Hey, Let’s Redefine George Monbiot, Instead

Real Clear Politics has a link to the latest gust of ill-wind from George Monbiot, in which the noted climate change activist bleats that we are engaged in a battle to “redefine humanity.”

This is the moment at which we turn and face ourselves. Here, in the plastic corridors and crowded stalls, among impenetrable texts and withering procedures, humankind decides what it is and what it will become. It chooses whether to continue living as it has done, until it must make a wasteland of its home, or to stop and redefine itself.

That first sentence puts me in mind of an amusing prank pulled by one of my professors in college on the first day of his class. The students were seated in an auditorium, and he invited each of us to stand, turn around, and introduce ourselves to the person directly behind us. Of course, since everyone turned around simultaneously, we all wound up looking at the backs of the people behind us, who had turned around to greet the people behind them.

In essence, Monbiot is asking us to do the same thing; however, he isn’t joking. Let’s turn around and face backwards, Monbiot exhorts us; let’s turn our backs on the idea of personal freedom, on “unrestrained” capitalism, on the quality of life that our ingenuity and liberty have provided for us, and embrace the limitations that our forward-looking intelligentsia have divined through empirical, scientific inquiry – untainted by a larger ideological agenda, of course.

The meeting at Copenhagen confronts us with our primal tragedy. We are the universal ape, equipped with the ingenuity and aggression to bring down prey much larger than itself, break into new lands, roar its defiance of natural constraints. Now we find ourselves hedged in by the consequences of our nature, living meekly on this crowded planet for fear of provoking or damaging others. We have the hearts of lions and live the lives of clerks.

The summit's premise is that the age of heroism is over. We have entered the age of accommodation. No longer may we live without restraint. No longer may we swing our fists regardless of whose nose might be in the way. In everything we do we must now be mindful of the lives of others, cautious, constrained, meticulous. We may no longer live in the moment, as if there were no tomorrow.

Ah, we are “the universal ape.” I suppose that would include certain climate change scientists, who, presumably, will now argue that those alarming emails weren’t a sign of a conscious conspiracy, but merely the result of the natural sloppiness that comes from typing with one’s feet.

But what to make of this extraordinarily purple prose? It is the kind of thing that, say, a high school student engages in when writing a paper at the last minute, desperately attempting to cover up his factual ignorance with high-flying rhetoric: “We have the hearts of lions and live the lives of clerks… The summit's premise is that the age of heroism is over… No longer may we swing our fists regardless of whose nose might be in the way…” It’s like…I dunno…a really cheesy go at epic free verse.

And no surprise! “I lead a mostly peaceful life, but my dreams are haunted by giant aurochs… So here we are, in the land of Beowulf’s heroics…” Little Georgie, with his plastic sword, fighting the imaginary, human-headed dragon of climate change.

I’m sure I wasn’t supposed to respond this way, but I practically cheered when I read this part:

A new movement, most visible in North America and Australia, but now apparent everywhere, demands to trample on the lives of others as if this were a human right. It will not be constrained by taxes, gun laws, regulations, health and safety, especially by environmental restraints.

Damned straight, buddy! You’ll get my incandescent light bulb when you pry it out of my cold, dead fingers (although, since I’m one of the people “unconstrained” by gun laws, that eventuality may prove to be…problematic).

Perceptive observers have known for a long time that green is the new red, and that the kind of environmental extremism being peddled by Monbiot, Gore et al is nothing but a totalitarian horse of a different color. In “redefining” humanity, the statists want to be the officially-sanctioned epistemologists, etymologists and lexicographers.

The one indisputably true thing in Monbiot’s article is the opening sentence in the title: “This is bigger than climate change.” Yes. Yes, it is.