By Jack Kerwick
Saturday, April 26, 2014
It won’t surprise readers of this column to learn that
the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCG) insists
that unless “global warming” is addressed, the planet promises to suffer all
manner of evil. Courtesy of “coastal flooding” and “storm surges,” “urban
populations” especially are susceptible to “the risk of death, injury, and
disrupted livelihoods [.]”
To a far greater extent than any other issue, that of
Global Warming reveals what makes the leftist mind tick.
That the leftist aches from the very marrow of his being
for the consolidation of power and authority in a central government is a
no-brainer. While there are ways in which governments use their power to which
he objects, the leftist has never known a limit on the amount of power at a
government’s disposal with which he could rest comfortably.
So, the leftist has always wanted Big Government. And
this insatiable lust for unlimited government is inseparable from his disdain
for the nation-state and its concomitant, “nationalism”: national boundaries
impose a limit on the extent to which government can expand. The logic of Big
Government has a life all of its own, pointing beyond the nations in which it
takes root toward the rest of the planet. It is self-perpetuating, much like a disease
that can’t desist from moving from host to host until it dies.
There is no issue short of a conflict with an
extraterrestrial race that better serves the global aspirations of Big
Government than that of Global Warming.
The conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott contrasts
two fundamentally different models of a modern (“nation”) state. On the one
hand, modern states have been looked upon as “civil associations,” associations
of human beings doing their own thing and bound together by nothing more or
less than the law. The latter, in turn, doesn’t tell associates what they must
do, but only how they must do, or refrain from doing, whatever it is that they
choose to do. Since laws are not policies designed to bring to fruition some
grand master plan or vision for the nation, government, from this perspective,
is not visionary or activist.
Rather, government serves the function of an umpire or a
referee: it exists solely to insure that the rules (laws) of the association are
observed by all of its members.
Modern states have also been thought of as “enterprise
associations.” The government of an enterprise association is visionary,
activist. It leads by policy; it doesn’t rule by law. The members of an
enterprise association are not related to one another as one law-abider to
another, but as “joint-enterprisers,” comrades-in-arms, fellow-travelers.
“Global Warming” is made for the idea of the
state-as-enterprise association.
Even war, the stuff of which collectivist dreams are
made, isn’t quite as amenable to the lover of Big Government as is Global
Warming. War insures the centralization of power and the transformation of
government into an agent of activism. However, from the perspective of the
leftist, the zealot of Big Government, war—because it always pits one actor
against another—exacerbates “nationalism” and, thus, actually limits the growth
of government.
Global Warming is another proposition altogether. The
term “Global Warming,” far from being descriptive, is chock-full of imagery of
death and destruction of epic proportions. The term is what logicians since
Aristotle have referred to as an “appeal to force,” a rhetorical device
designed to at once circumvent rational argumentation and coerce people into
bending to the will of its apologists. It is the secular equivalent of Hell or
Armageddon in both the images that it calls to mind as well as the uses (i.e.
the instillation of fear and the consolidation of power) to which it is put.
Like Hell or Armageddon, there is no one that is safe from its clutches—unless
they turn to, not Almighty God, but Almighty Government.
And since Global Warming is, well, global, it provides
the golden opportunity for the governments of the world to either join forces
or synthesize with one another.
In the process, national sovereignty and individual
liberty will be relegated to the dustbin of history.
Global Warming is the gift that keeps on giving to the
leftist. This is why he will never give it up.
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