Wednesday, January 13, 2010

The Anxieties of Our Time


When we last encountered Frank Furedi, he was using the principles of metaphysico-theologo-cosmolonigology to prove that environmentalists are wrong because they say depressing things that frighten people. Bourgeois complacency, to him, is as integral to human excellence as stereo vision and opposable thumbs, and anyone who challenges it has no more ethical sense than a spirochete. For Furedi, it'd be insane to wonder whether one can write poetry after Auschwitz; he prefers to attend to practical matters, like whether the poem should be about babies or unicorns.

His latest column begins by considering the snowstorms in the UK. Like Mona Charen, he knows perfectly well that weather isn't climate. And like Charen, he sees something sinister in the fact that scientists keep reminding him of this. If global warming is a real threat, why are scientists trying so hard to convince us that it's actually happening?

There's a bigger problem, though. Furedi is able to tap into the Collective Unconscious as easily as you or I might order a pizza, so he knows that when we talk about "extreme weather," we're really talking about ourselves.

Extreme weather is not so much a scientific as a cultural metaphor that expresses the anxieties of our time. The conceptual linkage of weather with extreme symbolises a growing tendency to endow natural phenomena with moral meaning.
First off, weather per se is not a scientific or a cultural metaphor; it's fucking weather, for fuck's sake. Second, the "conceptual linkage of weather with extreme" is based on the hard-won knowledge that some types of weather are more powerful than others, which is why we place, say, hurricanes into different categories depending on their strength. Third, the word "extreme" has no moral meaning whatsoever in this context; it's simply a measure of relative force. As much as Furedi might wish to pretend this is some sort of bizarre value judgment that stands in need of glibertarian deconstruction, I'm pretty sure that like most people who have the choice, he's more likely to stay indoors during episodes of "extreme" weather.

Last, you have to be a truly monumental asshole to complain about the "growing (!) tendency to endow natural phenomena with moral meaning" while arguing that decades of scientific data on natural phenomena, extreme and otherwise, should be dismissed as evidence of a collective character flaw.

Speaking of which...you know what this crazy idea that human activity can affect the climate reminds Furedi of, when you come right down to it? A belief in witchcraft!
Today unexpected weather conditions are blamed on the impact of human beings on the environment. In medieval times unusual climatic episodes were seen as the handiwork of wicked demonic forces. Witchcraft was used to account for virtually every misfortune and unpleasant act. It was the climatic change brought by the so-called Little Ice Age in the 16th century that led to a resurgence of witch-hunting in Europe. From 1380 onwards, accusations of magic and weather-making increased dramatically in inquisitorial trials.
This is fertile ground indeed. In medieval times, witch hunters used to prick moles and warts with knives and needles in order to "prove" that people were witches. Today, climatologists take core samples from the polar ice caps in order to "prove" that people are using some sort of magical, unquantifiable power to affect the climate. When you treat these obsessively penetrative, probing behaviors as cultural metaphors, they're almost identical!

Thanks to Furedi's psychohistorical Doctrine of Signatures, we can easily ascertain which sciences are on the right track, morally speaking, and which signify the return of some repressed irrationality from the Bad Old Days. Monsanto's genetically engineered seeds are simply an improvement to the gentle art of gardening; you'd have to be insane to let it worry you. But as for ecotoxicology...weren't Jews once accused of poisoning wells, much as mining companies are now accused of contaminating groundwater? That being the case, couldn't one argue that the extraction industry is, in fact, the Jew of enviro-fascism?

The answer is plain to all those who are versed in Naturall Philosophy, for so universal and perpetual an Analogy can arise from nothing but its Pattern and Archetype in the infinite God our Maker.

Incidentally, Ferudi is the author of a book called Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?. Which just goes to show that it's lonely at the top.


15 comments:

Tacitus Voltaire said...

The conceptual linkage of weather with extreme symbolises a growing tendency to endow natural phenomena with moral meaning

it's almost as if environmentalists are asserting that actions in the physical universe can have a moral dimension

this preoccupation with quantification and logical deduction must surely stem from overcompensation for dissasociative personality disorder

charley said...

do you want to make a deal?

from my favorite album.

i know you don't care for dylan, but everyone who has participated in the MTV unplugged series has delivered stellar performances.

i heard neil did it twice becase he was so dissatisfied with the first one.

see, now it's just like eschaton, no relation to the topic posted.

peace. how does it feeeeeeeeeeeeeel?

Jazzbumpa said...

Hey, I saw Saruman using wizardry to control the weather when the Fellowship tried to cross the Redhorn pass into Lothlorien. We have to take this sort of thing very seriously.

Doesn't it go hand in hand with Karma backed currencies?

Anyway, the little ice age is over. The snow melted off my driveway today.

Cheers!
JzB

Phila said...


see, now it's just like eschaton, no relation to the topic posted.


Give me an okra recipe, and it'll be like old times.

Phila said...

Anyway, the little ice age is over. The snow melted off my driveway today.

I'll be the judge of that, after I hack into your e-mails and cherrypick any sentences that could conceivably be misconstrued as a contradiction of what you've just said.

Jazzbumpa said...

OK. I just followed your "Doctrine of Signatures" link and found this:

This militant appeal to common sense (i.e., to ignorance, misperception, prejudice, and wishful thinking) as an antidote to a decadent, liberal "offical" history is what makes Goldberg's outlook essentially pre- or even anti-modern, and it's typical of...well, we'll just leave it at "typical," for now.

What struck me is how similar your assessment of "common sense" is to my assessment of "The Comsevative Mind," based on a reading of the first 35 pages of Russell Kirk's Magnum Opus. The pillars of conservative thought processes are ignorance (he praises it in the very first paragraph!) prejudice (saves all that tedious mucking around with fact collection and critical judgment) false choice (anyone who isn't conservative is "radical") and magical thinking (OK, religion, but same dif., right?)

The parallels are striking. Or, at least, they struck me.

Cheers!
JzB the stricken trombonist

Used Ice Machines said...

Ya Dear
I am totally agree with you,in our ancient time we had not resources to fight from whether changes,but today we a lot of invention to fight from all this...

Gummo said...

So science is just modern witchcraft? Or is science the equivalent of witch-hunting?

I'm obviously way too simple to follow the rarefied reasoning of someone like Furedi.

Phila said...

So science is just modern witchcraft? Or is science the equivalent of witch-hunting?


Well, you've got to define your terms. First, there's the idealist notion of Science as a one-way ticket to human perfection, limitless wealth, and technological quasi-divinity. This is a toughminded discipline that provides us with valuable knowledge about the world in which it doesn't and can't exist.

And then there's the hopelessly corrupt everyday practice of science, which tries to impose limits on human development by claiming that it's possible for people to run out of natural resources, or ruin them, or make stupid mistakes that kill everyone.

The people who believe in the latter are like witch hunters; the people who believe in the former are the innocent people they persecute and kill, in a certain cultural-metaphoric sense.

Or something like that.

Phila said...

What struck me is how similar your assessment of "common sense" is to my assessment of "The Comsevative Mind," based on a reading of the first 35 pages of Russell Kirk's Magnum Opus.

I've read some of his lame supernatural fiction...I suppose I should try to get through at least 35 pages of his philosophy, someday. I'll get on it just as soon as I finish the collected works of Anthony M. Ludovici, which I've tentatively penciled in for the first half of 2075 unless something better -- like death -- comes along first.

magical thinking (OK, religion, but same dif., right?)

The one doesn't necessarily entail the other, though you wouldn't necessarily know it from listening to American fundamentalists.

As RMJ might (or might not) say, the French got Simone Weil and Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Nancy, and we got Pat Robertson.

charley said...

sorry phila.

i was so embarrassed for posting my drunken meander that i wasn't going to come back for a week.

but i found this blog in my links. you might be interested.

the year in pictures.

who knows, maybe i picked the link up from you. in which case, never mind.

Phila said...

i was so embarrassed for posting my drunken meander that i wasn't going to come back for a week.

That's kind of like being embarrassed that you were naked at a nude beach.

Tacitus Voltaire said...

Frank Furedi

it occured to me that this furedi character produces his rationalizations, such as you have quoted, not as a disinterested observer writing an academic paper purely for the purposes of illuminating something, but in a highly charged atmosphere, with the intent of providing a kind of intellectual product, or, perhaps, weapon, for re-use

as such, and given that he takes a high-falutin' intellectual posture, i wonder who will end up being the consumer of this product. it might be interesting to see who regurgitates it...

Tacitus Voltaire said...

naked at a nude beach

i've heard it said that manet's olympia was shocking not because she was nude, but because she was naked

echidne said...

Now that was a fun read. :)

It's as if he is stumbling in the dark trying to find that light switch which turns off the moral judgments horrible liberals make about possibly catastrophic climate changes on humans and such.