Screeds
Thursday, September 02, 2004
Beyond Salvation
June 22, 2003
From Perry de Havilland’s Samizdata blog, in a thread about some up-and-coming video games, comes this:
Game consoles are just one more symptom of an out of control consumerist culture. How many millions of those worthless things have been produced with precious resources? What’s even worse is they make the old consoles go obsolete very quickly and then build up a whole new batch of the things while the old ones eventually end up in landfills. Common sense environmentalism is dead, people are willing to rape the Earth for the most useless and pointless things.
That’s right: a radical environmentalist had wandered into a libertarian Weblog—and a conversation about video games, no less. Once there, he delivered himself of a more-or-less standard denunciation ("out of control consumerist culture”; “precious resources”; “rape the earth"), and withdrew.
If the above commenter had relieved himself thus in a dedicated video-gaming forum, the multitudes would have renovated his anal anatomy at once, and in a really big way. Because he’d done it at a politically oriented, highly civilized blog, the others there grappled with his statements rather politely.
Your Curmudgeon is something of a video-gaming aficionado. A lot of weapons engineers are. Along with being delightful, the games help to refine skills and a mindset that are quite useful to us. (Let’s not have any snide comments about our devotion to Tomb Raider, thanks.) Among the frivolous indulgences, video games are one of the least costly and least harmful, the opinions of bluenoses notwithstanding. Those with an acquaintance with video games are likely to agree.
What the environmentalist commenter put your Curmudgeon in mind of with his emission is the way previous generations of his kind ranted about the electric toothbrush. If you’re not old enough to remember, in the Sixties the electric toothbrush, a relatively new item, was demonized by the environmentalists as the emblem of human rapacity. Many of the same denunciations we hear today were heaped upon it, in particular those about our “out of control consumerist culture.”
The electric toothbrush wasn’t important of itself. As Ayn Rand pointed out at the time, it consumed almost no power or resources, and contributed greatly to the maintenance of oral health. Therefore, it could not fairly be considered pointless or wasteful. It was a symbol, a totem object, by whose execration the green radicals of that time sought to reify their hatreds. Today, the video game console is taking its place.
Totem objects are features of primitive religions. Animists and pagans have always held that their totem objects don’t merely represent supernatural powers, but actually imbed them, in ways that make veneration or vilification of those objects more than mere symbolic exercises. By comparison, a Christian’s crucifix is simply a symbol of the Sacrifice of Christ, by reflecting upon which he fixes his thoughts for prayer. It’s not itself a source of power.
Religion is the realm of those propositions which can neither be proved nor disproved on this side of the grave. Environmentalism has become one such.
That’s not to say that there’s no evidence for or against any of the claims of environmentalists. Say rather that, regardless of any mountain of evidence that might be amassed against its tenets and strictures, environmentalists would be unmoved. That much has been demonstrated time and again. For example, the famed Julian Simon / Paul Ehrlich bet, and the conclusive refutation of Ehrlich’s many doomsday claims by the simple accumulation of evidence over time, are well known to all. Yet these things have had no muting effect on the convictions of enviro-radicals. If anything, they’ve committed themselves to their faith with redoubled intensity.
And these folks laugh at believing Christians.
Your Curmudgeon didn’t set out this morning to skewer environmentalists in particular. The case is useful because it’s representative of the sort of ideological clash that now predominates in American politics: a clash, not of convictions that respect facts and logic and are therefore open to possible disproof, but of religious commitments that forbid consideration of alternatives or contrary evidence.
Religion is all very well as a personal choice. A religion whose commandments rest solely upon the willing adherent is beyond criticism. But political cults, which seek State power through which they might impose themselves on unbelievers and agnostics, are quite another matter.
Given the large amounts of evidence against today’s political religions, one is naturally led to wonder what keeps the communicants in their pews. Surely not all of them are immune to doubt, or hostile to disconfirming data. Why are there so few apostates?
The question cannot be answered definitively, but in many cases what we see is the result of a process protracted over time. Time winnows institutions. Those that adopt clear, simple core principles and cleave strongly to them will tend toward internal purity. Persons whose attachment to the institution’s premises is tentative or conditional will be flensed away, leaving only those whose commitment is total.
Total commitment almost always arises either from unquestioning faith or absolute material dependence. In either case, he who dissents from the dogmas severs arteries of acceptance and sustenance that dwarf all other considerations. If he derides the totems and walks out the doors of the church, he will no longer have the swaddling comfort of the like-minded, by whose approval and concurrence he nourishes his soul. He will have placed himself beyond salvation.
When Eric Hoffer spoke in The True Believer of ideological cults as “compact and unified churches,” whose members shield themselves from doubt with “fact-proof screens,” he was looking at precisely this effect. True religions, which purvey a mythos of supernatural significance and an ethos of proper individual conduct, need not safeguard their communicants from facts or logic. Only those which strain to extend their sway over the whole world must terrify their adherents about being cast into the outer darkness.
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