It’s Not the Money, Dummy!

No. It’s a second reality. Something terrible has happened and the US Government and the establishment media are pretending it hasn’t happened. A lot of rice bowls are about to be broken, it is true, but more importantly, there is an immanent threat to the immanentists. They are in danger of being thrown into nothingness. The Emperor has no clothes and people might start to snicker and laugh.

Of course I am talking about global warming. Or rather man-made global warming. Apparently a whistle-blower put up on the internet hundreds of email messages from research scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, a public university in Great Britain whose stored records had become subject to the recent British Freedom of Information Act. The institute’s director had apparently requested the systematic deletion of compromising emails.

As the Wall Street Journal has summarized the situation:

“However, we do now have hundreds of emails that give every appearance of testifying to concerted and coordinated efforts by leading climatologists to fit the data to their conclusions while attempting to silence and discredit their critics.” (See the original article in the WSJ dated November 24, 2009.)

So why haven’t the immanentist old-line US media covered the story? Why isn’t it the cause célèbre of this Christmas season?

Cui bono? Asks the lawyer.  Who benefits from the silence? The large energy corporations who have spent millions advertising on television about the wonderful things they are doing for the environment (pending government megagrants, of course)? But what else would you expect?

When the Nazis took over in Germany in 1933, the great German corporations tripped over each other to supply Hitler with Panzer tanks for his blitzkriegs and Zyclon B Giftgas for his death chambers. Our famous large corporations here in the US have always painted their lips for the government in power because operative economic theory and practice has always been based on Darwinism, or rather, phenomenalism (a subject we will consider this coming week in our regular Voegelin excerpt from the Collected Works), which means in effect that the spiritual side of man is beyond all business calculus.

The answer lies, Virginia, not in money, but in fear. As Eric Voegelin commented in his Autobiographical Reflections,

“[Ideologies] indulge in constructions that are intellectually not tenable. That raises the question of why people who otherwise are not quite stupid, and who have the secondary virtues of being quite honest in their daily affairs, indulge in intellectual dishonesty as soon as they touch science. . . . The overt phenomenon of intellectual dishonesty then raises the question of why a man will indulge in it.”

The specific disorder is limned for us here:

“[The ideologue’s] problem will become clear, as soon as we state the alternatives to persistence in his dream. In order to accept reason, he would have to accept truth experienced — but the reality of existential tension is difficult to revive, once it has atrophied. If the prison of his dream, however, were broken in any other manner than by a return to reality, the only vista opening to him would be the bleakness of existence in a world-immanent time where everything is post-everything-that-has-gone-before ad infinitum.”

“The second alternative would release a flood of anxiety, and the dread of this flood keeps the doors of the prison closed. We should be aware of this horror, when sometimes we wonder about an ideologue’s resistance to rational argument. The alternative to life in the paradise of his dream is death in the hell of his banality. His self-made immortality is at stake; and in order to protect it, he must cling to his conception of time.”

“For the time in which the ideologue places his construction is not the time of existence in tension toward eternity, but a symbol by which he tries to pull the timeless into identity with the time of his existence. Though the reality of tension between the timeless and time is lost, thus, the form of the tension is preserved by the dream act of forcing the two poles into oneness. We can characterize the ideologue’s “post-Christian age,” therefore, as a symbol engendered by his libidinous dream of self-salvation.”

My friend Owen Jones emailed me the other day looking for a good Voegelin quote on science and scientism. It was, in fact, that exchange that prompted this commentary and I sent him the following quotation which brings out a further problem: the social dominance of scientistically oriented spiritually deficient men:

“Once the scientistic pathos has penetrated into the educational institutions of a society, it has become a social force that cannot easily be broken, if it can be broken at all. The problem, therefore, is no longer one of mere ignorance. If belief in the self-sufficient ordering of existence through science is socially entrenched, it becomes a force that actively prevents the cultivation of human substance and corrodes the surviving elements of the cultural tradition still further. The spiritual desire, in the Platonic sense, must be very strong in a young man of our time in order to overcome the obstacles that social pressure puts in the way of its cultivation.”

“Moreover, with regard to the cultivation of substance men are gifted differently (gifted in the Pauline sense of endowment with spiritual charismata). The active carriers of the scientistic pathos will be the men who are deficient in such gifts, and the penetration of society with the scientistic pathos creates an environment that favors the social success of the deficient human types.”

“Hence, the advancement of science and the growth of the rational-utilitarian factor are accompanied by a restratification of society that hitherto seems to have escaped attention because it cannot be expressed in terms of social classes. Restratification through the social prestige and success of the deficient types must be expressed in terms of human substance.”

Some will remember when CBS television news anchor Dan Rather published the sensational story that then-President Bush had arranged with the Texas Air National Guard to avoid war service.  Rather produced letters that were later shown to have been written on a  personal computer rather than a typewriter available at the time of the purported letters.  When Dan Rather was caught out and had to resign, he insisted that the story was true even though the letters might have been forged.

This suggests the following:  The accused climate scientist says to himself: “The world is headed for a catastrophe.  No one will act to prevent the catastrophe if the science is muddled and ambiguous.  We must therefore present clear science before we actually have clear science, because if we wait it will be too late.”

Notice how God’s love for man and man’s spiritual nature is omitted from the calculation. Or as someone once put it: “At the bottom of all serious disagreement you always find theology.”

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