20AR25-34

( - previous issue - / - next issue - )

AR 25:34 - Environmentalism as 'a substitute religion'

In this issue:

CULTURE - when "weakly religious households [lose] a core part of their meaning or purpose"

ENVIRONMENTALISM - "a substitute religion for those who have abandoned traditional faiths"

Apologia Report 25:34 (1,491)

August 27, 2020

CULTURE

Strange Rites, [1] by Religion News Service columnist Tara Isabella Burton -- Writing for National Review (Aug 6 '20), congressional staffer Patrick T. Brown explains that Burton <taraisabellaburton.com> "offers a series of Instagram-filtered snapshots of what the search for meaning looks like in the age of curated consumption. It also provides an irresistible frame for understanding the quest for community in the age of YouTube influencers and fan-fiction forums. ...

"Millennials adrift at the 'end of history,' Burton argues, use the infinite-swipe mentality of the Web to custom-build a sense of belonging and meaning while straddling different, often online, communities. ...

"Automobiles, arguably, did as much for the sexual revolution as any tract by Margaret Sanger. ... 'The proliferation of Internet creative culture and consumer capitalism have rendered us all simultaneously parishioner, high priest, and deity,' Burton writes."

One of her interviewees tells Burton that "If we had a god, that god would be consent." ...

Brown finds that "Burton's contribution is to explore, with rigor and empathy, the roots of how the political became spiritual."

Noting her background, he adds that "Burton, who holds a doctorate from Oxford University and is a contributing editor of The American Interest, suggests that the religiously unaffiliated, or 'nones,' are better understood as the 'Remixed'.... 'We may not all be Remixed, but we all live in a Remixed nation' [that is full of as Ross] Douthat might put it, ways of gratifying the 'God within' of ego or libido."

"Strange Rites reads like an unauthorized sequel to Ross Douthat's 2012 Bad Religion [2], which made the claim that America was becoming not a post-Christian nation but a heretical one. Almost a decade later, Burton proposes that our most national heresy is syncretism, a blend of ancient, faux-ancient, or contemporary practices to suit our needs - especially ones sold to us by corporations that recognize that 'spirituality sells.'

"Borrowing from Émile Durkheim, the godfather of modern sociology, Burton understands 'religion' as a set of rituals and beliefs that affirm participants' identity as part of a group. ...

"[S]he notes, religion is more than a set of shared actions. It is also, in the words of the sociologist and theologian Peter Berger, 'the human enterprise by which a sacred cosmos is established.' ...

"Burton reports, 'Our culture wars now better resemble Gamergate - with its clash of SJWs [social-justice warriors] and proto-atavist nerd culture - than they do the debates of the 1980s and '90s.' ...

"The commerce of virtue-signaling, from LGBTQ-themed soda cans to #MeToo-branded razors, demonstrates how 'today's new religions interface with the brands that so powerfully promote, reify, and profit off them.' ...

"American Enterprise Institute scholar Lyman Stone ... and other scholars have found, [this shift] is being primarily driven not by a mass falling-away from faith but by generational replacement, especially as children raised in weakly religious households come of age. The 'Remixed' grew up with religion as something '"nice to have" teaching "good values" or solidifying family bonds - [not] necessarily a core part of their meaning or purpose,' Burton notes."

Some "might see the Internet as accelerating, but not causing, the working out of homogenized consumerism in the way we interact with the divine and with one another [incurring an] unchosen obligation and the fetishization of autonomy that had taken root before the first message board went online. The fault may be not in our social-media platforms, but in ourselves." <www.bit.ly/2DCjEA9>

See also Barton Swaim's critique in The Wall Street Journal (Aug 4 '20), in which he complains that "Ms. Burton brings 'Strange Rites' to a disappointing end. She posits an apocalyptic struggle among three godless religions: the eschatological ideology of social-justice activism, the transhumanist vision of techno-utopianism and the atavistic nihilism of the alt-right," noting Burton's conclusion that "Only time will tell which one will win…".

He responds: "Really? The alt-right is a movement of mentally pubescent boys playing anonymous games on social media. Techno-utopianism is the vanity project of Bay Area dreamers with too much time and money and too little sense. The soft-totalitarian outlook of social-justice activism, by contrast, is the default ideology of our university, media, corporate, transnational, entertainment and political elite. I'm pretty sure I know which one will win." <www.on.wsj.com/3lhBTM3>

---

ENVIRONMENTALISM

"Why do green activists keep promoting policies that are harmful not only to humans but also to the environment?" With his new book Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All [3], reviewed in the Wall Street Journal (Jun 21 '20), "Michael Shellenberger is determined to solve this problem, and he is singularly well qualified.

"He understands activists because he has been one himself since high school [and] the more he traveled, the more he questioned what Westerners' activism was accomplishing for people or for nature. ...

"He's still worried about climate change, but he doesn't consider it the most important problem today, much less a threat to humanity's survival - and he sees that greens' favorite solutions are making the problem worse.

"He chronicles environmental progress around the world and crisply debunks myth after gloomy myth. No, we are not in the midst of the "sixth mass extinction," because only 0.001% of the planet's species go extinct annually. No, whales were not saved by Greenpeace but rather by the capitalist entrepreneurs who discovered cheaper substitutes for whale oil (first petroleum, then vegetable oils) that decimated the whaling industry long before activists got involved. No, plastics don't linger for thousands of years in the ocean; they're broken down by sunlight and other forces. No, climate change has not caused an increase in the frequency or intensity of floods, droughts, hurricanes and tornadoes.

"In 2002, Mr. Shellenberger proposed the New Apollo Project, a precursor to the Green New Deal. Many of its ideas for promoting renewable energy were adopted by the Obama administration and received more than $150 billion in federal funds, but Mr. Shellenberger was disillusioned with the results. ...

"He now considers most forms of renewable energy [wind and solar power] to be impractical for large-scale use. ...

"'Rich nations,' he writes, 'should do everything they can to help poor nations industrialize.' Instead 'many of them are doing something closer to the opposite: seeking to make poverty sustainable rather than to make poverty history.'

"While industrialization causes a short-term rise in carbon emissions, in the long term it's beneficial to the environment as people move to cities, allowing farmland to revert to nature, and as prosperity enables them to switch to cleaner and more compact forms of energy. ...

"Mr. Shellenberger blames the anti-nuke movement partly on fearmongering by activists and journalists, partly on instinctive hostility to new technology, and partly on financial self-interest. 'Every major climate activist group in America ... has been seeking to close nuclear plants around the United States while taking money from or investing in natural gas companies, renewable energy companies, and their investors who stand to make billions if nuclear plants are closed and replaced by natural gas.'

"Mr. Shellenberger makes a persuasive case, lucidly blending research data and policy analysis with a history of the green movement and vignettes of people in poor countries suffering the consequences of "environmental colonialism. ... I was drawn toward the apocalyptic view of climate change twenty years ago," he writes. "I can see now that my heightened anxiety about climate reflected underlying anxiety and unhappiness in my own life that had little to do with climate change or the state of the natural environment.' ...

"It has become a substitute religion for those who have abandoned traditional faiths, as he explains in his concluding chapter, "False Gods for Lost Souls." Its priests have been warning for half a century that humanity is about to be punished for its sins against nature, and no matter how often the doomsday forecasts fail, the faithful still thrill to each new one."

Reviewer John Tierney notes, in conclusion, that Shellenberger wants to woo environmentalists to the "alternative faith" he calls "environmental humanism," committed to the "transcendent moral purpose of universal human flourishing and environmental progress." Hmmm… <www.on.wsj.com/31tob0N

Watch Shellenberger being interviewed by Alex Epstein here: <www.youtu.be/eq60W2pRk84>

Visit <bit.ly/2PM3TJf> (DailyWire registration required) for "On Behalf of Environmentalists, I Apologize for the Climate Scare" the full text of Shellenberger's Forbes opinion piece which was pulled soon after its release on the Web.

Last March we sent Apologia donors our analysis: "The Cult of Climate Change?" <www.bit.ly/38P2yIS>

-------

SOURCES: Monographs

1 - Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, by Tara Isabella Burton (PublicAffairs, 2020, hardcover, 320 pages) <www.amzn.to/2MrGBHl>

2 - Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, by Ross Douthat (Free Press, 2012, hardcover, 337 pages) <www.amzn.to/2YxgHbi>

3 - Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, by Michael Shellenberger (Harper, 2020, hardcover, 432 pages) <www.amzn.to/3fPGUYj>

------

( - previous issue - / - next issue - )