"Climate Hubrists" : deniers of any limits to human ability to control reality

I separate Holocaust deniers from Climate Change deniers, I really do.

Most Holocaust deniers deny that the event ever happened - and continue to deny that, even in their heart of hearts.

But Climate Change deniers only pretend in public that they believe human-originated harmful Climate Change isn't happening and won't happen.

What they really and not so secretly believe - in their particular heart of hearts - is that Man can easily solve any bad climate change, or indeed any other global disaster that might happen, as fast and as easily as any comic book Super Hero might.



The denier/hubrists don't really read the bible and they don't really read many books.

Climate 'hubrists' a more accurate term than 'deniers'

But if you do the arithmetic, you will see that all active "climate change deniers" (I prefer to call them "Climate Hubrists") under the age of eighty-five had to grow up reading super hero comic books.

Those super hero ideas and conceits (along with Fox TV News, Talk Radio and the commentators on the sports channels) have in practise become the common intellectual currency of our age for people of an anti-intellectual cast, replacing things like the Sears Roebuck catalogue and the King James Bible.

Why else would Googling Climate Change and Manhattan Project produce 1.5 million results ?

A new Manhattan Project can't stop any global environmental crisis : in fact the old one produced - via worldwide strontium 90 fallout from local testing - the very first man-made global environmental disaster we ever knew.

But millions - and probably ultimately billions of people world wide - still take it as a comforting solution to our current climate change crisis.

It is a pity then that the names Robert Jewett , John Sheldon Lawrence and H Bruce Franklin are not better known among those combating the climate deniers/hubrists.

I recommend to all of us who are wondering why we are losing the public battle of opinion over the existence (or not) of harmful human climate change to spend some time reading , in combination, Jewett's & Lawrence's many books and articles on the "American (superhero) Monomyth", together with Franklin's classic "War Stars", about the enduring belief in a single superweapon ending all wars.

(Geo-engineering, in this context, might be regarded as the latest high tech superweapon - this time against incoming weather rather than incoming aliens.)

Instead of looking to wartime Manhattan's nuclear Project, we need rather to look to wartime Manhattan's (natural) penicillin Project for a pathway showing how when we work with Mother Nature, enduring good things happen.

Work with Nature instead of against her  ? Unimaginable to denier/hubrists.

Because the only thing the deniers ever really deny is any limits to the human ability to control physical reality --- and that reads as Hubris in my book....

Martin Henry Dawson : against a city - and an age - of Super Heroes, the story of an un-superhero

1875 -1965 was an age of Scientism and of Super (hyper) Modernity --- an era of unlimited faith in the abilities of technocratic elites (a view at least held by other technocratic elites).

An epoch hearing many (un-democratic) proposals for elite corps of skygod-like air police to short sharply govern the real world of unruly adults down below.

Fiction writers matched the non-fiction intellectuals by creating imaginary super-heroes doing basically the same job as the proposed  Air Police , to populate the fantasy world of male teens and boys.

It has been largely and deliberately forgotten today* that these schemes for an elite air police force to govern all the world were openly proposed and critiqued by many seriously respected intellectuals such as HG Wells.

It was as if the Greek and Roman skygods of ancient thought were to be adapted to modern times.

Little wonder then that the same young men who read everything vaguely Sci-Fi that HG Wells ever wrote , eagerly took up this idea for their various (Gotham based) comic book super heroes.

It pleasures me muchly then to be able to push hard against this grain and focus in on a story , set in that same Gotham as in the heyday of the Golden Age Super Heroes, that features a crusading scientist who positively oozed un-charisma.

Someone as un-superheroic and as un-skygod like as can possibly be.

Who yet did great things ....

__________

* PD Smith's The Doomsday Men is one sturdy exception .

There have been actually a fair number of other books and authors that have been successful in developing this theme : H Bruce Franklin's War Stars springs to mind.

Successful in the academic world that is , but not yet in the popular consciousness.

Real life 1940s comic book 'superhero' : Jewish nebbish Robert Oppenheimer and his plan to 'do good' with secret atomic powers

Move over Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster and let a real 1940s Jewish nebbish take the Superman wheel !

Gotham City-born Robert Oppenheimer secretly cloaked a bloodthirsty propensity to inflict supreme violence 'to do good' behind a rather mousy public exterior.

But his words at the top level meetings that determined when and where the first A-bombs were to be dropped reveal a man fully in grip of the traditional American monomyth of redemptive violence 'to do good' (pace John Sheldon Lawrence & Robert Jewett) via a war-ending superweapon (pace H Bruce Franklin).

Lawrence, Jewett and Franklin repeatedly document that these myths gripped both factual and fictional America , both Americas feeding off each other.

It is easy to caricature right wing Republican-leaning  Leslie Groves and Vannevar Bush as war-mongers , intent only on 'doing bad'.

Much less easy than trying to account for left-leaning Oppenheimer's propensity to kill hundreds of thousands of women and children to 'do good'.

The case of Oppenheimer forces us to confront the power of these enduring American shibboleths (the monomyth of justified extra-legal violence to 'do good' and America's right to the unique possession of a secret war-ending superweapon) in the mainstream of ordinary American thought ....