Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe

^6. Research and Religion (or, The Invisible Hand)

Laray Polk: Forty percent of the electorate in most states identify as evangelical. Pew Research indicates evangelical Christians largely reject anthropogenic climate change and are skeptical there is even solid evidence that the earth is warming.[74] So I think the extreme beliefs of the religious right benefit business interests and vice versa.

Noam Chomsky: That’s an interesting combination because the business leadership tends to be secular. On social issues, they’re what are called liberals. They’re perfectly happy to mobilize and support, by what are world standards, extremist religious organizations as their sort of storm troops and they kind of have to do it. Take a look at recent American history: it’s always been a very religious country, but until the past thirty years or so, there wasn’t much political mobilization of the religious right. It took off pretty much in the ’80s, and I think it’s correlated with the fact that the Republicans, who were in the lead on this, began to take positions that are so hostile to interests of the public that they were going to lose any possible votes. They had to mobilize some kind of constituency, so they turned to what are called “social issues.” The CEO of a corporation doesn’t care that much if there’s a law against, say, abortion. Their stratum of society is going to get it anyway, whatever the laws are. They’ll have everything they want.

And if you have to throw some red meat to voters out there whose views you just think are ridiculous, then you do it. In a way, a most striking case is the environment. If you took a poll among CEOs of the major corporations that fund the Chamber of Commerce and so on, I suspect they would be just like faculty members at the university. Maybe they donate to the Sierra Club in their private lives, but not in their public roles. In their public roles, not only do they fund propaganda campaigns to undermine support for global warming, but they also support the political party which is mobilizing those efforts.[75] Quite an interesting split between an institutional role and what are probably private beliefs. In their institutional role they have a function: they must maximize short-term profit and market share. Their jobs and salaries depend upon it. And that institutional role is driving them toward what I suspect is a fairly conscious commitment to longer-term destruction.

Do you think those aligned with the Republican Party are mostly funding doubt—doubt that climate scientists can be trusted?[76]

Or anyone. In fact, if you look at polls now it’s incredible. Last time I looked at a poll on this, I think approval of Congress was in single digits; the presidency, all corrupt, and Obama is probably anti-Christ anyway; the scientists, we can’t trust them, pointy-headed liberals; banks, we don’t like them, too big, but we’re not going to do anything about it except fund them; and so on across the board. Trust in institutions is extremely low, and, unfortunately, that has some resonances rather similar to late Weimar Germany—plenty of differences, but there are some similarities that are worth concern.

And they can appeal to something quite objective. Take a look at post–Second World War history. The first two decades, the ’50s and ’60s, were periods of very substantial growth. In fact, the highest growth in the country’s history—and egalitarian growth. People were gaining things, they were getting somewhere, and they had hope for the future and expectations, etc. The ’70s was a transition period. Since the ’80s, for the majority of the population, life has just gotten relatively worse: real wages and incomes have stagnated or declined; benefits, which were never very much, have declined; people have been getting by on working more hours per family, unsustainable debt, and asset inflation bubbles, but they crash.

So meanwhile, there’s plenty of wealth around. If everything were impoverished, it wouldn’t be so striking. You can read the front page of the New York Times and see it. A couple of weeks ago, they had an article on growing poverty in America, which is enormous, and another column on how luxury-good stores are marking up their prices because they can’t sell them fast enough, might as well mark them up anyway. That’s what the country’s coming to look like, so people are angry—and rightly angry. And nothing is being done about it except to make it worse.

So it’s a natural basis for preying on disillusionment and saying all institutions are rotten, get rid of all of them. The subtext being, you get rid of all of them, and we’ll take control. Unfortunately that’s the actual content of the libertarian conception, whatever the people may believe; they’re effectively calling for corporate tyranny.

In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber wrote: “Absolute and conscious ruthlessness in acquisition has often stood in the closest connection with the strictest conformity to tradition.”[77] Are there any parallels between Weber’s observations in 1904 and present conditions?

Depends what tradition one is thinking of. In the early days of the American Industrial Revolution, working people bitterly condemned the industrial system into which they were being driven as an assault on their fundamental values. They particularly condemned what they called “The New Spirit of the Age, Gain Wealth forgetting all but Self,” that is, the doctrine of “absolute and conscious ruthlessness in acquisition.”[78] The same was true of the people of England who resisted the enclosure movement and tried to preserve the “commons,” which were to be the common property and source of sustenance for all, and to be cared for by all—also one of the core features of Magna Carta, long forgotten.[79] There are innumerable other examples illustrating the radical attack on tradition by the doctrines of ruthlessness in acquisition. I think Weber would have agreed.

Rick Santorum accused Obama of practicing “phony theology” related to radical environmentalists who have a worldview that elevates the “Earth above man.” Santorum described his theology as “the belief that man should be in charge of the Earth and should have dominion over it and should be good stewards of it.”[80] There seems to be a discrepancy in worldview as to what constitutes good stewardship.

Without speculating on what Santorum is talking about, let’s take the lines you quote. A case can be made that the way to be a “good steward” of the earth is to abandon any thought of “dominion over it” and to recognize, with proper humility, that we must find a place within the natural world that will help sustain it not just for ourselves but for other creatures as well, and for future generations, recognizing values that are often upheld most firmly and convincingly within indigenous cultures.

Richard Land, host of the nationally syndicated radio show For Faith & Family, said the Christian electorate “would love to see a false smarty pants decapitated by a real intellectual … He [Newt Gingrich] would tear Obama’s head off.”[81] He seems to be saying one type of intellectualism is acceptable and the right kind, but the other is not.

When we look over the record of famous debates, we find that they are not “won” on the basis of serious argument, significant evidence, or intellectual values generally. Rather, the outcome turns on Nixon’s five o’clock shadow, Reagan’s sappy smile, lines like “have you no shame” or “you’re no Jack Kennedy,” etc. That’s not surprising. Debates are among the most irrational constructions that humans have developed. Their rules are designed to undermine rational interchange. A debater is not allowed to say, “That was a good point, I’ll have to rethink my views.” Rather, they must adhere blindly to their positions even when they recognize that they are wrong. And what are called “skilled debaters” know that they should use trickery and deceit rather than rational argument to “win.” I don’t know who Richard Land is, and if he regards Gingrich as a “real intellectual,” I don’t see much reason to explore further.

The term “intellectual” is typically used to refer to those who have sufficient privilege to be able to gain some kind of audience when they speak on public issues. The world’s greatest physicists are not called “intellectuals” if they devote themselves, laser-like, to the search for the Higgs boson. A carpenter with little formal schooling who happens to have very deep insight into international affairs and the factors that drive the economy and explains these matters to his family and friends is not called an “intellectual.” There is evidence that the more educated tend to be more indoctrinated and conformist—but nevertheless, or maybe therefore, they tend to provide the recognized “intellectual class.” We could devise a different concept that relates more closely to insight, understanding, creative intelligence, and similar qualities. But it would be a different concept.

Is there any value in skepticism without independent thinking?

Without independent thinking, skepticism would seem to reduce to “I don’t accept what you say.” It may be right not to accept it, but the stance is of value only if it is based on reasoned analysis and accompanied by sensible alternatives.

The current climate in the US—in addition to a lack of forums for reasoned debate—seems to be one of greed and also fear.

This has been a very frightened country from its origins. It’s a striking feature of American culture that is interesting, well studied. Now, it’s fear and also hopelessness. I’m just old enough to remember the Depression; objectively it was much worse. Most of my family was unemployed working-class, but there was a lot of hopefulness after the first few years. There was a sense that things are going to get better, we can do something about it, there’s organizing and government efforts—it’s bad, but we can get out of this. There isn’t that feeling now, and it may be objectively right. If we continue on the path of financialization of the economy and offshoring of production, there’s not going to be very much here for the working population.

It’s kind of interesting if you look back at the classical economists, Adam Smith and David Ricardo. They were sort of aware of this—they didn’t put it in precisely these terms—but if you take a look at Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, the famous phrase “invisible hand” appears once. It appears essentially in a critique of what’s going on right now. What he pretty much says is that, in England, if merchants and manufacturers preferred to import from abroad and sell abroad, they might make profit, but it would be bad for England. He says they’re going to have what sometimes is called a home bias—they’ll prefer to do business at home, so as if by an invisible hand, England will be saved the ravages of a global market.[82]

David Ricardo was even stronger. He said that he knows perfectly well that his comparative advantage theories would collapse if English manufacturers, investors, and merchants did their business elsewhere, and he said he hopes very much that this will never happen—that they’ll have, perhaps, a sentimental commitment to the home country—and he hopes this attitude never disappears. The insights of the classical economists were quite sound, whatever you think of the argument. And that’s essentially the world we’re living in.