(More properly, the title of this post should be The New Millenarianism, but Millennialism is more euphonious, in my opinion, and conveys the meaning, in any event.)
Eschatology is the study of the "end times" while Millennialism is the Christian version of Millenarianism, the belief that the end times will be ushered in by paradigmatic change, one variant of which is the Apocalypse.
The belief that people are living in the end times has been ubiquitous in human history. The intensity, depth, and breadth of the beliefs has waxed and waned, often in response to disorienting times of change. It is easy to notice such beliefs when they are presented in the context of deeply held religious belief. By this time most people have become familiar with the quasi-Millenarianism of the Sunni radicals of al Qaeda and related sects and the more overt Millenarianism cum Apocalypse of the Shia radicalism of the Iranian Mullahs. What is less often recognized is the more covert Millenarianism that fuels many of our modern "crises".
The belief that the world will end is ubiquitous for a reason; it will, for each of us end: Our self awareness, consciousness, is both a blessing that allows us to appreciate the world and impose our imprint upon it and a curse that leaves us aware of our impending death. We take it on faith that the world will persist after we are gone but in a very real way, the world as constructed and contained within our minds ends when we do. The solipsism at the core of our minds has been tacitly recognized from the beginning of history:
For the ancient Pharaohs of Egypt, the idea that the world ended when their consciousness faded was made literally true for those whose lives were entwined with the Pharaoh; the living were closed in with the deceased Pharaoh in his tomb in order to accompany him to the next world.
The awareness of our own personal mortality makes us prone to too easily accepting evidence of "the end of it all." The powerful attraction of various iterations of Millenarianism has fueled such divergent preoccupations as Y2K and AGW. I suspect that the scientists who first discovered what they thought was evidence for human fueled global warming were led astray by their own unconscious infatuation with their New Millennialism. Because most scientists are committed to rationality and eschew religious belief, they are quite prone to believing nonsense for which they can find rational explanations. Once convinced that their findings were real, short-circuiting the usual tedious efforts at confirmation and peer review (actual peer review, whereby your scientific peers examine your raw data and statistical/computer manipulations to see if they can replicate your findings and minimize confounding variables) became not just a convenience but a moral necessity. After all, if the world is about to come to an end and you have the ability to forestall the worst, any means become acceptable. The cascade of deceitful behavior that followed their "Aha!" moment would be logical and rational given the stakes involved.
This is no different in form from the rationalizations that more overt Millenarianists engage in to normalize and accept the most egregious of violence upon the innocent. In the name of preparing the way for Paradise on earth, murdering innocents (many of whom will actually be "saved" by their passive contribution to the effort) is not only acceptable but imperative. While the Warmists clearly believe their scientific "hedging" was necessary to save innocents, in reality, were the world's major economies to adopt all their recommendations, it would condemn many millions, perhaps a billion or two, of the world's poorest people to far greater penury than they already suffer. Creating more starving impoverished people in order to "save the planet" might well have been considered a responsible and reasonable outcome, in any case, but was largely ignored by the Warmists.
In a more attenuated way, it is easy to see the same worry/certainty that "the end is near" in the terrified rage of ideologues who believe that if their opponents "win", it will destroy our way of life. It is certainly possible that the West is ready to fall; after all, other civilizations have risen and fallen throughout history; but alarmism works best when it occurs in some proximity to the danger. When alarms are raised in the absence of danger one time too often, we risk turning into "the boy who cried wolf".
As far as AGW goes, at this point all we can say for certain is that the CRU data has been hopelessly corrupted and is essentially worthless for determining if, and how much, the earth's climate has changed and, more importantly, what the actual engine(s) of climate change are.
J. Storrs Hall offers a reasonable summary of the current state of knowledge in Eine Kleine Nachtphysik; read the whole thing and pay special attention to his conclusion:
So what does this all mean, bottom line? Not an awful lot — but just take all those claims you hear, on both sides, with a grain of salt.
We all have within us the residue of our once (in retrospective fantasy) blissful union from which we were expelled at birth. Many still yearn for a return to a perfect union with a transcendent Being. Utopian fantasies have their roots in such yearnings and gain their power from our very human failings and awareness of loss. Science works when, through the magic of replication, we allow others to test our hypotheses and our most cherished beliefs. The Warmists' attempts to prevent scientific due diligence have led to a terrible scandal, a politicization of science as profound as anything the Church imposed upon Galileo.
For those in mind of an enjoyable, only somewhat Apocalyptic, account of the coming "fall of Western civilization", John Derbyshire offers a most entertaining review in We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism. My response? Of course We Are Doomed; if Y2K didn't get us, and AGW doesn't get us, and the Islamists don't get us, fear not, there will be another existential crisis coming as soon as the embarrassment of this failed crisis fades. The history of Millennial movements that become specific (and AGW, as science must, became quite specific, which is part of its downfall) when the predicted Apocalypse fails to arrive on schedule is clear. The true believers simply consult their arcane texts and move the date forward. However, with each failed Apocalypse the number of followers diminish until the movements fade away, most often with a whimper, occasionally with a bang (cf Jonestown.) AGW has lost the data driven foundation upon which its Millenarianism was constructed. It should, as time passes, become less and less visible on the global scene. Cap and trade will fade away and probably will not be reintroduced in the next Congress. The momentum is gone. In three years, or five, or ten, another existential threat will appear and the world will be thrown into turmoil. (At the least, the MSM and governments will be thrown into turmoil.) Millenarianism is simply too inextricably part of the human psyche for people to pass up the gratification of panicking over the end of the world; there will be many more to come.
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