In his diary from Copenhagen, "The Orly Taitz of Climate Change? 'Lord' Monckton in Copenhagen ", Nick wrote about the top of the pyramid of global warming denialism. I'd like to follow up with some thoughts about the base--not the material base of the big oil and coal companies with so much money at stake, but the large mass of rightwing folks with no material connection, similar to the Birthers, who seem passionately attached to denialism as a kind of belief system. Digby recently wrote a diary,"Knowingly False", in which she wrote:
Following up on posts of the last few days asking why the global warming deniers are global warming deniers, Mike the Mad Biologist offers up another explanation, which is very intriguing:
I think Fred Clark at the Slacktivist hits on a key point in these two posts: "It isn't intended to deceive others. It's intended to invite others to participate with you in deception"
He then excerpts Clark's discussion an earlier right wing rumor that ran rampant on the right about Procter and Gamble being a satanic cult (seriously) culminating with this observation:
Are you afraid you might be a coward? Join us in pretending to believe this lie and you can pretend to feel brave. Are you afraid that your life is meaningless? Join us in pretending to believe this lie and you can pretend your life has purpose. Are you afraid you're mired in mediocrity? Join us in pretending to believe this lie and you can pretend to feel exceptional. Are you worried that you won't be able to forget that you're just pretending and that all those good feelings will thus seem hollow and empty? Join us and we will pretend it's true for you if you will pretend it's true for us. We need each other.
I think that's getting to the heart of this. And for those who observed the chauvinistic fantasies of the keyboard commandos after 9/11, you will recognize some of the same impulses.
I read Clark's original two posts with great interests, and they contain a good deal of insight. I think he's definitely onto something quite important. However, I don't completely buy this argument in one important regard: Clark argues that, for the most part, people just can't be that stupid. They have to know that what they are saying isn't true. It's driven by malice, he argues, not stupidity. I take a more complicated view: many people--including even you and me at some points in our lives--don't really have such clear sense what's believable and what's not, what's self-contradictory and what's not, what's real and what is not. Most of us in the reality-based community like to think that we're not like that, but anyone who's ever fallen in love knows that's just not true. Intense dysfunctional relationships make this painfully obvious, but even the fairy-tale version has the capacity to melt what we think we know of the world. And charlatans from time immemorial have found ways to use this and related aspect of human nature to make people believe all manner of absurd things.
My difference with Clark is a significant one, but it doesn't really come to the fore until after one absorbs the insight in his posts, and the thrust of the argument he makes, which I sort through on the flip.
In recent weeks--starting with Washington, DC kick-off just prior to 9/11--a coalition of progressive Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and others known as Operation Free has been holding public events to spread the word about protecting America from the security threat of global warming. Participants include VoteVets, VetPac, Veterans for Common Sense, The Truman National Security Project, The American Values Network, Veterans & Military Families for Progress, and Veterans for Green Jobs. An August story at Grist.org reported:
"As a former U.S. Army captain and a veteran of Iraq, I understand firsthand how our dependence on foreign oil is a threat to national security," said Jon Powers, chief operating officer at the Truman National Security Project, a sponsor of Operation Free. "We're looking to Washington to take this threat seriously and come up with policy that reduces the threat to national security."
This week, as noted by Think Progress, the vets with Operation Free were attacked as traitors (what else?) by a Pennsylvania legislator:
Upon hearing about the group's visit to Pennsylvania, State Rep. Daryl Metcalfe (R) blasted the veterans as "traitors" and compared them to Benedict Arnold:
"As a veteran, I believe that any veteran lending their name, to promote the leftist propaganda of global warming and climate change, in an effort to control more of the wealth created in our economy, through cap and tax type policies, all in the name of national security, is a traitor to the oath he or she took to defend the Constitution of our great nation!" Mr. Metcalfe's email reads. "Remember Benedict Arnold before giving credibility to a veteran who uses their service as a means to promote a leftist agenda. Drill Baby Drill!!!"
Rep. Metcalfe, who served in the U.S. Army from 1980-84, today defended the remarks, saying that "if the type of policies that an individual promotes undermines the Constitution and the law of the land in our country, then they are not patriots."
So global warming is "leftist propaganda," not only despite the complete consensus of the peer reviewed literature, but despite several years of recognition as a national security threat by high-ranking defense analysts. This is a classic example of Conservative Bullshit Epistemology, which I wrote about last weekend ("Bullshit Epistemology And Conservative Narcissism Run Wild"). In fact, it combines several different bullshit arguments all in one, which is what makes it such a perfect exemplar of how Conservative Bullshit Epistemology works.
Appearing on Hannity to promote his latest book, America for Sale, author Jerome Corsi purported to explain the causes of the mortgage bubble by advancing a litany of falsehoods and misinformation: repeating the myth that the Community Reinvestment Act was responsible for the bubble; claiming that President Obama was tied to the housing bubble through conservative bogeyman ACORN; and falsely suggesting that Obama lowered interest rates to "zero or close to zero." Corsi has previously written falsehood-laden books about Obama and Sen. John Kerry, has claimed that Obama posted online a "false, fake birth certificate," and has a history of controversial comments about Islam, Catholicism, progressives, and other matters.
What's wrong with this? Superficially, it's easy: the CRA was not responsible for the housing bubble-rather it was non-CRA, non-bank institutions that lead the way, ACORN fought against irresponsible lending practices, both with respect to CRA- and non-CRA-based lending, and Obama's limited tangential connections with ACORN had nothing to do with ACORN's low-income-housing advocacy. These basic points have already been well established long ago--at least for those of us who have been paying attention. But to understand why this sort of constellation of lies recurs again and again, regardless of previous refutations, we need a framework of understanding at a higher of abstraction, taking note of how conservative ideology, narratives and fundamental cognitive practice commonly function. At the highest level, I suggest we need to understand five things:
(1) Conservative ideology characteristically generates narratives of blame directed at low-status outgroups, holding them responsible for all of society's ills. (Blacks, Jews, immigrants, gays, etc.) So naturally, it will blame the sorts of people ACORN is working to help.
(2) Conservative narratives routinely impute selfish motives and conspiratorial methods reflecting their own disowned common practices (or those of their elite heroes) to liberal shadow elites working in cahoots with low-status outgroups. This would be anyone who works with ACORN--even a lawyer representing them on a single case, such as Barack Obama.
(3) Conservative narratives routinely deny systemic explanations ( Kegan Levels 4 &5) for social ills, affirming the just order of the world-at least when run by conservatives (Kegan Level 3)-and blaming ills on the disordering of that world, particularly elevating the status of "undesireables" (those whose enduring dispositions at Kegan Level 2 mark them as essentially evil or at lest inferior).
(4) Causation is associational--Shawn Rosenberg's "sequential reasoning"--things follow an identified pattern, the pattern is the explanation, rather than "linear" (one cause->one effect) or systematic (multiple causes and effects, including potentially circular causality). Such "reasoning" is immune to logical, empirical or rational refutation, since it has no consistent foundations, but only, at best, the outward appearance of them. Furthermore, the patterns are mutable, and can be changed at the drop of a hat.
(5) The deep background of such "reasoning" includes a combination of the "Bullshit Epistemoloy" (that there is no objective truth, the only truth is fidelity to one's "true self"), and collective narcissism which implicitly celebrates conservative identity. This combination reinforces and synergizes with the characteristic of associational reasoning to fundamentally resist any possibility of logical, empirical or rational refutation.
The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These "anti-realist" doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry. One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself.
To which I responded,
it strikes me that one can very well describe the conservative movement as having the generation of bullshit as one of its primordial functions. They are profoundly anti-realist, and narcissistically obsessed with their own nature, which they presume to be far superior to mere mortals worrying about mere facts. So the fit is a very natural one.
Of course bullshit is not limited to conservatives. One can find it just about anywhere, the vast majority of it having nothing to do with politics. It also crops up as a natural phase in the developmental process detailed in William Perry's typology of cognitive development during college--though it's only a stage to be passed through. My point is that when it does come to politics, bullshit plays a special role for today's conservative movement--and for a relatively simple reason: conservative ideology is woefully inadequate to deal with the real world, thus generating an abundance of contradictory and confusing data. Fighting wars doesn't bring peace. Teaching "abstinence only" doesn't produce virgins. Deregulating markets bring one financial disaster after another, etc., etc., etc. There's a reason why "traditional conservative solutions" have been abandoned by the trainload since the 1700s: They. Just. Don't. Work.
Dear moguls, magnates, captains of industry and masters of the universe,
Lately, we've noticed some media chatter over the notion that you might "go Galt" in response to the recent leftward political drift and the increasingly populist demands of the disgruntled public. Going Galt entails following the example of John Galt, the romantic, individualist hero/businessman of Ayn Rand's best-seller, Atlas Shrugged. In the novel, Galt decides to withdraw from the world in order to deny an ungrateful society the fruits of his creative genius. We think it's a great idea.
The truth is, we never deserved you. Please go. We never deserved your visionary leadership in the manufacturing, transportation and energy sectors, your inventive ability to devise new, arcane financial instruments, your wonderful political lobbies and their committed advocacy for sound policies in the realms of health care, education and foreign policy. We never deserved any of it.
We tried, half-heartedly, to show our appreciation by rewarding you with massive tax cuts, subsidies for your industries, grants for your research departments, and multi-billion dollar no-bid government contracts. But apart from those meager contributions, it was really your entrepreneurial spirit that earned you your first, second and third yachts, your helicopter and your diamond toilet bowl.
So teach us our lesson and leave. Let our economy devolve into a primitive bartering system where ten chickens will be worth one goat and two goats will be worth one i-Pod . Meanwhile, you can eat, drink and make merry in your secret Xanadu.
Please, follow the John Galt model as faithfully as possible and vanish without a trace. Leave your properties, art collections and, especially, your liquor cabinets intact. We, the hoi polloi, will now be burdened with the responsibility of managing your holdings and disposing of your estates as best we can.
We only ask that you pack your bags and spirit yourselves to your top-secret pleasure dome before we take the trouble of raising the scaffold, unpacking the guillotine and sharpening the blade. It's such a pain.
Sincerely,
The Rabble
P.S.: Please take any and all copies of Ayn Rand's fabulous novels with you. We don't deserve them either.
As David Sirota recently noted, Nick Kristof, the neoliberal with a heart of gold, has penned another brilliant attack on the vulgar protectionists and their bizarre campaign against sweatshops and for "labor standards."
I think Kristof is very brave for speaking out on this issue and ruffling some left-wing feathers. Needless to say, I heartily agree with Kristof's arguments; but I would take his proposals a step or two further.
In keeping with the spirit of free enterprise and market solutions, impoverished children of the world's shantytowns should be allowed to sell their organs, limbs, etc. on the international market. The income from a kidney sale would be enough to feed one ragamuffin and a good many of his or her relations for more than a year. Would we sooner let a little girl die of starvation than let her sell a cornea or a patch of skin? If anything, these budding young entrepreneurs should be encouraged to make the most of their anatomical capital.
Let's be clear here. Opponents of organ sale are snatching food from the mouths of hungry children. Won't somebody think of the children? Organ markets now!
A more radical proposal would be to have urchins of the Third World rounded up and sold as slaves. Surely their daily ration of slave gruel will be better than eating garbage or nothing at all, their work aprons better than their present shameful nakedness. Would the poor little scamps rather huddle under muddy tarps or enjoy the warmth and comfort of modern slave quarters?
Who but Nicholas Kristof will speak for these precious little ones. Won't these abolitionists think of the children? Slavery now! Slavery forever!
