Did environmentalism poison liberals’ historical optimism?
August 30th, 2010 at 8:24 pm by David FarrarFred Siegel is a professor of history and senior fellow at a centre-left think tank in the US.
In this article for City Journal, he argues the rise of environmentalism has poisoned liberals’ historical optimism:
For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, American liberals distinguished themselves from conservatives by what Lionel Trilling called “a spiritual orthodoxy of belief in progress.” Liberalism placed its hopes in human perfectibility. Regarding human nature as essentially both beneficent and malleable, liberals, like their socialist cousins, argued that with the aid of science and given the proper social and economic conditions, humanity could free itself from its cramped carapace of greed and distrust and enter a realm of true freedom and happiness. Conservatives, by contrast, clung to a tragic sense of man’s inherent limitations. While acknowledging the benefits of science, they argued that it could never fundamentally reform, let alone transcend, the human condition. Most problems don’t have a solution, the conservatives maintained; rather than attempting Promethean feats, man would do best to find a balanced place in the world.
In the late 1960s, liberals appeared to have the better of the argument. Something approaching the realm of freedom seemed to have arrived. American workers, white and black, achieved hitherto unimagined levels of prosperity. In the nineteenth century, only utopian socialists had imagined that ordinary workers could achieve a degree of leisure; in the 1930s, radicals had insisted that prosperity was unattainable under American capitalism; yet these seemingly unreachable goals were achieved in the two decades after World War II.
Why, then, did American liberalism, starting in the early 1970s, undergo a historic metanoia, dismissing the idea of progress just as progress was being won? Multiple political and economic forces paved liberalism’s path away from its mid-century optimism and toward an aristocratic outlook reminiscent of the Tory Radicalism of nineteenth-century Britain; but one of the most powerful was the rise of the modern environmental movement and its recurrent hysterias.
The full article is a provocative read.
No tag for this post.
August 30th, 2010 at 9:13 pm
Yep, the full article is worth reading.
Vote:Makes one wonder what the next bugaboo will be.
Thanks, DPF
August 30th, 2010 at 9:14 pm
Boil it down to the basics – Liberal/Socialists equal dreamers/idealists. Conservatives equal realists/pragmatists (is this a word?!) This is what has gone wrong with our welfare system. The socialists ideal was people down on their luck would have a helping hand to get up and go (comes from an ideal view of human nature).
Where as unfortunately many welfare recipients choose to live it as a lifestyle as human nature tends to what benefits oneself and who gives a stuff about any idealistic world view.
This is why socialism/liberalism will always result in messed up countries as they come from a fantasy viewpoint not reality.
Vote:August 30th, 2010 at 10:33 pm
Cut…paste….thanks Bill…..YAWN
Vote:August 30th, 2010 at 11:21 pm
Speaking of cut & paste…
Vote:Are liberals clinically mad? This controversial question has been proposed and written about by many political pundits and conservative intellectuals, most notably, Dr. Michael Savage, a visionary radio talk show host from San Francisco, in his 2005 book, “Liberalism is a mental disorder.” However, Dr. Rossiter, brings a solid background as a psychiatrist and non-partisan, and years of clinical experience dealing with mental disorders of every conceivable type – making his findings singularly unique, objective and difficult to ignore. http://is.gd/eKiHy – as posted on the most trustworthy palaeoconservative news site.
And… “”Based on strikingly irrational beliefs and emotions, modern liberals relentlessly undermine the most important principles on which our freedoms were founded,” says Rossiter. “Like spoiled, angry children, they rebel against the normal responsibilities of adulthood and demand that a parental government meet their needs from cradle to grave.”
August 30th, 2010 at 11:27 pm
Which would explain the dogged almost menopausal belief in AGW held by balding scientists for political purposes.
Vote:August 30th, 2010 at 11:43 pm
Thanks for the hat tip…
Vote:August 31st, 2010 at 7:58 am
Well, I wouldn’t say that Siegel is a leftie, dpf (cf Matt Yglesias: “Much the same could be said of signatory Fred Siegel who’s not a hawkish liberal or a moderate liberal — he’s just not a liberal. You can ask him about that if you’d like.” http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2006/09/euston_meets_the_new_world/).
But, having said that, I do think that having a clear commitment to and belief in our ability to build a better future has been an important feature in the progressive movement historically, and it’s something that faded somewhat in my lifetime (I’d put it down to the breakdown of the Keynesian consensus and the near-demise of Marxism more than environmentalism tho), although I think there’s a bit of a resurgence going on now.
Vote:August 31st, 2010 at 8:03 am
Underlying the fall in liberal optimism is the belief that systems have limits.
Vote:August 31st, 2010 at 8:04 am
It’s an interesting point, but I’d note that it uses the American word for liberal and I’m a bit surprised people here take it so acceptably. Liberalism, if we go to the Hayekian version, is quite different and draws its source not from the American quasi-socialists that call themselves ‘liberals’ and ‘progressives’, but instead the British tradition (which includes here and Australia), which sees liberalism as the belief in the individual and preserving liberty. In that tradition, to say that we’ve become negative is quite untrue, and the liberal traditions that ones sees in the Government today are its positives, not its negatives.
Vote:August 31st, 2010 at 8:29 am
@Jim, so that would mean that those who choose to live the “welfare lifestyle” are actually in some eyes the realists and therefore the only sane ones amongst us.
Vote:August 31st, 2010 at 9:15 am
He is a bit late..
Try this: http://www.rmastudies.org.nz/issues/65-the-age-of-environmentalism/307-enviromentalism
This essay, The Age of Environmentalism – the American Story, explores the origins of Environmentalism in the United States during the 1960s and its rapid development during the 1970s, and implies that this form of Environmentalism, which focuses on the natural and physical world, and makes the case for World Government, is the form which is most commonly expressed through the United Nations and current governments and has hence determined so much of the political debate of the current “Age”.
Essentially I argue that the sixties was not the beginning of the modern age but the end of the “Age of Optimism” and that after a period of gestation in the sixties the early seventies introduced “the Age of Pessimism.”
The massive shift in the history of political thought which emerged from the 1960s was the overturning of The Enlightenment tradition which had focused on how best to realize the perfectibility of the human condition, and how best to use the resources of the world around us to support economic growth and development and human welfare and wellbeing.
Vote:The new ideology of environmentalism turned this on its head. Instead of nature being a threat to humanity, humanity was now perceived as a threat to nature, and that consequently our actions must be curtailed to maintain the integrity of nature and in particular the integrity of its ecosystems.
The debate had shifted from an econocentric focus to an ecocentric focus.
Isaiah Berlin never saw this coming in his writings of the 1950s embodied in PIRA, but we have seen that the many threads of this ecocentric philosophy or ideology were well established by the end of the 1960s, and were dominating both intellectual and popular culture by the end of the 1970s.
The Precautionary Principle exemplifies this inversion. As the late Aaron Wildavsky observed, the traditional view of the relationship between the citizen and the state is that the citizen is free to act unless the State can prove harmful outcomes. The Precautionary Principle turns this on its head and requires that the citizen do nothing unless the citizen can prove perfect safety to the State.
Had the Precautionary Principle been applied and enforced in earlier times no human would have lit the first fire, invented the first motor car, or flown the first aircraft. One way to ensure technology does not solve our problems is to adopt a principle that stifles the application of new technology to any complex system.
August 31st, 2010 at 9:44 am
***Back in the early 1970s, it was overpopulation that was about to destroy the Earth. In his 1968 book The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich, who has been involved in all three waves, warned that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over” on our crowded planet. He predicted mass starvation and called for compulsory sterilization to curb population growth, even comparing unplanned births with cancer:***
Ehrlich may have been right when you look at the massive population increases in Africa, where numbers are expected to double to 1.5 billion in the next 30 or so years. http://allafrica.com/stories/201004010036.html
Overpopulation has become less of a liberal issue though as it happens in third world countries, so it might appear racist to point it out. Similarly, environmentalists in the US like Al Gore never suggest restricting immigration, even though the US population is expected to rise from 308 million to 439 million by mid-century. Fear of appearing racist trumps environmental concerns for liberals.
Vote:August 31st, 2010 at 9:47 am
The UN forecasts that the world population will go into overall decline around the middle of this century.
Wealth is the great contraceptive and female literacy comes next.
Vote:August 31st, 2010 at 10:06 am
***Wealth is the great contraceptive and female literacy comes next.***
It is and maybe Chinese investment will lead to a industrial revolution in Africa. Whether it is sustainable is another issue. UC Davis economist Gregory Clark has some interesting papers on how malthusian selection lead populations to become biologically adapted for modern economies.
“The Darwinian struggle that shaped human nature did not end with the Neolithic Revolution but continued right up until the Industrial Revolution. But the arrival of settled agriculture and stable property rights set natural selection on a very different course. It created an accelerated period of evolution, rewarding with reproductive success a new repertoire of human behaviors – patience, self-control, passivity, and hard work – which consequently spread widely.
And we see in England, from at least 1250, that the kind of people who succeeded in the economic system – who accumulated assets, got skills, got literacy – increased their representation in each generation. Through the long agrarian passage leading up to the Industrial Revolution man was becoming biologically more adapted to the modern economic world. Modern people are thus in part a creation of the market economies that emerged with the Neolithic Revolution. Just as people shaped economies, the pre-industrial economy shaped people. This has left the people of long settled agrarian societies substantially different now from our hunter gatherer ancestors, in terms of culture, and likely also in terms of biology.”
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2010/07/social-darwinism-21st-century-edition.html
http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/capitalism%20genes.pdf
Vote:September 1st, 2010 at 8:53 am
The world’s most high-profile climate change sceptic is to declare that global warming is “undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today” and “a challenge humanity must confront”, in an apparent U-turn that will give a huge boost to the embattled environmental lobby.
Vote:http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/aug/30/bjorn-lomborg-climate-change-u-turn