Modernity's fear : not the Wrath of God or Nature, but the Wrath of Neighbours

The claim that the 19th century saw the "Death of God" is so well known that it is easy to overlook that the Victorian Age also came to accept the claim of the "Death of Nature" as well.

Sir Charles Lyell came up with this particular claim, though he was always quick to say that he still believed in God,  despite most of his friends in Science no longer doing so.

Lyell was always a very superior person whenever dealing with 'lesser' beings, so it is little wonder he also took a distant Olympian view of the workings of earthly geological processes.

He dismissed the idea of  geological or cosmic catastrophes, not just in the past ( his best known claim) , but happening ever.

He did this by claiming that if you took a distant enough view of them, even earthquakes and volcanoes are but tiny wiggles in time, in the unending building up and wearing down of the Earth's surface.

Tiny wiggles up and down around a surface central axis that actually varied very little, in measurements of the overall diameter of the entire Earth, if  viewed over the long periods of geological time.

Eventually, he said, every volcano exploding above a city was matched by an earthquake sinking a city below the ground.

Any supposed 'catastrophe' , quote unquote, was thus reduced to being only local, small and short term, geologically speaking.

Humans actually living in the earthquake and volcano zone might dispute the minor-ness of  his august "Uniformitarianism" claims, but Lyell's real audience was those people living in the earthquake/volcano free zones of the Protestant north.

Indirectly, removing the possibility of global natural catastrophes  also reduced the possibility of a wrathful God having a physical means of punishing or rewarding humans, at least in the minds of 19th century Protestants who dismissed the idea of current Miracles but still believed in the workings of Providence.

So in effect, accepting the Death of Nature also eased one to accept the Death of any God capable of intervening in the physical , as opposed to the spiritual, world.

This is because Lyell's catastrophe-denying claim had wide metaphorical power, and moved quickly into many other areas of Science and civilized thought.

So it was that Lyell, the professional scientific expert and Christian,  who worked most successfully to remove the power of God's surrogates, the priests and preachers.

But I wish to argue that he also removed the independent power of those former DIYers, the bog-ordinary parishioners.

For Lyell's other main plank was his claim that all geological change happened exceedingly slowly : 'Gradualism'.

He claimed that while ,yes, earthquakes and volcanic explosions were over in seconds, the forces leading up to that moment developed over millions of years.

So generations of professional, expert, scientists could rest assured they had lifetimes to find modest, gradual, limited area solutions to modest, gradual, limited area problems.

 Nice, steady work with a good pension at the end.

Helping humanity could become a career, a sinecure, a new form of intellectual aristocracy, even !

Catastrophes were no longer massively global and sudden and thus beyond the power of anyone to ameliorate.

By contrast, Lyell's new micro-catastrophes ( local, small and short term and above all, slow developing) could be managed, given 'adequate' funding for long term scientific research : life-long work done by professionals like himself and his friends.

Earthquakes, cosmic collisions and great glacial floods being dismissed from the realms of possibilities , scientists quickly found new micro catastrophes in the ordinary vicissitudes of life, once handled more or less adequately by all of ordinary us, all on our own.

So it came about that today ordinary people (parishioners) are judged incapable, un-aided, of doing much of anything right.

 Even grieving the loss of their own family members. (Universities in the US now offer PhDs in professional grieve-counselling.)

Perhaps one half of us still does physical work ; the other half are professionals,experts, inspectors: those  who neither weave nor spin, but merely second guess the work of others.

And guess who gets better paid, works in better conditions and has higher social prestige ?

Catastrophes are the ultimate in sublimity : a liner dashed on the rocks by an ocean storm being so much more sublime than viewing just the storm itself.

But while God and Nature was no longer capable of supplying sublimity, that didn't reduce humanity's craving for the drug.

So catastrophe and sublimity crept back into life, no longer the work of God or Nature but of other humans.

The wrath of neighbours converted them into the sublime enemies of humanity : no more unearthly cries from jungle beasts, now it was the sound of our neighbour's Panther and Tiger tank treads that made our blood run cold.

It is no coincidence that Lyell's claims pre-heralded the mid 19th century rise of nationalism, with its single-minded group love and multiple group hates.

Even outside of nationalist warfare, catastrophes have had to always have a human cause.

No liner is ever sunk in a One Hundred Year storm as a result of an Act of God.

Now an official inquiry was sure to ask, given radio and radar, just what was the captain doing out on the seas at that time ?

Catastrophe, supposedly banished by Lyell, was back - smaller than ever , but also much more plentiful than ever.....

On Sunday ,climate skeptics worship Sir Charles Lyell : the "Deity of Denial"

DEITY of the DENIERS

Dr Pangloss is really more your average climate denying punter's cuppa, but he is a fictional character. Not that the denier cum skeptic doesn't love a lot of fiction, mind : he just calls it "science".

 No, better that the skeptics worship a real person like SIR Charles Lyell, almost a lord - sorta like Viscount Batty -  but only more dead.

Most older geologists now firmly deny that they ever believed in the Arbeit macht frei  of Lyell's  Uniformitarianism , they were all just "following orders" .

Victorian era is over for physics but not economics

However, news of their "warmist" apostasy hasn't yet reached the softer sciences, so Uniformitarianism is still the wind beneath the wings of orthodox economists and political scientists.

And denier skeptics are always much more motivated by economics and politics than by basic physical science issues.

That is because Uniformitarianism teaches that Man and Mind is all and Nature and the Physical is nothing : a mere passive, eternally-unchanging, back cloth.

The climate hasn't fundamentally changed, because it can't change, only oscillate within narrow, safe, bounds.

But whenever two or more people gather, they are planning a conspiracy and that IS a catastrophe.

Physical science can never truly animate a person who firmly believes that a major invasion by the Chinese is truly a catastrophe but a major Chinese earthquake can never be.

For your true climate deniers , the phrase "natural catastrophe" is always spelt : H u m a n  C o n s p i r a c y .

 It is always something done by humans to other humans ; never something done by Nature to humans......

The high school teachers of WWII's leaders, got THEIR high school education back in the Early Victorian era

MY high school teachers ran WWII !

It is striking how just old the leaders of WWII were: not just politicians, but also the generals, bureaucrats, CEOs, professors and editors. Anyone who was anybody was usually far older than today's leaders is in equivalent positions.

Most were born in the 1870s and 1880s and so got their last science education in the 1890s, from high school teachers who themselves got their last science education at a high school at the end of the Early Victorian era !

So : the Science of the late 1840s used to guide the world of the early 1940s.

The leaders of WWII , Modernists to the core, had a firm faith grounded on a distinct impression that the First Law of Thermodynamics and Lyell's Law of Uniformitarianism was the Alpha and Omega of scientific knowledge ----- for all time.

When your high school science teacher tells you the universe is eternally unchangeable, why bother to drop by to be posted on the latest updates in basic science . There aren't going to be any , there can't be any.

Just take a bit of time to keep up on the latest wonderful new technological offerings.

Now do the horrors of Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Stalingrad seem more understandable ?

The intellectual "Drift" of former mining company geologist Naomi Oreskes

LYELL, prophet of Victorian Optimism

Unlikely indeed is it to expect that the expert on the scientific debates of 100 years ago on geological Continental Drift  will turn up one day,  reborn , as the expert on present day Climate Change debates !

The head-spinning requires makes one's neck hurt to even to think about it.

Of course if continents do "drift", they do change and if they change, why not the climate as well ? One begins to see a possible connection. And both subjects do involve dissecting furious debates among scientists.

So we have some inklings of Oreskes' possible metamorphosis.

Still she IS a rarity : a former mining company geologist who stoutly defends climate change rather than climate denial.

The key may lay in a just few paragraphs on Page 199  in her first - very long - book on the debates around continental drift.

The historical geologist Charles Schuchert (1858-1942)  seems heaven-sent to make one of the "bad guys" in present day popular books about the decades-old battle over accepting the theory of tectonic plates ( with Alfred Wegener as the much-maligned "good guy").

But Oreskes doesn't fall into that trap.

Like a patient - and fair - bloodhound she goes through all information we have on Schuchert's long and troubled internal debate on the worth of Wegener's theory, rather than featuring only his few - but overheated - verbal outbursts on the subject.

To over simplify, basically in his own area of scientific expertise, Schuchert saw nothing but support for Wegener's ideas.

But like about half of all scientists, Schuchert was too overawed by strong comments of the "big guns" from other scientific disciplines, to actually put his own mind to work to consider the evidence first, through what ever he or she had learned of that discipline's methods .

The other half of scientists share the reverse flaw : believing that being an expert in say, nuclear physics, makes one an expert in every other science.

It is a quite a trick, trying to be intellectually honest, without falling down either of these slippery slopes.

Schuchert rejected his own (literally) "world-class" knowledge of the fossil record ,on the mere second-hand say so that all the "experts" in climate agreed that the climate in the past, at each latitude, was the same as it is today : climate uniformitarianism.

In 1912's intellectual "climate"  it seemed internally self evident that if climates can't change, then neither can continents.

In 2012's intellectual "climate", it is equally self evident, to what Modernists call "warmists",  that if continents can change, why not the climate as well .

Oreskes , Dawson & Daly 

I pay a lot of attention to Oreskes because I suspect that she came to see that yesterday's house wine of Modernity - the theory  of uniformitarianism - was still today's house wine of the climate deniers .

 Just as I have come to that conclusion as well - albeit coming at the subject of climate change via the distinctly odd angle of the Modernist debates over the worth and meaning of Martin Henry Dawson's  Natural Penicillin and Transformative DNA.

I think Herman Daly has also come to see the enduring strength of 1840s uniformitarianism in mainstream 21st century economics.

Given the wampum-like characteristics (In the Flanders & Swann sense of that word)  of this hyper-flexible meme, I almost hesitate to call "Uniformitarianism" a scientific theory : it seems - today - to be more a pseudo-scientific cover story, designed to  assure exuberant Victorians that their intuitive optimism had a  basis in scientific fact.

A dangerous truism today - just as uniformitarianism was in its heyday - is that in 1945 , Modernity fell and Post-Modernity arose.

I used to hold this position myself.

But now I believe that Modernity's hegemony fell apart and that modernity existed uneasily along side post-modernity (aka Global Commensality) in today's post-hegemonic era.

Now this  view at least lets us see the climate wars as the tippy-top of a much larger battle between modernity and commensality for hegemony (while the fate of the planet hangs in the balance) ....

Like race relations before King, like the Gold Standard, in deniers' minds the climate was supposed to be eternally stable and unchangable

heat death of the DENIERS' certitudes

"The climate can't be changing - it just can't," all the blue rinsed ladies cry. "Its not fair - everything in life is changing - and now the climate - it just isn't fair !"

After living a long life safe inside the nice warm milk and cookies of certitudes, to now - in their declining years - to face yet another lose of certitudes is all a little too much for the average - aging - climate denier.

Life used to be so stable : the negro, hebrew, homosexual or career woman used to know their place and knew how to mind their manners.

Money was stable, based on the solid gold standard.

Economists and scientists assured them that matter and energy was stable, indestructible and eternal: it could be changed but never destroyed.

Droughts came ,yes, in a few small areas and for only a short time, replaced by floods also in just a few areas and for just a short time.

Like the rise of volcanoes and the fall of earthquakes, recessions and booms / war and peace came and went, came and went : moderated oscillations but always around a strictly defined - and maintained - norm.

In the Victorian mindset, there could be no science of climate CHANGE

Weather was ceaseless in its oscillations but the climate - the climate was eternal , as eternal as God and the Sun and the Universe.

As Spencer Weart points out, the idea of climate change literally didn't exist and couldn't exist : there were no departments of Climate Change at universities, no Society for the Study of Climate Change, no Journal of Climate Change.

Deniers thought they hadn't asked much out of life, only a level playing field to play out their life upon.

And  modernity's science - for its own selfish, greedy reasons - appeared to give that to them.

Until recently, until the rise of post-modernity science  : the new young whippersnappers.

Because, in fact, there is no such thing as a level playing field, never was and never will be : all fields, like it or not, must tilt subtly but inevitably downward, tracking the great arrow of time's long slow plunge into Heat Death.

Because the one thing the deniers were never taught in school was that the First Law of Thermodynamics (the claim that neither mass or energy can ever be created or destroyed but merely altered) was to the Second law of Thermodynamics as Einstein's Special Law of Relativity was to Einstein's General Law of Relativity.

Which is to say, very much the junior partner in this particular law firm.

The Second Law's Entropy ensures nothing ever really stays the same but rather is always changing : energy and matter are not destroyed true, but their utility to us became steadily degraded - and to us, that is as good as destroyed.

The centre of the Earth is very hot, just as it was 4 billion years ago - but it is less hot today than back then : day by day, millennium by millennium, it is steadily getting colder and colder - and this will one day mean less magnetic fields, less atmosphere and less Life on Earth.

The deniers'  Victorian credo (Lyell's Uniformitarianism) is nothing more than errant nonsense : the present is a guide to nothing more than the present and presents no certitudes as to the past or our future.

Shat happens : suck it up....

LYELL emerges from grave to deny climate change , as Yankee deniers crow "we knew he would!"

Actually Sir Charles Lyell is dead - long dead - with no sign his body has yet risen from the grave. But what about his intellectual spirit ?

Because, in fact, Lyell's spirit, his soul (the theory of uniformitarianism) does live on (and on and on).

Lives on and on in the minds of the climate deniers - and never more strongly than in that heartland of climate denialism : among many of the old school American geologists.

No coincidence that, because in its heyday uniformitarianism also thrived strongest in America geology.

Geological and meteorological deniers today claim that the climate hasn't changed, because it can not change but merely oscillate over a constant central value, if viewed over geological time periods.

If this sounds even vaguely familiar, it is because American deniers back in uniformitarianism's heyday said exactly the same thing to explain why in their view the geology of the earth hadn't changed and couldn't change.

The House Wine of Modernity (& Denierism) is Uniformitarianism

The American geological elite's favourite words were the food and drink of modernity itself, so these geological deniers were then fully of the mainstream , in fact the mainstream of the mainstream.

Words and phrases like : normal,norm, average, static, unchanging, balance, equilibrium, eternal,universal, oscillating deviations of a local and temporary nature.

Nature was a passive backdrop : unchanging, eternal, universal.

 Einstein, one of the clearest examples of 19th century scientific thinking, believed that the universe had always been there and always would be there : it was neither birthed nor would it die.

Against this 19th century static theatre backdrop, the minds of human actors were the active, changing elements of reality.

Peasants, by contrast, extrapolated from their miserable and uncertain lives to see the forces of nature as still all powerful and dynamically uncertain and us humans powerless to do much more than strive to survive its storms and earthquakes.

But upper middle class males, highly educated in western values , saw reality as very certain and predictable, again extrapolating from their extremely privileged lives.

(They, it can be safely assumed, never had to deal with even the minor uncertainties of life such as just when and how baby would choose to spoil her last remaining clean diaper !)

So if we threw Fred Singer out of a plane over Sub-Saharan Africa and told him to hunt and gather for himself, it would be pretty safe to assume we would find him a few years later, not just thinner and fitter, but also with a totally reversed view on whether Climates - and Nature in general - can and do change.

It is no coincidence that the Rich think reality is stable and unchanging and the Poor feel it is unstable and unpredictable....

With deniers believing in Victorian Era Science, conspiracy belief inevitably follows

There is nothing at all logically inconsistent with finding that most climate change deniers sincerely believe that talk of global warming is a scam to enable one group of people take over the world by subterfuge.

That strange belief logically follows from their continuing belief in the equally strange - and scientifically disproven - axioms of Victorian Era science.

They are, in a phrase, "People of the First Law" , when the 21st century's leading (tenured/peer-reviewed) basic scientists are all  "People of the Second Law".

Thermodynamics , dear Watson : the two sides of the climate change debate are fighting over nothing more than the human consequences of assigning differing priorities to the two Laws of Thermodynamics !

Majority of deniers think Watermelons, not Jewish families, are behind Climate Change

Some deniers may think that conspiracy group consists of old world Jewish "banking families", but the vast majority of deniers think the actual group planning a world takeover on the backs of a bogus claim of a warming planet are the so called "watermelon conspiracy".

After "Our Side" won the Cold War in the early 1990s, deniers explain, "The Red Side" (not at all to be confused with the Red States - they are the good guys) cheated by just pretending to accept defeat.

But what it actually did was paint a new colour all over itself by expressing a sudden new "green" interest in saving the environment while still secretly planning to dominate humanity via a One World Government scheme, based on old "red" socialist-communist values.

Voila ! "The Watermelon Conspiracy" : green on the outside and red on the inside.

Hence the election of Obama-the-birther, some deniers claim ( shout out to the Viscount !), because "we all know how them there colored boys love ther watermelon".

Along with straight razor fighting and beatin' their gal : yep, its the Era of  "The Coon Song Redux" .

And why not ? Because the science of the deniers is also from that long ago era of more than a century ago - might as well be consistent.

Belief in the priority of the First Law of Thermodynamics sees nature as a largely static backdrop to the dynamic activities of humanity : the climate literally can't change,  can't do more than merely oscillate within a narrow range, back and forth or up and down, around a fixed, eternal, central equilibrium.

If you are over the age of sixty and took any geology in your science education at high school or university, you might recognize this as geology's all-ruling DOGMA, until very, very recently : Sir Charles Lyell's Uniformitarianism.

Expressed in slightly different forms, it dominated all science and in fact all human thought until well after 1945 and the uniformitarian debacle of WWII.

In mainstream Economics and in Darwinian Biology, this mid-Victorian scientific delusion still does dominate.

And of course, in the minds of  the deniers. Most of them are old enough to have the genuine excuse of claiming that it was, after all,  the cutting edge theory of its day at the high school where they last encountered the formal study of science.

With Nature passive and yet Reality highly active, believers in the First Law are almost forced to credit all change in the climate to just two things : a claim that these large and long term changes in our climate are in fact just temporary and local, if you view them from a long enough and distant enough perceptive, like that of say Simon-Pierre LaPlace in his executive suite high above the Universe.

Or that some group of humans, credited as a consequence of the First Law with virtually unlimited powers of will and mind power, have managed to fool all other humans into believing in a delusion : the delusion that the climate - and Mother Nature herself - can actually change.

Deniers sincerely - and consistently following from incorrect axioms - logically believe it is not they but the rest of humanity that is deluded.

As I have always claimed, all debate and all conflict is over initial axioms and nothing else......