Steven Colbert recently admitted that while Global Warming would certainly seem to entail an impending catastrophe of Man’s own making, he has not really made the personal life-style changes necessary to easing the impact of human behavior on the dynamics of Climate. His recommendation, therefore, is that governments be granted the authority to coerce their citizens into the proper mode of environmental responsibility. While he certainly does not see it as such, his statement is a perfect manifestation of the cynical vision of the species inherent in “progressivism,” a perspective which flatters itself with its “humanist” preoccupations while defining human beings as little more than mindless animals, a perspective which ludicrously grants governments the right to shepherd the herds entrusted to them, while seemingly impervious to the Obvious Fact that those governments are comprised of members of the same flawed species!
The prescriptions of the Enlightenment philosophers are irreplaceable, the Rule of Law, subject to constant rational revision, being our only antidote to the abusive exercise of power which the Left arrogantly seems willing to facilitate in governments which share its views. That Man-Made CO2 is the cause of current weather trends is a Hypothesis rather than a Fact. To the dozens of my acquaintances who find this statement ludicrous, I assure you I have probably read 10 times more than any of you on this subject. Ought governments, as Colbert suggests, to be allowed to coerce their constituents into complying with regulations that fly in the face of pragmatism itself. As always I must point out there is a radical difference between the ideological urge to stifle carbon-based energy projects which would still seem necessary to human well-being both in the Capitalist West and elsewhere, and the legitimate goal of sanctioning those guilty of polluting our air and water for crass economic reasons. This is but to say, for example, there is nothing rational or justifiable in Biden’s knee-jerk cancellation of the Keystone Pipeline, a political coup that cost thousands of jobs both north and south of the border while actually, demonstrably increasing possible harm to the environment by making America more dependent on countries with seemingly no environmental conscience whatsoever. Biden’s recent plea to those countries to increase their production in order to compensate for the shortages caused by his very own edict were truly pathetic yet an apt example of the Left’s absurd disconnect from the real world.
Eco Modernists see Human Intelligence and Ingenuity as essential tools in Man’s attempt to deal with the legitimate environmental issues before him. The radicals who dominate contemporary climate discourse, however, envision a world thrust into the past, a world dominated by bicycles and windmills. And the brilliant Colbert is perfectly comfortable with granting governments the right to effect that “progressive” change! This impulse is but one aspect of the anti-Western, anti-Capitalist, anti-Technological, anti-Rational agenda of the contemporary Left, an agenda ultimately rooted in what is little more than a species of religious fanaticism. Colbert’s insistence that governments ought to be entitled to impose upon their populations the strictures of radical environmentalism, a perspective fraught with a thousand unanswered questions, has no more moral or intellectual merit than Catholicism’s Medieval Inquisition.
Ayn Rand placed her faith in Man’s capacity for Reason. Reviled today as a “conservative” fully comfortable with a heartless Capitalism born of sheer self-interest, she in fact celebrated the “ethical” exercise of Man’s rational urge for self-improvement as the informing Principle of any truly Liberal Democracy. Her politics was informed with a vision of Man at his very best. Colbert, on the other hand, perfectly willing to admit his own moral failures, assumes a species prone to the same level of degeneracy. “Progressives,” that is to say, on every issue we have confronted, disregard the traditional Humanist vision of Man as a being capable of both Reason and Compassion and assume even seemingly principled objections to their world-view to be just so much hypocrisy. Ignoring the sanity and wisdom of the dozens of wonderful “conservative” firebrands with whom I have become acquainted, they ascribe to them the truly repulsive xenophobia that does in fact exist on the outer fringes of the Right, dismissing all “conservatives,” however moral, however compassionate, as equally degenerate. It is the “progressive” tactic du jour, one that allows them to never actually consider the substance of any point of view other than their own.
Colbert’s “logic”? As I am a conscienceless jerk, so also, no doubt, is everyone else. Let us therefore grant governments the power to coerce their citizens into the proper mode of being. The flaw in his logic is obvious, indeed one which cost the species hundreds of millions of lives in the last Century at the hands of Socialists/Communists who felt perfectly entitled to slaughter those who did not share their “enlightened” point of view!