I Know Best. Roger L. Simon
then what is climate other than weather over time? No one has explained.
Elites have to fight hard to convince the benighted hoi polloi of the importance of global warming and, for now at least, it’s a losing battle. (Who do you believe—Al Gore or your lying eyes?) Although, as I noted, a scandalous amount of black money has been made, the massive wealth transfer desired by climate change adherents has not happened, and people are still driving around in their retrograde gas-guzzlers, most of which, these days, don’t pollute that much anyway. Progress continues in the way it normally does, largely initiated by the profit motive. The future is still in the hands of people like Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs—the ones more likely to bring into being and inspire true advances, despite the best efforts of a swollen bureaucracy. One has the sense that many still adhere to the climate change narrative because to question it would open the door to questioning too many other things. It’s the tip-of-the-iceberg phenomenon. Better not to go there or the whole morally narcissistic construct will start to unravel. The most rational approach to climate science I have read comes from Reason magazine’s science correspondent Ronald Bailey, a climate agnostic: “Whenever you encounter information that confirms what you already believe, be especially skeptical of it.” Excellent advice, but few heed it.11
The most narcissistic aspect of the climate debate, however, is the odd notion that we humans are more, or at the very least equal to, the sun, moon, and the stars, not to mention the various galaxies, in the effect on our weather. Call this extreme “homocentrism.” This viewpoint was made to seem particularly ridiculous in the freezing temperatures of the winter of 2015. At the same period, the center of our solar system, aka the sun, had reached a low point in activity measured in x-ray output, which was flatlining. The sun was also virtually devoid of spots to a degree not seen since 1906. According to Vencore Weather for February 17, 2015,
. . . it is safe to say that weak solar activity for a prolonged period of time can have a negative impact on global temperatures in the troposphere which is the bottom-most layer of Earth’s atmosphere—and where we all live. There have been two notable historical periods with decades-long episodes of low solar activity. The first period is known as the “Maunder Minimum,” named after the solar astronomer Edward Maunder, and it lasted from around 1645 to 1715. The second one is referred to as the “Dalton Minimum,” named for the English meteorologist John Dalton, and it lasted from about 1790 to 1830. Both of these historical periods coincided with below-normal global temperatures in an era now referred to by many as the “Little Ice Age.”12
Brrr . . . Are we headed for another ice age? Although New York City just experienced its coldest temperature in eighty-one years, I have no idea. But neither does most anybody, if they’re honest about it. Nevertheless, talk about the real climate denial, the homocentrist view of the cosmos inherent in the climate alarmist’s Weltanschauung, seems bizarrely primitive, like ancient man staring up in wonder at the sun in some Stanley Kubrick movie and then thumping his chest in superiority. Moral narcissism indeed—and in extremis.
When Rajendra Pachauri, the longtime chairman of the UN IPCC and symbolic Nobel Prizewinner with Al Gore, resigned at the beginning of 2015 in the wake of sexual harassment allegations (some say he should have resigned in 2009 in the wake of the “Climategate” scandal), he wrote in his farewell letter “For me the protection of Planet Earth, the survival of all species and sustainability of our ecosystems is more than a mission. It is my religion and my dharma.” This confusion of religion and “dharma” with science is the essence of what is wrong and the reason we all have to suffer through that endless parade of English majors at cocktail parties lecturing us on climate Armageddon. It is the Lysenkoism of the trendy.
And yet, other manifestations of moral narcissism in our culture are far more treacherous in the long run than the vicissitudes of climate and far more destructive than the mere economic profligacy cum superstition this belief might engender. These manifestations have the capacity to break our nation apart as never since the Civil War, perhaps more permanently, both at home and from abroad. “A Republic, if you can keep it,” Benjamin Franklin is reputed to have said when emerging from the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Those words—often considered more of an apocryphal tribute to Franklin’s wit than an accurate quote—have suddenly taken on more relevance in today’s America, because moral narcissism has helped create that most reactionary of results . . .
How and why moral narcissism helped bring back racism and the disastrous racial violence across America at the very time it was starting to diminish.
“Nostalgia” seemed an odd term to apply to racism in mid-2015 when a twenty-one-year-old white devotee of apartheid regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia had just walked into an historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, and gunned down nine innocent people, including the pastor of that church, who was also a state senator. When I first heard the dreadful news, I thought I should revise the title of this chapter and perhaps its slant. Like many, I was hugely depressed by the event. And indeed, I knew the terrain of the killings personally, having stayed at the Courtyard Marriott across from that church when covering the presidential election of 2012 for PJ Media. It had been the site of Denmark Vesey’s ill-fated slave rebellion in 1822 when Vesey and thirty-three others were executed before their revolt could even get started. Hallowed ground.
But on reflection I obviously didn’t change my title or what I had already written, emotional as those days in June 2015 were. Evil or criminally insane individuals (depending on your world view) like the homicidal Dylann Storm Roof have existed throughout history and have appeared in every country and among every racial and ethnic group. Until we are genetically engineered, and even possibly after that, they will continue to exist, unfortunately. To consider such a person—Roof was apparently also an abuser of the pharmaceutical Suboxone that has been linked to spontaneous outbursts of violence—as an exemplar of anything except the random tragedy of human life is finally pointless.
Barack Obama, in his typical morally narcissistic style, declared the morning after the event that these mass murders do not occur nearly as frequently in other advanced countries—this only months after the even more extensive massacres in France at the offices of Charlie Hebdo and the Hypercacher Jewish supermarket (not to mention the recent mass murder in Norway that left sixty-nine dead.) Perhaps the president had forgotten “Je Suis Charlie” because, unlike so many other world leaders, he had decided not to attend the memorial in Paris. Neither did the president mention the steep decline in the murder rate in America in recent decades, only interrupted by an upturn from recent events in Ferguson and Baltimore. Instead, he took the opportunity to propagandize for another of his favorite causes—gun control. He ignored the data, we can assume he was aware of it, that shows a correlation between the growing number of American citizens owning guns and that decline in the murder rate. Candidate Hillary Clinton reacted to the Charleston murders in substantially the same way.
The president and his putative successor both preferred to proselytize in the face of this horrific event, politicizing it, so I am going to do what I originally planned, leave my writings as they were and begin as I did in the halcyon days of 2005. I think we have more to learn from that than from the actions of a psychotic. Yes, nostalgia for racism is involved. It’s possibly the most destructive form of moral narcissism extant.
During an interview that year of 2005 with Mike Wallace for CBS television’s 60 Minutes, the Academy Award-winning actor Morgan Freeman said something that today would seem remarkable about how to end racism—“stop talking about it.” The conversation evolved this way:
WALLACE: Black History Month, you find . . .
FREEMAN: Ridiculous.
WALLACE: Why?
FREEMAN: You’re going to relegate my history to a month?
WALLACE: Come on.
FREEMAN: What do you do with yours? Which