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May 2007 -- In the previous issue, I featured the worldview of a fictional character—counterterrorism agent Jack Bauer of the hit TV series “24.” Though wildly popular with the general public, Jack has been raising hackles in intellectual and political circles because (in the words of the show’s conservative executive producer, Joel Surnow) “He’s a patriot.” Or, as I put it, “he does what he must in order to protect his highest values: his family, his country, their freedom, their security."
That such an outlook would be considered controversial, even reprehensible—at least among our intellectual and political leaders—says a great deal about the values and principles governing their thinking, and their distance from those of the general public.
About the same time that my column appeared, yet another polarizing figure was making cultural and political waves. This one was a real-life character—former senator and vice president Al Gore. His public reception, however, has been the opposite of Jack Bauer’s.
America’s intellectual and political leaders love Mr. Gore, showering Academy Awards upon his alarmist global-warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, and receiving him with a hero’s welcome in a special appearance before a congressional committee in mid-March.
By contrast, however, his reception among the general public has not been globally warm. “In fact,” declares a Rasmussen Reports opinion poll released on March 24, “just 36% of Americans say that Gore knows what he is talking about when it comes to the environment and Global Warming.” Intriguingly, there is a strong “gender gap” revealed by the poll results. “Women, by a 2-to-1 margin, say Gore knows what he is talking about. Men, by a similar margin, say he does not.” Political party divisions are equally pronounced: “By a 65% to 9% margin, Democrats say that Gore knows what he’s talking about. By a 57% to 11%, Republicans say he does not.” (I would be willing to bet that a poll about Jack Bauer would reveal a mirror-image reversal of these affinities.)
Gore constantly refers to “science” during his public presentations; he cites various scientific studies, statistics, and charts in support of his contentions. But these poll data strongly suggest that values, not science, are governing the debates over global warming and environmentalism. People’s perceptions of scientific truth about these issues are being shaped by their fundamental beliefs and attitudes—in a word, by philosophy.
In the biblical spirit, Gore offers a series of exhortations to self-sacrifice.And indeed, at root, Al Gore is not really peddling opinions drawn from meticulously objective scientific research. Even the pro-environmentalist New York Times pointed out in a March 13 feature that “scientists argue that some of Mr. Gore’s central points are exaggerated and erroneous.” Among these: his claims about the increasing severity and frequency of hurricanes; his predictions of catastrophic sea level rises of up to twenty feet (the prediction by the alarmist UN climate panel is only twenty-three inches); his declaration that recent temperatures are the highest in a millennium; his smug assertion of a scientific “consensus” that humans are the main culprits in climate change; his downplaying of natural climate variability and cycles; and his warning that we face massive increases in malaria and other diseases due to warming.
No, Al Gore isn’t peddling science; that’s just the packaging. Underneath the scientific wrapping paper lies a philosophically rooted political agenda.
Gore never misses an opportunity to frame environmental issues in moral terms. In his March congressional testimony, for example, he said, “I know the phrase sounds shrill, and I know it’s a challenge to the moral imagination to see and feel and understand that the entire relationship between humanity and our planet has been radically altered” (emphasis added). “The evangelical and faith communities have begun to take the lead, calling for measures to protect God’s creation,” he added. Comparing the global warming “crisis” to World War II, he emphasized, “This is a moral moment of similar magnitude. This is not ultimately about any scientific discussion or political dialogue. It is about who we are as human beings and our capacity to transcend our limitations and rise to meet this challenge.”
This “moral” emphasis is not surprising coming from a man who once attended divinity school. Nor is it surprising to anyone who has read his 1992 bestseller, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit. Consider some passages from the Gospel According to Al Gore.
In the Foreword to the paperback edition, Gore speaks of “the collision between our worldwide civilization and the ecological system of the earth.” This collision he blames on “three large changes in the nature of our relationship to the earth: first, the population explosion…; second, the scientific and technological revolution [that] has increased our power to manipulate nature and has vastly increased our ability to have an impact on the world around us; and third…our way of thinking about our relationship to the environment.” He refers to all this as a “great moral challenge.”
In the Introduction, he warns that “civilization itself has been on a journey from its foundations in the world of nature to an ever more contrived, controlled, and manufactured world of our own imitative and sometimes arrogant design…. It is now all too easy to regard the earth as a collection of ‘resources’ having an intrinsic value no larger than their usefulness at the moment.” If we ignore our impact on the earth, he warns, “then we will not be able to see how dangerously we are threatening to push the earth out of balance.”
And later, he tells us that “we are creating a world that is hostile to wildness, that seems to prefer concrete to natural landscapes.” He asks, “have our eyes adjusted so completely to the bright lights of civilization that we can’t see…the violent collision between human civilization and the earth?”
What is all this but an updated reiteration, by a former divinity student, of Genesis, and of “arrogant” man’s fall from grace—man’s desecration of a perfect Garden, functioning in perfect “balance”? In fact, Gore explicitly alludes to Genesis, where men were “charged with the duty of stewardship” over the earth.
His own philosophical premises are drawn from the premodern muck of mystical and tribal antiquity. In the biblical spirit, Gore offers a series of exhortations to self-sacrifice. “We must make the rescue of the environment the central organizing principle of civilization,” he writes. The changes involved will be “wrenching” and “will affect almost every aspect of our lives together on this planet.” Among them: “We should be emphasizing attractive and efficient forms of mass transportation” with “the strategic goal of completely eliminating the internal combustion engine over, say, a twenty-five-year period.” Even “power grids are themselves no longer necessarily desirable,” while windmills are an option that’s “surprisingly competitive” (certainly surprising to anyone who has studied the matter). And on and on.
What, pray, stands in the way of Gore’s implementing his pre-modern “central organizing principle of civilization”? The same things that stand in the way of the postmodern enemies of modern civilization: reason; individualism; liberty; capitalism.
Reason: “This rational, detached, scientific intellect, observing a world of which it is no longer a part, is too often arrogant, unfeeling, uncaring.” Individualism: “We enshrine the self as the unit of ethical account, separate and distinct not just from the natural world but even from a sense of obligation to others…” Liberty: “[W]e have tilted so far toward individual rights and so far away from any sense of obligation that it is now difficult to muster an adequate defense of any rights vested in the community at large or in the nation…” Capitalism: We must enact “a comprehensive and ubiquitous change in the economic ‘rules of the road’ by which we measure the impact of our decisions on the environment. We must establish—by global agreement—a system of economic accounting that assigns appropriate values to the ecological consequences of both routine choices in the marketplace by individuals and companies and larger, macroeconomic choices by nations” (emphasis added). We also need “a national approach to technological development, sometimes called an industrial policy.”
This, then, is the Gospel According to Al: irrationalism, collectivism, statism, socialism. Earth in the Balance is breathtaking in the scope and consistency of its consistent assault on America’s founding premises and fundamental institutions.
Though his own philosophical premises are drawn from the pre-modern muck of mystical and tribal antiquity, Al Gore’s enthusiastic reception among postmodern intellectuals and the cultural elite only underscores the superficiality of their differences. These individuals are united by a shared hatred and a working agenda. Their goal is to obliterate the American Enlightenment legacy.
Gore never misses an opportunity to frame environmental issues in moral terms.
Those conservatives who believe that the likes of Gore can be fought by a return to religion and tradition will not be encouraged by what they find in Gore’s sermons, for he draws upon those very sources to make his own philosophical case. Likewise, those libertarians who flirt with postmodernism, and who believe that capitalism can be defended without reference to a systematic philosophy of rational individualism, will not be encouraged by the postmodern thinkers they find riding Gore’s bandwagon.
Reason, individualism, freedom, and capitalism are of a philosophical piece. They stand or fall together. Those who fail to grasp this will learn the hard way from those adversaries, like Al Gore, who do understand this linkage, and are only too happy to exploit the inconsistencies of America’s self-proclaimed defenders.
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