This is a highly personal sort of rant so anyone who expects the usual cooly reasoned, tightly argued piece of analysis won't find it here today. No. This time its personal.
Al Gore has long sojourned in the land of illusion. His travelogues based on his ventures in the horror filled territory of global warming replete with dead lands and brackish water, littered with the corpses of polar bears and assorted amphibians have brought him fame, fortune and the cachet of a Nobel Prize.
Apparently the global crusader for greener living feels overlooked of late as the US economy sputters, in part because of escalating food prices--prices driven to some unquantifiable extent by the Gore promoted fad for biofuels. But, you can't keep a good mouth down for long.
He's back with a headline grabbing call for the US to replace all fossil fuel electrical generation by earth-friendly technologies such as solar, wind and (unspecified) other forms of production within ten years. Notably, Gore did not mention nuclear power as an alternative.
Get a grip, Mr Gore!
The Geek knows a thing or two about alternative energy production. He has been living off the grid for ten years now. All his electricity comes from the sun--when there is sun.
Aye, that's one of the rubs. Solar power works when there is sun. Wind power works when there is wind. At night, those of us who use the sun must depend upon batteries. The few folks who live somewhere near the Geek who use the wind as their main energy prime mover must rely upon either a backup system or batteries.
The batteries are the weak point in the system. Until there is a new form of battery technology which insures longer life and greater storage capacity per pound of battery weight, there will be significant built-in limits to solar energy in particular.
Then there are the greens, particularly the deep greens who should be the loudest singers in the pro-Gore choir. Where are they?
After being significant players in the counter productive campaign for biofuels which not only hike the price of food, lower the energy potential of vehicle fuel and wreak environmental havoc in their own right, the Deep Greens, the True Believers of the environmental movement have been part of the problem. They should like solar-thermal electrical generation, right?
Wrong!
Even though the vast watelands which constitute large portions of southeastern California, southern Arizona and Nevada seem ideal for the construction of large solar powered generation facilities, the DGs are against them. The huge arrays of either mirrors or photovoltaic panels might somehow interfere with desert dwelling lizards and small mammals. Can't let that happen in the rampant human quest for energy, can we?
Wind power. The DGs ought to like that too. They don't. Spinning blades might interfere with the birdies. That's a Greeno No-No. (There's actually a practical objection to wind farms at sea as has been proposed by the New Jersey Governor among others--the radar systems used by ships can't see through the chaff-type interference caused by the blades as they revolve.)
Gore overlooked the first two sets of problems. He overlooked a third set as well. Planning, gaining approval for and constructing a large, base-load plant takes longer than ten years even with well-established, well-proven fossil fuel technology. How much longer will it take to design, gain all the legally required stamps of approval and build a base-load replacement plant using an emerging technology?
Then, what does the country do for electricity while the inevitable bugs are beaten out of the new systems?
Gore uses the analogy of the man-to-the-moon program of the Sixties. It is a totally specious analogy in both method and scope. The space program was a single thrust effort. Replacing coal and oil fired base load generation plants would be a multi-thrust effort requiring the development, integration and construction of diverse technologies welded into a single system.
In short, Gore is retailing another illusion hoping to hook his cause onto the myth of the Sixties. Get over it, Mr Gore. The Geek is also a product of the Sixties. He knows that myths and happy dreams don't buy a cup of coffee in the real world. Don't you, Al?
Now for Pope Benedict, the other person who has shown himself over the past twenty-four hours to have little or any connection to the real world.
The Pope is in Australia for World Youth Day or some such affair. Sidney is flat full of young and enthusiastic sorts. Just awaiting for the Pope to give them, not hell, but heaven.
Of course the road to heaven is paved with strict abjurations. His Popeness is willing to lay them out. It seems that Benedict thinks that the human race is ruining the globe by virtue of its collective "insatiable consumption."
It is fashionable to bash "consumption" and "consumerism." The Geek would like to join in on the fun, but his sense of intellectual integrity to say nothing of his keen appreciation of reality prevents him from so doing.
In any event the Pope has it wrong. The problem is not consumption, "insatiable" or otherwise.
No. The problem is simply that there are too many people alive and consuming. Too many people needing everything from the most basic of necessities to the most useless and frivolous of luxuries.
Consider the US. The population of the US has slightly more than doubled during the Geek's lifetime (or Al Gore's for that matter.) That's an increase from slightly less than one hundred fifty million people to some 305 million.
The US has been an also-ran in the Great Global Baby Race compared to dozens of other countries. From relatively prosperous "emerging" societies such as those in the PRC or India to countries at the bottom of the survival list, more than doubling the population in slightly more than fifty years has been the norm.
Now, Pope Benedict, that is the real problem. The questions for you and the global enterprise of which you are CEO are these: what have you done about it? What will you do about it?
The answers to both are simple. Nothing. And nothing. The response of your institution has been and, in greatest probability, will continue to be: level down the global standard of living. Take away from those who have and give to those who have not until everybody has nearly nothing.
This is the sort of human destroying logic that is expectable from a theoretically responsible adult occupying a leadership role in a very large, politically potent organisation that calls upon people to put "religion" first in their public and private lives.
That is the sort of logic that gave Europe the deepest gloom of the Dark Ages as the early Medieval Period has been correctly dubbed. That is the kind of logic that your institution showed centuries ago when it insisted on repressing thought, inquiry and expression--to say nothing of torturing and killing those who dared to question.
Your logic is the functional and ethical equivalent of the logic employed by the death oriented mullahs who issue fatwas calling for mass killing.
Pope Benedict, when you make a false parsing between "subjective" feelings and faith as you did in your speech today in Sidney, not only do you show a disastrous misunderstanding of faith which must be inherently subjective, but you substitute obedience to a specific religious dogma for faith. That, in the Geek's reading of the Message of Jesus, runs antipodal to the teachings of that wandering sage and healer.
Get a grip, Pope Benedict. It is not the secular thinkers who fail to appreciate either the nature of the problems that confront the world and its people today as well as the necessary and necessarily painful and unfair solutions to them.
It is you.
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4 comments:
You said: "faith, which must be inherently subjective. . . "
Must be? Only if you accept some form of scientism. Prior to his trip to Syndney, the Pope commented: "In this climate of a rationalism shut-in on itself, which considers the model of the sciences as the only model of knowledge, everything else is subjective. Naturally, Christian life also becomes a subjective option and, therefore, arbitrary." In other words, the idea that Christianity is subjective is a logical conclusion from a prior commitment to an alternative philosophy--some form of rationalism or scientism (science as the only model of knowledge). In fact, the claims of religious worldviews are not any more "inherently subjective" than the claims of any other worldview or philosophy. Of course, you may have good reasons for thinking particular religious claims are true or false. But one cannot avoid the question of truth by simply dismissing them all from the outset as "inherently subjective."
Thank you for your thoughtful rejoinder. Allow the Geek to clarify his position which he sees as essential given that you appear to do as so many do--conflate the words "faith" and "belief."
The Geek is of the view that these terms are not synonyms. Faith qua faith is and must be inherently subjective. An epiphany, whether great or as small as "the still, small voice" occurs only within the individual's awareness. It cannot be shared with another. It cannot even be accurately and fully conveyed to another person by words or images. The inner experience of faith exists outside the realm of consensual objective experience.
Belief depends upon an objective consensus. The objective consensus of a shared creed, dogma, doctrine or ideology. Belief and its roots can be fully and accurately communicated by a believer to either another believer or a non-believer. Belief need have no subjective component although such is not prohibited.
The Geek rejects scientism, preferring science per se. The word science describes and denotes a process, a method, and, in part, a result. Science seeks a more comprehensive and accurate understanding of the universe including human beings. It does not seek, nor does it produce, Truth with a capital "T." Accurate and comprehensive understandings should never be confused with (capital T) Truth.
Rationality is a facility of the human mind by which (hopefully but not necessarily) accurate understandings might be achieved, realistic policies might be formed and effective implementation of problem solving policies might occur. While rationality attacks areas of understanding which properly fall under the terms "philosophy," "ideology," even "theology," there is no need to have "faith" in the correctness of one's employment of the rational faculty.
Frankly, the Geek trusts rationality in meeting the challenges and making advantageous use of the opportunities resident in the human condition far more than he does revelation. He notes in passing that use of rationality has allowed two strangers to communicate as we are doing now. He also notes that revelation, whether of a "religious" or "ideological" foundation has piled up more dead bodies than he cares to think about--and will continue to do so.
You might think about the potential impact of belief and read the Geek's previous posts on the subject of True Believers. While the most recent post dealt with Muslims meriting that appellation, the same concept applies to any who blindly follow a Belief without critical, which is to say, rational faculty being employed.
The History Geek says: "That is the sort of logic that gave Europe the deepest gloom of the Dark Ages as the early Medieval Period has been correctly dubbed."
You date yourself. Even Wikipedia notes that modern historians no longer use the term "Dark Ages," unless in a non-pejorative sense.
Excerpt:
"When modern scholarly study of the Middle Ages arose in the 19th century, the term "Dark Ages" was at first kept, with all its critical overtones. Although it was never the more formal term (universities named their departments "medieval history" not "Dark Age history"), it was widely used, including in such classics as Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, where it expressed the author's contempt[citation needed] for priest-ridden, superstitious, dark times. However, the early 20th century saw a radical reevaluation of the Middle Ages, and with it a calling into question of the terminology of darkness.[4] A.T. Hatto, translator of many medieval works, exemplified this when he spoke ironically of "the lively centuries which we call dark". It became clear that serious scholars would either have to redefine the term or abandon it.
When the term "Dark Ages" is used by historians today, it is intended to be neutral, namely, to express the idea that the events of the period often seem "dark" to us only because of the paucity of historical records compared with later times. The darkness is ours, not theirs.[4] However, since there is no shortage of information on the High and Late Middle Ages, this required a narrowing of the reference to the Early Middle Ages. Late 5th- and 6th-century Britain, for instance, at the height of the Saxon invasions, might well be numbered among "the darkest of the Dark Ages", with the equivalent of a near-total news blackout in terms of historical records, compared with either the Roman era before or the centuries that followed. Further east, the same was true in the formerly Roman province of Dacia, where history after the Roman withdrawal went unrecorded for centuries, as Slavs, Avars, Bulgars, and others struggled for supremacy in the Danube basin, and events there are still disputed. However, at this time the Byzantine Empire and especially the Arab Empire experienced Golden Ages rather than Dark Ages; consequently, this usage of the term must also differentiate geographically. While Petrarch's concept of a Dark Age corresponded to a mostly Christian period following pre-Christian Rome, the neutral use of the term today applies mainly to those cultures least Christianized and thus most sparsely covered by the Catholic Church's historians.[citation needed]
However, from the mid-20th century onwards, other scholars began to critique even this nonjudgmental use of the term.[4] There are two main criticisms. First, it is questionable whether it is possible to use the term "Dark Ages" effectively in a neutral way; scholars may intend this, but it does not mean that ordinary readers will so understand it. Second, the explosion of new knowledge and insight into the history and culture of the Early Middle Ages, which 20th-century scholarship has achieved, means that these centuries are no longer dark even in the sense of "unknown to us". Consequently, many academic writers prefer not to use the expression at all, and a recently published history of German literature describes the term as "a popular if ignorant manner of speaking".[5].
The public idea of the Middle Ages as a supposed "Dark Age" is also reflected in misconceptions regarding the study of nature during this period. The contemporary historians of science David C. Lindberg and Ronald Numbers discuss the widespread popular belief that the Middle Ages was a "time of ignorance and superstition", the blame for which is to be laid on the Christian Church for allegedly "placing the word of religious authorities over personal experience and rational activity", and emphasize that this view is essentially a caricature.[7] For instance, a claim that was first propagated in the 19th century[8] and is still very common in popular culture is the supposition that the people from the Middle Ages believed that the Earth was flat. According to Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, this claim was mistaken, as "there was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who did not acknowledge [Earth's] sphericity and even know its approximate circumference."[9][8] Ronald Numbers states that misconceptions such as "the Church prohibited autopsies and dissections during the Middle Ages", "the rise of Christianity killed off ancient science", and "the medieval Christian church suppressed the growth of natural philosophy", are examples of widely popular myths that still pass as historical truth, even though he says that they are not supported by current historical research.[10]
(I won't bother to copy the sources. If interested, go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages)
The Geek doesn't know if you are being willfully obtuse or simply at a loss for genuine argument. Unlike your first rejoinder which the Geek characterised as "thoughtful" and thus deserved a considered reply, this doesn't.
First, the Geek used the term "Dark Ages" is a metaphorical sense. No historian of the early Medieval Period would celebrate the centuries following the collapse of orderly society and polity in the West as anything but gloomy at best. While it is true that not all rational activity stopped for centuries under the heavy hand of Belief, there is no doubt but that advancement in any area slowed to a glacial pace.
Second, to rely on wikipedia is ill advised at best. Had any student of the Geek's done so back in his academic days, the resulting conversation would have been less than enjoyable--for the student. The Geek would be happy to point out errors in the section you copied, but he has neither the time, nor the solar power available to do so. And, considering the way in which you chose to respond to his comment on your earlier rejoinder, he doubts it would be worth the effort or appreciated by you.
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