Reader response is a wonderful
style of literary criticism which allows the reviewer to just note down their
personal reactions, even if those reactions occurred while watching the show at
midnight, when we get sleepy and our inner five-year-old emerges.
This post doesn’t explain the plot step by step, but it does contain all the spoilers and all the sarcasm.
So, my reactions to the movie version of Angels and Demons, in order …
1. Oooh, these Catholics are so
mysterious and sinister!
2. Science-y stuff is happening
inside the big collider. The people are
speaking French. They think the collider
might blow everything up, but they press on anyway because it’s Science.
3. Now they have made
antimatter.
4. The messenger from the Vatican speaks
English with a cool, ominous accent. He
seems to be perfectly fluent, but he can’t remember the word formídable. The closest he can get is for-mi-dá-blay. The professor has to translate for him.
5. The professor is really smart.
He knows more about Catholic history than the Catholics themselves. Seems legit.
6. The Illuminati were a bunch of
honest truth seekers who were absolutely, positively not into the occult. They were just rationalists and scientists
who were persecuted by the Catholic Church.
Now they want to use the antimatter to blow up a small country (Vatican City), but that
is totally justified because the Catholics branded a cross on the chests of
five Illuminati back in the 1500s.
7. The Illuminati have kidnapped
the four preferiti, a.k.a. Cardinals who are being considered to become the
next Pope. The other Cardinals are in
conclave. The Great Elector, the leader
of these, is obviously the bad guy. He
doesn’t want to evacuate St. Peter’s Square, even though it clearly might be a
good idea. He has “I WANT TO BE POPE”
written on his forehead, and it’s possible he is behind this whole scheme. He either works for the Illuminati, or is
more likely using them.
8. The Illuminati assassin is
torturing the preferiti one by one and leaving them around Vatican City for the Professor to find.
9. VATICAN CITY SCAVENGER HUNT!!!
10. Wow, I am just learning so much from this movie. I had NO IDEA that the church adopted the symbols and holidays of previous pagan religions, or that Dec. 25 was originally … oh, wait. Yes I did. I wrote an article about it here.
11. Also, English was the language of rebels and mavericks, like Shakespeare and Chaucer. (Chaucer????)
12.
Honestly. There are no admirable characters in this
movie. Not the Great Elector, not the
Komandant of the Swiss guard, not the Illuminati assassin because torture, not
the Professor because he always looks like everyone is getting on his last
nerve with all this religion stuff … The only admirable character is a young
priest who was the Pope’s protégé and who confusingly still loves the church as
a place of simple people full of compassion even though he admits the church
has “always sought to impede progress.”
I’ll bet he apostatizes before the end.
Either that or he becomes the next Pope.
13. The Pope was murdered, by the way. Turns out he didn’t really have a stroke. I think we are supposed to feel sorry for him (or for the protégé), but the scene when they open his coffin displays a black, swollen tongue protruding from his mouth and spreading a stain over the rest of his face. Clearly super symbolic.
14.
Speaking of symbolism, in one scene the Professor gets trapped in the
Vatican Archives. To preserve the
ancient books there, oxygen is kept to a low level and the walls are lined with
lead. When the power goes off, the
electronic doors lock. The professor has
to break out of this hall of old books where he cannot breathe or communicate
with the outside world, or he will literally die from being stifled. The only
way he can break out is to push a heavy bookcase full of priceless artifacts
into the re-enforced glass, destroying these precious objects.
Hmm, what ever could all of this
symbolize? Let me think …
15. OK, they have saved the one
remaining preferitus. And they have
found the antimatter. But – oh no! – they can’t replace the battery
that will prevent an explosion, without possibly causing an explosion.
16.
The protégé is taking the antimatter up in a helicopter so the explosion
doesn’t kill anyone! He’s going to be
martyred and made a saint!
17. Oh wait, he parachuted out!
18. But the explosion high over St.
Peter’s Square is blowing his parachute all around! He’s going to die after
all.
19. He survived! Now the cardinals are finding an obscure bylaw
that allows them to make him Pope.
20.
But the Professor has just found a hidden video that shows the protégé was the one who hired the
assassin! He just made it look like an Illuminati plot! It was him all along!
I did not see that coming.
21.
But the reasons he did it were the same old tired reasons we have been
told all along. He killed the Pope
because the Pope was OK with the scientists making antimatter and the protégé
thought it was blasphemous.
22. In other words, he did all this
in order to impede progress because he thought it might diminish the power of
the church.
23.
The lady scientist feels guilty about having made antimatter because it
was stolen by the assassin and almost used to kill thousands of people. She wonders if they should go on making
antimatter.
The professor encourages her to make some more. That’s good advice. After all, what are the odds of something like this happening again?
24.
The Great Elector is now allowing the remaining preferitus to become
Pope and is acting all nice & humble towards the Professor. “Religion is flawed, but that’s because
people are flawed.”
OK, I was wrong about the Great Elector. Still, this feels like Dan Brown is trying to have it both ways. He’s just spent an entire movie showing us that religious zeal is really really bad and destructive, but now he wants to say that it’s also not, with no reasons given.
Verdict: I ended up really enjoying this movie because it was so twisty. But that doesn’t change the fact that it was a hatchet job. Even the twists serve its purpose, because the person behind the evil plot turned out to be the character who seemed the most saintly and was certainly the most zealous. He ends up setting himself on fire, murmuring, “Father, into Your hands I commend my spirit” and then screaming and writhing like a demon as he burns. If that’s not blasphemous I don’t know what is.
Bjorn Andreas Bull-Hansen blogs here about men’s mental health, viking culture and bushcraft (“viking camp”). That’s why I call him an actual Viking.
I realize that not all of you will make the time to watch this 8-minute video, so below are some highlights of the transcript. But you need to watch the video to get the full effect of the Norwegian accent, the poignant eye contact, and especially the emotion in this guy’s voice at 6:55 when he talks about “our gods. Or what we perceive as holy.”
Highlights of Bjorn Andreas Bull-Hansen Talking about Female Thor
“So, you want to make Thor a
woman.”
[takes swig from beer bottle]
“… you people.
“Listen. I’m OK with a female Thor. I don’t care! That’s only because I’m a grownup.
“But here’s the thing. Thor is a symbol of masculine power. But I do suspect that … the writers … have a little bit of an agenda and they think it’s interesting to tear down that concept of masculine power. But let me tell you, there is actually such a thing.”
[takes swig of beer]
“My ancestors, they knew how important masculine power is for our society, for the family, and for our culture. And let me just say that you are stepping on something now that means a lot to some of us.
“So go ahead, make Thor a
woman. But just know this: if you think
it’s OK to make Thor a woman, you should never again criticize anyone for ‘cultural appropriation.’
“Every day, I walk my dog among the grave mounds of my ancestors. And my belief system is no less important than any other belief system.
“We should all lower our shoulders when it comes to our gods. Or what we perceive as holy. I think the world would be a better place if we did. But never again will you cry out about ‘cultural appropriation.’ Because that’s what you’re doing now, making Thor female.”
[swig of beer] [shakes head] “You people.
“So go ahead, go ahead! I don’t care. Thor is still out there. All around us, as a symbol of masculine power. He is present in every healthy society, in every healthy family.
“That’s all for now. Have a wonderful day! Bye-bye.”
Yes, you read that right: “Woodstock” and archaeology in the same sentence.
Imagine how fun it would be to excavate Woodstock.
There are people still alive who were there. There are documents and maps and photographs. We know what the purpose of the gathering was and how many days it lasted. We know what to expect.
Nevertheless, the article includes this line:
“By examining surface vegetation and rocks in the area, now covered in forest, the team was able to identify 24 booth sites and 13 other ‘cultural features’ that were made by people, but whose function is not known.”
On a dig at a site that is just 50 years old, still in living memory, there are man-made features whose function is not known.
So many things to speculate about here. Are the structures additional snack booths? Port-a-Johns? First Aid tents? Opium dens? Bases for journalists or event security? Hideouts built by parents who were checking up on their children? Just really big and elaborate tents made by unusually enterprising attendees?
Further speculation. What if this site were 1,000 years old? 5,000 years? What if we didn’t know exactly how old it was? What if we weren’t sure whether it had been used annually for 500 years by 1,000 people or once, for three days, by 400,000? What if it were a refugee camp, a religious gathering, or some sort of pagan orgy? Perhaps we would find the names of the gods and goddesses who were worshiped here. (Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and The Grateful Dead. The latter were probably entities less like gods and more like the Valkyries or the Furies, though in this case they seem to have been male.)
What if Herodotus had told us a little something about this gathering, though he only heard about it third-hand and didn’t seem to know much about it, and we are not even sure this is the same one he meant?
Please, speculate a little more in the comments. Go wild.
A few years ago, I posted this article on Hubpages. It argues that most social science research data can’t be trusted because of the inherent difficulties in studying human thought and behavior. Today, just like Herodotus, I am vindicated.
This article on Futurity shows that a major psychological test that has been used for years to screen for potential psychiatric illness is not reliable. The differences between the scores of schizophrenics and neurotypical people are smaller than the differences in scores for less educated versus more educated people, and even slightly smaller than the score differences among blacks versus whites. In other words, whether you finished college has a greater impact on your score of this test than whether you are an actual schizophrenic. Yet the test supposedly measures our ability to guess what other people are thinking.
This does not mean that the designers of the
test were racist or classist. It means
that, like nearly every person who dares to undertake social “science,” they
were naïve. They didn’t realize that it’s almost
impossible to measure anything in human cognition without also measuring a
bunch of other stuff, such as vocabulary and cultural norms. And often, you don’t even realize that you
are measuring the other stuff instead.
Rating People’s Ratings of Pictures of Eyes
For the test, subjects were shown a series of black-and-white shots of actors’ eyes expressing various feelings. For each eye shot, they were asked to choose between four words that would best describe the eyes’ mental state. For example, in one of the samples in the article, you are asked to choose between sarcastic, suspicious,dispirited, and stern.
I am sure you have spotted the problem already. You have to be fairly literate to parse the nuances of those four words. And all the shots were like that. This explains the education disparity produced by the test. To make matters worse, in most of the examples the article gives, two or even three of the offered words could plausibly describe what the eyes are expressing. Which word was considered right on the test was decided “through consensus ratings.”
Finally, some kinds of emotional expression are culturally conditioned. For example, in many cultures people show respect by looking down, avoiding eye contact. This is not true in mainstream American white culture. So, the same eyes that might say “confident” to an educated WASP could say something very different to a Latino: “defiant,” perhaps, or “angry.”
The test designers’ naivete lay in not realizing how much of emotional expression is culturally conditioned. This is a blind spot that all of humanity shares, but in this case there were serious real-life consequences for it because this test was being used to identify people who might be at risk for psychiatric disorders, and thus might require intervention. Imagine being flagged as possibly schizophrenic because you didn’t understand the cultural norms behind a test.
However, I would argue that the deepest problem was not with the designers’ ethnocentricity but with their assumption that they were in a position to “objectively” measure human thought and predict human behavior.
You can’t do it, people.
Machine Analysis of Word Frequency
Here’s another test. This one is much more recent, better backed by data, and apparently better at predicting what it’s supposed to predict. But there’s still a problem with it.
This test, too, is used to screen for potential psychosis, which usually, according to the article, comes on in a person’s early 20s, with warning signs in the late teens. Apparently there are subtle signs of being predisposed to psychosis in a person’s language (for example a less rich vocabulary).
For this test, researchers used an algorithm to study in detail the speech of 40 individuals in their diagnostic interviews with therapists. Based on these diagnostic interviews, a trained therapist can predict who will later develop psychosis with about 80% accuracy. The participants were then followed for 14 years (!) to discover whether they in fact developed psychosis. (Following a subject long-term is called a longitudinal study.)
It turned out that the algorithm could predict psychosis with a greater than 90% accuracy. The machine found that in addition to using a lot of synonyms, another predictor of psychosis was “a higher than normal usage of words related to sound.” The researchers had not anticipated this.
I am impressed with the results the test yields and I am really impressed that the designers actually tested its results by doing longitudinal studies to find out how many of the subjects actually displayed psychosis. (I think longitudinal studies are almost the only legitimate kind of social science research.) This checking of their results already puts them light years ahead of the eyes test.
That said, I think there is a potential problem with the way the machine was trained. To create a baseline for “normal” conversation, the researchers “fed [the] program the online conversations of 30,000 users of the social media platform Reddit.”
Internet conversation defines “normal.” That should raise red flags for all of us.
Then, that baseline of “normal,” from written conversations, was used to evaluate transcripts of face to face interviews. It looks like, in this case, this problem did not skew the data, given how well the test predicts psychosis. But I have a huge problem with the principle that we can diagnose people based on word frequency counts. In the wrong hands, this principle could really escape its glass cage and go rampaging across the countryside, wreaking havoc and destruction.
To take just one example, I’ve heard of a scholar (somewhere) who decided the Apostle Paul had some kind of sexual fixation because his letters so often use the word “flesh” (sarx). Never mind that Paul used the word sarx as shorthand for the deep sin nature of the unredeemed human being. When he used sarx, he was talking about a frustrating natural human inability to do good … and usually, he was talking about this phenomenon in himself.
This demonstrates how easily
word-frequency studies can be manipulated to prove whatever we want. And this problem gets bigger the smaller the
size of the text being studied.
What if you were analyzing an essay in which the author has to define a term? The term in question, and its synonyms, could come up dozens of times without being something that author is fixated on in everyday life. Using machine learning, you could “prove” that Ben Shapiro is a Nazi, because lately he’s had to spend so much time refuting that very accusation. (Shapiro is an orthodox Jew.)
Suffice it to say, though this particular study
seems well-done, in general I am deeply suspicious of word-frequency tests,
especially if they are the only measure being used, because they allow the
researcher to ignore the actual content of the text in question.
So, What’s the Takeaway?
I don’t have a big moral of the story to give you here. Read the articles I linked to and decide for yourself. I am just sounding a warning that social science “data” is not nearly as objective as we tend to think it is, and may often be flat-out false.
Ok. I don’t know whether it’s really the worst. It’s the worst one that I know of.
This song has been around since I was a kid. Listen to it, and if you can get through it without throwing up, we will discuss.
“Thank You” by Ray Boltz. Here are the things I hate about the song:
It gives a false impression of heaven.
Heaven is not going to be about finding out how wonderful we are. It is going to be about finding out how wonderful He is.
We already spend way too much time trapped in the world of our own efforts, our own talents, our own flaws, our own accolades. Everyone knows that this self-focus is not in any way heavenly. It is hellish!
Gee whiz. We go to heaven to get away from this stuff. To finally be free to focus on something truly worthwhile. I can’t think of a more depressing lie than being told that heaven will consist of finding out that it’s all about “you.”
It gives a false impression of service.
This is a very minor point compared
to the fact that the song makes “you,” instead of Christ, the hero of the
story. So please, don’t take this second
point as being nearly as important as the first. However, having once engaged
in idolatry, the song then compounds the error by making it sound as if it’s easy to earn all this adulation.
What did the hero of the song do in order to create all these wonderful effects? He gave some money to missions when he didn’t have much wiggle room. (Sounds like it was just one time, after a presentation, perhaps – forgive my cynicism – to make himself feel better because the missionary’s “pictures made him cry.”)
And he taught Sunday School. This is admittedly hard, as it involves dealing with kids. But, in the song, the thing that made such a big impact was the simple act of praying an opening prayer. Something that takes less than a minute.
Both of these examples make it sound like you can do an act of service once, at relatively low cost to yourself, and – boom! – lives are changed.
Real service is very different. It consists of years of effort that often feels futile. For example, the act of getting up day after day, providing for your family, sticking with your spouse, staying in relationship with your children, is far more impactful than either of the examples in the song.
As for “giving to the Lord,” as someone who has actually tried it, let me tell you what it is more like. You start out trying to do something good. Then you find out that your motives were all wrong. You repent. Then you find out (maybe years later) that even with right motives, you were undertaking your labors in the wrong way, missing critical bits of information. In many cases, you discover that you have done more harm than good. (For more information about this experience, see the book When Helping Hurts by Steve Corbett et al, and the novels No Graven Image by Elizabeth Elliot and The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell.)
In my personal version of the scene above, I arrive in heaven and eventually get an opportunity to ask forgiveness for my grievous mistakes from the people I once started out so confidently trying to serve. And I find out to my relief that despite my inadvertent efforts to keep them from entering, they are there anyway. And they are no longer ticked about my mistakes because Jesus got to them directly, without my “help,” and they are just so thrilled to be there.
But none of this would be the first thing that happens. It’s heaven. The Lord is there. I think we will have higher priorities right at first than sorting out who did what to whom.
It gives a false impression of the Christian life.
My worst nightmare would be that someone who does not believe in Christ would hear this song. (And they probably will, now that it’s on my blog.) It paints a repellent picture of what it means to be a Christian. It makes it sound like the life of faith is all about going around patting ourselves on the back, rather than about progressively recognizing and repenting of our faults, and coming to admire and depend on Christ more and more. If we are engaged in back-patting, then we have not yet embarked on the path of Christ. We are still stuck in Pharisaism, with all its attendant miseries. This is already the impression that many people have of Christianity. The last thing we need is a song like this to further obscure the Gospel.
The Grain of Truth in the Song
Having said all this, I have to be fair. There is a grain of truth in this song.
I mentioned that people who attempt a life of service usually find themselves engaged in years of work that seems fruitless and sometimes actually seems to do more harm than good. Human efforts are futile. “Meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless.” (Ecclesiastes 1:2, 2:1, 2:11, 2:15, 2:17, etc.) That’s in the Bible too.
It is one of the ironies of the universe that often a person can put in intense labor without achieving the desired result, only to have some small, random thing that they did turn out to make a huge impact. That may be the phenomenon that this song is trying to capture. (I think it does a really lousy job of it. Perhaps we shouldn’t try to capture years of wisdom and experience in a 5-minute song. But there is truth in this insight.)
Jesus said, “When you give to the poor, don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.” There is humor in this statement (Jesus’ humor is under-appreciated). Dallas Willard has pointed out that when our hands do things automatically, without us having to think about it, it is because we are engaged in some routine process such as brushing our teeth. Our hands automatically coordinate themselves, and the whole thing runs on muscle memory. And this only takes place with things that we do often. Jesus was saying that our giving should not be the kind of thing for which we pat ourselves on the back, but rather a completely normal part of life that we hardly notice we are doing.
So perhaps what this odious song is trying so clumsily to capture is the truth that it will be small actions, ones we hardly notice we are doing, that will turn out to have blessed others the most. I could see that would be an encouraging message if it were better expressed. However, there has got to be a more nuanced and less idolatrous way to point this out, so let me go on record as saying that I still hate this song.
This does not mean that I go around picking apart other people’s speech.
Normally.
This time I’m going to make an exception. This is a grammar rant, so buckle up.
“Begs the Question”
Everyone uses this phrase wrongly. Usually, misused phrases kind of tickle me. Common usage and all that. Plus, I am sure there are some that I misuse myself. But this one is really annoying. So listen up, people:
“Begs the question” is NOT the same thing as “raises the question.”
If a situation naturally leads to a certain question, that is not begging the question. It is “raising” or “provoking” the question. For example, the Green New Deal will cost $93 trillion. Which raises the question, Where is that money going to come from? Or, my son just showed up with chocolate all over his face. Which raises the question, What happened to that pudding I made an hour ago?
“Begging the question” is a technical term from the realm of formal logic and debate. It refers to a logical fallacy where the argument assumes what it is trying to prove.
For example, “Intelligent design is not a scientific theory because the only legitimate kind of science relies on pure naturalism.” ID is unscientific because we have defined it as unscientific. This is begging the question.
I don’t know how that particular method of arguing in a circle came to be called begging the question. Maybe because these kinds of arguments avoid the question that they purport to answer. And I agree that the phrase begging the question sounds like it ought to mean raising an obvious question.
Many years ago, a friend and I got
talking about what Utopia would look like to us. I ended up producing a fairly extensive
write-up on utopia according to me, dubbed “Jentopia.”
Jentopia turns out to be a very decentralized, low-tech society. I sketched a vision of people living in a scattered network of mostly self-sufficient farmsteads. They subsisted on agriculture, animal husbandry, hunting and fishing, or whatever combination of these best suited their immediate environment. Government was local. Crimes were handled at the community level by a tribal or community council. If a major military threat should arise from without, communities would get together and form a temporary militia to repel it. All art was folk art, all music folk music. Things that require a specialist, such as medicine, midwifery, and metalsmithing would be handled by local experts or by traveling specialists with whom gifted young people could apprentice if they chose. Young people, when they came of age, could travel to other communities to find spouses or seek work. Or they could simply go explore their world. Because of the low level of technology, it was unlikely that any one group could completely wipe out another. The low tech also limited the speed and range of travel. The world was connected, but loosely so. Families and communities were largely self-sufficient.
The only thing wrong with this cover illustration is the boots. Almonzo goes barefoot in the summer.
The closest I have ever seen historical conditions coming to Jentopia is the description of Almonzo Wilder’s boyhood in the book Famer Boy, written by his wife, Laura Ingalls Wilder. I suppose that this book, plus the Noble Savage myth, is where my mental picture of Jentopia originated.
The Wilder family are prosperous
farmers living in upstate New York
in the 1880s. They raise cows, sheep, pigs, and horses. They have fields and a big garden. The sheep produce wool, from which Mrs. Wilder
weaves and then makes all the family’s clothes.
They have their own woodlot, from which they get (as needed) wintergreen
berries, nuts, and timber. They have their own lake, from which they cut ice to
store for the summer. They achieve all
this by working nonstop. By the time he
is nine, Almonzo is plowing all day in the early summer. He makes up for it by eating his weight in
food at every meal.
The Wilders are as near as a family can come to being completely self-sufficient. Nevertheless, they are connected to the outside world. A shoemaker and a tinker each make an annual trip to the area, selling the family what they need. A buyer from New York City comes by once a year to buy Mrs. Wilder’s butter. Mr. Wilder trains horses and sells them. And they are not completely safe from crime. A neighboring farm family is robbed and severely beaten in their own house one night. Also, the Wilder’s whole lifestyle would vanish if one of them were to become disabled by an injury or a serious illness.
Mrs. Wilder weaving a boarding school uniform for her older son
We All Want It …
Despite not being perfect, the “Farmer Boy” lifestyle is very appealing to me in theory. And not only to me. It appeals to many people for different reasons. Some are survivalists who want to have more security by having more control over their food supply. Others are environmentalists who would rather not contribute to the problems of pollution and industrial farming.
These are not unusual
feelings. I think most people, if you
asked them, would rather be as self-sufficient as possible. And nobody, if you ask them point-blank, wants to pollute or create huge piles of
garbage or exploit other people in sweat shops or indirectly participate in
cruelty to animals. We all would like to
live in an ideal world where we don’t harm anyone or anything else by our lifestyle.
We are all trying to get back to the Garden.
The Resistance
So why is it that most people resist the call to suddenly enact a low-tech, environmentally friendly lifestyle? As a fellow blogger put it, “people don’t like environmental rants.” His theory is that we are all just too lazy and selfish to give up our luxuries. But I don’t think it’s that. I think most people resist “environmental rants” due to good, sound psychological reasoning.
People are willing to do something if they believe it will provide them some kind of tangible benefit. It’s best if they start seeing this benefit right away. If we tried to plant a garden and nothing came up, we might try again next year, but we would certainly be discouraged and might give up. This effect, by the way, is the reason that Dave Ramsey advises people who have a lot of debts to tackle their smaller debts first. It would make more sense mathematically to start with the larger debts, which rack up more interest. But Ramsey has discovered by trial and error that people need the early sense of accomplishment that comes with seeing a debt vanish. This gives them hope that paying off their debts is possible and further motivates them to keep saving.
Occasionally you meet a person who is so disciplined and mature that they can work hard and sacrifice for a very long-term goal, sometimes for years before seeing any results. But this is not the norm. In the real world, people give up if they don’t believe their efforts are having any effect.
That is the problem with asking people to make changes in their lifestyle for an abstract environmental goal. There is no obvious connection between our actions and the end result. We are told that the world is ending and that it’s because of our lifestyle. However, we are also told that even if we completely changed our lifestyle tomorrow, it’s possible the disastrous trend would not reverse. And even if everyone in our city – or state – or country – managed to completely change our lifestyle, China would still be out there polluting. Our actions wouldn’t make a dent in climate change, if it is even mostly human-caused. If it is even worse than the alternatives.
In the end, the actions we are urged to take are so tiny that it’s hard to see how they could do anything. Use a different kind of light bulb. Produce less trash. Don’t eat meat. Whoopee. I don’t take environmental end-times prophets seriously unless they ask us to move to the wilderness, go full Wilder, and stop using electricity altogether.
And some of them do.
The Hard Way
I hate to pick on the Green New
Deal, but it’s out there, and I have heard people say that we are selfish,
anti-science, anti-future dunderheads if we object to it. So, let’s talk about it.
The basic premise behind the GND is
to enact a sudden, universal switch to a sustainable, environmentally friendly
lifestyle from the top down, by force. There are two problems with this. One is the tyranny problem. The other is the death problem.
The Tyranny Problem: The problem with enacting radical lifestyle changes from the top down is that this is, not to mince words, tyranny. It is tyranny any time a government tries to force large segments of a population to give up their livelihood, move to a different place, raise their children in a certain way, have more or fewer children, or any other major changes to the elements of our lifestyle that are the proper domain of families.
Mao Tse Tung tried this in China. It was called the Great Leap Forward. He basically outlawed white-collar jobs and
forced millions of city dwellers to move onto collective farms. Millions died in the famines that
followed. (Top-down control of farming
>>> crop failure >>> famine.)
Any time a government tries to
force major lifestyle changes on its populace, whatever else the initiative may
be it is also a power grab.
Actually, the advocates of the GND
admit that it’s a power grab. They say
that radical, tyrannical steps are necessary now just as they are (arguably)
necessary during Total War, because we are all going to die unless we do
something about this environmental problem.
They say tyranny is justified because they are saving us from death.
So let’s talk about the death problem.
The
Death Problem: Besides the fact that it’s tyranny, there is another huge
problem with trying to get an entire population to give up electricity,
plastics, and motor vehicles essentially overnight. The problem is that these modern luxuries have
enabled us to build up and sustain a population that is much, much bigger than
subsistence farming could support.
We all depend on electricity (hence coal) and on oil for things like our city sewer systems; our clean, processed water; our garbage removal; our heat in the winter; our healthy, abundant, affordable food. We also depend on these systems for medical technologies that keep many of us alive. Many people are dependent upon medicines that have to be refrigerated and that can only be produced with our current technology.
If we suddenly gave up petroleum and coal, all these systems would collapse. This scenario has been explored – frequently – in sci-fi and dystopias. It always ends in huge die-offs. Often, the die-offs have an additional cause such as zombies. But if you want to read a detailed exploration of what would happen if the lights simply went out, I recommend Dies the Fire by S.M. Stirling. At the beginning of that book, all electricity, motor vehicles, and gunpowder (!) suddenly stop working. There is no bomb, and there are no zombies. Lights out is all it takes to kill off most of the population. If you don’t have time to read Dies the Fire (a doorstop of a book), try the much shorter One Second After by William R. Forstchen, in which gunpowder and motor vehicles continue to work, but the power goes off and communities no longer receive goods from the outside world via trucking. This is even closer to what the Green New Deal would bring us.
Anyone who seriously wants the United States
to stop using coal and petroleum within the next ten years is asking at least
50%, probably more like 75%, of us to die in the cause of environmentalism.
I honestly don’t know whether the advocates of the GND realize this or not. Maybe they think there would be a way to find another source of power, such that it would not cause massive die-offs. Maybe they think the die-offs would be a good thing. Or maybe they don’t actually expect the GND to be enforced as it is written. In any case, I don’t think they’ve thought seriously about how bad it would really be.
The Possibly Not Fatal, But Still Extremely Hard, Way
The only nonfatal way that I can
see for a Luddite dreamer to get from city life to Jentopia is to move there
voluntarily. Buy some land, build a
chicken coop, plant a big garden. Become
a homesteader. Have a generator or a
wood stove or whatever you need in case the power goes out. Dig a root cellar. Stock up on any necessary medicines.
This is good, as far as it goes. It is something that I would like to do if so positioned. That said, there are a few caveats.
Not everyone is in a position to take
up the homesteading lifestyle. Some
people can’t afford to move or can’t afford to buy land. Some are taking care of a sick child or
elder. Some are committed to an
important, demanding career that ties them to a city. (We don’t want all our doctors and
firefighters to go full Luddite!)
Even supposing we do take up the
homesteading lifestyle, it is going to be very demanding. Farming is difficult to succeed in if you
didn’t grow up in it. (For example, you
need a lot of wrist and hand strength that has to be developed in your youth.) For
most people, their homestead would end up being only partially self-sufficient.
They might have a large garden and keep chickens, perhaps even a cow …
but a portion of their food, all of their medicine, and probably the bulk of
their income would be coming from elsewhere.
Even to take up a partially self-sufficient lifestyle,
here are the skills you might need: construction (fixing your house, and
building barns, chicken coops, etc.). Plumbing. Gardening, including knowing what varieties
of garden crops do well in your area and how to handle pests and plant
diseases. Animal husbandry (if you want
your own milk) and butchering (if you want your own bacon). Food preservation (canning, pickling, and
maybe a smokehouse). Water purification.
Home cooking from scratch. Camping
skills such as how to start a fire in a fire pit or in a wood stove – and, not
unrelated, fire safety. Knitting,
sewing, and – if you are hard core – spinning and weaving. Sheep shearing. Soap making.
First aid and possibly more advanced medical knowledge, if you are
living in a place remote enough that it would be hard to get to medical
care. Home dental care (tooth
extraction?). Home haircuts. Vehicle maintenance (or horse breeding). How to maintain the road into and out of your
place. And finally, if you are preparing
for the lawlessness that would follow a social or environmental apocalypse, you
will need self-defense skills, shooting skills, and gun maintenance (or sword
skills if you are living the world of Dies
the Fire).
Obviously, living in an environmentally friendly way is going to be a full-time occupation and then some. You will have no time for art or leisure.
Let me be the first to say that I
do not have all these skills. I do not
have a green thumb. I have a tiny yard
that is not set up for chickens or gardening.
I have a modestly stocked pantry and one lousy rain barrel. I have a fire place but no wood pile. If the power went off in our city in the
middle of the winter and stayed off for a month or two … maybe my family would survive. That’s leaving looters out of the equation.
Maybe I should start calling myself
a Hypo-Luddite.
It’s a really big club.
Sources
Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder, HarperCollins, first published 1933. Shows the Wilder family’s lifestyle by following Almonzo through one year of his life.
The Quarter-Acre Farm: How I Kept the Patio, Lost the Lawn, and Fed my Family for a Year by Spring Warren. Seal Press, 2011. Warren decides she personally (only she, not her husband and sons) is going to eat only what she grows on her own property for one year. (She has to exclude beverages from this, or she would have to give up all drinks but water.) She works her tail off, but she does it. Her learning curve is delightful to read. Note that she lives in California, which has a good growing climate, and when the book starts her yard already boasts fruit trees.
Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang. Chang chronicles the life of her grandmother, her mother, and herself. Her parents were both dedicated communists early in the movement. Her family survived being separated and sent to collective farms during the Great Leap Forward.
See thesurvivalmom.com to get a sense of the range of skills that homesteading requires.
“The Climate Case of the Century” by Edward Ring on American Greatness. The web site is kind of annoying in terms of ads and pop-ups (sorry about that!), but in the section of the article called “Critical Questions,” Ring asks a series of great questions about the extent and nature of climate change and the relative harm and benefits of trying to switch to solar and wind power.
Out of Babel Books 