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April 2, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
47:57
1629 Dr Robert Nelson: Environmentalism as Religion

Dr Robert Nelson of the University of Maryland argues that environmentalism is a modern form of religion.

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Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I have on the line the highly esteemed Robert H. Nelson.
He is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute and a professor of environmental policy in the School for Public Policy at the University of Maryland.
He has been published in a wide variety of academic and popular journals and has a new book out which I find to be quite a fascinating thesis on the degree to which environmentalism can be interpreted And I think quite accurately, too, through the lens of religiosity.
So, I thank you so much, Dr.
Nelson, for taking the time to have a chat.
I was wondering if you could lay out the general thesis of the book so that the audiences can get a good sense of where you're coming from.
Well, the basic idea of the book is, as you stated it, that environmentalism is a new kind of That basically has a lot to do with the impact and the success of the environmental movement because it's meeting a demand for religion in modern life and many people aren't finding it in other places and so they're turning to environmentalism.
Part of its attraction is For some of these people, they think of themselves as secular or even atheists, and so they're turned off by the formal institutions of the official churches and the formal theology, but they're looking for what they might say they're not religious, but they might say they're spiritual.
And so they're looking for a source of I would say that's an illusion.
They're looking for a source of religious understanding and energy and inspiration.
But instead of finding it in the historic churches of the West, they're finding it in a kind of a new church, environmentalism.
So, for example, when they are looking for spiritual inspiration, they go to the wilderness.
And so the wilderness becomes a type of I'm not the only person by any means to note that it's a cathedral.
Or if they're attracted to the idea of saving all the species of the earth, they don't find that by reading about Noah and his ark, but instead are interested in the Endangered Species Act and the idea of biodiversity.
Or if they're concerned that human beings are behaving in a sinful way and God is going to punish them.
And in the Bible the typical punishments are things like famines, floods, droughts, pestilence, natural disasters like earthquakes.
Instead of reading the Bible to get the story of human sinfulness and the Divine punishments that we can expect.
They study global warming, and they see that the future of the Earth is threatened by rising greenhouse gases and by climate change.
But what are the consequences of climate change?
I mean, they're essentially biblical Cataclysms, rising seas, famine, drought.
In this case, the natural disasters are more likely to be hurricanes, but it's all a kind of secularization of biblical stories that the environmental movement is offering.
And certainly, if you go beyond many of the messages of the environmental movement and look at things like Recycling, there's also a whole set of religious rituals that are part of the whole practice of environmental religion.
These are basically moral or ritualistic statements like driving an electric car or as I said, recycling or changes in Changes in behavior to limit consumption, and the idea that consumption is a threat to excessive consumption, especially a threat to the human future, which is a very Calvinist way of looking at the world.
So, as you can see from the examples I'm giving you, it's not just the idea that environmentalism is a religion, but it actually, in many ways, draws its themes from Christian and Jewish religion and from the Bible actually but what it does is it presents them in its context which is divorced from all of that and that's precisely the source of its attraction because if you presented these themes in their old-fashioned ways at least for the modern university student and a lot of other people who regard themselves as sophisticates who've moved beyond all those kinds of biblical ideas It's much more attractive.
So that's the core of the book.
Right. And while you were talking, I was thinking, I'm not sure if you'd touch on this on the book, but there are two other themes that I have always found similar in sort of the great three, in a sense, tyrannical ideologies of, as you say, particular kinds of Calvinistic Christianity, Marxism, and environmentalism.
And they share these two traits, one of which is that there was a golden age in the past where everything was better.
And of course, that's the Garden of Eden in religion.
That's primitive societies in Marxism.
And that's, again, primitive societies in environmentalism, where there's this idea that, you know, the Native Americans lived in harmony with the earth and used all parts of the buffalo.
And so there's this golden age of the past that people seem to be very confused about in terms of the historical reality.
And the second aspect is that there is a very tyrannical aspect in that there's this idea that if people exist in a state of freedom, that man is naturally sinful without a great deal of state power to restrain and constrain his greedy, materialistic, destructive impulses.
And of course, for religion, that is the power of the church.
For Marxism, it's the power of the state.
And also for environmentalism, it is the power of the state.
If we let people be free, they will rape and despoil Mother Earth and so on.
So we need all of these rules and these laws and these fines and these prisons to restrain the natural evil of human behavior, which is not something I believe in at all.
I'm very much a free market guy.
But there does seem to be these strains between these three great tyrannies of the modern world.
Well, I think you're exactly right.
Although, I mean, again, it's a complicated thing.
You know, Christianity and the idea of human beings as being gravely sinful and fallen and therefore requiring, you know, force to restrain human evil.
I mean, it was, you know, it goes way back.
Property rights in Christianity were justified as It's necessary because of the depravity of man.
Property was required to keep people from doing excessive damage to each other, which they would do if they were left outside a rule of either state or property or something like that.
It comes really from the idea of human beings as fallen, going back to the idea that in the Garden of Eden we were naturally innocent.
But then we fell, and ever since, we've been depraved, which is certainly a fundamental Christian message.
And the thing that's interesting about it is, it's not just Marx.
I mean, really, the first person to do that was Rousseau, who in the Enlightenment, there was a wide sense of optimism among many intellectuals.
And what distinguished Rousseau was his characterization of human existence in just the terms that you were talking about, which is we had been innocent and we had been happy and we had fallen and we were now corrupted.
And so Rousseau tells that story and then Marx tells it in a new variation.
But Marx is even more attractive though for people who have a Somewhat Christian orientation, because Marx says that, well, it's true, we're living in total corruption, which is due to the class struggle and the alienation, which has resulted from that class struggle, but it's due to end.
And actually, fairly soon, in the apocalypse of the struggle, you know, the final struggle between the proletariat And the capitalists.
And that cataclysm, which is virtually out of the book of Revelations, will usher in a new stage of history and a new earth.
And so it actually, in that sense, while it presents current human existences, depraved offers the hope of escape fairly soon.
Again, following in the Christian world.
In the Christian tradition.
And yeah, now environmentalism.
I mean, in the book I talk about how a number of environmentalists, they actually have a more precise time frame for all this.
They say that we were living in happy harmony with nature until about 10,000 years ago.
And so the fall of man really commenced About 10,000 years ago.
Not so different, interestingly enough, from the biblical fall, which was supposedly about 6,000 years ago.
But it commenced with the rise of agriculture, which then made possible the development of civilization, and which then alienated people.
And so the idea of alienation is Marxist, but it's also Rousseau, it's also Calvin, it's also Christian.
It's basically another term for fallen and depraved.
But anyway, this growing depravity set in 10,000 years ago, and it's been increasing to the present.
You see that stated quite explicitly.
I mean, you don't see that in the public pronouncements of our leading environmental politicians.
But if you read the literature of the environmental movement and where the environmental movement is trying to articulate where it's coming from and not trying to be politically, you know, avoid anything that they think would offend the general American public, you see this theme all the time.
So, yeah, I agree with you completely.
And it does lead to the idea...
That we need force to control things.
Sorry to interrupt, but it's a mind-boggling idea, even if you accept the premises of, say, Marxism and environmentalism, that human beings are innately selfish and greedy and exploitive and so on, which I don't believe, again, but let's say you accept that.
The idea that human beings are fallen, and therefore we should give a group of highly limited, highly ambitious, highly avaricious, and power-hungry human beings a monopoly on force to organize everybody else in the way that they see fit, would seem to be entirely counter to the idea that human beings are fallen, right? Well, I mean, like I said, it goes back to Hobbes.
I mean, these people, they might be avaricious, but, you know, it's like...
Maybe it's the religious equivalent of what Winston Churchill supposedly said about democracy.
It's a terrible thing, but it's better than all the rest.
And that would be the way, anyway, that would be a classic way of thinking about it, that it's better to have a dictator.
I mean, it will be in the self-interest of the dictator not to destroy all the people.
Yeah, like a farmer with his livestock.
He doesn't kill all the livestock.
Yeah, right, exactly.
He doesn't kill all the livestock.
And actually, up until the point at which he slaughters them for meat, they don't have a...
might not be a great existence, but it's not so bad.
And so dictators want to be able to tax their citizens and etc., etc.
So they don't...
I mean, they don't really have a reason to...
Well, again, I understand what you're saying as far as the Hobbesian nature, red, and tooth and claw.
He has a very dystopian view of the origins of human society versus some of the other idealistic Garden of Eden approaches.
But the problem I have with that is that, and I'm not saying you share the ideology, of course, but It's never stated openly, right?
So environmentalists don't say, well, human beings are greedy and avaricious and destructive, and the same thing is true of our political leaders.
They are destructive and greedy and avaricious and evil like everybody else, but they're the best that we can do.
They always seem to promote them as these glowing, you know, guardians of Mother Earth and so on.
It depends.
The environmental movement is, look at, for example, nuclear power.
That environmentalist would be closer to your page on that.
They would say, look, this is too dangerous of technology, and it concentrates power in the hands of a small number of people, and science is too risky, especially when science is putting such incredible powers in the hands of current politicians.
Given the reliability of these politicians, it's better just not to have nuclear power at all.
I don't know where you would stand on that, but you would have to admit that it's not so different from what you were just saying.
I think the free market should decide energy policy, not government regulations.
But even if we were to accept that, that politicians are too fallible and science is too fallible, then of course you can't rely on science for global warming if you don't think it's reasonable.
You can't sort of pick and choose the science that you like or don't like.
But even then you would say, if the politicians are too fallible to run nuclear power plants, then politicians are too fallible to enact positive and altruistic and virtuous environmental policy, so we need to find some other solution and that would lead them more towards free market thinking, I think. Yeah, and of course there are some environmentalists who have gone down that path.
The Environmental Defense Fund, I don't know if you follow them at all, but yeah, you're right.
The environmental movement is tricky in that regard.
It's really actually, in a lot of ways, it's anti-scientific management.
And on the other hand, there was the utopian ideas of That science would basically perfect our human existence, and a symbol of that was a dam.
People used to make pilgrimages to places like Hoover Dam.
It was almost a form of worship of science and progress, that human beings could control a huge river.
But actually, it turned out that most of the dams that were ever built in the United States were boondoggles.
Partly reflecting the frailties of the political situation.
But who has opposed the building of more dams, which is basically an assertion of central scientific authority of the federal level and of the state?
Actually, it's been environmentalists, and they've been by far the most effective.
I'm only playing the devil's advocate here.
I agree with a lot of things.
But what I'm trying to do is to say that you maybe need to have a somewhat more nuanced position that there are significant elements of environmentalism that are actually anti-state.
And that actually, one of the arguments that I make is that environmentalism Of all of the religious origins of environmentalism, Protestantism is the most important.
And that actually, many of the ideas of environmentalism, if you actually start tracing them historically, you can trace them through the history, through New England, through Emerson, through Jonathan Edwards, and even all the way back to Calvin.
So the pattern, though, they remain characteristically Protestant, but what you see is they're increasingly secularized, even while having the underlying Protestant quality, for example, the rejection of consumption.
And the idea that excessive consumption is a threat to your soul, well, now it becomes resistance to growth and things like that.
But Protestantism had a very ambiguous relationship to authority.
On the one hand, you know, the Puritans cut off the head of the English king when he tried to infringe on their religious freedom.
But on the other hand, Protestants could be quite oppressive, and they burned their share of witches, too.
Yeah, Protestantism is like the America of the Christianity.
I mean, that it started as a revolt and quickly grew into a leviathan.
Yeah, but then the thing that was interesting about Protestantism is that it spawned continuous revolts, even against its own oppressive products.
I call Protestantism kind of free-market religion, and Catholicism is a sort of, you could call it, monopoly religion.
But one of the interesting things about environmentalism is that there are almost no important Catholics among the top leadership.
of the environmental movement historically.
And there are actually very few key Jewish environmentalists also, although there are a few, like Robert Marshall, the founder of the Wilderness Society, as opposed to virtually none from the Catholic community.
But on the other hand, if you start looking, it actually turns out that not only are The top thinkers, John Muir, David Brower, all these people, I mean, the people who led the environmental movement in its development over the last hundred years, basically, they all have Calvinist backgrounds.
I've actually written one of the chapters in this book that you mentioned, or sections, it's called Calvinism Minus God.
And where I argue that basically environmentalism is a very Calvinist way of thinking about things and owes much of its inspiration to that.
I mean, it's not surprising, you know, the American history has been dominated in many times and places by Puritan thinking.
And so basically, Environmentalism, in my interpretation anyway, is secularized and thus, you know, a lot of the environmentalists would be horrified to hear them described as newfound Calvinists.
And my thinking in that regard is not popular with the environmental movement.
But actually, you know, Calvinism had a lot of the characteristics that you were talking about, you know, but also the tensions that are found within environmentalism.
On the one hand, It fiercely asserted religious independence, and in that sense, a lot of libertarianism was spawned from Calvinism.
But on the other hand, it could provoke people to take up arms and to become...
We ended up in religious wars, and half the population of some German states died in the tensions.
I mean, that wasn't just Calvinism and So, Calvinism has had a very checkered history.
Also, in New England, you know, the Calvinists were driven out of England, they went to Massachusetts, but yet, Rhode Island had to be created as a place where religious freedom could actually exist, when the Massachusetts Calvinists weren't willing to tolerate it.
Yeah, anyway, so what I'm saying is that I describe this.
This is not something that I wrote about as much in the book.
I mean, of course, I wrote the book about a year or two ago when it came out here just in the last few months.
But, I mean, this phenomenon of finding religion in what seemingly are non-religious places I've been thinking even more about it recently.
In fact, I've been writing something just now about Avatar and the fact that Avatar is filled with religious messages.
It's not a clear-cut theology.
Some of the messages might even be in conflict a bit with one another.
But they're very biblical and very Christian and Jewish.
I mean, the god, Iwa, I mean, I don't know what Cameron was trying to do.
I mean, he clearly was telling somebody that he was writing, you know, he was writing about a Jewish Christian god by virtually adopting the same name.
But this Star Wars is the same way.
Or if you go back to, you know, The Lord of the Rings or C.S. Lewis, he wrote a lot of theology, but his Tales of Narnia had a lot more impact In spreading Christianity, which without saying it was Christianity.
So in a way, again, going back to what I said in my opening comments, it's the idea that unlike what a lot of people, you know, they say, oh, environmentalism, it's based on Buddhism or some kind of pantheistic paganism or something.
Actually, it's based on Christianity.
But it's offering Christianity in a form of Where people don't recognize it as such, which paradoxically makes it much more attractive to them.
Right, yeah, people think that if you destroy the form of a meme or a thought pattern, that that thought pattern then vanishes.
But it doesn't, it just takes another form.
It finds another outlet.
And environmentalism, I mean the movies, things like Avatar and Star Wars, Or novels like Narnia and Lord of the Rings are outlets for that, but the thing that's remarkable about environmentalism is that it's not a fictional portrayal.
And it's basically a world system offered as real, but it's similar in the sense that it's a sort of secularized Christianity.
I mean, obviously the two are blended together in ways that you could never separate.
I find it striking that there's also an immunity to evidence that you find in ideologies where the external manifestation is serving, I think, a deeper psychological need.
So, for instance, there are still Marxists despite the obvious catastrophes of 20th century and 19th century Marxism.
And in the environmental movement, just as in the religious movement in Mormonism, I don't know how many end-of-the-world scenarios there were that came and went without any great deal of fuss.
Right. I mean, there's Paul Ehrlich in Famine, and in 1980, it was obvious that it was a ludicrous spirit.
Right, but it doesn't change people's thinking.
In fact, he keeps on making it.
Right, so no matter how many times the prophecies fail, a new prophecy pops up, which means you know it's not empirical, it's serving some deeper need, that I think you're right, comes directly out of a more religious tradition within the West, because you would think...
Marxism has exactly the same explanation.
I mean, Marxism is a Christian heresy, or if you want to call it that.
I mean, basically, what is the story of We were living in happy harmony and primitive innocence, and we were corrupted by economics, by greed and the desire for more, which set off the class struggle, which created alienation, which is just another Marxist term for fallenness and depravity.
Or separateness from God, right?
Yeah, separation from God, exactly.
And the new God in Marxism is economics and economic history, which controls everything.
Everything is as controlled by economic history as, in the Christian view, God controls the events of the world.
And even ideas in your mind, according to Marx, are basically just epiphenomena or false consciousness of underlying economic realities.
And where does it all lead, though?
It all leads to a glorious ending.
Well, and the ending in religion and environmentalism and in Marxism is, much like the origins, is very ill-defined.
I mean, it's very hard to find a Marxist who will talk about what happens after the state withers away.
And it's very hard to find an environmentalist.
Right, but they think it's wonderful. It's basically a Christian heaven.
Right, but there's no details to it, right?
There's lots of details about the depravity of the present, but there's almost no details about the glories of the future.
But we don't know even what a Christian heaven is.
And in fact, I've heard some people argue that a lot of the depictions of heaven would be boring.
Oh, yes. Absolutely.
But anyway, that's another thing about environmentalism, though.
It's not nearly as clear-cut about its prediction of where things are going to end up as Marxism was.
Marxism was definitive, and it was a wonderful ending.
But environmentalism is very...
they're a bit tortured.
A lot of environmentalists actually are rather despairing about the future prospects.
And there's even an element of environmentalism which really says that the ideal...
Ending would be essentially human suicide.
Well, it's the radical depopulation that also falls in line with Calvinism, who believe that only a small percentage of human beings are savable.
And the same thing occurs in radical environmentalism, where significant depopulation is considered the only way forward.
Well, there's that. But, you know, if you take...
Let's say you go back to what I said, Calvinism minus God.
But if you take God out of Calvinism, all you're left with is corrupt and depraved and evil creatures that go on forever.
And so in Calvinism, to make it work, you have to have God.
And if you don't have God, you might as well just, you know, the best thing would be for human beings to die off and disappear from the earth and let nature, you know, take its course.
Some of the leading environmentalists have called humans, they call them the cancer of the earth, or the AIDS of the earth.
We're basically spreading around the earth like a cancer that's out of control, it's growth out of control.
That's the imagery. If you take that only one step further, now they don't, but it's obvious what the next step would be.
Which is, look, what's the best thing you could have if you have cancer?
Well, for the cancer to disappear, right?
And so that's implicit, actually, in the worldview of a non-trivial part of the...
I mean, they don't draw it to the conclusion that I just did, because it would be awkward, and in a way, it would force them to confront tensions In environmental thinking that are difficult to deal with.
And so they obviously draw back before pushing it to the point that I just went to.
But the point is that the conclusion I reached is entirely logical if you start from the same premises.
But again, you know, Not to be too critical.
I mean, in Christianity and in virtually all religions, none of them are perfectly developed logically and rationally.
They all have issues or things that are hard to deal with and so forth, or points that theologians have fought about for centuries.
And never resolved adequately.
Now, I was wondering if... I'd just like to get your thoughts.
I don't want to take up your entire, particularly...
Well, you can say I like to talk, so it's okay.
I've often been struck by the degree to which...
I mean, if Nietzsche were writing today, he would have, I believe, an absolute haymaking field day.
With environmentalism, because of its similarities to Christianity and Marxism, in that there is this, you know, the rich are the devils, and the corporations are the devils, and the state is like Jesus or God who will save us, and the poor are the virtuous.
It's the slave morality and the resentment of success that Nietzsche, I think, described so perfectly in his philosophy, or it's hard to say he's a philosophy.
Yeah, although I don't think environmentalism is that.
They definitely don't like corporations.
And private profit and things like that.
I don't think it's as favorable towards the poor as you suggested.
Well, sorry, let me explain.
There have been some environmentalists who said, you know, that, again, they don't say this too publicly, but it was implicit that, well, okay, AIDS was a good thing in Africa.
And that's hardly, you know, a pro-poor point of view.
Well, but in terms of the ideal of where we were pre-10,000 years ago or where we would be in some ideal future...
Yeah, it's not poor, though. It's living in primitive innocence is a better way to put it.
Well, potato, potato.
Now, you're saying, well, yeah, in the real world, that would be poor, but that's not what they're thinking of.
I mean, they're thinking of it in terms of images more like heaven.
And, you know, natural, all the corruptions of human civilization would be gone.
and uh the whole the even the distinction between rich and poor would be gone because we would all be you know equal in our you know in our tribal societies and none of them would be rich and all would there would be a natural harmony among human beings and that's of course i would put it that way the lion lies down with the lamb and the classless society of the marxists and the egalitarian society again i i see i see what you're saying you know
It is a very common thread throughout these three, I guess, two offshoots of one core religious approach to life.
Right. And the other thing that I should say is that I've been and we have been talking about environmentalism as though it's one thing.
But I mean, it is one thing, but in a sense it's no more one thing than, let's say, Christianity.
And so you have lots of different...
Forms of environmental thinking.
Now, they're united by a lot of core ideas, just like Christianity, but on the other hand, there's still a great deal of difference among some of them, too.
And just like Christianity can, on the one hand, be the source of human freedom, but on the other hand, the source of human oppression, you can have similar kinds of things happening within the environmental No, and I think that's an excellent point.
If environmentalism were one thing, then it would not be a candidate for an offshoot of religiosity, because religiosity is, I mean, sometimes it feels like with sort of, in a sense, different emphasis or cherry-picking on the Bible, that every time you meet a religious person, you're meeting a kind of new religion.
So if it didn't have that multiplicity, it wouldn't be a candidate to be an offshoot of religiosity, because religiosity certainly has that multiplicity.
Right. But I would say, I mean, what I've tried to do in some of my other writing is, I mean, as I say, we're also dealing with a multiplicity of what you might call secular religions, which all basically drew on, in a way, the Christian heritage of the West.
Even National Socialism in Germany had a lot of Christian elements in it.
And it appealed to those.
I mean, the most obvious was the 1,000-year Third Reich.
I mean, it was the Nazi millennium.
And so what you find, and this is the broader picture that I'm presenting, is that there's been a turn, let's say, in the last 200 or 300 years away from At least among many elites, Christian and Jewish historic representations and believing in the Bible as literal truth and things like that.
But yet these same things have reappeared in a host of secular religions, of which environmentalism is about the most recent of the really important ones.
And it also draws more heavily On Protestant religious antecedents, whereas I would argue that socialism, and I actually argued this quite some time ago in a book, socialism is much more compatible with Roman Catholic Christian antecedents.
I mean, in fact, I called environmentalism Calvinism minus God.
I mean, I think it was Thomas Huxley who called socialism Catholicism minus God.
So you can actually trace, and if you look out more broadly at the whole domain of secular religion, you can trace branches of Christianity evolving into particular forms of secular religion,
and then struggling amongst themselves in the way that those branches of traditional religion fought three or four hundred or five hundred years ago, and now we find their heirs as secular religions still fighting with each other.
Right. Well, there's always been a class of intellectuals and powerful communicators, in my view, who are well-paid by the state or by the secular rulers to frighten the living hell out of the average citizen.
And the rise of Marxism to me was, well, people are no longer as afraid of hell, Or demons anymore because of the Enlightenment.
And so now we need to invent a predatory ruling class.
And then when Marxism begins to fall, you need to invent the Cold War.
When the Cold War begins to fall, you need to invent environmentalism.
Because you always have to have people having the living crap scared out of them.
So that they will surrender rights and money and freedom to those in power.
Because if we're not afraid of something, we really don't need rulers to protect us.
Well, you might not agree with me on this, but I put the war on terror in the same category.
I would completely agree with you with that now.
And it's always, when you look at it, it is always enemies that have been invented by the very class that claims to protect you from them.
Well, and the point is that once they become established in power, I mean, that is how they stay in their positions.
So, I mean, we have the Department of Homeland Security, which we're spending $40 billion a year on, to possibly virtually no practical benefit, and yet they're not going to go away easily.
Well, it's a huge practical benefit to those receiving the $40 billion.
Yeah, exactly.
That's the practical benefit.
But yeah, but what have they done?
They've basically mastered the art of terrorizing the American public.
Sure. And as a way of making sure that they do never go away.
Now, sorry, I just wanted to finish with one last point because you've written quite a lot about global warming and I think with a great degree of prescience because I think it's sort of...
I don't want to be overly optimistic, or maybe this is overly pessimistic, but it seems that it is a narrative that is showing enough credibility cracks that it may need to be replaced with something else, just as the War on Terror is showing enough credibility cracks that it may need to...
Do you have any idea whether you think these things might deflate and what might take their place as the next boogeyman?
Well, yeah.
I mean, my view on Global warming and climate change, just to state it very briefly, is that it's not a great threat to human beings, especially the rich part of the human beings.
And even the poor part, it's not as much of a threat as often advertised.
I do think that there's some reasonable chance that global warming will occur.
I mean, I think we don't have any real definitive knowledge of whether it's a degree or two or four or five degrees.
Probably a lot of people that I would respect say there's a good chance it'll only be a degree or two.
But even a degree or two is going to change a lot of ecologies around the world.
And so my view is that, again, it becomes more of a religious than a scientific question.
If we start remaking the Earth's atmosphere and the world's ecological systems, it puts us in the position of playing God with the Earth.
Now, this is not a scientific matter at all.
But if you look at, as I said, if you look at what environmentalism says is going to happen, it's basically biblical.
It's the exact same punishments in the Bible that are visited on the Jews in Deuteronomy and other places who challenge God's authority.
It's, you know, rising seas, drought, famine, and so forth.
So again, it's almost a biblical Parallel.
I have to admit that I'm not entirely enthusiastic about human beings playing God with the earth.
In my ideal world, it wouldn't happen.
Then you say, well, okay, what are you going to do?
It raises the possibility that to try to control it, you could get all kinds of oppressive I do think, going back to your earlier comment,
the kind of sense that there's an obvious answer and that any right-thinking intellectual ought to agree upon it, and if you don't, you must be some kind of out-of-touch person.
I think that has been eroded.
The way of thinking about it that way, that there is a consensus and everybody has to think the same thing, that has been eroded significantly in the last five months.
Yeah, yeah.
But I don't think that there has been a...
So what's been eroded is this incredible, powerful groupthink that was dominating everything, which was ultimately religious in character, And that has started to come apart.
And that means that people will need a new absolutism now because these kinds of personalities are black and white.
They don't tolerate ambiguity very well.
That would be...
I mean, that's sort of a pessimistic view, which is that no matter what happens, whether it's one thing or another, We're just going to go from one false absolute to another false absolute.
Well, that's why I run a philosophy show, so I can give people tolerance for ambiguities and complexities.
I see. Okay.
Well, good luck.
Well, you know, keep your fingers crossed.
Now, sorry, please go ahead.
I didn't want to interrupt your thought. No, no, no.
Well, I was going to put in a promotion.
Please, that's what I was about to offer you.
I'm going to go and read my book. Actually, there's multiple books.
The first one... Where I traced the connection between secular religion and Christianity was in 1991.
It was called Reaching for Heaven on Earth, The Theological Meaning of Economics.
And then I had another one in 2001, which is called Economics as Religion, From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond.
So in this latest book that we've been, or that you mentioned at the beginning, I'll mention it myself again in case anybody is interested.
It's called The New Holy Wars, Economic Religion vs.
Environmental Religion in Contemporary America.
I mean, it's somewhat of a sequel to not only those two books, but I've been writing on this subject in magazines and journals, and some of them prominent and some of them obscure.
I actually wrote a series of columns for Forbes magazine along these lines in the 1990s.
So those got a lot of play, but they didn't influence the dominant sources of opinion.
I also published a lot of them in rather obscure places.
Now, I also would like to give you the opportunity, just before we wind up, and thank you so much for your time.
It has been a really enjoyable conversation for me.
I would like to give you the opportunity to plug The Independent, which I think is a great, great resource for people who are interested in, I guess, more libertarian and certainly not mainstream views on contemporary events.
Yeah, well, I'm a senior fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, and it's been around, I'm not sure of the exact founding, but 20 or 30 years anyway.
I mean, it's basically kind of a libertarian, although these issues of religion and the interaction of religion and secular debate have become a new area of interest.
It's actually a new part of the agenda of the Independent Institute.
For example, they are publishing my book.
The book is published by Penn State Press, but it's in cooperation with the Independent Institute, and it reflects a redirection of its Not a redirection, but in addition to its historical, more economic and libertarian orientation, to thinking about religion and the issues of religion and libertarian thought.
I would encourage anybody who's interested in thinking about these questions to visit their website.
They also do a lot of other pieces about foreign policy and The regulation and the impacts of regulation and so forth.
And what's the website? I think I remember it, but I'm not sure.
Do you remember the website for The Independent?
If you just Google the Independent Institute, it would come right up.
Yeah, it's either independent.org or something like that.
I'm sorry, I should have written it down. Yeah, I don't actually.
I'm afraid. I'm a Googler.
I just Google the name and it'll be the first thing that'll come up.
Yeah, independent.org. Again, you can sign up for the newsletter there.
And I would strongly, strongly urge people who are Trying to bring the light of reason and evidence to the world, and as those of us who try regularly to do that, we know that we get into that Socratic cheese grater where we're kind of putting our foreheads up into this cheese grater of people's irrational resistance to reason and evidence.
I don't think that you can understand the modern world, however scoured it seems to be of religion in certain areas, you cannot understand the modern world without a deep study of religious history and religious thinking.
Well, and that's my theme is that Yeah, if you try to just think about rational argument without putting it in the context of religion and religious issues and faith, but to recognize that religion hasn't gone away at all,
really. It's just reappeared in new forms, which sometimes are based, you know, on the idea that they're not religions, which is what makes them particularly attractive as new religions, because for some people, religion is in the I'm sure you know Michael Kremer.
Unfortunately, he died a year or two ago, but he described environmentalism as religion for urban atheists.
Yeah, it's something that people have to really understand, that the church may crumble, the gods live on in new forms, and that's something that you really can't process the modern world without that.
And of course, a lot of people who are not religious will look at religion as a sort of semi-medieval superstition that we've outgrown, But if that's the case, it doesn't explain why so many irrational beliefs persist so dogmatically into the modern world.
So I really do applaud your work in tying together some of the contemporary secular movements with the history of religiosity.
I think that it's essential for people who want to have a real effect in the world to understand how the modern superstitions, in a sense, are outgrowths of earlier religiosity.
Okay. Well, thank you. Thank you so much.
It's been an enjoyable conversation.
As you can see, I like to talk about these things.
And I thank you for inviting me to be on your program.
I appreciate it. And I will put a link to your books on the website on the video.
Thank you so much. I appreciate it, Robert.
Okay, great. Thanks a lot.
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