Reflections on the Climate of Opinion

This was an article I put in to my local regional newspaper recently in an attempt to step back from the climate change 'debate', to try and separate its ideological, cultural and ecological elements. 

For American audiences, David Hicks was an Australian Taliban caught by the Northeren Alliance in Afghanistan in 2001, handed over to the US forces, imprisoned for some years at Guantanamo Bay, recently released back here and has become something of a cause celebre amongst some of the local literati for his recent book on his experiences.

The reference to a 'lumpen proletariat'  is a contemptuous Marxist term for a permanently unemployable petty criminal underclass that existed outside the structure of the working class culture of organised solidarity, class consciousness and discipline.

Read on.........


"The climate debate that has characterized letters in these columns has been couched in terms of 'yes it is a human activity problem and the science confirms it', and 'no it isn't and the science doesn't'.  I think we need to step back a bit and think about the underlying drivers of this debate.

This is not just about an irrational attack on and denial of the legitimacy of a specific area of scientific inquiry.  Climate is not the only theater where this is happening, as anyone following the growth of religious fundamentalism and the attack on Charles Darwin and his successors can see, particularly in the US.

Something big is going on in our culture; a kind of creeping loss of confidence in the things we have so taken for granted in the last two hundred years.

I suggest that the dark shadow of a lack of sustainable practice and thinking across all areas of what we now do, hangs over us like the brewing of a terrible storm.

It is now possible to foresee the end of the rapaciously over-consuming society that assembled itself after World War 2.  It is also possible to imagine that the liberal ideas that we inherited from the American and French Revolutions have degenerated into a horrible and disabling parody that has quite literally destroyed our system of social governance and the social commons it is supposed to protect.

The social commons has rights too, not just individuals. We shouldn't have to tolerate trashy third rate product from a dysfunctional system of social reproduction, and we wouldn't have to if there were a system of governance left that was worth a crumpet.

The irony is that in the climate debate, the majority of the people who represent the most grossly unsustainable social and ideological values, are the ones carrying the the environmental sustainability banner.

While the environmental unsustainability of current economic practice is unmistakably closing in on us, who wants to listen to characters who would give us gay marriage? an open door asylum seeker policy? a human rights framework that turns our children into ungovernable brats whose only guidance is from the sponsors? who turn traitors like David Hicks into a folk heroes? who apologize for and justify what happened recently on the streets of the cities of England? who would abandon our American allies and close down most of our defense capacity? and are prepared to give indigenous peoples and anyone else they deem to be the 'helplessly poor, downtrodden and marginalized', a moral blank cheque they wouldn't dream of giving anyone else?

These are people who have abused originally legitimate words like 'discrimination', 'social justice', 'racism', homophobia' and 'prejudice' into bludgeoning ideological cliches and moral propaganda tools that also conceal and shield the thoroughly crummy prejudices and unsustainable social practices and attitudes that the post-Marxist left have fallen into.

The Green/leftist package is really easy to say 'no' to, but, and it is a huge but, if we fail to act on climate change, our descendants will likely suffer a fate I can hardly bear to think about.

The ideological left controls the environment debate because their latter-day cold war Marxist predecessors realized that while the class struggle was going nowhere, the environment was a new weapon that business-as-usual would not be able to sweep under the carpet for long.  The Radical Ecology Conference in 1975, whose organizing organizing committee I was on, was a Communist Party Front.  And I became a member for some three years, so I know.  'The Party' didn't survive, but the Greens became the inheritors of this ideological push and continue to conflate it with saving the environment.

If we are going to save our future, the environmental agenda has to be removed from the left, because they will never get a majority constituency for their other policies, no matter how bad our environment gets.

Besides, the environment is inherently a conservative issue; as in conserving; thinking to the sixth generation about the implications of anything we do today.  How conservative is that?  Rejecting the trashy short term thinking of most bureaucratic and business policy makers is exercising conservative judgment.  Sustainability is a conservative idea to its bedrock roots.

We desperately need an instinctively conservative social movement committed to sustainable social, economic and environmental behavior and principles, that gets back to the basics of what life is supposed to be about and values the wealth we have in our heads as highly as the stuff which we own.  It can be secular and it doesn't need to be traditionalist or guided by precedent.  It can adopt the best sustainable practices of our own day and improve on them.

The whole idea that 'progress' can be monopolized by a single ideological group is pure propagandaspeak.  We conservatives can have our own 'progressive' view that we see as the wave of the future; our light and vision; not that of a small minority of lefty wannabees who in many ways have completely lost the plot.

There was a time when the Marxist left would have regarded the lumpen proletarian scum on the streets of Brixton as only potentially useful to The Party, after the application of considerable working class discipline, consciousness raising and literacy training, so that they could actually read party documents and intelligently follow its line and spread its word.  Without that, these execrably worthless characters would be just as likely to be dangerous to the proletarian cause as they are to each other!  What was once a rigorous social movement driven by analysis has been reduced to sentimental slops and do-goodism.  It is time to give the left a decent funeral and move on; and take the only piece of worthwhile agenda it has got, the environment, and give it a broad social base that will guarantee real action, so that we can fix it before it is too late."