The Religious Zealots Who Will Destroy Us All
Today I had a row. Two rows actually. The first was with a climate 'scientist' - formerly the adviser to ex-Prime Minister Gordon Brown no less - whose response to a series of home truths I put to him during a televised debate was to turn to me immediately afterwards and accuse me of being a liar.
And the second one happened just before, while I was waiting to go on TV to have my argument with the climate scientist. This time my victim was the aide to a Liberal Democrat MP who was busily explaining on TV why Britain's proper place in the world was shackled to the rotting corpse that is the European Union, that David Cameron's veto had left Britain more isolated than ever, etc.
"Crikey, how can that blithering idiot spout such unutterable nonsense!" I yelled at the television.
"Excuse me. That's my boss!" said the aide.
"Well he's a bloody fool!" I said.
"No he's not, he's talking sense!" said the aide, loyally.
So we had a row.
Patiently - well, not that patiently, actually - I tried explaining that Europe is now in a death spiral. You do not encourage economic growth by imposing uniform austerity measures on countries as diverse as Spain and Germany on the eve of the worst depression since the Thirties. You encourage it by allowing them to exploit their comparative advantage, liberalising their economies as they see fit,deciding on their own taxes and regulations in much the way different states are able to do in the US. By denying member states their freedom, the EU is creating a recipe for stagnation, civil unrest, possibly even war. So much is obvious. What kind of a lunatic would you have to believe and go on national television to argue that Britain's best interests lie in reserving a place on the Titanic?
Why am I telling you this?
Well I was struck by a thought. One of my heroes Thomas Sowell divides the world into those with a "constrained" vision and those with an "unconstrained" vision. (I'll leave it to Peter Robinson to explain what these mean). But I think what might one equally well argue is that the world can be divided into those with a "religious" view of the world and those with an "enlightenment" one.
I'm on the "enlightenment" side - as I believe, regardless of their personal religious affiliations most Ricochet readers are too. Which is to say that our beliefs are founded on empiricism. We look at the world, note the facts on the ground, see what works and what doesn't work and form our judgements accordingly.
Those of a "religious" persuasion, on the other hand, and they number everyone from Paul Krugman to Mahmoud Ahmadinajad, don't let any awkward details like reality get in the way of their plans to make the world a better place. They know what's right and they know what to do, regardless of any countervailing evidence. Believers in Man Made Global Warming and believers in a United Europe also fit into this category.
Given half the chance they will destroy us all.
Discuss.
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Comments :
Jun '10
Re: The Religious Zealots Who Will Destroy Us All
James: I think you're right, but I think a distinction is missing from your argument. Your religious category includes those who, in the parlance of British historians like Christopher Dawson and Michael Burleigh, espouse political religions (i.e,. religions without God). The first example is the French Revolution, which attempted to destroy (or co-opt) the Church and then created its own version of a civil religion. By the twentieth-century, these religions went big-time (Nazi Germany--think Nuremberg)--, Stalinist Russia, and Mao's China). We all know how those turned out. Two essential elements of these civil religions are (1) complete lack of humility based on (2) the belief that government can create a heaven on earth.
The truly religious (I can only speak in terms of Christianity) view men as fallible, fallen creatures who, when given broad powers, behave badly. We know that heaven on earth is beyond our all-too-human nature. We also believe that humans can be organized based on reason (i.e., making rational incremental decisions based on real data)--but government should do only what it can do, and then it should do it with a light touch.
Edited on Dec 12, 2011 at 2:16pmOct '10
Re: The Religious Zealots Who Will Destroy Us All
I have taken to calling them “slavers” and found that designation, which I identify in the:
Your own book, Watermelons, identifies one part of the slaver axis, but it is much broader, encompassing as I wrote:
Add Greens and EU fanatics to that list.
Apr '11
Re: The Religious Zealots Who Will Destroy Us All
Arf a mo' there Jimmy...In your remarks about Krugman and Amadinajad you are drawing an unwarranted equivalence between Religion and Progressive Utopianism. They are hardly the same thing. Moreover, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were firm believers in the empirical and pragmatic and I wouldn't for a moment think of offering them as paradigmatic of Enlightenment thought.
Moments ago I finished reading your Telegraph Blog about your encounter with the Labor lackey in the BBC Green Room. Good stuff! But now I think you need to take a deep breath and head down to your local for a pint o' Scrumpy. You need to get your bodily humours back into balance.
Sep '10
Re: The Religious Zealots Who Will Destroy Us All
While I do believe leftism to large extent is a religion, and often replaces religion for people who are ashamed to believe in anything that smacks of religion, I don't think this is a distinction that furthers rational argument.
The problem is that almost everybody believes that their opinions are founded upon reason, while the opinions of those who disagree with them are not. Hence the presumption among liberals that conservatives are either evil, crazy, or stupid. I've had down-the-line liberal friends tell me with the utmost assurance that they are in fact pragmatists. As if it is mere coincidence that they have never voted Republican in their lives.
Being a strong believer in the constrained vision myself, I am unable to argue forcibly that it is only those on the other side who have beliefs that inform or even form the opinions that they whole-heartedly feel they have arrived at through reason and empiricism.
Sep '10
Re: The Religious Zealots Who Will Destroy Us All
I would add that for me, the most wonderful thing about Sowell's thesis is that it gives liberalism its due. Reading A Conflict of Visions was formative for me, because it allowed me to see for the first time what the underlying assumptions of liberalism are, how they could possibly believe all the nonsense that they do. Given their assumptions, they are being reasonable. It is the assumptions themselves that are wrong.
Feb '11
Re: The Religious Zealots Who Will Destroy Us All
James, you write: "even war".
Can you expand on why this is a possibility?
Jun '11
Re: The Religious Zealots Who Will Destroy Us All
Having a blurry view of the Euro-crisis (which you are sharpening at a pace Mr. Deingpole,) I am quite concerned by the FIRE+PETROL combo of your "slaver/zelots" and cancerous bureaucracy.
If these zelots were held directly accountable by their constituents when their plans collided with reality, their influence would wane or even vanish. At least until they came up with an improved approach, or better branding...
The current situation appears directed by appointed super-apparatchiks who govern without any concern for their constituents' needs/fears/point-of-view. Instead these elite-o-crats view their countrymen as subjects prone before an arbitrary sovereign power.
Didn't go so well in 1789, did it?
Does Britain not see this, or are Britons unwilling to admit the obvious?
May '10
Re: The Religious Zealots Who Will Destroy Us All
Jonathan Chait made this same claim the other way around years ago (i.e., liberals are empiricists and conservatives are idealogues), and he and Jonah Goldberg went a few rounds on the subject (see, e.g., this Goldberg File). I naturally agree with you that we're right and they're wrong, but I don't think this kind of generalization about why is very helpful in understanding large swathes of humanity. Many people who hold the views you describe are decent, fair-minded people who are simply wrong, for one reason or another -- maybe because of faulty premises, a biased education, misinformation by the liberal media, etc. Also, there are plenty of conservatives who believe many of the the right things because they were raised that way or whatever, but who are not particularly open to persuasion based on reasoned argument or facts.
In fact, much as I love Thomas Sowell, I've found in general that attempts to find some sort of unified theory of why people hold different views don't work very well. Humanity is just too complex, and the reasons for holding different views are too varied.
Oct '10
Re: The Religious Zealots Who Will Destroy Us All
Humanity might indeed be complex, but world view, the platform on which one stands to view all about him, is far less complex. in our Western civilization, the two fundamental world views are Creationist and Evolutionist. From one of those platforms you may see events as either the product of a mind, that of the Creator, or of chaos.
From one of those two platforms everything is viewed.
Aug '10
Re: The Religious Zealots Who Will Destroy Us All
I think you have to be careful to avoid labeling one side as 'true believers', religious zealots, or people who do not believe in empiricism. And we need to reflect on the fact that the other side believes exactly the same thing about us.
In fact, we all suffer from the same problem - we embrace 'facts' that tend to reinforce our own belief systems, and reject those that doesn't. We on the right embrace economists whose theories support the kind of system we already believe in, and call the other ones charlatans.
Consider this thought experiment: Let's say that global warming as a theory existed, but that the overwhelming evidence was that it was caused by central planning and big government, and that the only way to correct it was to shrink the size of the state and embrace personal freedom. If such a condition existed, just who do you think would be quickly embracing the science, and who would be the 'skeptics'? My contention is that it would be the reverse of what we see today - the right would immediately embrace it, and the left would be the 'deniers'.
<cont'd>
Dec '10
Re: The Religious Zealots Who Will Destroy Us All
The most fundamental I can get on this is that liberals believe in the perfectibility of man and conservatives do not.
It sounds silly when you say it out loud, doesn't it? But it's true and I think it's the Rosetta stone to political philosophy.
What makes this dangerous is, thanks in large part to Marx, liberals actually believe not only that mankind is perfectible but also that that perfection is inevitable and is only being retarded by the actions of some elite cabal.
Not their cabal, some other cabal. The bad cabal.
But they do take on all the worst aspects of religious institutions without any of the redeeming qualities.
Aug '10
Re: The Religious Zealots Who Will Destroy Us All
So if we could eliminate the political overtones, what is the real state of global warming science today? It's incontrovertible that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and that man has been adding to CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. Therefore, you would expect a certain amount of additional temperature forcing caused by man-made activities.
Based purely on atmospheric physics, that forcing might raise global temperature by 1-1.5 degrees over the next hundred years, absent other feedback effects - an amount that does not warrant doing much of anything. In fact, the IPCC itself admits that warming below 2.5 degrees would likely be a net benefit to the planet - which is why they're trying so hard to find positive feedbacks and extreme scenarios to justify their meddling.
That's really the best science can do at this point. Everything else is still unsupported conjecture.
Jul '11
Re: The Religious Zealots Who Will Destroy Us All
There has to be a better name for those who never let facts get in the way of feelings. Nonetheless I always enjoy a good row with a thinking person and abhor any conversation with someone so mired in an opinion as to not examine/re-examine the data that support their opinion. How you can discuss AGW with some of those vitriolic data fudgers is either commendable or masochistic.
I definitely agree that there are conservatives and liberals of both the empiricist and ideologue fashion. I think like those words better by the way
Jul '11
Re: The Religious Zealots Who Will Destroy Us All
Ricochet double post gnomes. They exist, I know it, end of discussion.
Edited on Dec 12, 2011 at 3:13pmMar '11
Re: The Religious Zealots Who Will Destroy Us All
Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were empirical and pragmatic? I guess a person can empirically determine that there is a problem with food production, but a pragmatic person does not round up and kill the people who are good at it. One could determine empirically that iron production needs to be increased, but having people build backyard blast furnaces doesn't win any practicality awards either. Likewise, perhaps empirically one could decide that there are too many intellectuals in society (I'd need to see the reasoning there -- oops, maybe I'm an intellectual) but killing people who wear glasses because that indicates that they read too much is...evil. And impractical, but mostly just evil.
The only thing that those three were pragmatic about was the attainment, maintenance, and exercise of power over their victims.
Dec '10
Re: The Religious Zealots Who Will Destroy Us All
No, they weren't, actually. They had a philosophy and stuck to it. And when faced with the failure that reality presented them, they just said, "Do more of the same."
That's what the Left always does. When faced with the harsh realities of life crushing their worldview, they say, "We just need more cowbell."
Dec '10
Re: The Religious Zealots Who Will Destroy Us All
Jimmy my boy, sometimes it isn't the precision of the argument but just how low down no good rotten your opponent is. If there every was a pasty faced banal parasite on the body politic it was Gordon Brown. That your ugly opponent had been an advisor to Gordon Brown, demonstrating such bad judgment in the first place, you could rest assured he'd measure down to your expectations.
Keep slammin Jim.
Nov '11
Re: The Religious Zealots Who Will Destroy Us All
I dunno. It's pretty fuzzy to me.
Deliingpole identifies empiricism with "what works." But what about when empiricism doesn't work? Or does one want to be so zealous as to claim empiricism always works?
Let me come at it a different way: If empiricism is about "what works," how does empiricism help figure out what one should work at? It can help with "how to get to the moon," but not with "whether one ought to go there."
Many modern blessings flow from Enlightenment, but a few centuries of experience shows Enlightened Minds were wrong to think someday, someday, someday, reasonable people would stop disagreeing about anything important.
To facilitate the end of disagreement about everything important, Enlightened Minds discounted the value, or discreetly denied the very existence, of much ordinarily considered valuable, e.g., love and the immortal human soul. Unlike religion, empiricism doesn't have much to say about such things. So people rightly ask: "How much good can it be?" That question cannot be disposed of with the aside, "regardless of their personal religious affiliations," as if people, or peoples, could be expected to remain regardless of those affiliations.
So practical politics continues to exist.
Edited on Dec 12, 2011 at 5:38pmMay '10
Re: The Religious Zealots Who Will Destroy Us All
James, I like you and agree with you most of the time, but this is such an awful post. Well, the final paragraphs are, anyway.
First, like the hippies we strive against, you seem to conflate religion with faith and accept the ridiculous notion that faith and reason are naturally opposed.
Only a cynical fool believes a person or society can prosper without trust and imagination. Many of our greatest scientists, from Da Vinci to Einstein, arrived at their most pivotal observations through the power of abstract reasoning. Verification is important, but it is only half of science. One needs something to verify... and that often requires more than the senses can directly provide. Discovery begins with a leap of faith.
Faith is not religion. Religion requires faith, but so do countless other human endeavors. Economics, for example, requires trust in delayed reciprocity ("I will give you this today in return for that tomorrow."). Religion is simply a comprehensive and foundational set of basic observations about reality and the moral implications thereof. We generally associate the word "religion" with spirits and gods because nearly everybody has considered such beliefs true and pivotal throughout human history.
As for the Enlightenment... [continued]
Feb '11
Re: The Religious Zealots Who Will Destroy Us All
It’s hard to imagine a more thickheaded vision of the world than one that neatly divides people into ‘religious’ and ‘enlightened’, especially when defined as Delingpole has. But thickheaded as it is, it might warrant a response. Delingpole characterizes a very large class of people as a mortal threat, simply because their opinions differ from his own. Given that this class includes nearly all American Democrats and any middle-of-the-road European politician, I don’t see why he thinks they haven’t already been given ‘half the chance’ to destroy us all. — Nor is it clear, given the ubiquitousness of the depravity Delingpole claims to identify, whether there are so many of us who are worthwhile saving.
If Delingpole were right about the inaptly named ‘religious’ persuasion (and again, remember how few he excludes from these), it would be hard to justify engaging much in public rational discourse. For people who cannot be persuaded by facts cannot be persuaded by reason either. But giving each other reasons is the only means we have of respecting each other’s freedom. Enlightenment (in the true sense) requires respecting one’s own reason, and the reason of others.