La Défense or Notre Dame

I've just ordered from my pusher, Amazon, The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America and Politics without God. It was written a couple of years ago by George Weigel, an American Catholic, biographer of John-Paul II, and Founding President of the James Madison Foundation.

My defense of liberal democracy is basically a utilitarian one: it works better. Weigel thinks this is uninspiring and inadequate. Struck by the debate over whether the preamble to the European constitution should mention Christiantity, by the blank modernism of the Great Arch of La Défense, by the demographic suicide that Europe seems committed to, he has written this book to argue that liberal democracy needs God in order to survive.

There's a talk by Weigel and a short Q&A about the book here. It includes the following.

Can a political community established in an act of historical amnesia defend itself by giving an account of its commitments and its aspirations? Can a political community deliberately founded on principled skepticism about the human capacity to know the truth of anything give an account of its commitments to human rights, democracy, the rule of law, civility, and tolerance, beyond the very thin account that it works better, it's a less sloppy way to conduct public affairs, and things move more easily if we are all good to each other?

Salvation for athiests

One of the great weaknesses of Classical Liberalism is that it does not give adequate ritualised space to two permanent human qualities: the sense of guilt and the consequent need for salvation. Both are necessary to a well-run society, but like sex, are very difficult to keep in proportion. Religion, which gives them a greater importance, is a more congenial home for them.

Industrialisation has been a great progenitor of guilt. It has granted an unparalleled power over nature and an enormous and visible inequality of means and wealth. The violence generated in the 20th Century to overcome or rationalise those gaps is indicative of the sense of guilt induced by them. (Mr Smith's speech to Morpheus in The Matrix is a good expression of this.) We have been made aware of the enormity of what we have created at the same time as we have slowly realised just how inadequate our power and importance are in relation to time, space and the rest of it. Unconscionable power and inadequacy: explosive combination.

So, where lies salvation? Let's save the planet. Our nest. Surely that will help. That's gotta be a plus. At the end of the days.

The new religion. Environmentalism.

the religion of choice for urban atheists ... a perfect 21st century re-mapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.
Michael Crichton

A new book by a mathematician called David Orrell, The Science of Prediction and the Future of Everything, describes the inadequacy of our models, our need for prophecy and “the gospel of deterministic science”. There's a review here.

The new Stalinists

Dr. Heidi Cullen of The Weather Channel on how to deal with those who do not acknowledge the culpa of you and me in global warming. The American Meteorological Society should suffer no dissent.

If a meteorologist can't speak to the fundamental science of climate change, then maybe the AMS shouldn't give them a Seal of Approval. Clearly, the AMS doesn't agree that global warming can be blamed on cyclical weather patterns. It's like allowing a meteorologist to go on-air and say that hurricanes rotate clockwise and tsunamis are caused by the weather. It's not a political statement...it's just an incorrect statement.
[my emphasis]

The Party Line has been determined, and anyone fool enough to fly in the face of Historical Inevitability deserves to be disbarred, and worse...

When we've finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we're in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards* -- some sort of climate Nuremberg.
[my emphasis]

*Climatology jargon for those in the denial industry who will be first against the wall...

This is how someone called Dave Roberts, who has appeared as an expert on Ms Cullen's TV programme, greeted the publication of George Monbiot's book, Heat, which he seemed to like.

Strangely, the many commenters who say nasty things about Ms Cullen's view of scientific debate refer often to Hitler, as does Roberts, but never to the master of ideological tyranny, Stalin. Which is a shame, because what we are embarking on now is yet another voyage into the stormy waters between the Scylla of righteousness and the Charybdis of salvation. That is Stalin's territory and the heritage of the Left.

Check out the list of the disasters global warning has already caused. Keep checking back because it grows by the day and you wouldn't want to miss one.

(via Tim Blair)

Local belief systems

This is the right approach.

Environmental evangelists are therefore not interested in pragmatic solutions to climate change or technological fixes for it. They are even less interested in evidence that if we were really serious about reducing carbon emissions we could do so by large amounts without significantly affecting our economies or our lives. Windmills on roofs and cycling to work are insignificant in practical consequence, but that is to miss their point. Every ideology needs rituals of observance which demonstrate the commitment of adherents.

Business should treat the environmental movement as it treats other forms of religious belief. Business leaders do not themselves have to believe its doctrines. Indeed we should be wary if they do: business linked to faiths and ideologies is a sinister and unaccountable power. But companies must respect the belief systems of the countries in which they operate, and acknowledge both the constraints these structures impose and the commercial opportunities that arise.

Last week (was it only last week?) we had to sit and listen as the High Priesthood and their acolytes hurled fulminations at Tony Blair because he had travelled by plane to Florida and then to watch him squirm from common sense towards cringing acknowledgment that he had sinned and would do penance. There's that faint echo of Bukharin reciting that hanging was too good for him.

(via Tim Blair)

Clippings 3

All three today are from the same source, an article in the New Criterion by Roger Kimball: Raymond Aron & the power of ideas.

"Skepticism is first of all the habit of examining evidence and the capacity for delayed decision. Skepticism is a highly civilized trait, though, when it declines into pyrrhonism*, it is one of which civilizations can die. Where skepticism is strength, pyrrhonism is weakness: for we need not only the strength to defer a decision, but the strength to make one. ["TS Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture]

"Freedom of criticism in the USSR is total." [Jean-Paul Sartre, on returning from Russia, 1954]

What Aron called the “Myth of the Revolution” (like the “Myth of the Left” and the “Myth of the Proletariat”) is so seductive precisely because of its “poetical” charm: it induces the illusion that “all things are possible,” that everything—age-old institutions, the structure of society, even human nature itself—can be utterly transformed in the fiery crucible of revolutionary activity. Combined with the doctrine of historical inevitability — a monstrous idea that Marx took over from Hegel — the Myth of the Revolution is a prescription for totalitarian tyranny.

*Pyrrhonism: Sceptical philosophy which doubts everything

Benedictine rule

The Pope has several reasons to go to Turkey. One of them puts him in the centre of the most burning issue of the day:

[the] attempt to help spark Islamic theological reform. According to this analysis, the pope's speech in Regensburg on the necessary unity of faith and reason was aimed as much at the secularized West as it was at the Islamic world.

"There's no doubt in my mind, he states it clearly, that Islam can evaluate when a passage of the Koran was written: was one early, was one later, was one in a certain context and one in another," Moynihan said. "Those remarks in the Regensburg speech make very clear that he's inviting Islam to engage in a process of self-evaluation and examination and of exegesis of the Koran, which is extremely difficult, controversial. But in my view, it's absolutely clear that he's inviting them to engage in that." [Robert Moynihan, a medieval historian and editor-in-chief of the magazine Inside the Vatican]

Also worth a read is Joshua Treviño's lament for Hagia Sophia.