Category: philosophy

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Skyhookers versus the Up From Belows

There is an immense cosmic Opinion Bowl, the Cosmodome. It seats a hundred million people, most of whom, at a given time, are dead spirits. They shout as lustily as the small minority of the audience who at any given time are living.The game lasts eternally. There are time-outs for civilizational collapses, plagues, and really serious wars. If the Opinion Bowl has been at various times destroyed, it has always been rebuilt. In the Opinion Bowl one fight has gone on since the dawn of civilization. It is a struggle for dominance in explanations, between the Skyhookers and the Up-From-Belows. There are other matches too, besides the Skyhookers versus Up-from- Belows, and sub-fights within the factions. The immense, indeed near infinite audience, forms into factions and tribes at the speed of thought.

Prominent captains of the Skyhookers have included Plato, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Aristotle, Descartes, Pascal and other luminaries of the Western canon. Monotheists tend to be Skyhookers, but not exclusively, nor even to the extent of denying the arguments of the Up-from-belows. Indeed the question of theism – is there an organizing God? – tends to confuse the debate somewhat, because the debate is really about whether matter is sufficiently self-organizing for conscious observers (us) to emerge from the primordial stews, or was there some help – guidance if you will – from the future, from where we will end up, allowing for an overall purpose and direction in history. Such a view – the importance of observation – is consistent with the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Physics.

Unfortunately the two thousand year-long  dominance of Plato and Aristotle, two of the greatest skyhookers who ever thought, who were blind to the virtues of evolution, of trade, of self-organization, of growth and development, biased the intellectual life of the West to static thought, to anti-mercantile attitudes, and to the idea of immutable characters and essences. Aquinas’ adoption of Aristotle in the 12th century, and his acceptance by the Church as official orthodoxy, kept Skyhooker attitudes firmly entrenched in the core of official Christianity. It took a Reformation and a scientific revolution to loosen the links between Christianity and Aristotle. It now asserts that faith in Skyhooks is just that, faith, and if you do not believe in the Great Skyhook, you have not understood the Gospels properly.

The Up-from-Belows started out small but in the last few centuries have grown to dominate the game. First it was Epicurus, then Lucretius who set Epicurus’ thought to one long poem, and the near miraculous finding of a lost text of Lucretius in a German monastery at the time of the Renaissance. Lucretius is the first exposition of a materialist world of self-organizing atoms without the need for gods to explain anything. No wonder the Platonists were not anxious to preserve it. Later came Adam Smith, David Hume, Darwin, Friedrich Hayek, economists, and other proponents of the self-organizing capacities of nature and man. Atheists are, in general, up-from-belows, but many proponents of the Skyhook tradition also acknowledge the reality and importance of the self-organizing features of nature, which includes human beings.

Now Skyhook is a term of derision, like Puritan, Tory, Quaker, Whig, Protestant, Grit. The Skyhookers think that the entire universe has been brought into existence by a Mind, and that it is pervaded or organized by something like thought, and that behind the appearances is a Big Thinker, who has brought reality into being. Not just quarks and leptons, the strong force and the weak force, electromagnetism and gravity, but mind itself. They point out that mind is a feature of this universe that has to be explained.

Other skyhookers think that minds in the future are, by the force of their observations in the future, bringing into existence a state of affairs conducive to life, consciousness and intelligence. This view was the basis of the recent science fiction movie, Interstellar.

The Up-from-belows, when they wade into cosmology, get into trouble with mind. Their views are frequently materialist, and their ideas of matter are seen, by Skyhookers, as constricting limitations of the largest kinds on whatever could be real.  Daniel Dennett is a prominent example. Extreme materialists end up denying the existence of mind, or denying the particular appearance of qualities (known to the trade as qualia). If everything is self-organizing matter, and we know that matter is dead – so to speak – then mind is found in brains, and dies with brains. Brain generates mind, and not the other way around. This conclusion is an undiscussable reality for the extreme materialist.

The Sky-hookers say that Mind is a feature of this universe that needs explanation, and they rely on the Benign Designer God as their Super Turtle, the explanation that stops the need for an infinite regress of explanations. The Universe rests on the back of an Elephant, and the Elephant stands on the back of a Turtle, and either it’s turtles all the way down (infinite regress), or a Super Turtle ends the regression. That is what I mean by a Super Turtle.

Many Up-from-belows say that the question is absurd: we are here by fluke. Others say that we live in a multiverse, and in this world of infinite possibilities, we just happen to live in the world that generated minds to observe it. So they offer the same explanation as the flukers, only disguise it under the multiplication of universes. Many up-from-belows  disparage the idea of  an Intellgient Designer, but hold that physical laws are Platonic abstractions that exists outside of time and space.  Designer God, fluke, multiverse, the immutable Laws of Nature which exists outside human influence: each is a Super Turtle. The whole issue is explored entertainingly and well by Paul Davies in the Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life?

Just because the Up-from-belows wander into conceptual and metaphysical difficulties when they ponder the origin of everything, and the nature of mind, does not mean that they are wrong about how  human institutions have evolved.

Thinkers as different as Darwin and Hayek are in the Up-from-Below camp. It is frequently amazing to me that people who celebrate the process of biological discovery called evolution tend to be squeamish about the process of price and product discovery called capitalism.

The basic idea is that humans create order without thinking about it, and that order causes changes in us, as we adapt to it and develop social customs that allow for greater wealth creation and more complex societies. Such an idea infuses thinkers like Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek. In fact Charles Darwin is known to have thoroughly read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations when he was in university.

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This has to be the most long-winded introduction to a wonderful book by Matt Ridley, the Evolution of Everything. I strongly recommend it.

Ridley engages in a thorough exploration that evolution applies to everything: religions, moralities, biology, technology, languages, laws: a complete bottom-up self-organizing explanation of everything.I do not find it necessary to agree with every argument of a writer, especially when they are engaged in a serious romp through vast reaches of important subject matters. For a splendid stimulation of your mind, even as you may argue with it as you read, Ridley’s book makes a great Christmas gift.

He is not the kind of writer who obliges you to agree with him on pain of being cast into outer darkness.

PS:
If you google this book, ignore especially the Guardian’s mean spirited assassination attempt. Kirkus Reviews discusses the actual ideas of Ridley fairly.

 

Amsterdam

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Amsterdam is one of those places that challenge every libertarian’s ideas about how things should run. It is intensely left-wing in many respects: its citizens evince a strong social cohesion predicated on non-market values, the city enforces minute regulation of architecture, zoning and social behaviour, while a high level of government spending maintains social and municipal services. Yet Amsterdam also manages to show how capitalist it is in every store-front. In some ways, I thought, this place is a Potemkin village, and then thought “No” it is a Disney-like theme park maintained by millions of tourists and the willing cooperation of its citizens.

It seems to gather every hipster in Holland into one place: there are tiny stores selling electrical fixtures of the 1950s, micro-art galleries, baroque music concerts, weird antique stores of every description, ecological butcheries, and apartments which, when revealed by walking by, are contemporary art-galleries with dining room tables. Indeed, I was informed that the police check out every potential inner-city resident of Amsterdam; that to live there requires a permit. And the permit is issued if you are Dutch enough, which is to say,  willing to abide by the rules of the place, as the police may explain to you.

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Make no mistake. This place has rules, visible and invisible. Once, more than a decade ago, I was with a bunch of guys at a restaurant on one of the outer ring of canals. It was October, dark and cold. We headed out the door for a doobie, because it was a non-smoking bar. Eventually the young lady of the place came out and politely informed us that we could not smoke a joint in front of the place, because that might imply the restaurant tolerated dope smoking , but that we could smoke dope at the end of the block, at a construction site a few yards away. A Dutch compromise of behavioural zoning worked out precisely to the meter.

A place as well run as Amsterdam must run on behavioural zoning. Stuff allowed in the red-light district cannot be tolerated a block away from it. By the way, if you do not wish to find the red-light district, you can avoid it for your first seven trips  to the place, as I did. Nothing to see: move on.

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Indeed the charms and delights of Amsterdam are found in the walking around, in the architecture so carefully maintained, in the thousands of great bars and restaurants, in the amiable way the Dutch manage to live in the crowded spaces, in their friendly inhabitation of the place, in their tolerance of the tourists in their midst.

The annoyances of Amsterdam for the North American conservative are the arrogant sit-up cyclists in their damned cycling lanes whizzing by, who have rights of way against pedestrians and motor-cars;but more importantly,  in the idea that minute planning and regulation, formal and informal, could actually work, that a great capital of 17th century capitalism could actually be preserved more or less intact for centuries without  redevelopment, high rises, and modern architecture, but at the price of this regulation, that a highly capitalist people – including the hipster artists – might choose to live in a highly regulated way.

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Does this not send Ayn Rand spinning in her grave? I hope so. Amsterdam epitomizes every thing that Jane Jacobs had to say about cities, communities, and markets: that highly creative and capitalist places are one and the same, and that markets are embedded in, and contained by, societies, and that the rules of markets co-exist within non-market institutions and rules. Do yourself a favour. Read Jane Jacobs’ “Systems of Survival”, which is scarcely a hundred pages long, and see if your views of markets and society are not deepened.

Or join me for another ramble through Amsterdam, as we discourse about markets, societies, religious freedom, and how to hold them all together in some harmony. The walk will do us good.

 

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Theodore Dalrymple and I on Slavoj Zizek

You have probably come across Zlavoj Zizek (Slavoi Zhizhek) the Slovenian post-everything Marxian bafflegabber at some point in your wanderings through youtube videos. Some people take him seriously, the kind who need some physical exercize in a thought reform camp. I cannot, but apart from his snot-nosed ludicrous lectures – really just outpourings of close-to-nonsense – I have never had quite the time available for analyzing why he is drivel. I just know that he is. Now the wonderful skewer of nonsense, Theodore Dalrymple, has explained why: there is nothing to understand; it is completely bogus.

Professor Žižek brought to my mind something that at first I could not put into words (a phenomenon that is of some philosophical significance, I suspect, for it shows that thought can precede the words in which we express it). But then, in a eureka moment, I realized what it was: Professor Žižek reminded me, even physically, of the Californian fake gurus that I had met at the Kumbh Mela, a Hindu festival that comes every twelve years to Allahabad, when the Ganges there turns, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, into ambrosia that washes away sins.

I want to avoid all misunderstanding: this is no condemnation of Professor Žižek; on the contrary. The Kumbh Mela is easily the most wonderful human gathering in the world, where tens of millions of people converge more peaceably than, say, eight men in a British pub could ever manage. It is a gathering of the most perfect tolerance, where no one is in the least disturbed by the charlatanry (and obvious prosperity) of the Californian gurus, with their solid gold knuckle-duster rings and sexual acolytes. They do no harm, and Hinduism is in any case not a doctrinal religion; indeed, whenever I have finished reading books about it I am not much better able than I was before, and certainly not for very long, to say what Hinduism is. I suspect that many readers have a similar experience after they read Žižek.

In any case, I am not against charlatans; I even admire them if they are amiable, as of course the vast majority of them are (an unamiable charlatan is almost an oxymoron). To be able to glide through life in the knowledge that one is bogus is a great achievement, far greater than that of the majority of genuinely earnest people. If the world, including academia, were to be purged of its charlatans, how dull life would be!

Dr. Dalrymple has made me feel so much better. A Dalrymple a day keeps a Marxist away.

I have had the same reaction to Charles Taylor, who is, I suspect, an altogether better philosopher and person. There are people of whom you have read, or whom you have read, listened to or met, that generate a deep feeling that their rubber does not quite hit the road, and you do not have four years and a master’s thesis worth of reading to find out exactly why. And you are ready to be thought ignorant by some for having come to such conclusions. You do not care, life is too short to do otherwise.

An article in the German magazine Der Spiegel captures the essence of Zizek: logorrhea, monomania and boredom.

The experience of meeting Zizek is initially fascinating for everyone (for the first hour), then frustrating (it’s impossible to get a word in edgewise) and, finally, cathartic (the conversation does, eventually, come to an end). Zizek begins to talk within the first few seconds, and in his case talking means screaming, gesticulating, spitting and sweating. He has a speech defect known as sigmatism, and when he pronounces the letter “s” it sounds like a bicycle pump. He usually begins his discourse with the words “Did you know…,” and then he jumps from topic to topic, like a thinking machine that’s been stuffed with coins and from then on doesn’t stop spitting out words.

In earlier life I knew a Polish emigré to Canada who was one of the new class of people created after World War 2 by the Communist regime. His dad had been in the Polish equivalent of military intelligence, so he was a part of the Communist priviligentsia. He had an amazing capacity to put together words in the same semi-brilliant way as Zizek. He could manipulate any bureaucracy in the world into giving him something, though he had no idea how to do an honest day’s work. He could get into the guts of your computer and do amazing things with the underlying software such that it would be permanently unusable, but his fingers fairly flew across the keyboards. He once nearly caused a seven car pile-up driving my car by panic braking where panic braking was uncalled for. He had been talking too much to notice the slowdown in traffic. Hyper-reactive, adept at manipulation, but completely unable to perform the ordinary tasks of getting a living, because, for all the brilliance, he was unable to write a coherent sentence in English, and, I sometimes think, in his native Polish.

When I think of Zizek, I think of my erstwhile Polish friend in the same light: as new communist men, philosophers of nonsense, flaneurs, layabouts, artistes, bohemians, the upper class of a socialist regime. They are of a type, one that is only reproducible in a world immunized against practical consequences for spouting drivel. If that sounds like a western university, welcome to Communism for the privileged.

Allah is dead #2

Rebecca Bynum’s “Allah is Dead: Why Islam is not  a Religion” is dense with exact head-shots at Islam. She makes the points as a theologian and philosopher, those two professions which are superfluous in the Religion of Peace.

A few quotes to stir your interest:

Real faith is in fact the great emancipator, for faith properly defined is the actual living connection between the individual believer and his divine source of light and love….Faith is the mechanism that allows man to search for God, which is to say, to search for reality. Islam, on the other hand, is the destroyer of faith and the bestower of delusion, creating nothing but the most profound unhappiness, born of absolute denial, among its adherents. The idea that God would actually desire human happiness is utterly foreign to Islam, for according to its doctrine, Allah does not value the individual except for his contribution to the collective….

So what the Islamic system has done is usurped the place of God in the lives of its believers. It has made a spiritual God unnecessary. The Islamic system is all one needs to know and obey. (pp 48-49)

Muslims are always accusing every other religion and idea of social organization of idolatry: worshipping man-made law (by obeying secular governments) , worshipping the Trinity, believing in the chosenness of the tribes of Israel. Yet the ultimate idolatry they commit, in Bynum’s view, is the idolatry of Islam, the rendering superfluous of God for the system which is Islam.

Note also that for Islam, religion and social organization are identical concepts.

Bynum’s essential insight. in my view, is that the definition of God goes to the very core of this struggle with Islam, for it in turn defines the nature of civilization, and one’s understanding of reality.

In Christian thought God has created an intelligible universe, in which we have a place. Hence science is possible. He has also created  creatures who have the autonomy to disobey Him; hence the prayer line from Jesus “Thy will be done on earth, as it is in Heaven” recognizes that God’s will is not done on earth all that often. Autonomy, love, capacity to commit wrong: these are the basic features of the human condition, according to our view, but the first two are denied in Islam, and the third is defined in terms of robotic obedience to outward standards of conformity. Islam wants us to belong to a hive mind.

The Christan God loves us, and asks that we grow in love, towards our Creator and towards other people in consequence. Hence the two essential commandments uttered by Christ Himself.

Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord; and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the Prophets.” (Book of Common Prayer, p.70)

Bynum again:

We fought both World War 2 and the Cold War in large part to bring the enemy to his senses….Man’s relation to the state was actually a secondary consideration.

Now we find ourselves fighting a war in order to answer the question, what is God and what is man’s relation to him? We might also state the question this way: what is reality and what is man’s relation to it?…

The struggle between the two different answers… will likely determine the future course of human existence. It certainly is a contest that has not stopped for over 1,300 years and there is no natural end to it, given that the belief system of Islam is unlikely to change. (pp-55-56)

By contrast with Christianity,

In Islam, man (in abstract) is not the measure of all things; one specific man is [Mohammed]. Islam puts man in place of God, the material in place of the spiritual, and the group in place of the individual; and for certain we see its fruits.” (p34)

Bynum’s book is available at your bookseller. I found mine at Amazon. Read it.

 

 

Neurotwaddle

An important funding source for neuro-imaging via MRIs will no longer fund studies concerned with showing which parts of the brain light up when certain activities are engaged. The funding source is the James S. McDonnell Foundation.  The reason why it will not longer do so was given thus:

“Proposals proposing to use functional imaging to identify the ‘neural correlates’ of cognitive or behavioral tasks (for example, mapping the parts of the brain that ‘light up’ when different groups of subjects play chess, solve physics problems, or choose apples over oranges) are not funded through this program. In general, JSMF and its expert advisors have taken an unfavorable view of .  .  . functional imaging studies using poorly characterized tasks as proxies for complex behavioral issues involving empathy, moral judgments, or social decision-making.”

The heartland of neuroimaging has decided that areas of the brain lighting up tell us nothing about empathy, judgments, and decision-making. Bravo! Another blow against neurotwaddle.

The most significant critic of neurotwaddle, a man who is himself a physician and an atheist, is Raymond Tallis. Tallis has written several important critiques of materialist reductionism – the “we are nothing but a bunch of neurons” school, in which  Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Crick and their useful idiot Hitchens are to be found.

I found an article of Tallis’ on the same subject in the New Humanist magazine of January 2010. It is worth reading. Tallis finds all talk of neuroimaging techniques identifying “God-spots” in the brain as utter rubbish.

At first sight, it might seem that a humanist atheist like me should welcome the reduction of religious belief to tingles in parts of the brain. It will be evident now why I do not. The idea of God is the greatest, though possibly the most destructive, idea that mankind has ever entertained. The notion that all there is originated from and is controlled by a Maker is a profound and distinctively human response to the amazing fact that the world makes sense. This response is more, not less, extraordinary for the fact that it has no foundation in truth and, indeed, God is a logically impossible object.

How mighty are the works of man and how much more impressive when they are founded on an idea to which nothing corresponds! Cutting this idea down to size, by neurologising and Darwinising it, is to deal not only religion but also humanity a terrible blow. It undermines our uniqueness and denies our ability, shared by no other creature, to distance ourselves from nature. In defending religious belief against neuro-evolutionary reductionism, atheist humanists and theists have a common cause, and in reductive naturalism, a common adversary.

Readers will know I am not an atheist; I find greater truth in belief, and I find works like David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness  Bliss more persuasive than Tallis’ non-materialist humanism. For me, Tallis is on a narrow ledge between materialist reductionsim, which he rightly rejects, and belief in a supernatural ordering Creator, in whom we move and have our being. But that is possibly a matter of taste, and is certainly not a matter for compulsion. His attacks on neurotwaddle are more welcome because he is an atheist.

Here is David Bentley Hart on the issue of reductionism – the school of thought that asserts “we are nothing but _________ neurons, genes, dancing atoms (pick one)”.

 Once more, the physicalist reduction of any phenomenon to purely material forces explains nothing if one cannot then reconstruct the phenomenon from its material basis without invoking any higher causes; but this no computation picture of human thought can ever do. Symbols exist only from above, as it were, in the consciousness looking downward along that path of descent, acting always as a higher cause upon material reality. Looking up from the opposite direction, from below to above, one finds only an intraversible abyss, separating the intentional nullity of matter from the intentional plenitude of mind. It is an absolute error to imagine that the electrical activity in a computer is itself a computation….All computation is ontologically dependent on consciousness.” (p.223)

“Ontologically” means “having to do with being itself”, an idea more easily rendered in Greek than English.

A parting shot from Hart:

The mechanical picture of reality, which is the metaphysical frame within which we pursue or conquest of nature, is one that forecloses, arbitrarily and peremptorily , a great number of questions that a rational culture should leave open”.

There are vast questions that should be left open. Raise a ragged cheer for a rational culture!

 

 

The religion of unhappiness and outrage

I have long maintained that Leftism is prior to Marxism. Hence when the rubbish that is Marxism visibly failed, the Left barely broke stride on its way to embrace feminism, ecology, and Islam as vehicles through which they could continue the attack on civilization and the people who uphold it.

The Left is permanently outraged, and the outrage is prior to any political or religious view. It starts in outrage, and has no permanent goal. No reform will make it happy because unhappiness is its nature, and to be happy is to “sell out” to the “System”.

Hence all rational improvers and all reformers are not Leftists. The true conservative cuts the rotten branch, said Tennyson. I may disagree with some person’s mistaken view of  global warming, for instance, without thinking them Leftist.

Leftism is a soul sickness, as I define the term. “Pneumopathological” to speak Greek.

I was reminded of these truths this morning by perusal of an excellent discussion of the same topic in Front Page Magazine. “The Left’s Religion of Unhappiness”, by Daniel Greenfield. A snippet or two to entice you:

The left does not redistribute wealth. It redistributes want. It does not want everyone to share in the happiness of others, but to be burdened with a larger burden of their miseries.

The left’s greatest vulnerability is its meanness of spirit. It has suffered its worst defeats at the hands of the happy warriors of the right. Its defeat comes when its malaise is contrasted with happiness, when its deep suspicion of humanity is met with patriotic optimism and when its alarmism is met with laughter.

The reason why the Left accuses conservatives of “mean-spiritedness” is that they live that condition every day. They know it intimately, they dwell in it.  I knew these Marxist pukes in university and I have never been deceived; they are servants of evil itself, and they inwardly suspect they may be so. Badly  brought up, they need conversion to a religion of peace and love, which they fight with every breath in their bodies. Hence conversion to Islam merely justifies the hatred and does not change the animus. Their situation is hopeless, and quite serious.

Flogging a dead horse, episode 582: climate change

I was reading a few moments ago the confessions of a Joseph Boutilier, of the Loonie Politics aggregator site: “When it comes to climate change, we must all be leaders “.

Boutilier meditates on the issue of how to get people motivated when so much cynicism pervades the public. {Hold your nose -purple prose alert}

The pitfalls of the quest for climate action can also become our strengths.  Now that a real groundswell of awareness surrounding the need for urgent action has been translated into some effective, visible, exciting campaigns, the activist arm of the climate movement will mature with more bravado, empowerment and recognition than we’ve seen since the Al Gore bubble burst close to ten years ago.  Combine that with the undeniable passion of many climate-concerned opposition politicians and the high level of guidance and expertise offered through the same scientists and educators who first raised the issue to the public’s attention – smart, moral, dedicated people like James Hansen, George Monbiot, Andrew Weaver and David Suzuki – and the potential for a grassroots movement in Canada with pinpoint ambition, poise and influence is unparalleled among global causes.

Boutilier writes better than he thinks.  Apart from the reasons he cites, there are several reasons (note the word reasons, and not just causes) why interest in “climate change ” has declined.

Global warming is at bottom a scientific proposition. It asserts that by far the preponderant cause of observed global warming is carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere. Being a scientific proposition, it can be falsified. Humans have been pumping CO2 into the atmosphere steadily since the industrial revolution. The proportion of CO2, while still minuscule, is rising towards or has surpassed 400 parts per million. According to the theories of the warmists, there ought to have been a steadily observed increase of global average temperature to accompany the rise in CO2, since the causal relationship between CO2 and global warming is the core of the theory.

 

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The warming has not been observed for something like 17 years. Climate change is basically a computer-modelling game, in which one matches a theory of climate against observed historical  data, and makes projections into the future of what will happen if the model is true.

There is a rough but not exact  correspondence between most computer models and the recent past. To say this rudely, the models do not even “predict” the past very well. There has been no correspondence between the predictions and the observed facts for the last 17 to 26 years.

Accordingly, it can be concluded that the scientific basis of global warming has been significantly damaged by the failure of models to correspond to observations.

 cmip5-models-versus-temperatur The black line above shows the mid-point of computer model predictions; the blue squares show what has been observed.

So let us return now to the credal statement of Joseph Boutilier and observe the poor fellow’s passion:

I realized that what the climate movement needs isn’t more extraordinary people.  It needs more ordinary people with extraordinary passion.  Like the first time I learned how to ride a unicycle, I had to let go of my own expectations and reservations to gain the impetus for action.  I had to see that I wasn’t especially capable, creative or resilient to discover that none of that mattered.  To realize that my heart wouldn’t be silenced by any logical excuse not to learn how to balance on one wheel.  And that my heart couldn’t possibly beat stronger than it does when I imagine the slim chance for a dramatic shift in our approach to climate justice.

What’s more, if such a shift does occur, if such a movement could be sparked by any number of ordinary folks like me, it wouldn’t just save the human race from famine, hurricanes, typhoons, floods, ocean acidification, desertification, heat waves, war and conflict, societal – and possibly species – collapse.  It could also restore our faith in the potential of our political system.  It could demonstrate the value of our parliamentary democracy.  Better yet, it could transform government through a process of peaceful, consensual, fundamental shifts in influence, aim, and connectedness with citizens to reflect the needs and desires of the rising generation.

How many tropes are touched upon here?

  • saving the world
  • saving the human race
  • justifying parliamentary democracy
  • getting right with the younger generation
  • achieving climate justice

Boutilier’s  screed is the expression of the romantic spirit in man, the quest for authenticity, the desire to transcend and also perfect the Self. All very German Romantic circa 1820. Global warming or climate change is just the cover for an essentially religious desire on his part to merge with the creative possibilities of the Spirit moving through history.

All very Hegelian. All drivel. He will be embarrassed by what he wrote within fifteen years.

I would like there to be a new ice bucket challenge: I challenge Joseph Boutilier and his band of Romantics to blather on about the horrors of global warming while having a large bucket of ice-water  dumped over their heads in freezing temperatures. There will be no sauna or fire to warm them afterwards, lest CO2 emissions increase. They will then be offered the microphone to urge us to climate action. Most coherent sermon wins. It should be a hoot on YouTube.

Then we will see how well “smart, moral, dedicated people” like Mr. Boutilier continue to enthuse about climate change and political engagement.

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Since the decline of Bourque Newswatch, Loonie Politics is doing a reasonable job of aggregating the headlines and the columnists.