The Retreat From Physical Reality: From Climate Change to the Human Body

In the 1700s the scientific revolution facilitated the escape of Western societies from the medieval metaphysics of religion. Knowledge would be based upon the rigorous observance of the natural world, the “scientific method”, instead of the interpretation and reinterpretation of previous texts that referred to mystical beings and powers. It was not a total escape as much religiosity still exists in the West, especially in North America, but religion was dethroned and separated from the state and the epistemology of knowledge creation. Three centuries later, the West is beset by what Dunlap defined as “human exemptionalism” the belief that humanity through a magical force called “technology” or even “culture” can overcome any natural limit. This belief can be said to be the core belief of modern society, one that has spread far and wide in the social sciences as well as being a fundamental assumption of many scientists.

The societal discussions about climate change have been rent with a whole series of magical thinking designed to reject first of all the very existence of climate change, and then to reject the existence of anthropogenic climate change. After more than three decades of such nonsense, such beliefs have been generally pushed out of the mainstream; although the US seems to have a special ability to bring them back, even in the manifestation of a US President. This “victory” rings hollow though, as it only moves humanity from blunt denialism to a much more sophisticated level of denial, human exemptionalism. This level of denial can in many cases be traced back to the post-WW2 period and sociological modernization theories and mainstream economics. The latter explicitly rejected what it called natural resources as a major driver of economic growth, instead anointing a “technology” that could drive growth independent of natural resources. In the 1980s, in response to the new ecological awareness of the 1970s, eco-modernism was born with its embedded belief in human technology to overcome any ecological limits; backed up by the “sustainable development” discourse pushed by the United Nations and the World Bank.

The human exemptionalist paradigm has withstood empirical falsification for decade after decade, taking on increasingly bizarre forms while the ecology upon which human civilization depends continues to deteriorate. The United Nations Internal Panel on Climate Change modellers assume mega-scale technologies not in existence and a frictionless replacement of the global energy system and implementation of massive new industrial infrastructures to reconcile the conflict between economic growth and a safe climate. An economist is heralded for assuming in his models that human society can survive average surface temperature rises of 3 and 4 degrees centigrade and is even given the economics ersatz “Nobel” prize for his work. At the same time, the leading elements of Western societies push an agenda that assumes that including ecology inside human economy will fix all of the widespread deteriorations in that ecology. The fact that the human economy is a sub-set of the Earth System’s ecology, not the other way round does not seem to concern them. So onwards humanity travels toward disaster while believing in a modern version of medieval metaphysics.

A closely related level of metaphysical belief is that a nuclear war involving any more than a very limited number of nuclear warheads would not lead the world directly into a nuclear winter, with an outcome for human civilization close to that depicted in the movie The Road. Instead, billions and even trillions of dollars are wasted to maintain and upgrade nuclear arsenals that are in fact either useless, or only usable for a murder-suicide. The irony is that the modellers that work on climate change use exactly the same tools that are used by those modelling nuclear winter.

Adding to this disconnection from reality is the extremes of the post-modernists, who in their reverence of textual analysis as the deliverer of truth repeat the work of the religious scholars of the Middle Ages. They assume that words create reality and that that reality does not exist outside human consciousness; the movie The Matrix, is a good example of such thinking. Again, reality is reversed; ecology becomes a subset of human consciousness rather than humanity being just a very clever animal within the Earth System’s ecology. In such a world truth can be anything you want it to be, with both propagandists and the paranoid taking full advantage.

Then we have attempts to eradicate any notion of the physical reality of human bodies within a sexually dimorphic species. Even though 99.94% of humans are born with either XX or XY chromosomes, and only 1 in 4,500 births show ambiguous genitalia, there are those that argue that sex is not binary. This is either conscious misrepresentation or lacking a basic understanding of how to draw a statistical frequency distribution. One researcher claimed a 1.7% of human births being intersex, but this included many conditions that are not generally considered as being intersex. There is also the argument that surgery and hormone treatment to change external sex characteristics creates a human male or female from the opposite, but the physical differences in the sexes are much greater than just external sex characteristics. Within the diversity of human culture, a human male can identify as a woman and a human female as a man, but this does not change the underlying physical reality of a sexually dimorphic species. Perhaps that is why there is so much effort to confuse sex with gender, and visa versa, creating a lack of clarity where clarity clearly exists. Sex is biology, gender is culture.

China has had a very different philosophical history than the West, having never gone through the religion as ruling orthodoxy phase. Instead, Chinese philosophy (which has a written history of nearly four millennia) and ruling discourses tend to be an eclectic and pragmatic combination based upon empirical testing rather than that derived from a dominant religion or ideology (with the possible exception of parts of the Mao era). This may help inoculate China somewhat from the Western fall into metaphysics giving it a significant advantage in the fields of science and general governance. Just when the West has a formidable competitor, it may be walking away from the very modernity needed to stay in the race.