of a nuclear bomb could have made a dent in their embrace of their faith. So, united by a collective delusional system, most Scientologists remained among the faithful right up until the War, when just about all of them perished, either because they were too close to one or another ground zero, or contracted one or another of the new and viciously virulent pestilences set loose on America’s East Coast by the incoming asteroid that started the War, or were prevented by rigid adherence to Scientological beliefs from acting in their own best interests.
Similarly, in the year after the Two-Day War, numerous fundamentalists committed suicide because they had become convinced by what they imagined to have been Armageddon and the fact they hadn’t been Raptured away to heaven that they were damned for eternity. Now, just why being damned should prompt someone to commit suicide is a puzzle - in that case, most of us would want to go on living for as long as possible, to put off that eternal hellfire for as long as possible. But psychologists who have worked with such fundamentalists and their families, trying to keep the former from committing suicide and giving grief counseling to the latter when all their efforts go for naught, say that suicidal fundamentalists were so distraught over, as they conceived it, the loss of God’s love that unbearable despair pushed them over the edge of the Abyss. The same sort of thing because of which rejected lovers and parents whose children have been killed kill themselves, to end the very real agony of love and the objects of love lost.
Libertarians are now somewhat less prone to suicide, save over the loss of family and friends from the many catastrophic changes in the world as a result of the War, which is something the entire planet-wide human zoo has been prone to since probably forever. They are also much more likely to survive than a lot of people sharing none of these belief systems were even before the War. The rampant consumerism, passive watching of spectacles and sports events on TV, and other behaviors and behavior patterns that left no room for exercise of any kind and promoted junk food above any sort of health-giving meals sealed their doom. Many libertarians, however, dipped into Survivalist literature and discovered ways to make life good without a killing cost of one’s health and well-being, such as how to survive in the wild, what herbs and vegetables and fruits you could grow in your own back yard, and how to protect yourself and others with weapons of all kinds as well as unarmed combat. Because those keeps that have come into existence and survived since the War, with the exception of Fresno keeps and others like it here and there, promote the same survival-positive ideas and behavior that such libertarians espouse, most of today’s libertarians don’t have many problems with non-libertarians, though they do keep insisting that “global warming is just a scheme cooked up by pre-War scientists to get grant money.” That, in spite of all the evidence for global warming, which they refuse even to consider for a moment. Their collective belief system doesn’t allow for that, so therefore there’s no point at looking at the evidence for its reality.
As for the Greens . . . well, I certainly can’t say they didn’t believe that global warming is real. They did. The few that seem to have survived to the present - or, at least, haven’t emerged from hiding - are still trying to proselytize their Luddite philosophy, and do so in the face of the fact that technology, the more advanced the better, is absolutely necessary not only for human survival on our ruined world, but the survival of what’s left of Earth’s nonhuman life. They share with the fundamentalists and libertarians the trait of confusing belief in with belief that, of confusing religion and its analogs with science. From everything that has come out about the phenomenon since well before the War, they are not able to learn how to “do” science and, in many cases, mathematics. It’s not willful ignorance on their part - they genuinely lack whatever inherent mechanism, whether genetic or cultural, it is that throws up giant, uncrossable roadblocks before their intellects that scream, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” concerning study of objective reality, not to mention those areas of social studies that don’t accord with their belief-systems. Either something genetic is missing from their genes, or nutrition while they were in the womb was somehow deficient, or the way they were raised did not allow for development of the requisite skills. Whatever it is, most of them cannot learn those skills and the viewpoint which regular, ongoing exercise of those skills gives rise to. As for the rest, it’s likely that even if they once had those skills, they let them rust away due to lack of use as mandated by their religious and philosophical beliefs.
To this day, all three groups - adherents of certain religious beliefs; those who have embraced what, in all justice, should be called “strict libertarianism,” as opposed to more open-minded versions of that philosophy; and Greens - are still resistant to anything that contradicts any part of their beliefs. And, from time to time, some of them go so far as to show just how lively that resistance is, by causing trouble of various kinds and degrees of severity. As far as they’re concerned, it’s the same old world it always was, perhaps with a lot fewer people where they are than there used to be, all other people residing somewhere over the hills where they can’t see them. Yet. Collective psychoses like these have been responsible for a great deal of the woes of the world. Their adherents may be perfectly sane in every other way - but when it comes to their belief systems, they talk and act as if they were quite mad.
Such people are unable to grasp the philosophy of science or much else about it, especially when it comes to planetology, ecology, and other biological systems sciences. The same is true of mathematics. It’s not that they just never wanted to study these fields - they cannot grasp their basic principles. Nothing else accounts for their weird explanations as to why they don’t just reject the idea of global warming, but actually turn away from any and all substantive evidence to support its reality, as if they were about to vomit at the very idea of looking at it; attack anyone who claims it is real as being a member of some enormous and impossible conspiracy to con the public into believing it, for reasons ranging from religious (demonic possession, Satan’s inspiration, etc., etc., all in the name of sending souls to hell), political (e.g., to gull people into accepting total Communism), and so on; and otherwise behave in ways that, to someone familiar with the psychology of addictions, are for all the world classic examples of denial.