Posted on 04/17/2003 3:29:32 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
The extent to which green-left thinking on the environment has taken hold in the mass media and at all levels of education has made it the dominant voice in the so-called environmental debate. There is not one opinion leader or political party, especially the Democrats, that has not been heavily influenced by it one way or another.
However, it would be a serious mistake to assume that the green-left is ideologically united. It is not. Basically it comprises two factions: the Marxist-Leninist faction and the utopian faction. Both are temporarily united by their mutual loathing of capitalism. I say temporarily because their long term goals are mutually exclusive.
The unregenerate Marxist-Leninists (aptly called watermelons: green on the outside and red on the inside) still fervently believe that capitalism will be brought down by its "inner contradictions" and a lot of pushing from them. The collapse of the Soviet Empire has taught them nothing. They still have the fanatic's capacity for enormous self-deception. To them socialism has not failed, it just has not been tried. Hence conservationism is just another weapon in their ideological war against capitalism. It is "conservationism" that will provide the regulatory noose chat will strangle capitalism.
Where the old left still believe in the virtues of a centrally planned economy, the utopian left consist mainly of people who have developed a vague vision of an agrarian socialist society. These leftists (many were Trotskyists) originally joined the Greens with the intention of using them in the fight against capitalism. But a funny thing happened to these leftists on their way to the revolution: their anti-capitalism was transformed into an anti-industrial ethic. They abandoned their visions of a workers' state to embrace the fantasy of a Green Elysium which only the elect can enter.
This is why they had no difficulty in deserting the materialism of Marx for Rousseau's fantasies. None of this is really surprising. Their utopianism is obvious to any informed observer. Incredible as it seems and despite all the evidence to the contrary, these dangerous clowns actually believe that profit driven economic growth (is there any other kind?), creates mass unemployment and wholesale destruction of the environment.
What is really striking, however, is the resemblance of the green movement to revolutionary millenarianism — with one crucial difference: the top echelon of the green movement consists largely of intellectuals, the spoiled and selfish offspring of an affluent and indulgent capitalist society. In one subtle ideological move, "the dictatorship of the proletariat" has been transformed into the dictatorship of the lumpenintelligentsia.
Where as medieval millenarian movements were made up of the lowest strata of society; "the rootless" poor of town and country who turned to militant millenarianism in a desperate attempt to escape from oppression and abject poverty. In this they were usually led by members of the lower clergy. Thus we find that there is nothing new in the internal dynamic of the Green movement.
We had the same phenomenon in the Middle Ages and both movements were driven by revelation. (This brings us to a small but significant observation: Nazism was a millenarian movement and the most destructive one in history. When Hitler proclaimed the "1000 year Reich" he was not speaking figuratively — he was making a millenarian statement).
As one astute American student of the 'conservation' movement sarcastically observed: "You won’t see any branches of the Sierra Club in Watts or Harlem." So basically the Green movement has been formed by intellectuals for intellectuals. And this brings us right back to their hatred of capitalism, or should I say economic growth. They hate it because it gives the masses what they want rather than what they, the intellectuals, think they should have.
Capitalism is the real enemy because it serves the masses, it challenges class structures and pulls them down; it subverts the status quo; it is blind to race, creed and class; it has made rich men poor and poor men rich; it has created unprecedented wealth and raised the living standards of the masses to a level undreamt of even forty years ago.
Within a generation it worked economic miracles. But some, like the Austrian economist Schumpeter, have argued that the very success of capitalism will be its downfall. It will, because of the creation of more and more colleges and universities, produce and expanding pool of disaffected intellectuals. Now there have always been disaffected intellectuals. some of whom were quite brilliant and made great contributions to the development of free societies. I would dread to think where we would be today without such people. But these people were not the product of a mass education system.
What Schumpeter and other observers meant is that as society became progressively wealthier the demand for 'education' would grow. It would be demanded as a right. As higher education became a mass system there would be a proliferation of what we call Mickey Mouse subjects in the humanities and social sciences to satisfy the demand for "higher education." Those graduates of these subjects would have developed expectations that simply could not be met. Further, in the course of their studies they would have come under the influence of teachers and lecturers who would be imbued with the anti-capitalist ethic.
Thus, when they graduate they find that their ideology and "education" has made them superfluous to the cultural, intellectual and economic needs of the progressive economy that nurtured them. Having been made psychologically unfit for physical work, and painfully aware of their own intellectual inadequacies, they will become progressively alienated. In short, they won't feel needed. But what they mean by needed, however, is being put into positions in which they can exercise power and influence. The kind of positions that only a Soviet-like state could provide. it really is no accident that they strongly support state intervention.
Having had that denied to them and feeling 'unneeded' an emotional vacuum has emerged. To them any society that does not need them (in the way they think they should be needed) is unjust. callous, materialistic, racist, etc.Schumpeter expressed it superbly in his book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy:
"...capitalism stands its trial before judges who have the sentence of death in their pockets. They are going to pass it, whatever the defence they may hear; the only success a victorious defence can possibly produce is a change in the indictment."
The situation has only worsened since a prescient Schumpeter wrote those words 60 years ago. After all. what can we expect from those who prefer the absurd romanticism of Rousseau to the philosophy of Locke. One thing is certain: green utopians will continue to have successes against economic growth until the masses are made aware that it is their welfare, their jobs, their living standards and their families that are being sacrificed to satisfy the greens utopian fantasy.
The Greens, like the Nazis before them, are inordinate, i.e., there is no limit to their demands. Each demand, when met, will be followed by more demands. They are only interested in total and unconditional surrender. No public relations campaign. no matter how clever, how expensive, how intense can beat them. Orthodox PR is simply powerless in the world of ideas and the battle for minds.
It is vital that the defenders of economic progress recapture the moral high ground. This requires moral certitude, determination and intellectual rigour.
Green views on energy:
Dr. Paul Ehrlich: "Giving society cheap abundant energy . . . would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun."
Amory Lovins: "It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap abundant energy because of what we might do with it."
Funny isn't it how smart people like engineers and real scientists and mathematicians don't get involved with utopians. Do Utopists know that they are utopists?
I had always thought that the 1000 years was a reference to the length of the Roman Empire. I would like to know which it is...the above is something I hadn't heard before.
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