The Secret Knowledge (7 page)

And it may indict religion as superstition. But man cannot live without religion, which is to say, without a method for dealing with cosmic mystery and those things ever beyond understanding; so the new religion will not be identified as such. It will be called Multiculturalism, Diversity, Social Justice, Environmentalism, Humanitarianism, and so on. These, individually and conjoined, assert their imperviousness to reason, and present themselves as the greatest good; but as they reject submission either to a superior unknowable essence (God), or to those operations of the universe capable of some understanding (science and self-government), their worship foretells a reversion to savagery.

The laws of the seasons, for example, have been studied since human beings first observed that the seasons changed. But the new man, who fears change above all things, has decided that the seasons are now changing in one direction only, toward oblivion, and that this change must be stopped. How may this incomprehensible and awful catastrophe be averted? Only through sacrifice. So the new group, which is the Left, is prepared and is in the process of sacrificing production, exploration, exploitation of natural resources, and an increasing standard of living upon the altar of something called “global warming.”

But the earth has, in fact, been noticeably cooling for the last decade, and has, at many times during recorded history, and before any emission of manmade carbon, been markedly warmer than it is now or was prior to this cooling trend. This supposed warming is a story known of old as the history of Chicken Little—it means the End of the World. And to the Left, those denying it are classed as heretics, for who but an evil monster would wish the world to end? And, for the Left, to refer its pressing question to adjudication is to hasten the end of the world. The heretics who would do so are marginalized and dismissed and mocked, even though many are renowned practitioners of science—an ancient social development allowing man to differentiate truth from falsehood by the process of observation and measurement.
²³

See the Left's inability to discard utterly exploded threats of extinction. In its cosmogony can still be found the theory of Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) that overpopulation will soon and inevitably destroy the world—resulting in mass starvation and the destruction of mankind (birth control); that power must come from “natural,” renewable sources (which it, at present, cannot; wind power will not run Philadelphia, and ethanol costs more and pollutes more than gas), and that nuclear power is an unacceptable risk (though it has powered France accident-free for over fifty years); that World Unity and disarmament is the only way to Peace (though the antimilitarism of France and England between the wars led to the conquest of the first, and the near conquest of the second).

All the old canards can be found, as if new-discovered, today on the nearby Volvo: “The Population Explosion: It's Your Baby”; “Wind Power”; “War Is Not the Answer”; “Coexist.”

No wonder the Left embraces Socialism, the largest myth of modern times and the most easily debunked; for it is a religion, and the tests of actual membership in any religion are likely to include an endorsement of their Foundation Myths: God in the Burning Bush, Joseph Smith's discovery of the Tablets; the Resurrection of Jesus. This is not to denigrate religions, merely to say that they are all based upon myth and symbol, which is to say that they proclaim at the
outset
their intention to approach toward the unknowable, and toward that over which we have no power. This is, however, necessary in religion, a rather unfortunate basis for a political philosophy.

Observe that to propitiate an unknowable power, the Left, ignorant or dismissive of any society or history but its own, insists upon the primacy of Trees and Soil, Oceans and Animals—theirs is a return to the nature worship of the Savage. To see that this nature worship is not quite the good simple-heartedness they believe it is, but rather a religion, observe its imperviousness to information: polar bears are
not
, in fact, decreasing but
increasing
in population;
²⁴
the earth is
not
, in fact, warming.
²⁵

The philosophy of the Left is not, in fact, a
love of
, but a
rejection
of wisdom. And it is contrary to common sense.

For where is the wealth to come from? If we are no longer to explore, to drill, to develop or to use the world around us, and those things fashioned from that world; if we are to “cap and trade,” that which is, essentially, an imaginary commodity (carbon emissions do not in any way affect the temperature of the planet);
²⁶
if we are to tax and limit growth in service of a fantasy, who is to chance his time and treasure to produce the wealth, and how?

Carbon dioxide is not harmful to the atmosphere. There have, in the past, been periods, much colder than today, when the CO
₂
in the atmosphere was twenty-five times what it is today. Carbon emissions offer no threat whatever to the planet. And, as the Left is opposed to nuclear energy, how are we to provide power?

Where is the power to come from? Where is the wealth to come from? From nowhere. For the Left, this new tribe, self-sufficient in its knowledge, ignorant of history, and unwilling to observe, does not understand economics—that man produces, that man consumes, that man trades—and that the necessary consumption drives trade and its attendant invention and exploration, which produce a civilization's wealth.

The Left (as Thomas Sowell points out in
Intellectuals and Society
) believing in what it calls “social justice,” believes that wealth should be “shared,” but enters the discussion in its middle. For wealth may or may
not
be shared (in fact, it is shared, as efficiently as possible, through trade), but the a priori question, to the Left, is unasked and unanswered: Where did it
come
from?

It was not, again, quoting Professor Sowell, descended from heaven, like manna, and spread evenly over the ground. It was created by individual expenditure of effort and individual willingness to undertake risk. The Liberals see wealth as manna from Heaven, falling equally upon all; which, being to them the case, means that for any one to have more of any thing than another, it must have been gotten by cheating—the possessor of “more” must be a thief. To the Left, in spite of one hundred and fifty years of the most extensive and tragic disprovals of Marxism, property = theft.

Rejecting both science and industry, the Left is fearful of man's ability to survive, so it sees scarcity everywhere, and its one answer is to
stop
.

As my generation did not live through the Depression, World War II, and the agony of the immigrants who are our grandparents or great-grandparents; as we were raised in the greatest plenty the world has ever known and in the most just of societies, we have grown lazy and entitled (not unlike Marx, who lived as a parasite upon Engels, and never worked a day in his life). The baby boomer generation, my own, is content, if of the Left, to live out our remaining years upon the work and upon the entitlements created by our parents, and to entail the costs upon our children—to tax industry out of the country, to tax wealth away from its historical role and
use
as the funder of innovation. The religion of the Left is to leave untilled that world whose operations it does not understand and, failing to investigate, fears.

It, therefore, mythologizes uselessness, and praises it.

We have all seen this phenomenon as schoolchildren, in the insecure and self-hating child, raised to think himself weak, who will shrink from effort and from communal activity, attach himself to authorities—the tattletale and the spoilsport, who cannot take the rigors and tests of the schoolyard—the complainer and sanctimonious prig, forever calling out about supposed slights and injustices—his is the all-purpose complaint of the preadolescent “it's not
fair
.”

For mine is a generation which never grew up. And we have, in our short lives, dismantled that necessarily imperfect system of industry and government for which our parents lived and died. We have awarded ourselves for realizing its imperfections—as if any human act or combination were perfect—and have created a culture of guilt and shame—corrosively and compulsively shaming where any human act of individuality may be indicted as wrong (which is to say, destructive of equality or equanimity).

But it is the free individual who alone can provide sustenance for the group. For if there is no effort, no use (called “exploitation”), no reward for initiative (called “greed”), where will the food come from? Malthus, before the invention of the improved plow and before scientific agriculture, “proved” that the world must soon starve.

Socialist Europe is held up as a model of “just behavior”; but the Left forgets that for seventy-five years America defended Europe from the Communist threat, and bore the cost, which would have bankrupted Europe, and which, in the event, bankrupted Communism. The Left looks at the peace of Europe since World War II and forgets that it was not only ensured, but created by American military strength and determination.
²⁷
And now the Left has elected a President who thinks it good to go to Europe and apologize for our “arrogance,” who proclaims the benefits of appeasement both at home and around the world.

This appeasement, called the antiwar movement, the antinuclear movement, One-Worldism, Code Pink, “the end to American Exceptionalism,” is, to the Left, another example of the Correct Thinking of the never-involved. They believe that our enemies, like the monsters in
Where the Wild Things Are
, will be so moved by some unnamable but real excellence on our part, that they will forswear their desire for our destruction (recognizing it, now, as an unnecessary expenditure of effort) and beat their swords into plowshares.

But the Left does not stop to consider that if we, the most prosperous country in the history of the world, choose neither to exploit nor to defend our property, someone else will take it, and if we announce, indeed,
proclaim
our passivity, we will only advance that bad day.

The Left insisted that we abandon, in 1973, a war we had just won in Vietnam, and go on home, as the Left today insists we withdraw from Afghanistan and withdraw from Iraq. Leaving to one side legitimate legislative differences over the strategic worth of any one conflict, what real or potential enemy could possibly misinterpret its possibilities of gain in the light of our absolutely predictable absence of resolve?

Just as the Left, geopolitically, does not recognize enmity (other than on the part of the Right), it judicially does not recognize crime; or that which, historically, was known as crime (that is, behavior transgressive of those statutes enacted for the protection of society), calling it “error,” or the effect of “environment,” or searching for any artifice to free itself of the mature human necessity of choice and enforcement.
²⁸
So doing, the Left everywhere relaxes those judicial norms which alone can give some measure of certainty to the populace.

(Note that in Samuel Butler's
Erewhon,
an 1872 Utopian novel, crime was considered sickness, and the criminal coddled and condoled with, while sickness was treated as crime. I will not belabor the similarity to the Left's New Age health movement, which, in its charms, potions, and essences and practices, discards science in favor of “ancient wisdom.”)

My generation huddles in ignorance that is felt, on the Left, as a worship of man's “natural state,” this supposedly being, all human history to the contrary, one of health and peace, ignoring and in fact rejecting both our imperfections as a species and our differences as individuals.

The random distribution of abilities and ambitions, which has allowed human beings to thrive and communities to grow, and which gives to the group strength and to the individual the possibility of achievement and, so, happiness in the approbation of the group, is derided by the Left as nonsense. To them, each child is born a blank slate, and any difference in subsequent individual accomplishment, status, or wealth, must, thus, be due to some maleficent influence, which is to say, to exploitation.
²⁹
As if we were created to thrive in a society made exclusively of cobblers, or second basemen, surgeons, or deliverymen. The Left sees trade—the source of wealth—as exploitation; and, each child being born equal, all differences in wealth, again, as theft. (Here forgetting the lessons of the schoolyard—that one child may prefer the orange and the other the candy bar, and, so, both may be made happy by an exchange. Is this simplistic? No, it is simple: left to our own devices, we human beings increase our happiness by unfettered trade, and however much we may vote for Government Supervision [state control] we all delight in barter, and the free give and take of the flea market.)
³⁰

To correct this observed inequality, which the Left sees as unnatural, it invented the term “social justice.” But a system of Justice already exists, formulated by Legislature, in supposed expression of the will of the people, and administered by the Judiciary. This is called the Judicial System. What, then, is this additional, amorphous “social justice”? It can only mean, as Hayek wrote, “State Justice.” Here, though the Left will not follow the reasoning out to its end, the State (operating upon what basis it alone knows, and responsible to no law enacted by the people) confiscates wealth accumulated
under existing laws
and redistributes it to those it deems worthy.

History proves that the worthiest in these Marxist schemes are, or quickly become, those in charge of distribution, which is to say “the State,” its constitutional powers usurped by those we know as “dictators.”