"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....

why focus on Allied FAILURES of WWII ?

Why not focus on the Axis failures of WWII ?

Why not, you say, use a sawed-off shotgun at short range on a big fish in a small barrel ?

Hum, tempting  - too tempting obviously for all the world's Rogue Boomers - people like Stephen Harper and Tony Abbott : 'we won the war, did nothing wrong, so no need to change nothing, carry on, business  as usual.'

Rogue Boomers with short noses are more than usually handicapped by nature - being so unable to see beyond the end of it.

All three sides* in WWII expected a short cheap war - and all sides were wrong : that is the real lesson of WWII : the naivete easy optimism of pre-war Modernity and Scientism was revealed to all - or rather should have been.

(*Because remember, for a shamefully long time, the majority of the world's population was not at Germany or Britain's side but rather was Neutral.)

We don't have to wait till the current climate change crisis plays out to drawn the needed lesson that there is no pointing denying that there are limits to human abilities to control unpleasant change.

We already had the lesson - and the exam - during the six bloody and long and disappointing years of WWII : when time and time again all sides were told that a technology breakthrough, a new superweapon, would end the war quickly, cheaply and painlessly.

The truth be known, the WWII traffic in super hero instant solutions between children's comic books and senior leaders' Minute books are unceasing ....

'Rogue Boomers' : Running our world ; ruining our planet

When one thinks of Rogue Boomers, one immediately thinks of people like prime ministers Stephen Harper (born 1959) and Tony Abbott (born 1957) --- and not just because they are currently leading the charge (from the rear) against doing anything substantial about man-made climate disaster.

Rather it is something so unexpected about the vivid contrast between their still-baby faces and their totally Old School ways of thinking that humans can control the natural world - thinking we'd might expect more from their grandfathers, let alone their fathers.

Yes, those I call Noir's Children , the most vocal (and regrettably the smallest) segment of the Boomer kids got it, successfully absorbed the dire lessons (on all sides) from WWII , and adjusted their thinking.

But the Rogue Boomers ( the silent majority of my Boomer generation) carried right on as if nothing had changed, still believing in the simplistic old pre-war ways , despite Science (reluctantly) revealing an ever more complicated world.

It was as if they were to be frozen in aspic, forever locked into a time warp with the first generation of comic book super heroes.

Entombed forever within WWII's golden age of superheroes, superpowers, super-weapons and super-easy solutions to controlling unpleasant reality....

Noir's Children : the teenagers who MADE Mo go Po

Noir's Children (my particular birth cohort of 1940-1956) those of us born 'after the Fall of France but before the Rise of Elvis' - were virtually unique in being perfectly comfortable living inside TWO whales .

Those two whales being the Modernity (Mo) of our childhood and early teen years and the emerging Post Modernity (Po) of our late teen years and early adult years.

We still remain unique in this regard - we are old enough to remember believing in our elders' tattered Modernity but with minds not so rigidly formed we couldn't also take on the attributes of an emerging Post-Modernity - which was the only reality our younger siblings ever knew first hand.

My cohort did not just feel the transition from one era to another : we were that transition.

Modernity only died when it failed to reproduce itself in its young

For it was our failure to carry on the ideas of Modernity as we matured that condemned Modernity to a slow sad certain death as our  still-faithful elders died off, one by one.

Why our post WWII birth cohort - and not any earlier birth cohorts - came to reject the centuries-old Enlightenment Project is the subject of this blog and of my book projects .

And like many exciting things, it all begins in wartime Gotham  - where the reigning American Super Hero was not the comic books' Superman, Batman or Captain America but rather a squat balding middle aged Dutch-Swiss-American called Carl Norden.

His invention , a bombsight that was claimed to unerringly drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from three miles up - was going to end the war ( even end all wars) quickly, cheaply and with minimum loss of civilian lives.

As a result, the British and American governments of the day in 1940 saw no need for spending serious amounts of taxpayers' monies on either atomic bomb or penicillin development.

In their experts' eyes, the atomic bomb was serious overkill (literally) and life-saving penicillin, rather like old fashioned infantry riflemen, wasn't really going to be needed in a short modern war of minimum casualties.

The best laid plans .....

Medicalizing Modernity : a few vigilante superheroes against the many democratic un-superheroes

We have traditionally considered super heroes to be 'super' because their various strengths are clearly superior to those of ordinary beings, but this could be the wrong way to view their 'super-ness'.

We can instead think of super as simply meaning bigger and fewer.

This is because the basic laws of physics with regard to mass, energy and space suggest that fewer big things can occupy a given niche than can many small things.

Hold that thought as we turn to that time-honoured fictional small frontier town beset upon by outlaws.

The fictional residents have two basic choices.

In one, all the citizens can decide democratically what to do and then do it as a collectivity : the democratic and the legal way .

Now we know that few democratic decisions are ever unanimous and even fewer collectivities ever work together for long with one mind : this process is going to be slow, noisy and costly.

Or the fictional town can seek one individual to rid the town of the outlaws, by working outside the law.

Shane or Superman, in this fictional universe the vigilante one always solves the problem the democratic many could not, quickly taking out the bad guys --- and the problem never ever comes back.

Now in real frontier towns, such as Manitoba's The Pas, the actual problems before them are very complex and enduring.

To over-simplify ,they concern relations between a white protestant middle class in the heart of the town who hold all the positions of power and authority and a poorer population, usually catholic and aboriginal or immigrant, on the edge of town, literally Beyond the Pale.

Neither Superman, Batman or Spiderman or George W Bush's 'shock and awe' can solve those problems in the blink of a stun-gun on an outlaw's face.

They have instead emerged because the forces of modernization has brought big industries to places once solely occupied by non-industrial cultures.

The money thrown up by those industries draws in many different ethnicities to come together to live and work around it.

Think of it as one of the most common and contentious plenitudes thrown up by unconscious forces of modernization.

Modernity or Plenticide was the semi-conscious reaction by many to it : to reduce the new complexity of life by re-ordering it in a vertical hierarchy of worthiness, with the people with all the existing power coincidentally always at the top.

Medicalizing Modernity (seeing modernity as a quasi-medical solution to a global mental health issue : modernization's overwhelming plenitude overwhelming our need for order)

In their heart of hearts, all the peoples of The Pas know how their problems came about - and that that there is no tiny band of outlaws to lay blame upon.

But they all retreat instead to watch movies starring super heroes solving big social problems instantly and cost-free --- because it sure beats emerging from the Cineplex back out into the real world again.

There again to deal with the long and messy democratic process of reconciling various cultures who share a common humanity.

Perhaps then we should consider adding the cost of regular visits to Super Hero movies to Medicare, for those of us who can't handle too much change or variety.

Even when the change or variety is for the better...

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.

un-superheroes : Earthlings --- not super heroes , not Skygods

Joe and Willie , PBI , not Captain America or Bomber Command.

Down in dirt , muddling through , boots on the ground .

When hyper-modern technology fails : send in the shovels ...

the Super-Modern Era : the hyper-arrogant era of Supermen and Ubermensch

The current term 'Super Heroes', though not the age old concept , first fully emerged at the apogee of the super-modern era (the New York's World Fair ,circa 1939-1940) and have tagged along with us ever since.

Their continuing popularity - and not just among 15 year old boys - is a useful measure of the strength of belief in Super-Modern ideas , 70 years into this era of the post-Modern.

The other measure is, of course, support for the climate deniers.

Their chief funders and cheerleaders are old men (born on both sides of 1930) who were those same young 15 year old boys who first read of the original comic book super heroes.

Gosh Koch : comic books form the deep ideology of the climate denying network ?

Who would ever have thought that ?

Super Heroes started WWII -- but only un-superheroes could end it ...

It flatters us greatly to focus upon WWII as simply a war between good (us) and evil (them).

This, rather than accurately/painfully contrasting the high expectations of all sides in September 1939 (and many other such key dates throughout the six year conflict) with the depressing reality of September 1945.

For the swift and powerful English and German bomber fleets (or swift and powerful Russian and German tank armies) (or  swift and powerful Japanese and American carrier task forces) did not 'always get through' .

No major campaign - and the war itself - ever ended in a breakthrough after a few swift painless weeks, as promised.

Super Hero militaries and their civilian fellow travellers certainly talked  a lot during WWII--- but they did not walk.

Instead civilians in bomb shelters,  little Grumman fighter planes, muddy infantrymen and tiny corvette navies plodded their way to a sad, slow victory : in a truly un-superheroic fashion

1940s Super-Heroes : each an intoxicating - toxic - mix of muscles, magic, machine and mind

Comic Books in 1940 would never profess that "Might is Right" , rather that "Only Might can Do Right" .

But first : why then the need for a secret ID , if one is truly omnipotent ?

Well , remember that 1940 superheroes were merely the moral equivalent of that year's notorious enemy Fifth Columns : because while their great strength was impressive, their sneakiness was even more so.

While in perfect disguise as weak, meek , mild civilians, no police, military or intelligence service could destroy these superheroes in some predawn surprise attack.

With our workaday nerds and geeks instantly turned into cloaked avengers, sneak attacks of a sort were always the other way around --- now coming from the good guys.

So Superman : a Panzer tank disguised as a Peugeot.

But while these superheroes tried to avoid violence on the innocent, rather like a moral 1940 Norden bombsight, one can see that, once off the comic pages, that even their violence to physical structures were bound to kill real world innocent bystanders.

Surgical strikes by superpowers or superheroes rarely are.

More importantly, on a moral plane, exalting violence for social good allows others to equally and sincerely claim to also morally use violence for social good.

Many - perhaps most -  of those killing Jews, Romas et al truly believed their job were like that of social doctors , cutting out cancerous portions of the Aryan body politic to save its life.

Morality is in - or isn't in - all of us , any of us : morality does not come only SuperSized.

In 1940, Dawson's tiny team of unfits was certainly not super , but it definitely was heroic....

Gotham's wartime unfits rescued natural lifesaving penicillin-for-all

Wartime Gotham's concrete jungle was crawling with comic book Super Heroes and their opponents.

After all ,most of today's best known super heroes were created during the war years.

These Super Heroes did their stuff on some very mean streets that also managed to look a whole lot like the actual streets of Manhattan , circa 1940.

(And more than seventy five years later, they still do !)

I find it hard to feel totally upbeat about Super Heroes - they hold too many overtones of 1940 Hitler's Ubermensch to make me very comfortable.

I can't accept that people who aren't physically extraordinary - or indeed not even ordinarily physical fit - can't make perfectly good heroes.

In fact, I'd argue their task of heroism is much harder to achieve .

because they are not blessed with either Superman's gift of super-special physical powers or Batman's extraordinary-honed human skills (and wealth).

In that same concrete jungle that was 1940 Gotham for example ,Dr Henry Dawson's team of unfits could hardly muster a half dozen ordinarily full functioning limbs between them.

But who can say than anything morally greater ever came out of WWII's bad news war than their unlikely success in rescuing natural lifesaving penicillin-for-all from the meanness of the Allied medical-scientific establishment?