Appleton covers more thoroughly the ground mapped out by Barone; a useful discussion that touches on some of this is John Jay’s post. Advocates of global warming make it increasingly clear their interest is less in solutions than political & cultural revolutions.
It’s harder to take Al Gore seriously if you reread sections of Wigglesworth’s “Day of Doom” every semester and have some sense of human nature. We love to create a certain frisson of terror at the results of our own evildoing. I’m not sure that is all that bad – we aren’t truly innocent and a real if controllable fear helps reign in our willfulness. Besides, well, it’s human nature. Poe & Hitchcock, artists who strive primarily for effect (Poe’s primary goal), derive their power from recognizing we like to be scared; bogeymen buried in our consciousness want out out every once in a while & we like to feel a little horror of recognition before we pop them back. And we know, without often expressing it or acknowledging the appropriate gratitude we should feel, that life is easier, than it has perhaps ever been: we live in a world in which entertainment is one of our larger budgetary expenses. We feel a little guilt.
Measuring the Political Temperature, Josie Appleton discusses less the effects of global warming than the context in which it is posed – finding motivations less in tune with science or technology than patterns in our cultural history and human nature. (Arts & Letters links to a Spiked review.) She introduces her argument by noting the patterns of the use of science:
But there is another way to approach this question, which is to look at the political circumstances in which climatic science is produced, a process that also has its own laws and patterns. It is strange, at a time when the social construction of science is an established idea (Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which he describes science’s progress through ‘paradigms’, is on every undergraduate’s reading list) that nobody thinks to look at the social construction of global warming theories. Global warming science is being produced in highly febrile times; and history tells us that the more the political temperature rises, the more science’s view of nature is distorted.
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