Looking for a \u201chook,\u201d an attention-grabbing story to use as an introduction for this essay, I found so many extreme weather events in 2017-2019 that I was at a loss for which one to pick. In their sheer<\/p>\n
destructiveness, they were all devastatingly similar. And the responses of the people who went through them were terrifyingly alike—dazed, overwhelmed, traumatized with fear—fear of death.*<\/p>\n
I got a firsthand account of the fear from relatives who were in Dominica when a category 5 hurricane—Hurricane Maria—hit that island. \u201cIt\u2019s beyond words,\u201d they said. \u201cThe hurricane took eight \u2018eternal\u2019 hours to pass through the island, and during that \u2018eternity\u2019 we were huddled in the bathroom.\u201d The wind was what they spoke of most. \u201cThe screeching, howling sounds, combined with the staccato of the hard-pelting rain, was fearsome to the last degree. It\u2019s like we were besieged by a horde of shrieking monsters,\u201d they said. \u201cBut as we prayed and sang hymns, we were enveloped by a tranquillity that still awes us to this day.\u201d<\/p>\n
Listening to them, I got an inkling of the primordial pagan fear of the elements, and why they personified and deified natural forces. I can imagine those pagans imploring, hysterically beseeching, the howling winds to spare their lives. If today we don\u2019t implore hurricanes, storms, volcanoes, as if they are gods or living beings, it\u2019s because of science. Discovering laws that govern nature, empowering us to exploit them, radically changes our view of nature. For us moderns, as Max Weber said, \u201cthere are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play.\u201d We can, \u201cin principle, master all things [through science and technology]. . . . One need no longer have recourse to magical means.\u201d1<\/p>\n
When natural disasters strike, we call 9-1-1. But what will we do if faced with cataclysmic natural disasters beyond the capacity of emergency services, disasters science can\u2019t relieve? For instance, according to a recent research cited by the New York Times<\/em>, rising seas could affect three times more people by 2050, threatening major coastal cities. \u201cSouthern Vietnam could all but disappear,\u201d we are warned. Such are the doomsday climate scenarios that climate scientists are extrapolating from the extreme weather events caused by global warming.<\/p>\n Although the scientific evidence of global warming is unequivocal, to extrapolate forward to doomsday climate scenarios is prophecy and not science. It\u2019s not like weather forecasting. For there is just no way any research can factor in all the variables and contingencies and then come up with accurate future climate scenarios, even after using \u201cartificial intelligence to determine the error rate and correct it.\u201d2 Similarly, there is no research that can accurately predict that global warming can be reversed, all the complex climate models and high-tech computer simulation notwithstanding.<\/p>\n To say this is simply to point out the uncertainty that is part not only of scientific work but of human life in general. We always see through a glass darkly, just as we always know in part. Prophecy and absolute knowledge are exclusive to God. To put it forthrightly, climate scientists and activists need a modicum of humility, to see the limits of their knowledge, especially when it comes to predicting climate scenarios, and our ability to reverse global warming.<\/p>\n If climate activists lack humility, climate deniers lack honesty. To deny that all the air and water pollution that has been going on since the beginning of modern industry in the mid-eighteenth century has not affected climate deleteriously is disingenuous. To be sure, the ad hominem attacks of climate deniers reveals the vacuity of their arguments and disingenuousness. They bring to mind the tobacco industry\u2019s denial, for decades, that smoking was dangerous to health or the pesticides industry\u2019s denial, in the 1950s, of the effect that the pesticide DDT had on bird reproduction. In light of these and other cases of blatant denials of scientific evidence, it\u2019s unsurprising that to advance their cause and change minds, climate scientists and activists resort to the FEAR FACTOR, and concoct doomsday scenarios of climate change, animated to be sure, by the omni occurrence of extreme weather events. <\/p>\n In using fear, they are using a time-tested mobilizing method. In normal times it can be a spur to action. But in unsettled times, such as the one Western democracies are going through, it reinforces mass anxiety. Indeed, since the 2008 financial crisis, fear has been omnipresent and contagious—fear of losing jobs, fear of losing homes, fear of losing health-care coverage, fear of terrorism, fear of losing one\u2019s identity\/culture, fear of immigrants, fear of the uncontrollable speed of change. And, perhaps above all, fear that things are falling apart, and those in authority cannot hold the system together. <\/p>\n If we bundle these fears, we have an ambience, \u201ca climate of fear.\u201d And we have much more to fear, in my view, from the \u201cclimate of fear,\u201d than from climate change. For, as Edmund Burke insightfully noted, \u201cno passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. For fear being an apprehension of pain or death, it operates in a manner that resembles actual pain.\u201d3 The crux here is that fear makes the imagined pain or threat real. It detaches one from reality, and detached, it magnifies threats, turns them into monsters. And of course, monsters call for monster slayers, such as the \u00dcbermensch<\/em>, Nietzsche\u2019s superman.<\/p>\n As it is, this is precisely the dynamic shaping climate activism. This is what Astra Taylor wrote in The New Republic<\/em>: \u201cAs you\u2019ve probably heard, U.N. scientists recently warned that we have eleven years to avert climate disaster. We face a civilizational crisis that can only be solved by unprecedented action on an unprecedented scale.\u201d This first sentence (17 words) is the only sentence in the 3,388-word article to mention climate change; the rest (3,371 words) advocate the urgent need to resurrect the \u201cancient ideal of solidarity,\u201d drawn from \u201cthe legal books of the ancient Roman Empire.\u201d<\/sup><\/p>\n However, what makes this article truly a farce is that the \u201csolidarity\u201d is anything but Roman. It\u2019s rather a prop for recycled Marxism. Indeed, Taylor nostalgically writes of how \u201cMarx and Engels movingly envisioned a form of class solidarity extending across borders and nationalities, yoking together strangers alienated and exploited by the same economic forces.\u201dAnd curiously overlooking the reduction ofcollectivism to Stalinist autocracy, she repeats the Marxist mantra of \u201ccollective action,\u201d \u201cchanging minds\/behavior\u201d or \u201ctransformational change,\u201d and even scapegoats the \u201cplutocrats and politicians\u201d for the failure of the \u201cMarxist vision.\u201d4<\/p>\n Incidentally, one of the untold stories about climate activism is how the old ecological movement, which did admirable work agitating against industrial air and water pollution and environmental degradation, was hijacked by Marxists after the collapse of Communism and turned into a smoke screen for attacking capitalism and liberal democracy. Of course, conservatives aren\u2019t fooled. Their denial of human-induced climate change may be vacuous and disingenuous, but their skepticism of grand solutions to the climate crisis is sound and sincere. Ultimately, however, according to Pew Research, \u201cpartisanship is a stronger factor in people\u2019s beliefs about climate change than is their level of knowledge and understanding about science.\u201d For example, \u201cmost Democrats with more science knowledge believe climate change is due to human activity, but there is no difference by science knowledge among GOP.\u201d5 <\/p>\n This is a sobering fact. If the best predictor of whether we agree with evidence or science is partisanship, our political affiliation or ideology, then we have a crisis of authority<\/em> of the first order. To appreciate the gravity of the crisis, we must note the crucial difference between authority and power. Authority rests on persuasion—<\/em>the voluntary submission to evidence, facts, truth, and moral norms, what Weber called \u201cinner justifications,\u201d6 so that individuals control themselves from within; while power rests on external coercion<\/em>—the threat of penalty, pain, loss or shame, so that individuals are controlled from without.<\/p>\n Liberal democracy is based primarily on authority, on the voluntary submission to shared outlook, moral values, ideas, and presuppositions. This is what limits external coercion<\/em>, the domination from without by the state or a dictatorship. As such, a crisis of authority<\/em>, like the one Western nations are going through, poses an existential threat to liberal democracy. To be precise, a crisis of authority,<\/em> unresolved, invites anarchy and anarchy unresolved invites external coercion—<\/em>dictatorship, a Dostoevskian Grand Inquisitor, or a Nietzschean \u00dcbermensch<\/em>—to impose order.<\/p>\n Indeed, in the course of human affairs the point sometimes arrives when different streams of problems coalesce into one massive river, which presses for an extreme response, a total solution. We seem to be reaching that inflection point in Western democracies. We have extreme <\/em>weather, extreme<\/em> polarization, extreme<\/em> income inequalities, extreme <\/em>breakdown of traditional political parties, extreme<\/em> breakdown of the social fabric, the liberal international order, extreme<\/em> immigration and identity problems —you name it; extreme<\/em> is the apt adjective of the myriad problems confronting us.<\/p>\n All these problems, as many thoughtful observers have noted, are interconnected, with climate change offering a vantage point of seeing the interconnections. And Laudato S\u00ed<\/em>, the encyclical letter of Pope Francis \u201con care for our common home,\u201d7 traces the interconnections to launch a fundamental criticism of market capitalism, technology, consumerism, and the cultural liberalism underlying it. In the criticism it\u2019s easy to detect a retro-medievalism, a romantic nostalgia for a pre-modern arcadia, in which humans are believed to have lived in harmony with nature and one another.<\/p>\n Indeed, the encyclical opens with a paean of Saint Francis of Assisi, the pope\u2019s namesake: \u201cPraise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with colored flowers and herbs.\u201d But then: \u201cThis sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her.\u201d The encyclical thus calls \u201cfor global ecological conversion,\u201d since \u201cauthentic human development has a moral character,\u201d and \u201cthe book of nature is one and indivisible,\u201d according to Benedict XVI, and \u201cincludes environment, life, sexuality, the family, social relations, and so forth.\u201d<\/p>\n Let\u2019s review this encyclical. First, the use of pagan mythology is very troubling. \u201cMother Earth\u201d is a Greek goddess (Gaia), the source of all life on earth, but here it\u2019s said that God \u201cendowed her.\u201d Thus, God and Gaia are joined, and Gaia is placed between humans and God. In fact, reversing the dominion God granted us over the earth, the encyclical subjects humans to Gaia: \u201cWe have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will.\u201d This personification and reverence of nature is very unbiblical. Redolent of the primitive sacred, it can, in a full-blown \u201cclimate of fear,\u201d easily slide into nature worship. <\/p>\n Second, viewed biblically, \u201cthe book of nature [is not] one and indivisible,\u201d since humans, created \u201cin the image of God,\u201d were set apart from, and not subsumed, in nature. Again, God created through a process of separation, distinction, and classification; and inscribed these distinctions in the ceremonial and social rules in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. In other words, God intends us to view all created reality as discrete entities, differentiated and disenchanted. To be sure, that\u2019s why the Bible always speaks of the heavens and earth, the mountains and seas. The word nature <\/em>doesn\u2019t appear in the Bible at all. And not without significance. Only God sees or knows the whole, the totality, of things, all reality. For us humans, as Paul said, \u201cwe know in part, and prophesy in part\u201d (1 Corinthians 13:9).<\/p>\n The encyclical lacks this epistemic humility. Its premise of \u201cone and indivisible nature,\u201d embracing the human and the nonhuman, reflects the totalitarian ambitions of mythical-philosophical thought from which it is drawn. Again, in avowing respect \u201cfor the various cultural riches of different peoples, their art and poetry, their interior life and spirituality,\u201d since \u201cno branch of the sciences and no form of wisdom can be left out,\u201d it reveals a syncretism common with mythology and alien to the Bible, which reserves the unification and reconciliation of all things to God (Ephesians 1:8-10), and at the end of the time.<\/p>\n Unification and reconciliation of all things is reserved for God, because only God can and will completely eradicate the root cause of all human problems—sin and its author, Satan. Although the encyclical lauds the Catholic Church\u2019s openness to \u201cdialogue with philosophical thought,\u201d and this has \u201cenabled her to produce various synthesis between faith and reason,\u201d the existence of sin and the devil forecloses any ideological synthesis, cultural syncretism, or final solution. The pope must take heed<\/em>. For Babylon, \u201cconfusion,\u201d and the antichrist are the apocalyptic symbols and warnings for the human-desired but demonic-inspired bid for unity, before the end of time. <\/p>\n Indeed, as I see it, the \u201cclimate of fear\u201d around climate activism, the populism, polarization, the yearning for strong leaders, and the escalation to the extremes now driving the politics of Western democracies is a perfect foil for the rise of the antichrist predicted in the Apocalypse, and which Dostoevsky strikingly dramatized in \u201cThe Grand Inquisitor.\u201d Indeed, to understand the current crisis of liberalism and what it\u2019s likely to metastasize into, read \u201c<\/em>The Grand Inquisitor,\u201d for it uncannily foresaw the crisis, its spiritual roots and demonic valence. <\/p>\n In sounding this apocalyptic warning, I\u2019m not advocating passivism in face of the pressing global political, social, economic, and environmental problems. Christians are called to be light and salt of the earth. In other words, to illumine the roots of human problems and to act as preservatives. And they\u2019re to do so, \u201cnot by might, nor by power, but by [God\u2019s] spirit\u201d (Zechariah 4:6), that is, by living their faith concretely in every sphere of life, while proclaiming the gospel. This is how the early Christians, we must remember, transformed the Roman world, and effected in Nietzsche\u2019s words, \u201cthe greatest transvaluation of values in world history.\u201d<\/p>\n And it\u2019s still the way the church or Christians are to transform the world, but without a unifying political ideology, because the gospel is the \u201cideology.\u201d Proclaimed authentically, it accomplishes effortlessly what different empires, cultures, religions, and ideologies have attempted without success. As expressed in Revelation 14:6, the gospel is able to permeate barriers of otherness, and unite strangers from \u201cevery nation, tribe, language and people\u201d (NIV)8<\/sup> in solidarity, while recognizing their individuality and identity. Again, by directing us to worship the Creator-God, the gospel also heals our alienation from nature (Revelation 14:7).<\/p>\n Above all, the gospel is about the \u201cnew heaven\u201d and the \u201cnew earth\u201d (Revelation 21:1, NIV), which tells us that God, not some human-caused or natural catastrophe, will bring history to an end. And when we embrace the Creator-God, \u201cwe will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and the mountains quake with their surging\u201d (Psalm 46:2, 3, NIV).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Looking for a \u201chook,\u201d an attention-grabbing story to use as an introduction for this essay, I found so many extreme weather events in 2017-2019 that I was at a loss for which one to pick. In their sheer destructiveness, they were all devastatingly similar. 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