It’s next to impossible these days not to be overcome now and then by a crushing sense of political melancholy and a deeply personal grief for the fate of our country. If the polls are right, the vast majority of us are mourning the loss of the nation’s sense decency, the terrible troubles that have come with gross income inequality, callous abuses of power, murderous masked “law” enforcement, and the intellectual morbidity of flat-earth politicos who think that being careful and taking precautions not to damage the livelihoods and peace of mind of other people is a sign of political weakness.
How to make sense of the Trumpian wing of American political life — of an administration that’s tangled us all in an unnecessary narcissist’s war, of politicians who consider peaceful dissent a form of terrorism, a government run by people who hate government with the same superstitious fanaticism as medieval zealots who figured goats were demonic because they had horns?
We live in a nation where our leadership thinks that vaccinations, the triumph of medical science, are more dangerous to children than actual diseases; a nation whose leadership consorts with a community of billionaires many of whom relied on the “services” of a child rapist and pedophiliac sex and drug trafficker and colluded in the secrecy that protected him; a nation whose leadership thinks that global warming, a danger agreed upon by an enormous majority of the world’s scientists, is no better than an obnoxious hoax.
It doesn’t take a great leap of intellect to see that our country has fallen into the wrong side of a universal moral polarity, a conflict between people who think nothing of hurting other people to further their own power and wealth against people who help other people because they believe in bettering the public good. It’s a moral polarity that pits self-righteous ignorance against the spirit of communitarian goodwill and its fundamental rule to do no harm.
The politics of climate change is a good example. In the midst of a record-breaking early spring heat wave in Albuquerque with March temperatures reaching into the 90s for more than a week, denying the reality of human-caused global warming is the height of willful ignorance.
In a recent piece in the New York Review of Books, Robert Pogue Harrison reviews a book by philosopher Mark Lilla entitled “Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know.” Harrison writes “Our ability to ignore, repress, and deny is matched only by our ability to believe the unbelievable…”
It seems unbelievable to me that leading climate change deniers — the most prominent of whom are smart enough to become billionaires — could disbelieve hard data collected from all over the world for close to 175 years that shows global temperatures, atmospheric CO2 and changing sea levels have been sharply on the rise since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. You’d have to be a truly madcap conspiracy theorist to think that all those people doing all those measurements for all those years were colluding to dupe the populous of the 21st century into dangerously wasting time and money trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.
As Mark Lilla writes, “the denial of evident truths seems to be gaining the upper hand, as if some psychological bacillus were spreading by unknown means, the antidote suddenly powerless. Mesmerized crowds follow preposterous prophets, irrational rumors trigger fanatical acts, and magical thinking crowds out common sense and expertise.” German philosopher Fredrich Nietzsche has called this “the will to ignorance.”
The money bags behind climate change denial make no bones about representing the oil, gas and coal industries, all of which produce the vast majority of the world’s human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.
Their political allies use the same kind of arguments against global climate change that most of use to weasel out of tasks and duties we don’t want to do even though we know we should. We choose to be ignorant and pretend that reality is different from what common sense, on good authority, tells us it is.
The howl of denial comes across as childish gibberish: “Oh, the data on climate change is flawed; it’s unreliable and manipulated. The historical data is incomplete. Cold spells and arctic blasts prove that warming is wrong. Besides, the climate is always changing, and it’s not really as bad as all those liberal alarmists, who hate big business, say it is. Anyway, how could puny humans change the weather? And who knows, maybe the heat will be good for trees and agriculture.”
Such arguments purposefully ignore the undeniable reality that 97% to 99% of peer-reviewed research efforts — in their tens of thousands, published all over the world — agree that human activity is the overwhelming cause of climate warming that’s been documented for almost two centuries.
To deny that is to deny that we can do anything to change it.
Willful ignorance is not just some kind of mind game played by anti-eggheads. Denying the obvious to serve your own greedy purposes is a well-disguised but violent form of propaganda, one that the current leadership of our government uses shamelessly to perpetrate an elaborate scam that sacrifices the wellbeing of its citizens and of future generations to fuel its own ideological fanaticism and win elections.
No wonder the political blues are so hard to shake.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
You’ve said better and in fewer words than lmost anyone else! I especially like the allusion thorns and medieval goats.
Thank you!
Thank you, V. B., for another excellent column. You always find the best words to describe what we are dealing with, acknowledging disorientation and grief while naming the problems and focusing on their solutions. The only exception I would take is to the idea that billionaires have to be smart to accumulate their fortunes. All they need, I think, is the willingness to exploit others in a really big way. There’s no doubt that our country is currently controlled by a self-involved fascist and his loyalist yes men, and that they have taken us into very dangerous territory not only here but around the world. But I am encouraged by this past Saturday’s demonstrations, conservatively numbering eight million people, who continue to stand for justice. I only hope these numbers will allow us to reach a tipping point from which we can make real change and begin to rebuild and heal.