This one will stir up a hornet’s nest….
The words “global warming” may have achieved Pavlovian status. Like the ringing of the bell that accompanied the Alpo fed to Pavlov’s dogs, the words foster an immediate and instinctive response by adherents of our disparate political faiths. Among liberals it fosters the an immediate desire to put a halt to the unleashing of new greenhouse gases, a Gore-ish propensity to quote the latest scientific research and deep disapproval of the American way of life. Among conservatives it causes a condition close to the foaming at the mouth, a knee-jerk rejection of “purported” science, a denunciation of Statist paternalism and proud assertion of the rightness of our industrial project. The two sides could not be further apart on this issue. Yet, what strikes me is how opposite these respective reactions are to the stated political philosophies of liberalism and conservatism – so-called.
Contemporary liberals are marked, perhaps above all, by the modern faith in science and a rejection of the claims of mere nature. Liberalism was built on the modern scientific project inaugurated by Francis Bacon who rejected that nature was a fixed and permanent entity, but instead urged humankind – through its ingenuity and capacity to understand and decode – to exert governance, dominion, and even mastery over nature. Liberalism ecstatically welcomed the 19th-century research of Charles Darwin for its fundamental rejection of the idea of a notion of fixed and permanent nature created with intention and design by God. Darwin refuted the idea that nature was static, and instead – while it purportedly demoted mankind by rejecting the idea of a “Great Chain of Being” – implicitly promoted the idea of humankind as a self-fashioning creature who was capable of changing the natural world that was itself constantly subject to changing forces. Our contemporary effort to reduce everything to Darwinian terms (even religion!) reflects the view that all human artifacts and efforts are part of the instinctive effort to exercise control over our environment. We shape and reshape the world in our own image, and reject the antiquated notion of a fixed or “normal” conception of the natural world.
Yet, it is our contemporary liberals who argue against the human contribution to climate change, who appear to embrace the notion that the climactic conditions of the past several centuries constitutes the normal or what should be permanent condition of the world’s climate. Contemporary liberals seem to exhibit a reverence for nature that belies what is otherwise nearly everywhere a hostility to mere nature shorn of the human ability and imperative to govern its working (e.g., birth control, abortion, etc.). There is even a strong element of anti-humanism in the arguments of many opponents to climate change, the sense that human ingenuity in utilizing exosomatic energy represents an abuse of the existing natural world – and not a Darwinian survival strategy. Rather than understanding climate change within the dominant liberal framework of Darwinism – which would suggest that we are at least neutral to creaturely alteration of the world, if not welcoming of the dynamism it will unleash that may force further evolutionary developments and adaptations – instead we witness the invocation of a “normal” condition of nature that seems to be based upon a curiously fixed and unchanging view of how the world should be.
By contrast, conservatism – particularly as inaugurated by Edmund Burke – arose as a critique of the often Pollyanish and optimistic worldview of liberalism. It argued on behalf of caution and insisted upon an awareness of the law of unintended consequences. Conservatism was the locus of at least once principle – “the precautionary principle” – which urged great caution in the face of claims that human actions would always and everywhere result only in good and positive outcomes. Classical conservatism was firmly wedded to a conception of unchanging human nature – and, in turn, a created order reflected through nature – that demanded hesitation and doubt in the face of claims that the human or natural order was alterable at will. Conservatism regarded the governing claims of science with suspicion and hesitancy, arguing against its universalizing tendencies and its efforts at dominion, and arguing on behalf of the legitimacy of longstanding local practices of culture and tradition that modern science often sought to eviscerate.
Yet it is our contemporary conservatives who most blithely reject the import or relevance of many findings that suggest increases in global temperature are the result of human industrial activity. It is our conservatives who today urge the rejection of “the precautionary principle” when speaking of global warming, who insist that it is the liberals who are Chicken Littles. At times they argue that – even if the evidence is true – we will have the ingenuity to find technologies and scientific solutions for the problems that are generated by the very successes of modern science. They are optimistic about our mental prowess and confident that any changes will not be so significant that we cannot redress them. They retain a commitment to our dynamic and energetic society that generates innovation and change.
In short, when it comes to the issue of “global warming,” our liberals seem to embrace a conservative stance, while our conservatives appear to evince all the earmarks of liberalism. What gives?
Dare I submit that global warming is not really about global warming – not really? Global warming, it seems to me, is a proxy battle in a larger war, a bit like Vietnam was a proxy war in the greater conflagration of the Cold War. As such, we find ourselves aligned with peculiar allies and defending uncomfortable positions. Indeed, the comparison to Vietnam is not inapt, since Global Warming is now where many of the political and culture wars have now come to rest. It is an issue around which a now-traditional set of ideological divisions have now come to roost – ones that curiously lead our conservatives to hold a deeply unconservative position and our liberals to act illiberally.
Of course, the immediate and most palpable issue is that of free market economics: contemporary “conservatives” hold a adhere to a deeply anti-conservative faith in an unregulated market that is a remnant of the Cold War, while liberals dream of a world State in which we achieve Rawlsian redistributive justice that can be measured based on our respective carbon footprints. Inasmuch as the fight over global warming can be reducible to a debate over the relative merits of the free market, the incoherence of these two positions is a direct inheritance of the Cold War.
Still, even these respective positions on the economy itself reflect a deeper divide over a more fundamental question. What seems to be is at deeper issue is the battle over the existence of human nature. For those on the Left, Global Warming represents the best contemporary avenue toward the age-old ambition to overcome that recalcitrant part of human nature that seems to belie the belief that we can change ourselves without limit – self-interest. If a new form of global consciousness is possible, then its best prospect for realization appears to be through the inculcation of an immediate sense of the interconnectedness of all things. Echoing the 19th-century hope among some utopians for the creation of a new “cosmic consciousness” (the most popular book of the late-19th century – Looking Backwards, by Edward Bellamy – was premised upon the achievement of such a form of consciousness in the year 2000), the primacy of the issue of “global warming” among today’s liberals is a continuing echo of that ambition to overcome the recalcitrant existence of the human ego. Weirdly, the Left adopts a “conservative” stance toward the achievement of anti-conservative transformation of the human creature.
Meanwhile, for those on the Right, the effort to transform human consciousness on this issue represents a step the age-old liberal faith in the plasticity of human nature. Their insistence that humans continue to act in accordance with the economic imperatives based in human self-interest reflects their Pavlovian understanding that underlying the utopianism of liberal efforts to foster a new consciousness is a kissing cousin of socialism and Marxism.
Ironically, this proxy battle is taking place in spite of, and not because of, the actual issue of global warming. It is our conservatives who should rightly be warning of a potential catastrophe for humanity out of a plenitude of caution and prudence. Our conservatives should be urging restraint of our industrial activities out of ample concern for “the precautionary principle.” It is our liberals who should be less wed to a conception of a “normal” or permanent natural condition, unaltered by biological activity. They should celebrate the dynamism of our society and its success in liberating us from the constraints of culture and tradition.
Doubtless this incoherence is with us to stay for a time – perhaps a very long time. But we should recognize it for what it is: above all, that both camps are not really debating over global warming. Were liberals truly devoted to a reduction of greenhouse gases, they would have to sacrifice one of the fundamental pillars of liberalism: the pursuit of human liberation from nature. Liberalism’s admirable concern about global warming is informed by a high degree of incoherence, in the first instance partaking of a deeply anti-humanistic belief that, at base, draws on classical liberalism’s division between nature and culture. Further, and more incoherently, the current liberal faith relies unrealistically on a kind of technological optimism that holds we can run our current civilization, continue worldwide economic growth and “development,” all the while cutting back substantially on the exosomatic energy sources that have made much of modernity possible. Their concerns are real enough, but nevertheless they otherwise occupy a realm of unreality.
Meanwhile, our conservatives are trapped even more deeply in a state of incoherence. Their devotion to an unregulated free market is one of the deepest sources of anti-conservatism in our time. Their blithe acceptance of the “creative destruction” of the market is the single greatest contribution to the evisceration of traditional “family values.” Their implicit hostility to nature attacks the deepest source of conservatism’s meaning – the imperative to conserve. It is my hope that a new generation of conservatives – highlighting the root word “conserve” – will change the dynamics of this debate. By urging a concern for the natural order; by insisting upon governance of our appetites; by inculcating prudence and respect for the natural order; by pointing out the incoherence of both contemporary positions, perhaps we will indeed find a better way to exist in a natural order that we did not ourselves create, upon which we rely for life and livelihood, and of which we are finally and permanently a part. Whether and what will happen as the planet warms is unknown to me. To be blithely optimistic that we’ll figure out how to deal with it – that science and the market will find a way – seems to me to be the very antithesis of a properly conservative response. Politics inevitably makes strange bedfellows, but one must always be wary of how you’ll feel about your bedmate the morning after.
(Cross-posted at What I Saw In America)
January 23rd, 2009 | 10:43 am
Brilliant analysis Mr. Deneen! Old style conservatives, paleo-cons, were against bigness per se, big government and big business. However, in the face of communism, they were vehemently pro private property rights and this has allowed big business the opening to destroy their traditional antagonists on the right and replace them with the neo-cons’ subservience to international corporations. The traditional conservative’s ideal was the independent businessman, the shop owner of the traditional American Main Street. These people were the bastions of the middle class, and the pillars of the community not only in an economic sense, but those who provided much of what consider the virtues of community, shared values, interdependence and support, trust. Americans embrace of big business has wiped out these people and replaced the traditional Main Street with the big box stores that blight the American landscape today.
The traditional left found it greatest support among labor groups which required the existence of big business for their own existence. They might have been against management, but they were comfortable with big business as long as it played by certain rules. There is now a movement among the new left, the neo-libs, to emphasize community and localism, to shop local and support local businesses. The arguments given for this support are very similar to what you would hear a Republican circa 1955 espouse, i.e., the already mentioned facts that these people were the bastions of the middle class, and the pillars of the community not only in an economic sense, but those who provided much of what consider the virtues of community, shared values, interdependence and support, and trust. A vehement anti-corporatism is added by the new Left based on the offenses and crimes of corporations in the form of third world labor practices, environmental abuses, the fall in American standard of living, and the fact that profits of corporations go to the top rather than being reinvested in the community. The Democratic party still ignores these voices as it has become as enslaved by corporations as the Republicans have, but the voices are loud and growing. It is one of the interesting juxtapositions that has occurred over the decades where the Right and Left have switched positions.
Most articles arguing that conservatives would be better able to protect the environment base their claim on the belief that market forces would do the job of protecting the environment better than government. I don’t believe this to be that case and yet do believe that environmentalists and conservatives have more in common than either side is willing to believe. At root, I believe that they share the same principles. The environmental movement today is based around two main tenets: sustainability, and localization. If I ask which political philosophy more closely embodies those two principles I am lead to the inevitable conclusion that (paleo) conservatives embody them far more than liberals. As far as sustainability goes, unfortunately under the neo-cons, the Republican party is as far from being the party of sustainability as can be. They’re now the party of debt, economic growth, fossil fuels, environmental destruction, military intervention, centralized power, and big business. Despite this, I actually think there is more hope for the Republicans to be the party of sustainability. The old school Republicans were as wary of big business as they were of big government, they were the ones who were for local businesses, were in favor of environmental protections, were for localizing political power, were noninterventionists, and were fiscal conservatives. There are still some of these around that might make a resurgence. I see nothing of the sort possible with the Democrats, who are far from the sustainability party as well. Despite being more open to passing laws protecting the environment, Democrats are the party of unchecked, unsustainable population growth, economic growth, widespread military deployments, and government spending. But more importantly, the Democratic party is the party of centralized political power, not localization. This is not to claim that environmentalists should be the accursed neo-cons. Rather that they should be paleo-cons, or perhaps crunchy-cons (see http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/ ).
To turn the issue around and see why conservatives in turn should be environmentalists, I would like to argue that the root instinct behind conservatism is desire to protect from change the things that ought to be preserved. We are accustomed to thinking this way when it comes to traditional values–conservatives are those who wish to maintain the traditional ways thinking that they believe are still valuable and ought to be preserved–while liberals urge reform. In the arts, the conservative temperament is that existing styles are good and ought not be abandoned for the latest flash in the pan. James Howard Kunstler and the rest of the New Urbanists fall into this category as far as architecture is concerned. Likewise, the environmental movement is based on the conservative impulse that the beauty of nature ought to be protected. In all of these areas the conservative impulse is the urge to protect something good from destruction, whether values, or art, or the environment.
January 23rd, 2009 | 12:08 pm
I am reminded of George F. Kennan that prescient, parrhesiast, who argued long before it was fashionable that the problem was ‘how, within the framework of a natural order already established, the individual is to conduct himself in a manner consistent with the divine purpose.’ He argued that the symptoms of the Western ‘crisis’ are found in an ‘appalling shallowness of the religious, philosophic, and political concepts,’ a ‘sickly secularism,’ urbanization, the hyperintensity of communication (long before the Internet), advertising, TV and the ‘destruction of the natural environment.’
January 23rd, 2009 | 12:35 pm
Thanks for another insightful post, Professor Deneen (and for the helpful comment, Empedocles). I’ve been thinking over this ground for a little while myself, and I’ve benefited often from your guidance, here and on your blog.
I do wonder: what would a positive statement of this sort of “conservatism” look like? Is such a statement even possible? I take it that the impulse to conserve the good, to resist undue change, is a kind of defensive posture; the conservative is on this account a kind of gadfly on the horse of liberalism. (Such is an issue you took up in your initial post here: have I got this wrong?) I understand that conservatives usually (at least avowedly) harbor a wariness of grand political systems. But I don’t think a “positive” political statement would entail a fully systematic one, or that the two are identical. I guess what I’m wondering is if the label “conservative” is always, necessarily, adjectival. I’m not “a conservative”; I’m a “conservative” something. Is that fair? What else does the adjectival conservative have to own up to?
A second question: what sorts of real practices ought the kind of conservatism you espouse to be cultivated in?
January 23rd, 2009 | 1:33 pm
I appreciate your efforts here, Dr. Deneen, and indeed, there may be many conservatives whose position on global warming policy rests on incoherence.
But it would perhaps be better to consider the coherent conservative argument against the kinds of global warming policies our current Administration is likely to pursue.
This argument begins with an idea that is prudent: that large expenditures of resources to solve a problem must be justified by the existence and severity of the problem itself. If we are thinking about spending resources to treat an illness, we ought to make sure the “illness” is actually an illness. In the case of global warming, the issue is not whether it exists (there is agreement that temperatures increased during some periods of time, but not since 2000, interestingly), but whether it is man-made. Surely it is not un-conservative to recognize the dearth of good evidence, as many reputable scientists have recognized.
Even if there were a consensus, it is un-conservative to believe that a problem must be solved at a “global” level, rather than at local levels. But the kind of top-down federal and even international policy sought by the current Administration eviscerates local responsibility; the very inhuman scale of the “anti-global warming vision” reminds us that when numbers like $500 billion, $1 trillion, or even more show up, we need to step back and remember the limits of man. Human beings are not god-like or wise enough to deal with the inhuman scale of quantities apart from local, human levels.
The temptation with a “global” issue like climate change is to reach for the pragmatic Machiavellian toolbox of national and global policy because it’s supposedly “the only thing that will work.”
Lastly, it seems to me eminently conservative to recognize the proper boundaries of the political government, specifically with respect to the marketplace. If it is true that the government has a nature and that by nature its domain is enforcing justice, classically understood as “people getting what they deserve,” it seems that the regulative role of the government with respect to the marketplace should be extensively limited.
In other words, it is conservative to oppose inordinate regulation of the marketplace by the government not because any regulation is bad, but because other non-governmental communities ought to be regulating the marketplace in ways appropriate to their communities–e.g. unions expel, trade organizations blacklist, medical associations de-license, law organizations disbar, churches excommunicate, families discipline–and not the government, except when matters of actual justice (not “social justice”) arise.
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen you dismiss conservative opposition to government regulation of the markets as un-conservative. I do understand that many so-called conservatives are actually libertarians, but you should call the “totally unregulated market system” libertarian rather than conservative, lest your argument be weak for the imprecision.
January 23rd, 2009 | 2:23 pm
“It is our conservatives who should rightly be warning of a potential catastrophe for humanity out of a plenitude of caution and prudence.
While pollyanna optimism isn’t conservative, neither is catastrophism. Catastrophism inspires panic and a “do something!” attitude not mindful of consequences. I worry there’s a middle ground here that isn’t being addressed.
January 23rd, 2009 | 3:10 pm
I could be wrong, but I think the schism on the liberal side of the coin has to do with the shirking of Classical Liberalism in favor of Progressivism. Maybe I’m making too great a distinction here, but it seems the Progressivist ethos would have ostensible liberals pro-actively enact and manage through technocratic means their vision of a Darwin-informed Global society. So it’s no longer about setting aside caution in order to let “nature” ( Darwinist conception) take it’s course.
And I think it’s this dynamic that informs the Conservatives skepticism over what to mean are politically fortunate claims that some kind of secular apocalypse is inevitable unless we go along with the Global agenda.
January 23rd, 2009 | 3:19 pm
Should be “what to me” not “what to mean”.
January 23rd, 2009 | 4:36 pm
Among liberals it fosters the an immediate desire to put a halt to the unleashing of new greenhouse gases, a Gore-ish propensity to quote the latest scientific research and deep disapproval of the American way of life.
False, insulting and far too reductive.
Dare I submit that global warming is not really about global warming – not really?
You dare. But you’re wrong.
First, as a liberal and a California water lawyer I am personally aware that anthropogenic climate change is real and deadly serious. California alone will need to spend tens of billions of dollars in new dams simply to capture the same amount of water as it is using today as a result of the change in the time, manner and temperature of annual precipitation patterns.
Second and more generally, modern scientific liberalism has no deep contempt for the current lifestyle. To the contrary, we recognize that we live in an extraordinarily privileged time. However, we also recognize that we are mining global resources at an unsustainable pace to support this lifestyle. Ever-increasing CO2 releases will have global impacts that are hard to predict with precision but certainly will be very expensive to mitigate. Every single major fishery worldwide is suffering from overfishing. Many agricultural areas worldwide are mining water at an unsustainable pace. And for the first time in modern history, we can start to see the point of collapse coming, when our aquifers, fisheries and soils will fail to meet our needs.
In sum, our lifestyle is supported by trillions of dollars of infrastructure built on a set of assumptions about planetary climate that are increasingly being challenged by solid science. Do nothing? How many people are you planning on killing through acts of omission?
Obama’s proposal to develop a new electrical grid, for example, is widely popular because it is essential to maintaining our current lifestyle. If liberals wanted to return to some kind of pre-modern state, they would be opposing the new grid and waiting for the current one to collapse.
Of course, the single greatest error of your post was to assume the existence of a single liberal position. Tens of millions of people voted for Obama. They don’t all hold a single position on the existence of climate change, much less an appropriate response.
January 23rd, 2009 | 5:18 pm
I didn’t realize climate science was on the bar exam nowadays..
Needless to say there is plenty of hard science that a “water lawyer” might not find particularly useful in making their case.
Nor is it a stretch to suggest that the mainline liberal mindset includes some hostility towards a kind of middle-american materialism, i.e, SUV’s and McMansions, or that this was present before Gore’s campaign for Global carbon taxation.
In fact, the ostensible solutions we’ve been presented as the only legitimate response to this “Oh my Gawd we’re all gonna die!” crisis are squarely in line with agendas that precede the Man-Made Global Warming theory by decades.
Look into the Club Of Rome and Gores’ relationship to it.
Is Obama’s plan for an energy grid wildly popular?
Or is any make-work program going to be greeted with cheer in our economic climate?
Regardless, It doesn’t seem to me that the author of the piece is hostile to your position the existence of man-made global warming.
January 23rd, 2009 | 6:48 pm
Of course, the single greatest error of your post was to assume the existence of a single liberal position. Tens of millions of people voted for Obama. They don’t all hold a single position on the existence of climate change, much less an appropriate response.
Generalizations by definition don’t apply to “all” of a population. But they are, nonetheless, generally true and are valuable thereby. Do you seriously believe that Mr. Deneen thinks “all the people who voted for Obama” have the same exact position on climate change?
January 23rd, 2009 | 8:26 pm
Regarding Francis’ response…I don’t think the point of Patrick’s post was to bash a “liberal viewpoint” or to applaud a “conservative” one. The main message as I read it– if you continue past the first paragraph– is that it is interesting to see how the terms “liberal” and “conservative” have become conflated vis-a-vis the long-standing political theories that bear their names.
January 23rd, 2009 | 10:05 pm
The author’s intent may not be to bash liberals. But he does a fine job of asserting the existence of a liberalism that simply does not exist.
Contemporary liberals are marked, perhaps above all, by the modern faith in science. Agreed.
the rest, however, not so much. Such as:
Among liberals [global warming] fosters … deep disapproval of the American way of life. …
False.
Contemporary liberals seem to exhibit a reverence for nature that belies what is otherwise nearly everywhere a hostility to mere nature shorn of the human ability and imperative to govern its working (e.g., birth control, abortion, etc.).
Mostly this is unintelligible. Reverence? I don’t know what that means in this context.
What I do know is that our way of life is remarkably fragile. How many days of food are stored in your house or supermarket? What would you do if the tap ran dry? Keeping 6.5 billion people alive is a tall order; minor changes in the productivity of farmland could have devastating consequences.
Were liberals truly devoted to a reduction of greenhouse gases, they would have to sacrifice one of the fundamental pillars of liberalism: the pursuit of human liberation from nature.
Umm, no. The sacrifice would be in the consumption of energy that causes the release of CO2, and shifting to CO2-free energy — solar, wind, tidal, etc.
Liberalism’s admirable concern about global warming is informed by a high degree of incoherence.
Now this line shifts from creating strawmen to just being rude.
True, there are some liberal factions who believe that the transition will be costless; they’re most likely wrong. Other factions, arguing for a return to a “simpler” life, apparently are willing to kill off billions.
These, however, are minority viewpoints. Mainstream liberalism is much more focused on the kinds of things I do — worrying about the effects of climate change on the fundamentals of California’s economy.
In general, before a writer starts accusing his opponents of incoherence, he better have a lot more support for such an insult than what was demonstrated in this essay.
February 1st, 2009 | 6:51 am
The biggest mistake I see with this analysis is that you only see two sides to the issue. There is (at least) a third side you left out — the Taoist view that we are part of nature and nature is part of us. Thus, any injury caused of nature wounds each of us just the same.
You wouldn’t stick a nail in your own eye, so why would you want to harm something that is as much a part of you?
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