People assume there are institutions which will go on forever. They have felt that way about PanAm, Polaroid, Cliff Richard. Only Cliff is still standing.
So it is with the European Enlightenment, and its legacy of curiosity, observation, empiricism. We thought it was here for keeps. Yet there are now students of the natural world, in the field of climate especially, who are unlikely to stick their head out of a window and who spend much of their time fiddling figures and factoids to establish a case for modern climate exceptionalism.
A recent expedition to Antarctica which borrowed the glorious name of Mawson was quite frank about its purpose of going there to affirm a fashionable dogma. Quite frank about it they were, and nobody said “Wha?”. When they got stuck in ice the previously adoring media began to describe them vaguely as just guys stuck in ice, rather than climate scientists.
A drought, a hurricane, a flood, a heatwave, a wildfire occurs and a whole community of experts is right there to explain to us how “while we cannot attribute this single event to global warming or climate change, we can say with certainty that such events will increase in frequency and intensity etc etc.” You just know, before anybody opens their mouth, that the dogma is going to take precedence, and that the vague, manipulative language which is the necessary vehicle of dogma will not be questioned.
We seem to be constantly re-living the scene in Casablanca where Captain Renault is expressing his shock that gambling is going on…then someone hands him his winnings. Any drought or flood in my country – which is proverbially a land of drought and flood – will be portrayed as somehow unprecedented. We are supposed to be shocked, shocked, that drought is going on in our respectable establishment. Yet even in Australia’s brief history of two and a bit centuries, we have countless precedents. Extreme is what we do.
Ah well. Enlightenment. You either like it or you don’t. Deep down, some don’t. The temple priest are making their comeback. If the Nile’s not behaving, up those offerings.
