Mark Steyn, recently returned from vacation to happily labor away at his Website, reprints a prescient essay he wrote eight years ago, for Labor Day, 2002:
This Labour Day, I thought about the working class, the masses.
No, honestly, I did. Okay, I was on the beach, but the folks around me lying on the sand had jobs they’ll be getting back to this morning. They worked. They would be classed as workers. But they’re not a homogeneous “working class,” they’re not conscripts in Karl Marx’s “masses.” The transformation of Labour Day, from a celebration of workers’ solidarity to a cook-out, is the perfect precis of the history of Anglo-American capitalism.
If you want to see what “the masses” are meant to look like, buy a DVD of Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s 1926 “expressionist masterpiece.” As futuristic nightmares go, it’s hilarious: The workers are slaves, living underground, chained to the levers, wheels, cranks and cogs of a vast machine, dehumanized by the crushing anonymity of their servitude, etc., etc.
Alas, nothing dates faster than a futuristic vision: Today, the nightmare that beckons is quite the opposite. Instead of a world in which the workers are forced to operate huge, clanking machines below the Earth all day long, the machines are small and silent and so computerized no manpower is required and the masses have to be sedated by shallow distractions like supersized shakes and Wal-Mart and 24-hour lesbian wrestling channels on Premium Cable.
It took the workers’ tribunes a while to catch on: Even today, when your average union leader issues his annual Labour Day address, you can tell at heart he still thinks it’s 1926 and Metropolis is just around the corner
And finally, in 2008, the left finally had a president in office, who like them, frequently believes he’s permanently trapped in 1933 — as does Time magazine, who put him on the cover in late 2008 portraying the then president-elect, via Photoshop, as the next FDR, even down to preserving Roosevelt’s cigarette holder, jaunty, but oh so hated by today’s nanny state.
Note these moments at the end of Mark’s article, again from 2002, which are a reminder that for virtually all of the previous decade, the center-right War on Terror proceeded apace with the far left’s war on modernity:
Back in those days, if PBS jetsetting finger-wagger Bill Moyers was sitting under some tree in the South African bush bemoaning man as a “cancer on the planet,” nobody in Connecticut would be able to hear a word he was yakking on about, oh happy day.But, over the millennia, the Eighth Psalm has held up, which is more than you can say for Fritz Lang or those 1970s eco-apocalyptics. By contrast, Suzuki’s “We’re All Animals Here” is a pitiful reductio, an expression not so much of evolutionary theory as devolutionary theory: We’ve evolved from the beasts, and, with a bit of a nudge from Moyers and Suzuki and PETA, we can evolve back. And if that means those fieldhands in southern Ethiopia have to eke out their four decades in the rustic version of Metropolis, so be it.
There’s no such thing as “sustainable” development. Human progress and individual liberty have advanced on the backs of one unsustainable development after another: When we needed trees for heating and transportation, we chopped ‘em down. Then we discovered oil, and the trees grew back. When the oil runs out, we won’t notice because our SUVs will be powered by something else. Bet on human ingenuity every time. We’re not animals, and it’s a cult as deranged as the screwiest fringe religion to insist we are. Earth’s most valuable resource is us.
Not surprisingly, that’s not a sentiment that’s been selling well with much of the far left since the late 1960s, as Fred Siegel recently noted at City Journal. But it’s all fun and games until somebody actually buys into the eco-paranoia and decides to hold a TV network’s offices hostage, Glenn Reynolds writes in the Washington Examiner:
Filthy. Parasites. Disgusting, overbreeding candidates for sterilization and extermination. Possessed of false morals and a “breeding culture.”
Hitler talking about the Jews? Nope. This is Discovery Channel hostage-taker James Lee talking about … human beings. Compared to Lee, Hitler was a piker, philosophically: Der Fuehrer only wanted to kill those he considered “subhuman.” Lee considered all humans to be subhuman.
Lee was a nut, an eco-freak who said he was inspired by Al Gore’s environmental scare-documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” His badly written “manifesto” underscores his craziness. He hated “filthy human babies.”
But, of course, Lee’s not alone. Looking at the environmental literature, we find terms like those used above — the currently stylish description is “eliminationist rhetoric” — used widely, and plans for mass sterilization are fairly common.
And, as Mark Hemingway pointed out in these pages a few days ago, one need only look to the writings of President Obama’s “science czar,” John Holdren to find something similar. Seeing humanity as destructive, Holdren wrote in favor of forced abortion and putting sterilizing agents in the drinking water, and in particular of sterilizing people who cause “social deterioration.”
Holdren has since distanced himself from these views, but still. Lee was a violent nut, but not a scientist. Holdren is a scientist (who held nutty views, at least at one point) but he’s not a violent nut.
Still though, best to keep Holdren away from NASA’s unmanned rockets. But as James Delingpole recently wrote in the London Telegraph, “James Lee is Al Gore is Prince Charles is the Unabomber:”
Al Gore’s Church of Climatism has claimed a new glorious martyr. His name is James Lee – the Discovery channel attempted eco-suicide-bomber – and if he’d had his way he wouldn’t have been the only one who ended up in the great recycling bin in the sky. That’s because, as far as the late James Lee was concerned, humans like the innocent Discovery channel employees he held hostage are the scum of the earth.
Just read some of the manifesto he posted on the internet and see for yourself:
The humans? The planet does not need humans.
You MUST KNOW the human population is behind all the pollution and problems in the world, and YET you encourage the exact opposite instead of discouraging human growth and procreation. Surely you MUST ALREADY KNOW this!
Does this sound like the ravings of a sad, deranged loner on the wilder fringes of eco-fascist lunacy? Not to me it doesn’t. Strip away the block capitals and what you have, word for word, is the core manifesto of the entire global green movement.
Some greens, such as Al Gore, the Prince of Wales, the Hon Sir Jonathon Porritt or that nice David Attenborough try to express their philosophy more diplomatically. Others, such as James Lee and his kindred spirit the Unabomber, are more forthright. Ideologically, however, there is not a cigarette paper’s difference between them. All cleave to the same fundamental tenet of the Church of Climatism: that humans are the problem not the solution.
Back in his Washington Examiner article, Glenn goes on to note:
Policing the science is likely to prove difficult. But policing the rhetoric — as American society has long done with expressions of racial hatred or genocidal sentiment — seems well within reach.
In contemporary America, no respectable person would advocate, say, the involuntary sterilization of blacks or Jews. Why, then, should it be any more respectable to advocate the involuntary sterilization of everyone? Or even of those who cause “social deterioration?”
They advocated abortion, not sterilization, but that’s not all that far removed from the argument the Freakonomics authors backed into a few years ago, unwittingly updating Margaret Sanger’s original theories, long airbrushed out of the left’s collective history.
The question becomes: What year was it when everything in the environment was right? I guess the unenlightened among us need a clearer target to shoot at. These regressives actually call themselves progressives making it certain, in the opening stanza of their enviro-diatribes, that they are always liars.
I guess we would have to go back to those good old days before man was here. Like when the whole earth was one boiling cauldron of volcanic activity. When only peaceful environmentally friendly creatures like T Rex and velociraptors frolicked amongst the ancient forests. Or maybe the econuts like Paul Watson and his band of hippies on Whale wars could guide us to nirvana.
I have trouble with those espousing the mass suicide of the entire human race. I figure they can either be hypocrites or they can be dead.
Personally, when debating those who seek the extermination of humanity, I have a simple, two-word response that I invariably use:
“You first.”
That usually either stops the debate cold, or gets them off into why they should be exempt and everyone else needs to die, which has the wonderful effect of making them look like the absolute lunatics they are.
Reminds me of a guy I talked to one time who was a member of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. He said they were a non-violent group who wanted to get people to choose to not reproduce, so that the Earth could go back to being a natural place without people screwing it up. He also said that if not enough people chose to do so voluntarily, VHEM would “have to take steps to ensure it happened anyway.”
As a graduate in humanities within the past decade, I can verify that a lot of people were silent over these matters. I was lucky to not have ever heard of Howard Zinn and the whole lot. I had only one professor who got angry that I did not share his views. But that was around the time of the tipping point. Soon afterwards, around the time of the voting recount in Florida, a fellow student (used loosely since he was the typical 30-something with a poneytail taking a history undergrad class) stormed in and yelled, “If Bush wins… I am leaving this country!” My professor replied with a half-chuckle, “I’m sure we’ll miss you. What was your name again?” We never saw that guy in class again. I believe something snapped around that time, that made everyone on the left lose that little filter between their brain and mouth. As one of my professors told me about her fleeing from Cuba during the communist invasion, “That revolution helped no one but the people who designed it, and hurt everyone underneath.” Sadly, I fear this country is being forced towards a revolution.
I, too, fear a revolution is at hand. Obamunist and his Marxist cohorts are the best gift the right has ever been given. We have one advantage: Having won two world wars and having survived several depressions and recessions, we are hardier and more determined. They fight for Utopia, an impossible dream; we fight for the Constitution as our forefathers did, as Americans always will.
A little leaven leavens the whole loaf.
It is good that a rich and prosperous society can support critics and gadflies. The very fact that we can support such people is a mark of our strength, just as the peacock’s otherwise useless display demonstrates Darwinian fitness.
Yes, and it is good for us to pause from time to time and reflect on how we can do better.
But now we’ve become all tail and no bird.
I’ve often wondered why those that thought the Human Race was a “cancer” on the planet didn’t “Lead the way” with a spectacular offing of themselves as a demonstration of how it should be.
Bravo Mr. Driscoll, Bravo!
This is grossly unfair. The bridge is to the 15th century.
No, really. See “Medieval elites”:
http://vulgarmorality.wordpress.com/2010/08/30/medieval-elites/
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What channel is that on?
Pay-per-View, of course.
I have often reflected, stepping way back to get the full historical view, that the two major totalitarian movements of the twentieth century were based on political and philosophical rationalizations for theft. Communism, for example, said that we should steal from the capitalistic rich and middle class, giving their ill-gotten swag to us, the virtuous working class; and the nazis said that we should eliminate the jews, take their sneakily amassed wealth (they’re all rich, aren’t they?) and re-distribute it to us, the noble Aryans. With regard to the totalitarian green movement, it’s possible that only the snout of the beast has so far revealed itself. It would fit the pattern for the full-blown radical green ideology to become that we should eliminate the capitalistic, wealth-creating despoilers of the earth, take all their goods and property and give it to us, the nature-loving and environmentally sound moral elite. After all, it’s just the further greedy creation of wealth that ruins the environment — wealth that’s already in existence need not be destroyed but should instead be re-allocated to those who most deserve it, who work hard day and night to preserve the environment.
Seeing that you discussing movements global green movement and you have mentioned some revolutionariesFeel that you will find a lecture given by Olavo de Carvalho
The Structure of the Revolutionary Mind
Near the end of a fairly long lecture in answering a question fromh is audience he builds up to:
The phrase ‘filthy human babies’ sounds like Invader Zim, the alien invader who really hates humans, especially human children.
They advocated abortion, not sterilization
Actually the eugenics movement advocated both, with sterilization the ultimate goal and abortion merely a stopgap measure. The eugenics literature of the period suggests that abortion should be illegal for the “correct” people, and mandatory for the “wrong” ones.
Scratch the surface of the pro-abortion movement and you will find eugenics. This is why I can’t call myself pro-choice, even though I think this issue is best dealt with outside the province of government.
Its all well and good to throw stones at the narcisstic nihilists, an awkward phrase that nonetheless seems to cover the ground well. But I think what is lacking is a conservative theory that upholds the value of personal decision making and a person’s control of their own welfare, without slopping over into hedonistic or amoral excess. I think we need a new Burke. Its not that the left is winning, its that the left seems to be the only one left on the intellectual field.
Until then, we are all in an intellectual Jonestown, and the trick is to know when today’s menu is koolaid.
It is very sad that so many on the libertarian centre-right have a blind spot regarding the environment. They don’t understand that all sustainable species are strictly limited in number by predators and disease. Whenever these limits are removed – H. sapiens seems to be in that position, but there are many prey-predator feedback cycles that illustrate this – the result is catastrophic. Those who oppose limits on human population are asking for catastrophe.
And you’d think the simple economics of resource logistics would both appeal to those on the libertarian centre-right and be understood by them. But no: many of them call anyone who is suspected of the ‘heresy of environmentalism’ a ‘far-left moron’.
It’s very sad, as any unthinking recycling of dumb slogans is.
Please answer the question in #1. Your population explosion fear mongering doesn’t hold water since never in the history of our species have we been able to feed as high a percentage of our population as we can right now.
Yoni, human population appears to have limits other than predation and disease.
Look at any society that has become wealthy in the technological age, and you see a massive, rapid decline in birth rates. Most “first-world” nations are at or below the replacement rate.
Wealth is not what the neo-Luddites claim. Wealth based on industry and technology, for a number of reasons, leads to a limit on population. It’s poor agrarian societies, those that DO live “in the stone age”, in a “sustainable” way (what a joke), that produce profuse numbers of offspring.
Is this an exact description of the progress of Islam in any society where tolerance has allowed it to metastasize? Can’t blame them. Their tactics have worked well with amazing adaptation to circumstances since their exodus from Mecca in 622. Their success has been simply amazing considering that history has proven cessation of all their aggression with burial of their dead wrapped in pork skins and embalmed in lard. A bag of pork skins in every marines back pack might be a cure for the malignancy if used in administering Muslims’ last rites.
Actually, after the rapture you can call “it” a bridge, an enviromental catastrophic event, a resourse logistics problem, an eugenics movement, a revolutionary movement’s unity, a revolution, nirvana, a discourse, A UFO event, whatever you want. But it will be too late for anything else. A little time spent researching bible prophesy now, will be worthwhile later. God bless to all.
This, right here:
“…if you’ve worked so hard to rise to the top of your status-sphere in academia, politics, or Hollywood, you really don’t want to think that the average air conditioning repairman, to use Tom Wolfe’s example above, has almost the same quality of life as you do.”
Nail, meet hammer. Remember reading about the aristocrats of old and their opinion of the “nouveau riche”? How gauche they were, and how tacky in their expenditures? They just didn’t understand how the wealthy were supposed to act. The bottom line is, these elitists do not want anyone else to achieve their level of prosperity or prominence. After all, if anyone can reach the pinnacle of success, then their achievement is a whole lot less special and they are just (gasp!) another regular person, just like anyone else.
Elite politicians have speech writere and handlers, top of the line Hollywood actors follow a script while carrying out the director’s instructions, our news from the msm comes from a person reading the news prepared by other reporters and writers and managed by the editor and all using technology none of these people created. I forgot many elites got their money from their ancestors. These are the elites we are supposed to listen to. Pardon the grammer.
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