The apocalypse is the scientist’s fundamentalism
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2008/05/22/2003412565
The feeling that the world is coming to an end is as old as the
scriptures, and certain climatic predictions have the same flavor
By Robert Skidelsky
Thursday, May 22, 2008, Page 9
It was only to be expected that former US vice president Al Gore would
give this month’s cyclone in Myanmar an apocalyptic twist.
“Last year,” he said, “a catastrophic storm hit Bangladesh. The year
before, the strongest cyclone in more than 50 years hit China ...We’re
seeing the consequences that scientists have long predicted might be
associated with continual global warming.”
Surprisingly, Gore did not include the Asian tsunami of 2004, which
claimed 225,000 lives. His not so subliminal message was that these
natural catastrophes foreshadow the end of the world.
Apocalyptic beliefs have always been part of the Christian tradition.
They express the yearning for heaven on earth, when evil is destroyed
and the good are saved.
In their classical religious form, such beliefs rely on signs and
omens, like earthquakes and sunspots, which can be interpreted — by
reference to biblical passages — as ****tending a great cataclysm and
cleansing. Thus, apocalyptic moments are products of a sense of
crisis; they can be triggered by wars and natural disasters.
Classical apocalyptic thinking is certainly alive and well, especially
in the US, where it feeds on Protestant fundamentalism, and is mass
marketed with all the resources of modern media. Circles close to the
Bush administration, it is rumored, take current distempers like
terrorism as confirmation of biblical prophecies.
In secularized, pseudo-scientific form, apocalyptic thinking has also
been at the core of revolutionary politics. In his latest book, Black
Mass, philosopher John Gray discusses how political doctrines like
Marxism colonized the apocalyptic vision in prophesying the
destruction of capitalism as the prelude to the socialist utopia. But
political messianism was an offshoot of 19th century optimism. With
the collapse of optimism, contem****ary apocalyptic belief lays more
stress on catastrophe and less on utopia.
For example, in his book Flat Earth News, the investigative journalist
Nick Davies reminds us of the millennium bug panic. Newspapers
everywhere carried stories predicting that computer systems would
crash on Jan. 1, 2000, causing much of the world to shut down.
The subtext was familiar: Those who live by technology will die by it.
Misre****ting of science is so routine now that we hardly notice it.
Much more serious is when science itself becomes infected by the
apocalyptic spirit. Faith-based science seems a contradiction in
terms, because the scientific worldview emerged as a challenge to
religious superstition. But im****tant scientific beliefs can now be
said to be held religiously, rather than scientifically.
This brings us back to Gore and climate change.
There is no doubt that the Earth became warmer over the 20th century
(by about 0.7°C), which most climate scientists largely attribute to
human carbon dioxide emissions. If nothing is done to restrict such
emissions, global temperatures will rise by between 1.8°C and 4°C over
the next century. At some “tipping point,” the world will be subject
to floods and pestilence in classic apocalyptic fa****on.
This is the second doomsday scenario of recent decades, the first
being the Club of Rome’s prediction in 1972 that the world would soon
run out of natural resources. Both are “scientific,” but their
structure is the same as that of the biblical story of the Flood:
Human wickedness (or, in today’s case, unbridled materialism) triggers
the disastrous sequence, which it may already be too late to avert.
Like Biblical prophecy, scientific doomsday stories seem impervious to
refutation and are constantly repackaged to feed the hunger for
catastrophe.
Scientists argue that the media and politicians are responsible for
exaggerating their findings as promises of salvation or warnings of
retribution. But scientists themselves are partly responsible, because
they have hardened uncertainties into probabilities, treated
disputable propositions as matters of fact and attacked dissent as
heresy.
Scientists are notoriously loath to jettison conclusions reached by
approved scientific methods, however faulty. But their intolerance of
dissent is hugely magnified when they see themselves as captains in a
salvationist army dedicated to purging the world of evil habits.
Today it is the West that foists an apocalyptic imagination on the
rest of the world. Perhaps we should be looking to China and India for
answers about how to address environmental damage, instead of using
climate change as a pretext to deprive them of what we already have.
How do the Chinese feel about their newfound materialism? Do they have
an intellectual structure with which to make sense of it?
The best antidote to the doom merchants is skepticism. We must be
willing to take uncertainty seriously. Climate change is a fact. But
apocalyptic thinking distorts the scientific debate and makes it
harder to explain the causes and consequences of this fact, which in
turn makes it harder to know how to deal with it.
The danger is that we become so infected with the apocalyptic virus
that we end up creating a real catastrophe — the meltdown of our
economies and lifestyles — in order to avoid an imaginary one. In
short, while a religious attitude of mind deserves the highest
respect, we should resist the re-conquest by religion of matters that
should be the concern of science.
--
"We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our
homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other
countries are going to say OK." -- Barack Obama
The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority but to
escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. -- Marcus Aurelius
"...the whole world, including the United States, including all that
we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark
Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights
of perverted science." -- Sir Winston Churchill
Joseph R. Darancette
daranc@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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