By Robert Bidinotto
Ed. Note: The ideology of environmentalism has proven itself to be, by far, the most persuasive enemy of the Master Resource, energy. Pollution … Health Hazards … Species Extinction … Ecosystem Destruction … Resource Exhaustion … Global Cooling … Global Warming … Melting Glaciers … Rising Seas … Climate Change. Why do the enemies of energy industries seem always to fall back, in the end, on environmentalist themes for their strongest and most effective stands? Is there something deeply embedded in our Western culture that makes the philosophy of environmentalism the most influential instrument for opposition to the energy industry?
Today, Master Resource begins a six-part series analyzing the philosophic basis of environmentalism, its enmity to the technologies of instrumental reason (especially energy technology), as well as its incompatibility with the foundational individualist philosophy of the United States. Written some years ago by the award-winning essayist Robert Bidinotto, this manifesto seemed worth preserving here at MR now that Bidinotto has moved on professionally to writing a political-thriller series.
Subsequent posts: “Conservation vs. Preservation” (Part 2) is here; “Inhuman Rights” (Part 3) is here; “Philosophic Conflict” (Part 4) is here; “The Value of Nature” (Part 5) is here; and “The ‘Ideal’ of Primitivism” (Part 6) is here.
The new Environmentalism was the complete antithesis of the American Founders’ Enlightenment outlook of reason, science, individualism, self-responsibility, personal freedom, private property, and capitalism.
Every culture and its institutions are the living embodiments of certain dominant ideas. At its birth, America’s basic premises were part and parcel of the glorious historical period that was rightly called “the Enlightenment.”
In his book The Empire of Reason, historian Henry Steele Commager wonderfully captured the spirit of the American Enlightenment. Men such as Franklin and Jefferson, he wrote, had “a prodigality about them; they recognized no bounds to their curiosity, no barriers to their thought, no limits to their activities.” Commager cited “their confidence in Reason, their curiosity about the secular world and—with most of them—their indifference to any other, their addiction to Science—if useful—their habit of experimentation, and their confidence in improvement…” Heroic achievers, these men “exalted Reason and worshipped at the altar of Liberty.”1
That linkage between reason and liberty wasn’t coincidental: men of reason require freedom to explore, to communicate their ideas, to realize their visions. And what is the goal of these activities? In Jefferson’s immortal words, “the pursuit of happiness”: that is, personal fulfillment and self-interest.
Such were the ideas and values of America’s Founders. Their individualist ethic, embodied in the social system of capitalism, has produced—in what amounts historically to the blink of an eye—the greatest material abundance the world has ever known. Once people were encouraged to employ their minds in the pursuit of personal values—and once they were politically free to do so—a torrent of human ingenuity and energy was unleashed, curing hunger, disease, poverty, and ignorance on an unprecedented scale.
Not just America, but every country and culture that adopted these ideas progressed dramatically to the extent it did so. On the other hand, every society that turned its back on these ideas continued to suffer, as primitive societies had suffered throughout history. Witness in our time the intellectual, economic, and political collapse of all forms of socialism, including fascism and communism.
It would seem that this practical demonstration of the extraordinary benefits of reason, individualism, liberty, and capitalism should have been enough to convince all the world—and certainly the world’s intellectuals and leaders—of their unarguable merits. Yet ironically, these Enlightenment ideas, which have given the world so much, are still considered controversial and suspect. And not just the ideas, but also the rational faculty that generates them.
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In fact, Man himself is no longer praised as a conqueror of nature’s obstacles, nor even accepted as just another part of the natural world. To many, he is an interloper, an alien presence on the planet—even nature’s enemy—and his creative works are increasingly regarded as a growing menace to all that exists.
“(W)e are threatening to push the earth out of balance,” warned former Vice President Al Gore in his book, Earth in the Balance. “Modern industrial civilization, as presently organized, is colliding violently with our planet’s ecological system. The ferocity of its assault on the earth is breathtaking, and the horrific consequences are occurring so quickly as to defy our capacity to recognize them, comprehend their global implications, and organize an appropriate and timely response.”2
Philip Shabecoff, formerly the chief environmental reporter for the New York Times, summed up this outlook in his history of the American environmental movement: “…(A)n unspoiled land of great beauty and wonder began to change when Europeans came here five hundred years ago,” he wrote. “Its resources were squandered…large areas were sullied, disfigured, and degraded, and…our negligent use of the Promethean forces of science and technology has brought us to the verge of disaster.”3
The Promethean allusion is strikingly appropriate, for Prometheus was the Titan of Greek mythology who loved Man, and brought to him the fire of the Gods—a tool by which he could transform nature for his own benefit. It is perhaps the archetypal myth of Western civilization.
But many—certainly, many who rally under the green banner of environmentalism—now hold that worldview in contempt.
Environmentalism vs. The Enlightenment
The essence of the environmentalist outlook is suggested in the title of Mr. Gore’s book, and made clear in its pages. It’s the view that everything in nature exists in a perfectly harmonious balance—a balance ever threatened by the activities of Man.
The roots of this outlook lie deep in antiquity. “We encounter the ‘paradise myth’ all over the world in more or less complex forms,” writes classical scholar Mircea Eliade. “Actually, all these myths show primitive man enjoying blessedness, spontaneity, and liberty, which he has most annoyingly lost as the consequence of the ‘fall’…”4
For example, in seminally influential writings, the Greek writer Hesiod (circa 750–650 BC) presented the so-called “myth of the ages,” or of a lost, blissful “Golden Age.” The Roman poet Ovid (43 BC–AD 17), “one of the most influential of the Latin writers of antiquity,”5 fleshed out the myth of the ages and transformed it into a consistent, compelling story of man’s decay that is remarkably resonant with the themes and narratives of contemporary environmentalism.
In these transcultural myths, the cause of Man’s decadence or “fall” from a previous blissful state of paradise is almost always rooted in the sin of hubris, of pride, and of self-assertion—especially intellectual self-assertion—against authority.
Consider the Greek myth of Prometheus. By giving men the knowledge of the gods, Prometheus enrages Zeus, who chains him to a rock to suffer a thousand years of torture. And to punish Man he sends him the first mortal woman, Pandora, bearing a box that he forbids her to open. But moved by curiosity, she opens it anyway, unleashing on Man all the evils of the world.
Similarly, when given wings of wax, Icarus is warned by his father not to try to fly too high, but the lad ignores him. Soaring upward, the aspiring youth flies too close to the sun, where his wings melt and he falls to his doom.
The Greeks believed that hubris had to be suppressed by recognizing something greater than oneself, by cultivating a sense of humility before the gods or some higher good. Man’s proper path lay in self-restraint, in practicing virtues centered on the idea of moderation, such as prudence, wisdom, and temperance. The importance of humility and steering a moderate course is illustrated in the cautionary Greek myth of Phaëton, who insists on driving his father’s chariot to bear the sun across the sky. But heedless of warnings, he fails to stay on the middle course through the heavens and, flying out of control, sets the world on fire and perishes.
This fear of unrestrained human aspirations, especially Man’s boundless thirst for knowledge, is equally evident in the Judeo-Christian tradition. To the ideals of humility and moderation, the Old Testament incorporates its own version of the paradise myth in the form of a pastoral ideal, symbolized by the Garden of Eden.
In Genesis 2:4–3:24 (King James Version), God plants a Garden, separate from the rest of nature, “and there he put the man whom he had formed” (2:8). This Garden is like a desert oasis, irrigated by a river from Eden—an earthly paradise that contains “every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food” (2:9–10). God also creates for Adam (“man”) a female companion, whom the man later names Eve.
Adam and Eve live together in the “pleasant” Garden as naked, ignorant primitives, eating the fruit of the trees that God has planted for them (there is no mention of killing and eating animals). Provided a virtually effortless sustenance, Adam’s only assigned tasks in the Garden are “to dress it and keep it” (2:15) and to name all the animals.
But Adam and Eve defy the authority of God and eat fruit from a forbidden Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. As a result of this Original Sin, God tells them that, as punishment, they will be expelled from the paradisiacal Garden into the harsh state of nature. Thereafter, merely to survive, Adam must “till the ground from whence he was taken”—soil that God has “cursed” and filled with thorns and thistles—and he must labor “in sorrow” to produce bread by “the sweat of (his) face” until he dies. Eve is cursed, too: she henceforth will conceive and give birth “in sorrow” and be subjugated to the will of her husband (3:16-24).
The Judeo-Christian story of Man’s fall from a pastoral “paradise” mirrors the core themes of the transcultural “myth of the ages” and similar ones. Other tales from the Bible reinforce these themes. For example, later in Genesis, when men try to build a tower that can reach heaven, God laments that “now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.”6 So to punish men once again for their unrestrained imagination and ambition, He scatters them across the earth and confuses their languages.
Consider the basic premises about Man and his world that these ancient morality tales have transmitted across the centuries—premises communicated in songs, sermons, images, icons, fiction, films, and scholarly works—premises that have shaped the thinking and the lives of billions. Here, in summary, is their message:
Everything in nature exists in harmonious balance and perfect order (the myth of the Golden Age and the Eden myth). Man’s duty is to accept his humble niche within this benign, bountiful, and balanced paradise, where he can exist simply and non-intrusively (the virtue of humility). However, Man’s ambition—especially his quest to improve himself by gaining and applying knowledge—represents a grave peril to this pastoral ideal (the sin of pride). Man’s ambitious exercise of his creative intelligence disturbs the tranquility and destroys the harmony of the pristine natural order (the danger of reason and the sin of selfish ambition).
To prevent chaos, therefore, Man’s evil, selfish appetites must be curbed, and his intelligence suppressed. That is the task of morality, whose virtues consist of constraints: humility, obedience, self-suppression, sacrifice of self to a “greater” good. By limiting Man’s disruptive ambitions and creative aspirations, then, morality will preserve the natural balance and order.
Since antiquity, this worldview has been drummed dogmatically into billions of brains—so successfully that it’s now the reigning interpretive template. It’s the basis for most people’s understanding of the world around them. It’s the code of values governing their choices and actions. It’s the metaphysical and moral heritage upon which writers such as Al Gore and Philip Shabecoff draw—and which they intuitively trust their readers to share.
It’s the spiritual soil in which the seeds of the environmentalist philosophy and movement have taken root and flourished.
It’s also the complete antithesis of the philosophical outlook of America’s Founders: a rejection of the Enlightenment outlook that, like Prometheus, championed Man and his requirements for living on earth: reason, science, individualism, self-responsibility, personal freedom, private property, and capitalism.
Rational individualism was the emerging worldview for people newly liberated from superstition, savagery, stagnation, and slavery—people striving to explore, develop, use, and enjoy the earth’s resources. Rational individualism was the philosophy of modernity.
But even in America, this modern, progressive ideal never fully overcame the pre-modern “ideal” of The Eden Premise. That atavistic ideal continued to hold a viselike grip upon millions who feared the prospect of self-responsibility, and hated the socio-economic system that demanded it.
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- Henry Steele Commager, The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment (Garden City, NJ: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1977), pp. 3, 15, 241. ↩︎
- Al Gore, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (New York: Plume edition/Penguin Books, 1993), pp. 2, 269. ↩︎
- Philip Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire: The American Environmental Movement (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), p. xiii. ↩︎
- Mircea Eliade, “The Yearning for Paradise in Primitive Tradition,” Diogenes, University of Chicago Press, Summer 1953; reprinted in Henry A. Murray, ed., Myth and Mythmaking (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1968), p. 62. ↩︎
- Larry Kreitzer, Prometheus and Adam: Enduring Symbols of the Human Situation (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994), p. 27. ↩︎
- Tower of Babel story: Genesis 11:1–9 (King James Version). ↩︎
About the Author
Robert Bidinotto is an award-winning journalist, editor, lecturer, and novelist who reports on cultural and political issues from the perspective of principled individualism. Over three decades he has established a reputation as a leading critic of environmentalism.
As a former Staff Writer for Reader’s Digest, Bidinotto authored high-profile investigative reports on environmental issues, crime, and other public controversies—including articles on global warming and the 1989 Alar scare. His Alar article was singled out for editorial praise by Barron’s and by Priorities, the journal of the American Council on Science and Health. He authored a monograph, The Green Machine,and for several years ran a website (“ecoNOT”), both critically examining the environmentalist philosophy and movement.
Bidinotto’s many articles, columns, and reviews also appeared in Success, Writer’s Digest, The Boston Herald, The American Spectator, City Journal, The Freeman, and Reason. He served as the award-winning editor of The New Individualist, a political and cultural magazine, and as editor of publications for the Capital Research Center, a nonprofit watchdog group.
In 2011, Bidinotto began writing political thrillers. HUNTER—the debut novel in his Dylan Hunter series—soared to the top of the Amazon and Wall St. Journal bestseller lists. BAD DEEDS, the first sequel, dramatizes the evils and dangers of environmentalism. A number-one best-selling Audible political thriller, BAD DEEDS was named “Book of the Year” by the Conservative-Libertarian Fiction Alliance. Bidinotto’s thrillers are available on Amazon.
Learn more about Robert Bidinotto at his fiction website, “The Vigilante Author” and at his nonfiction blog.
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