Poems By William Carlos Williams & W. S. Merwin-Doctors & Mystics And The Least Among Us

The Drunkard

You drunken
tottering
bum

by Christ
in spite of all
your filth

and sordidness
I envy
you

It is the very face
of love
itself

abandoned
in that powerless
committal

-William Carlos Williams

Hope in this world is a tricky thing, with all the suffering around, should we care to look.

I doubt Williams is invoking the Godhead here, but a ‘Jesus Christ’ might slip out of me or you upon suddenly catching sight of the wretched. Open sores and infections usually indicate deeper physical illness. Rambling speech and shuffling feet usually indicate a disordered mind and soul. Some people could be so far gone they may not be coming back.

But there’s an abandonment in the desire to be free, untethered, and lost within the world.

One of my takes: Love means obligations to others, where abandonment also meets responsibility, not merely abandonment to one’s own desires. Each of us, despite our habits, could become captive to our desires. Watch out for yourselves.

There’s something like a ‘narrative’ race on in the power-centers, and for politicos, right now, because I see U.S. institutions as seriously weakened, overbuilt and stagnant.

On that note, W.S. Merwin came of age during the post-war period, the son of a Presbyterian minister. I’d argue we’re witnessing a religious vision becoming transposed through the Modernist and post-Modernist lenses in his work (especially with the ‘eco’ stuff). This is what I’ve been calling the journey of the (S)elf, within the Romantic bowl of ‘Nature,’ where increasingly isolated individuals are seeking wholeness and transcendence through ‘the environment’ and ‘collective action’ and ‘(S)cience.’ This process of secular humanization is fast upon us here in the U.S. (much more advanced in Europe).

What occurs at the basic level of conception, and once held in the King James Bible, is now more likely to be ‘revealed’ to be a concern with the environment, or the ‘oppressed.’ Notice it’s not really about (S)cience but a kind of belief-level claim to knowledge and truth. Basically, I see ‘true-belief’ and righteous actors as often making things worse, and typically blaming everyone else in the process.

Do the wretches have something to teach? About what and to whom? Are poets exiles (the ones who imagine themselves as drunks)? What about ministers?

The Drunk In The Furnace

 For a good decade
The furnace stood in the naked gully, fireless
And vacant as any hat. Then when it was
No more to them than a hulking black fossil
To erode with the rest of the junk-hill
By the poisonous creek, and rapidly to be added
          To their ignorance,

                                                                                         
          They were afterwards astonished
To confirm, one morning, a twist of smoke, like a pale
Resurrection, staggering out of its chewed hole,
And to remark then other tokens that someone,
Cosily bolted behind the eyeholed iron
Door of the drafty burner, had there established
          His bad castle.

        
          Where he gets his spirits
It’s a mystery. But the stuff keeps him musical:
Hammer-and-anviling with poker and bottle
To his jugged bellowings, till the last groaning clang
As he collapses onto the rioting
Springs of a litter of car seats ranged on the grates,
         To sleep like an iron pig.

        
          In their tar-paper church
On a text about stoke holes that are sated never
Their Reverend lingers. They nod and hate trespassers.
When the furnace wakes, though, all afternoon
Their witless offspring flock like piped rats to its siren
Crescendo, and agape on the crumbling ridge
          Stand in a row and learn.

W.S. Merwin

What might work better for a lot of us, a lot of the time, but I don’t really know for sure: The Victorian idea of the ‘deserving’ poor. Reality means having to make decisions in a world of limited resources about how to help those not helping themselves. We all have obligations to others, but they largely occur to those we love, and those whom we must honor and protect.

Forgive the photo. My skills are a work in progress, but thanks, as always, for looking.

Repost: Who Is ‘Rasta Dale’ & What Is ‘Peace Pavilion West,’ You Ask? Curate Your Body In Time & Space-Some Links

Christian Alejandro Gonzalez reviews this book at Quilette:

‘Intersectionality is not just a branch of feminism, a means by which to advance women’s interests, or an analysis of matters of social concern. It is an all-encompassing philosophy that advances a unique politics, metaphysics, aesthetics, and epistemology, as well as its own (rather bizarre) interpretation of history. It is effectively a secular religion.1′

Many liberation-based ideologues and radical discontents have ridden the postmodern waves into academies and various other institutions of influence.

This blog operates under the assumption that, generally, people who’ve only conceived of the world as a series of power relationships, or fumblings of Self against the objectively meaningless void, or through lenses of collectivist oppression and victimhood, are generally people to be nowhere near positions of authority and stewardship.

Hey, it’s just the Arts & Sciences, as well as your freedoms.

Who is ‘Rasta Dale’?

Despite his humble beginnings as the bastard son of an itinerant diplomat and the global-warming journalist sent to cover him, Dale has worked hard to become the supreme leader of Peace Pavilion West. He oversees daily work assignments, Temple activities and breeding celebrations.

Protecting the environment, promoting women’s freedom and protesting warmongers here on Spaceship Earth are all in a day’s work in the community, and for Dale.

Here are some recent articles Dale wholeheartedly supports:

As I’m doing PR for PPW, I like to include my commentary when relevant.

Community Gardens IN THE SKY!

Of course Dr. Seuss should get political! Make everything political!

Dale had a dark period after the last EPA raid. He was found in the Temple by himself mumbling ‘Now we are all zero-waste:’

Not Really Science, Kinda Like A Religion-Some Eco-Links & A Discussion Of Adam Smith

First, from Darwinian Conservatism: On the Question of Religion and Ethics, Adam Smith Was the Last Esoteric Writer:

…”yes, a God-like being plays a central role in Smith’s ethics.”  In making that argument, he believes that he is in agreement with a long list of Smith scholars, and I am on that list.

Whether or not it’s the new Technocratic (S)cientific Consensus of (M)an, or the new Gospels of (M)an, we might want to remember much of the context the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers had.

I hope we don’t get too esoteric and Straussian.

Because you didn’t ask:

I think of enviro-preachers more on the Gospel side of things. They move like unwell country pastors, seeking-out soapboxes near the Sunday Service.

Is he still married?’ Doesn’t he live out near Cooper’s farm?’

The original sin is industrialization, you see, and we are all sinners. The cure always seems to be more Humanist/Anti-Humanist gospel. Liberal idealists hate to be caught too close to such utopian, poorly-groomed men, where questionable dressing habits usually indicate a (C)ommitment the (C)ause.

‘I hear he rides his e-bike eighteen miles one-way from Stockbridge to buy ox-meat.

‘“Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails.

Out: Older kooks with older media.

In: Newer kooks, whose mental instability is therapeutic, and a sign of passionate authenticity:

Tim Black at Spiked: “The Ongoing Creation Of Greta Thunberg.

‘It is all very disconcerting. From her breakdown, to her recitation of carbon-emission facts, the Greta that emerges in Our House is on Fire doesn’t feel like an individual. She feels like a fictional device. A God’s fool-style character, descended down to Earth to expose our folly.’

Come on down!

Shit! Tell me you didn’t buy a house with The GovCo Collective Housing & Blackrock Authority?

It’s built on an environmentalist burial ground!

A Take On Neo-Romanticism-Do You Agree?

3.

You tossed a blanket from the bed
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.

Has there been a better poet writing in English in the past 150 years?   Probably not.

The depth of commitment to his metaphysical vision and the breadth of that vision is remarkable.   Look at the rhyme and meter!  Sinful.

Romantic Urbanism seems to, well, inspire Romantic conceptions of a place.

Romanticism (also known as the Romantic era) was an artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850. Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism as well as glorification of all the past and nature, preferring the medieval rather than the classical.

For my piece, seeking poetic meaning, through the written and spoken word, moves many hearts and minds most deeply. Within such mediated and heightened, experiences of reality, many people forget their own senses and reason. A creative genius has created a work (a poem, a cathedral, your favorite song) where the creator’s senses and reason has become yours. You’re a bit like a walker on the forest floor; the creative genius the canopy overhead, filtering the sunlight to this tree and that. One need only look to revelation and myth, religious and ideological, to understand how powerful such works of the imagination are, and how such impulses within us, can be.

In the Romantic Age, this was channeled in specific directions.

I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

William Wordsworth’s Lake District ain’t necessarily the cloud in front of you. Those clouds have come and gone. You are not really a cloud (though for a moment maybe you were, within the mind’s eye, the cloud and the looker and the poet, while reading the poem).

Who’s more likely to be Romantically inspired? Well, some temperaments more than others, I’m guessing. All of us to some extent, however, in the modern world. I think people whose education has come through modern channels are more likely.

In my experience, sometimes it’s the rationalist, the data scientist, or the physicist, when the brain-draining day’s work is done, who becomes most inspired to identify with modern, collectivist and Romanticized thought. These folks are often among the brightest, and the ones working with hardest data, and the most rigorous standards of getting at the truth. But, such folks are human, after all. Often, they want comforting fictions over harsh truths. Ideal utopias dot the horizon. Some rationalists can also be painfully naive when it comes to the motives others have in a shared enterprise (a bureaucracy, a political coalition etc).

Reality, the reality of privation, violence and criminality are still with us. Some people choose violence for dominance and leverage over others. Some people develop skills which involve harming you. Many people in rough neighborhoods are happy to get over on you, and that’s about it. Many people in rough neighborhoods choose not to live this way and cultivate and strive to keep what’s good alive, moving forwards.

Incentives matter.

Some very educated people, with good backgrounds, can be absolute assholes, and even dangerously criminal. This shouldn’t come as entirely surprising. Higher intelligence is certainly no guarantee of character.

‘Poverty’ has become a kind of big, conceptual bowl into which the imaginings of a post-Christian, humanistic, ethic have gathered. Some people have turned these ideas into what I regard as a rather idealistic (and ideological) platform, actualizing such ideas through emergent thought.

I suppose we’ll see.

On that note:

I remain skeptical of much environmental thinking, primarily in the realms of politics, law and ad hoc ethics. Many people here aren’t actually doing science. Many such knowledge and truth claims are serving various masters. Such ideas have become the glue holding many coalitions of humanists, anti-humanists, idealists and ideologues together, mediating the natural worlds and those of (M)an.

On this site, see:

Slight Update & Repost-Hipster Romanticism? From The Atlantic Photo: ‘Adventures Of A Serial Trespasser’

Via A Reader-Isaiah Berlin’s Lectures On The Roots Of Romanticism

Some Thursday Songs-Metal, Myth, American Romanticism And The Civil War

Eric Kaufmann (podcast) samples some younger, more liberal people on their relation to many American traditions.

The new Equality movements are having effects, and many folks are coalescing around new moral lights, sometimes religiously.

The rule of law, due process, freedom of speech and many duties our Republic requires are viewed much more skeptically.

As posted:

Modernism goes to the movies.

Some pictures at the link.

There’s mention of the Mt. Rushmore house at the end of North By Northwest. I suspect some among us have wanted to live in a modernist lair.

From an article in Der Spiegel on the Bauhaus, where modernism got its start:

‘The real feat achieved by Gropius and his cohorts was to have recognized and exposed the sociopolitical and moral power of architecture and design. They wanted to exert “effective influence” on “general conditions,” fashion a more just world and turn all of this into a “vital concern of the entire people.”‘

Eric Gibson & James Panero discuss sculpture in exile & culture under siege.

From the public square to the Natural World:

Mike Shellenberger on his new book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.

As previously posted, ‘Do Children Cause Global Warming?

Bjorn Lomborg:

‘Across all cultures, raising a child is considered one of the most rewarding things a person can do. Yet a chorus of campaigners, scientists, and journalists suggest that everyone should think twice before procreating.’

As I see things, many in the West are replacing belief in a deeper substrate of religious doctrines with belief in a substrate of secular humanist ideals and various flavors of political idealism.

There’s a kind of Neo-Romanticism going on, including religious impulses channeled through secular beliefs and in anti-capital, anti-technology and anti-human directions.

OUT:  Old kooks

IN: New kooks

I’d like to remind folks that Peace Pavilion West, an Eco-Romantic Human Collective Going Back To Nature and Forward Towards Progress, is still accepting applications.

-Would you like to live in your OWN ecopodment as part of a living, working Community?

-Does 1,200 calories of guaranteed bug-paste and 8 glasses of fresh spring water a day sound good to you?

-Close your eyes: The day’s field labor is done. Honest sweat and natural musk mix with memory. Your mind, body and soul begin to rise towards the Cosmos, as each Community member joins hands, chanting Earthsong at dusk

True story:  I was tutoring a girl in Seattle, and she was in the arts.  Artists are often alone, more vulnerable, and she suddenly opened up about Climate Change.

This was one of the primary lenses through which she viewed the world, and it was predicting imminent disaster.  Doom and gloom.  The End Of The World Is Nigh.  Her teachers and peers were eye deep in this acopalyptic thinking, and such ideas were clearly amplifying her anxiety.

I shared some of my interest in the Natural world, animals and experiences.  We looked up some facts and discussed them for a bit.  I told a bad joke or two.  After both relaxing somewhat, I tried to suggest getting out a bit more and mixing it up.  You got this.

Instead of global green governance, what about a World Leviathan…food for thought, and a little frightening…there are other sources rather than Hobbes: At Bloggingheads Steven Pinker Discusses War And Thomas Hobbes

Ronald Bailey At Reason: ‘Delusional in Durban’A Few Links On Environmentalism And Liberty

Related On This Site: Isaiah Berlin’s negative liberty: From George Monbiot: ‘How Freedom Became Tyranny’

Urbanists love to hate Joel Kotkin, as he has offered them much in the way of criticism. At the New Urbanist website, I found the following quote:

“Only when humans are again permitted to build authentic urbanism — those cities, towns, and villages that nurture us by their comforts and delights — will we cease the despoiling of Nature by escaping to sprawl.”

Repost: The Founder Of Peace Pavilion West-The Early Years

I got nuttin’ these days.

The following is absolutely, 100% true: Dale Lonagan is back in the news, and the usual ‘Cult Leader or Visionary of The Modern Age?’ rumors have resurfaced. I thought I’d add some color to this barely sketched tale of peace and progress (how did The Human Pagoda come to be)?

Not Dale Lonagan!:

218px-jim_jones_receives_the_martin_luther_king2c_jr-_humanitarian_award_-_january_1977_28229By Nancy Wong – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44427361

The backstory (indoor gamin): Dale Lonagan is the illegitimate child of an international bureaucrat and the climate change journalist sent to cover him. Like so many orphans, Dale’s early life is one of hardship. He was abandoned and neglected, but fortunately for humanity, he was cast adrift within the bosom of collective progress.

The boy learned to survive within the corridors of diffuse economic and unelected bureaucratic power, selling stolen hand-soap at the bathrooms and cafeterias of 405 E. 42nd St.

Aerial view of the United Nations headquarters, New York City

O Global child, brilliant and wild, Earth calls before the Fall

512px-vincent_van_gogh_-_gamin_au_kc3a9pi_28camille_roulin292c_1888

Vincent van Gogh [Public domain]

For years, the boy knew only the touch of linoleum and cold marble, drifting off to sleep to the soft sursurrations of motions passing the floor.  How such bureaucratese might have nested in his brain is anyone’s guess, but I once heard him recite nineteen climate resolutions consecutively from memory.

***How the outside world may have looked to a young wharf child, peering out from within The International Style:

512px-united_nations_-_new_york2c_ny2c_usa_-_august_182c_2015_08Giorgio Galeotti [CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

‘I’d just grab the gallon bags off a the truck at the loading docks. The 10 gallons were bigger than my head. I’d stash ’em alongside my bed (a bed made of shredded U.N. resolutions). I slept myself the world.’

Enter Marine Stroop-Gruyere, Ambassador Minister Undersecretary for the Culture Of Peace. This committed global citizen noticed a young boy darting and wrapping himself awkwardly within a row of global flags.

He wore no socks, nor shoes, and the flags seemed to keep him warm.

After months of debates within her own heart and mind, she took action. She coaxed the young savage from a translator’s booth with morsels of locally sourced honey graham crackers sold for $13.99 a package. She took young Dale to her bosom. Stroop-Gruyere enrolled Dale in the United Nations Tour Guide Program.

After some months, Dale blossomed, soon becoming the youngest ‘Ambassador to The Public‘ in the history of the institution.

Year after year, watching the gavels lift and drop, seeing the commmittees come and go, a long view developed within this growing visionary leader’s heart and mind. Dale began to see that his thoughts, words and actions could make a difference.

He was becoming fully human.

To Be Continued

How To Live, What To Do, Humans & Non-Humans-Some Links

Roger Scruton perhaps could have chosen his words a little more carefully, but he was likely set-up from the start.

He explained more here in an interview with Toby Young at Quillette.

It’s a shame the man was treated this way.

Also from Quillette:

Clay Routledge-Is Secular Humanism Is A Religion?

Jerry Coyne-Secular Humanism Is Not A Religion

Certainly there are no deeply rooted religious impulses underlying many of these modern politico-moral movements, are there?  This blog sees a deeply Romantic-Modern-Postmodern Self-seeking artistic and philosophically-backed Western tradition unfolding before our eyes, sometimes falling into the vortices of radical, dead-end ideologies, resentment and ressentiment filled utopianism, and non-scientific modern mythic doctrines.

First, I’d noticed this,

Bathe in the bathos of a warming world: A SF Gate review of poet Jorie Graham’s ‘Sea Change:

‘In “Sea Change,” Graham becomes Prospero, casting spells by spelling out her thoughts to merge with ours, and with the voices of the elements. The result is a mingling of perceptions rather than a broadcasting of opinions. Instead of analysis, the poems encourage emotional involvement with the drastic changes overwhelming us, overwhelming the planet.’

‘Strengths and weaknesses, flows and ebbs, yet every poem in “Sea Change” bears memorable lines, with almost haunting (if we truly have but 10 years to “fix” global warming) images of flora and fauna under siege. Jorie Graham has composed a swan song for Earth.’

Now, perhaps, this filtering out into the culture:

At Peace Pavilion West, our Leader encourages his Children to re-connect with Gaia’s rhythms, channeling primal, hippie cries into produced hipster wails. Upon this raft of global sound will Humanity be Saved. Namaste.

— Chris Navin (@chris_navin) April 25, 2019

This blog likely got there before it was somewhat cool, anyways:

‘Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive
But to be young was very Heaven.’

Come see us at The Human Pagoda. Serve (M)ankind. We’re celebrating Progress, collective humanity and secular human transcendence daily. Liberation is Next. Nature is your home.

— Chris Navin (@chris_navin) February 14, 2019

I’d like to point out the quote from William Wordsworth was celebrating the birth of not only new Enlightenment knowledge, but the French Revolution as it came to term.

Here’s a similar, but different debate.

-Steven Pinker, Harvard experimental psychologist and cognitive scientist wrote a piece in the New Republic, entitled: ‘Science Is Not Your Enemy

-Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of the New Republic since the 80′s, responded at The New Republic:  ‘No, Science Doesn’t Have All The Answers.

-Ross Douthat, conservative Catholic columnist at the Times jumped in the fray: ‘The Scientism Of Steve Pinker’ 

-Jerry Coyne, evolutionary biologist, responded to Douthat.

-Wieseltier jumped back in with: ‘Crimes Against Humanities: Now science wants to invade the humanities.  Don’t let it happen.

-Daniel Dennett, philosopher, cognitive scientist, one of the New Atheists and Boston-based secularist responded to Wieseltier:

‘Pomposity can be amusing, but pomposity sitting like an oversized hat on top of fear is hilarious. Wieseltier is afraid that the humanities are being overrun by thinkers from outside, who dare to tackle their precious problems—or “problematics” to use the, um, technical term favored by many in the humanities. He is right to be afraid. It is true that there is a crowd of often overconfident scientists impatiently addressing the big questions with scant appreciation of the subtleties unearthed by philosophers and others in the humanities, but the way to deal constructively with this awkward influx is to join forces and educate them, not declare them out of bounds.’

Related On This Site:  From The NY Times Book Review-Thomas Nagel On John Gray’s New ‘Silence Of Animals’From Darwinian Conservatism: ‘The Evolution of Mind and Mathematics: Dehaene Versus Plantinga and Nagel’

From Edward Feser: ‘Nagel And His Critics Part IV’A Few Thoughts On Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts Of Liberty”

John Gray Reviews Jonathan Haidt’s New Book At The New Republic: ‘The Knowns And The Unknowns’

Update And Repost- From YouTube: Leo Strauss On The Meno-More On The Fact/Value Distinction?’

Franz De Waal At The NY Times 10/17/10: ‘Morals Without God?’

Theodore Dalrymple, Twitter Ignorance & The Latest In Titan II Living-Some Links

Rigid Diversity‘ by Theodore Dalrymple:

‘The present totalitarian threat comes not from government, as it once did, but from the universities and the intellectuals, or semi-intellectuals, that they turn out.’

Just a reminder: People who want to control how you think and feel are letting you know now how they will behave in the future.  You can’t necessarily count on institutions, politicians and authorities to maintain your freedoms, should you suddenly find intolerant people with bad ideas wielding influence over you.

Eventually, such folks get into government.

Peaceful protest, adhering to a cause which threatens the current Canadian political authority, is punishable by imprisonment, fines and lack of financial access.

Imagine your worst political enemies, cracking down on a peaceful protest out in the streets. Let’s say you’re passing by, and out of basic concern, you hand a bottle of water to a protestor. It’s possible the punishment for this simple act (apolitical) could follow you home, leading to fines and threats of imprisonment, staining your future financial and employment opportunities.

The technology is already here.

Surely you trust the people following the latest moral cause not to abuse the authority and technology they wield?

What about you and your people?

The previous two cents and two cents more gets you close to a nickel: Twitter as a platform is what it is (especially good at brief bursts of condensed information, data gathering, and disasters). It’s the kind of internal, open chat platform within a company, scaled more broadly. All you need is a device, free software to download, and voila, you’ve become a node on a vast network. This has advantages.

Communication, however, is obviously a pathetic prosthetic for human contact and real conversation.  I suspect the people curating Twitter of playing a dumb, dumb game by favoring their favored biases (like all of us, to some extent) instead of just letting speech flourish.

This creates echo-chambers.

Via David Thompson, I don’t think I’d want to live in a Titan II Missile Complex, but it’s only $495K. Get in on the ground floor, and go down from there.

As posted, Land Art is often about removing the monetary value, commodification and fungibility of a piece of art and making something big enough, weird enough, useless enough; maybe making a beautiful/ugly enough imitation of Nature or man’s design within Nature.

I’d argue such thinking (the Romantic conceptualization of Nature, and Man’s relation to it), has social and political consequences for all of us.

Here’s Wikipedia, keeping it simpler:

‘Land art, earthworks (coined by Robert Smithson), or Earth art is an art movement in which landscape and the work of art are inextricably linked.’

Repost-From The American Spectator: ‘Environmentalism and the Leisure Class’

Full piece here.

William Tucker makes some good points:

‘It is not that the average person is not concerned about the environment. Everyone weighs the balance of economic gain against a respect for nature. It is only the truly affluent, however, who can be concerned about the environment to the exclusion of everything else.

On this analysis, It’s the people who’ve benefitted most from industrial activity that are using their wealth and leisure to promote an ideology that is ultimately harmful to industrial activity, and the people who live by it. Tucker has been following how such ideas actually translate into public policy and political organization for a while. Tucker also invokes Thorstein Veblen, and highlights how environmentalism can make for strange political bedfellows:

‘But the Keystone Pipeline has brought all this into focus. As Joel Kotkin writes in Forbes, Keystone is the dividing line of the “two Americas,” the knowledge-based elites of the East and West Coasts in their media, non-profit and academic homelands (where Obama learned his environmentalism) and the blue-collar workers of the Great In- Between laboring in agriculture, mining, manufacturing, power production and the exigencies of material life.’

Aside from the political and sociological analysis, I would offer that there are many to whom environmentalism serves as a kind of religion (or at least a political and organizational entity offering purpose and membership, as a religion has a pretty particular definition).

On this view, man has fallen away from Nature, and built civilized society atop it through harmful, unsustainable means. He must atone, and get back in harmony with Nature, as he has alienated himself from his once graceful state (tribal? romantically primitive? collectively just? equal and fair? healthy? “spiritually aware?” morally good?). This obviously gives meaning to people’s lives, a purpose, belonging and group identity as well as a political and secularly moral political platform. A majority of these folks are almost always anti-industrial, and it’s worthy of note how environmentalism has grown in our schools, marketplace, and in the public mind.

It’s often tough to tell where the sciences end (and they are often invoked to declare knowledge that is certain, or near-certain, and worthy of action) and where a certain political philosophy (usually more communal, politically Left, Statist…regulatory, centrally planned economically) begins.

What say you?

Nuclear makes a lot of sense, but so does recognizing all the rather lost souls looking for some purpose in their lives, and making activism their purpose.

———————

Related:

Urbanists love to hate Joel Kotkin, as he has offered them much in the way of criticism. At the New Urbanist website, I found the following quote:

“Only when humans are again permitted to build authentic urbanism — those cities, towns, and villages that nurture us by their comforts and delights — will we cease the despoiling of Nature by escaping to sprawl.”

Bjorn Lomborg is skeptical of ‘Earth Hour’ in Blinded By The Light. Go towards the light.

Here’s Robert Zubrin:

——————-

How to separate reasonable environmentalism from the totalitarian impulses, the Malthusians and various other people who “know” how many people is enough? Now that environmentalism is a primary focus in our schools, it’s probably worth thinking about.

If you visit my Twitter feed, you’ll quickly realize the genius of Peace Pavilion West, a global peace raft overseen by a strong authority.  Join us, fellow human (this is very serious business):

Who shall hear our cries? Gaia, Gaia. Who shall heal her wounds? We shall. We shall. Who shall clean our air? The Western Wind. -Community Morning Prayer from The Human Pagoda. Namaste, NPR.

— Chris Navin (@chris_navin) May 4, 2019

Related On This Site: Isaiah Berlin’s negative liberty: From George Monbiot: ‘How Freedom Became Tyranny’

Walter Russell Mead At The American Interest: ‘The Failure of Al Gore Part Three: Singing the Climate Blues’

Amy Payne At The Foundry: ‘Morning Bell: Obama Administration Buries Good News on Keystone Pipeline’

Ronald Bailey At Reason: ‘Delusional in Durban’A Few Links On Environmentalism And LibertyFrom The WSJ-A Heated Exchange: Al Gore Confronts His Critics…From The Literary Review–Weather Channel Green Ideology: Founder John Coleman Upset….The Weather Channel’s Green Blog: A Little Too Green

Afghanistan, Environmentalism & Vaccines-Some Midweek Links

-A take on Afghanistan. Was Bin Laden primarily a charismatic modernist rather than a Muslim?

-According to one view of the modern world, the ‘environment’ is worth the lives of those on the margins. Theodore Dalrymple on the potential effects: Will Britain Shiver?

-Via Edward Feser: Geach’s argument against modernism.

-Via Walter Russell Mead at the WSJ (behind a paywall): Global Free Trade Is In Crisis

-On that note, a reader links to Paul Kingsnorth (former environmentalist looking for deeper meaning) regarding the vaccines and the current state of many institutions (related to the search for deeper meaning)

Are You A Gray Man? Some Hodgepodge Links

-Are you a Gray Man?

-What’s going on with the New American Right?

-A Catholic point of view?

-Ah, the the Dirtbag Left

Via an Australian reader:

  1. If China were to begin military action today in Taiwan (portal to the Pacific/semiconductors) what would the Australian response be?
  2. What commitments do the Australians have to America and to Taiwan? Vice-Versa? What about the Pacific alliance, and potential Pacific Rim allies (Tokyo, Seoul)?
  3. How could American weakness and potential military incompetence, along with a rising Chinese nationalism and semi-Communist State lead to potential war scenarios?

Lots to think about it and it’s hard, practical thinking.

From the public square to the Natural World:

Mike Shellenberger on his new book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.

As previously posted, ‘Do Children Cause Global Warming?

Bjorn Lomborg:

‘Across all cultures, raising a child is considered one of the most rewarding things a person can do. Yet a chorus of campaigners, scientists, and journalists suggest that everyone should think twice before procreating.’

Isaiah Berlin’s negative liberty: From George Monbiot: ‘How Freedom Became Tyranny’

Urbanists love to hate Joel Kotkin, as he has offered them much in the way of criticism. At the New Urbanist website, I found the following quote:

“Only when humans are again permitted to build authentic urbanism — those cities, towns, and villages that nurture us by their comforts and delights — will we cease the despoiling of Nature by escaping to sprawl.”

Bjorn Lomborg is skeptical of ‘Earth Hour’ in Blinded By The Light. Go towards the light.

Walter Russell Mead At The American Interest: ‘The Failure of Al Gore Part Three: Singing the Climate Blues’

Amy Payne At The Foundry: ‘Morning Bell: Obama Administration Buries Good News on Keystone Pipeline’

Ronald Bailey At Reason: ‘Delusional in Durban’A Few Links On Environmentalism And LibertyFrom The WSJ-A Heated Exchange: Al Gore Confronts His Critics…From The Literary Review–Weather Channel Green Ideology: Founder John Coleman Upset….The Weather Channel’s Green Blog: A Little Too Green