By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, December 2, 2021
Glasgow, Scotland
There is a whiff of incense in the air, sweet and
heavy as tree sap. The theme is “Spiritual and Religious Perspectives on the
Climate Emergency,” and Calder Tsuyuki-Tomlinson is conducting a tea ceremony —
“sitting with the future, sipping the present” — and thereby illuminating the
“intrinsic ephemerality of things.” I enjoy the smell of the incense, but here
at COP26, the annual United Nations climate-change convention, we are all about
the Science!, and the Science! doesn’t think much of burning
incense indoors: particulate matter, carbon monoxide, volatile organic
compounds, etc. Burning wood may be carbon-neutral, according to the EPA, but
it is a serious indoor-air-quality concern, if you’re concerned about that kind
of thing — about Science! At
COP26, I met monks, mystics, and misanthropes, but I didn’t meet one person who
knew the first thing about indoor-air quality.
The climate movement likes to wear the cloak of Science!, but here on the streets of
Glasgow, inevitably described as “gritty,” it is a movement of slogans — fruity
and loopy and hippie and New Agey inside the Scottish Exhibition Center, where
the U.N.-approved activists and critics and RINGOs and QUANGOs and YOUNGOs
offer up their predictable maxims (“We
Have a Right to Climate Education” and “The
Future Is Female” and the inevitable “Black
Lives Matter”), but they get angrier and ragier and a good deal less
grammatical as you move outward through the concentric circles of Serious
Power, centered today on the most sacred person of Barack Obama, paying a
surprise visit and upstaging the official U.S envoy, haughty private-jet
enthusiast John Kerry, which is plainly part of the former president’s extended
“Hey, Joe Biden Seemed Like a Good Idea
at the Time!” tour. And the mottos and calls to arms and such grow
positively hostile as you land on the actual Glaswegian street, outside of the
barricaded zone of U.N. approval, where there is talk of Nuremberg-style trials
for “climate criminals” and naked anti-humanism (“Love the Planet: Hate Children!”) and graffiti scrawled
either by some quasi-illiterate climate warrior with approximately Greta
Thunberg’s education or by some ingenious and nihilistic street philosopher
offering up Plato-by-way-of-N.W.A.:
“F*** the Polis!”
This particular rainy and postindustrial polis —
well, someone already has done the deed, and that some time ago. Glasgow is a
charming third-tier city that is in no way ready for globalist do-goodery on
this scale. It actually takes longer to get a taxi at the airport than it takes
to fly here from London, and as I wait, muttering to myself in the cold and
damp — and then in the cold and damp and the dark when the
lights outside the airport go off — I can’t help but think some seriously
climate-criminal-type thoughts, like: “Well, here we are in more or less the
future you greenie-weenie utopian ass-clowns have planned for us, cold and wet
and exhausted and longing in the darkness for the gentle rumble of an
internal-combustion engine turning dinosaur juice into convenience.” You can
tell the COP26 gang, at least the young ones, by their shiny new North Face
backpacks, none of which has ever seen a day’s camping. But the kids from
Oberlin and Haverford aren’t riding their bikes off to their hostels or Airbnbs
or hotels, and they aren’t taking the bus — they are getting into the back seat
of an automobile and exchanging currency for services rendered. I don’t mind
their looking to their comfort, but I could do with a good deal less sanctimony
out of them, these smirking and scowling and po-faced youngsters assuring one
another that what happens here in Glasgow this week will make or break the
future of the human race, and doing so with the kind of confidence that can be
mustered only by people who have never made a mortgage payment — the generation
that put the “I” in iPhone.
I do the Tom Friedman thing and interview my taxi driver.
COVID-19, he says, hit the taxi business so hard that a significant number of
drivers left and never came back, having found other work. But the regulators
still make it pretty hard to take an Uber from the airport instead. So it’s the
worst of both worlds. The convention center is as completely overwhelmed as the
airport, and getting in is like boarding a cruise ship full of people who are
angry to be getting on a cruise ship, the concessions and amenities are
overrun, there isn’t a seat to be had anywhere in the complex, and the official
press, the very town criers of globalism itself, stampede around from place to
place, chasing rumors of Obama sightings, clopping and swishing in damp Banana
Republic workwear like beasts of some digital savannah being chased by a
lioness. One tells another with great excitement and total confidence that Xi
Jinping has made an appearance, but there is no Xi in the house, and in fact
all the Chi-Com party bosses have followed the order to stay away in droves, as
have the Russians. The Americans have a big splashy spread in the exhibition
center, with a scheduled presentation by the good people of Minnesota about how
the Midwest is leading the way to a greener America and a greener world, which
inspires gales of merriment and puts big half-amused–half-bitter grins upon the
fresh-scrubbed young faces of high-level elite global do-gooding. The Americans
at the American pavilion aren’t quite as lonely as the guys over at the No-Really-Nuclear-Power-Is-Great-for-the-Climate booth,
who are the focus of all available side-eye, but nobody is tripping over himself
to hear what Uncle Sam, the Great Satan of CO2, has to say for
himself.
It’s all pretty tense. I figure that what I need is a Zen
monk, and I get two of them: Brother Spirit and Brother Embrace, a couple of
French monks who talk about the climate in terms of stress and anxiety — these
being concerns for the Zen practitioner — and are positively hyped for the
deployment of “spiritual technology” in the climate crisis. Brother Spirit
assures me that what he’s talking about when he talks about “spiritual
technology” isn’t some wacky mystical hoo-ha but meditation (which is wacky mystical
hoo-ha, but never mind) and conventional psychological and psychotherapeutic
practices, which he sees as reinterpretations of ancient spiritual practices.
“We keep rediscovering the same things over and over,” he says. Brother Embrace
is approached by a glowing young woman in street clothes — the brothers are
wearing brown robes — and she calls out to him and he greets her — in
character, I guess — with an embrace. “Nice haircut,” Brother Embrace tells me,
and then he points to his own shaven head: “Never goes out of style.”
These guys are with Thich Nhat Hanh’s gang down at Plum
Village in Thénac, France. Like practically every blue-eyed Buddhist monk
I’ve ever encountered, Brother Spirit gives off just a little whiff of anger,
like he resents that the world is so fallen and deep down into the māyā as to
require his benevolence. He says that people here are sometimes a little
confused by the presence of monks, as though they don’t belong. I think of
Thomas Merton’s insistence that a monastery is not a retreat from the world but
the heart of the world, a place where the business of being human gets done in
a particularly intense way.
Brother Spirit is happy to talk but gets a little snippy
when I write down the name on his name tag: “We don’t use that name,” he says,
apparently a monk with a mouse in his pocket. “That’s just the name for the
passport.” I get it — you have to take a COVID-19 test every single morning to
be admitted to the inner ring of power here (the blue zone), and so I don’t
imagine they’re letting French Zen masters register under noms des
moines when they have perfectly good legal names on their passports.
Brother Spirit — you can follow him on Twitter.
Blue-eyed Zen is just the right thing here, because, in
much of the Western world, Zen is a religion whose adherents pretend that it is
not a religion. Which is, of course, what this whole shindig here in
aggressively secular Glasgow is about.
* * *
You know you are in the presence of cultists when
you come upon a big-ass geodesic dome. The geodesic dome is, in fact, a perfect
metaphor for this entire undertaking: The structure is advertised
(inaccurately) as the most efficient form of building,
minimizing the materials necessary to enclose a particular volume. But geodesic
domes have long been invested by New Age types with mystical qualities.
Buckminster Fuller, the man who popularized the geodesic polyhedron as an
architectural motif (and coined the word “geodesic”), took it as central to the
spiritual mission of his Edwardsville Religious Center of Southern Illinois
University. The geodesic dome housing a miniature Earth, he wrote, provides a
“sense of orientation of each human individual within the profound magnificence
of Universe.” The architect goes on:
One goes inside to go outside one’s
self and into the center of the Earth and thence outward to the stars in
seconds. The Edwardsville Center becomes at once the cathedral of universal
reality and cathedral of universal mystery, in which is simultaneously revealed
the macro-dome designing integrity. Whose infinitely inclusive, detailed and
tireless concern and competence are overwhelming manifests of the eternal,
timeless, cosmically regenerative, love-intellect governance of Universe. Which
inherently transcends human comprehension because of the infinitesimally
limited locally and myopically over-emphatic experience inventory always
inadequately informing human consciousness and reason.
Naturally, there is a big geodesic dome constructed
inside the convention hall. Naturally, the people who put it up forswear any
mystical or quasi-religious intention. And, naturally, they call themselves the
“Eden Project.” Pure secularism, straight out of the Bible.
The Eden Project is a Cornish environmental-education
charity and, effectively, a theme park, featuring a series of “massive” — their
words — geodesic domes built on the site of a former clay mine in Cornwall.
They promise an “extraordinary day out where you’ll discover the natural world
as you’ve never experienced it before.” Which is true, in its way: They have
built, among other things, the world’s largest indoor rain forest and an
enclosed Mediterranean biome in southeastern England, a snow-globe version of
“the natural world.” They are proud that they have hosted more than 23 million
visitors.
Massive structures. Large-scale environmental
manipulation. Tens of millions of travelers. I wonder what the carbon footprint
of all that looks like.
The Eden Project is run by a couple of very nice and
entirely earnest-seeming post-hippies who are busy making “Earthling ID” cards
for COP26 conventioneers, with examples pasted up on the wall of the geodesic
dome: Vladimir Putin, Barack Obama, Boris Johnson, Xi Jinping, all of them
stamped “Earthling.” Elsewhere,
the walls are covered in plaques with little maxims and slogans: “The elements
we depend on must become sacred once more. Remember your myths, enact new
rituals.” Another piece of advice: “Design for other species.” There’s a
psychotic-looking mock crucifix displayed in a plastic reliquary labeled “Who’s
Who on the Tree of Life: A 3-dimensional diagram showing the mental adjustment
required to accommodate Darwin’s ideas concerning nature and man’s station in life.”
Buckminster Fuller was absolutely correct: This is a half-built cathedral for a
new religion, one that has rituals and myths and an apocalypse story but no
formal name.
These aren’t crackpots wearing sandwich-board signs on
some San Francisco sidewalk. The Eden Project hosted Queen Elizabeth II and
President Joe Biden, along with other world leaders, as part of the G-7 summit
last summer. It was the first meeting between the British monarch and the
American president. “Are you supposed to be looking as if you’re enjoying yourself?”
the queen wondered aloud as press photographers documented the affair.
“Glamorous,” the Tatler called it. Every cult needs a good
marketing plan, and getting in good with the royals has been part of the
program since the Christians recruited Constantine in 312 anno Domini.
In Qingdao, China, the Eden Project is building a
water-themed biome in yet another big geodesic dome, creating a tourist
attraction as part of a project that they say will — note the familiar Edenic
promise — “restore life,” in this case to the site of an abandoned commercial
dock. “We’re trying to create a story world,” says Nathan Mansbridge, a content
creator with the Eden Project, “one where people go inside and learn about the
carbon cycle, but in a way that is not didactic. They will meet characters,
some representing humans — there will be a village in the forest — characters
representing agriculture, characters representing industry, characters
representing the three parts of the water cycle — spirits, if you like,
representing storm, ice, and fresh water.” You already know these characters
representing agriculture, industry, water in different forms, etc., though you
know them by other names: Demeter, Hephaestus, Poseidon, Boreas. Triune water
spirits? Ancient mythology is full of them: the Gorgons, the Graeae.
“We are very much about storytelling,” he continues.
“And, so, we touch on a lot of different cultures’ myths, but we are also
looking for myths of the 21st century. One of them is our global nature. As
well as all the other identities we may have — faith group, gender, what have
you — what we all have in common is the planet that we live on. Our
Earthling-ID card is a way of touching on that.” Put another way: “There is
neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all
one in Gaia.”
“The original name of the Eden Project was chosen because
we have this chance to return to a connection with nature,” says Sue Hill, the
group’s founding artistic director. “That’s a stronger, more spiritual, more
nurturing relationship than the one we have at the moment. So the idea is that
though ‘Eden’ has that Judeo-Christian origin, it’s also the idea of the garden
that nurtures us and sustains us. That is something that we can respond to. We
need that now. Probably more than ever before, we have this sense of distance
from nature. We are trying to find ways for people to reconnect with that sense
of reverence, awe, and wonder.”
Reverence. Awe. Wonder. What does any of this have to do
with how many tons of carbon dioxide a million kilowatt-hours of electricity
generation produces?
* * *
Naturally, there are explicitly religious organizations
and figures at work here. Pope Francis sent a statement to COP26 advocating
“radical” action, the Aga Khan’s organization is represented, a group of
“climate pilgrims” showed up with a banner of the Blessed Virgin holding a tree
to her bosom, Catholic monks brandished plainly pagan placards (“Mother Earth Calls Us”), and Carmelite
nuns proclaimed that they were “praying for climate justice.” Leaders of
Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, different Christian churches, and other religious
groups signed a joint statement calling for . . . penance and reconciliation,
more or less.
In a much-remarked-upon 2003 speech, Michael Crichton
insisted that environmentalism had become a full-on religion — and that
religion is Christianity repackaged.
There’s an initial Eden, a
paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace
into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and
as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are
all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now
called “sustainability.” Sustainability is salvation in the church of the
environment. Just as organic food is its Communion, that pesticide-free wafer
that the right people with the right beliefs imbibe.
He was hardly the first or the last to make the
observation. Environmentalism as a faith seeks to dominate — or merely to
co-opt — the Judeo-Christian tradition in part because most religions work to
overthrow or incorporate competitor faiths (which is why the pagan goddess
Brigid shows up undisguised among the Catholic saints and why Christians still
do all that pagan fertility-totem-and-tree-worship stuff on the major holidays)
but also because the Judeo-Christian account of man’s relationship with nature
is incompatible with the new faith. For man to have “dominion over
the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing
that moveth upon the earth” is politically and (ultimately more important)
spiritually at odds with the tenets of mystical environmentalism. Dominion
is a word that the various religious orders within the environmental faith —
feminists, anti-capitalists, neo-primitivists — do not want to hear in any
context other than a vitriolic denunciation. Darwin is their prophet, because
they believe his revelation to have provided a new foundational map of the
universe, one that no longer has man at the top, exercising dominion over
everything else, but that establishes instead a complex system of
interdependencies. That’s what that “Who’s Who on the Tree of Life” business is
really about at heart.
And that may provide some people, especially in the
largely post-religious West, a sense of meaning and universal order, a moral
yardstick, and a sense of community. Those things are not the essence of a
religion, but the auxiliary benefits of religion. It is, in principle, entirely
possible to build a dynamic and moral society without religion, but, in
practice, it has proved difficult to achieve. It is for that reason that Marxism
became the great new religion of the 20th century, while its not terribly
distant cousin, environmentalism, has become the most widely shared faith of
secular-minded people in the rich countries in the 21st century.
The downside, of course, is that transforming
environmentalism into a religion — a religion with creeds, rituals, and infidels —
has made widespread international cooperation on meaningful environmental
goals, including meaningful climate goals, all but impossible. As the graffiti
around Glasgow denouncing “climate criminals” and the jeremiads of Greta
Thunberg et al. have made perfectly clear, the true-believing environmentalists
have very little interest in common ground or a middle ground, insisting
instead that “climate justice” requires a complete transformation of both the
individual and society.
As politics, that is totalitarianism; as religion, it is
fanaticism. And the sweet smell of incense is not enough to mask the stink of
it.
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