The language of perpetual crisis

(Apologies if this one reads a little scattered - harder to collect thoughts when out of town visiting family, instead of at home in your nice home office!)

I wrote a couple of posts ago here that I had never seen the problem of common and typical weather reported as climate change doom we’re all going to die! as much as seems to be happening right now. Asking exactly why we have gotten to this point is sort of the point of this post. According to Joe Bastardi, for most of the country, the last 45 days have been cooler than average (indeed, at a city pool yesterday in Cincinnati I heard someone comment that in June it was sometimes too cold to swim).

But the last few days have been hot, so all that is immediately forgotten and we’re straight into we’re all gonna die.

It is true that one aspect of this story is that the technological age has given us very short memories. Media and social media can, and would like to, make you forget what happened just a month ago and keep you living in the constant present. A people with no memory are particularly easy for others to manipulate (have I occasionally mentioned that everything today is part of the spiritual battle?).

COVID and Global Warming

One interesting and, you might say encouraging, phenomenon I’ve watched on social media is seeing people who were decidedly left-of-center before COVID (and may still think of themselves that way), who were driven by their observations to skepticism of the “approved” COVID narratives, now quite publicly and apparently without fear applying that same skepticism to climate change narratives. And indeed there are many parallels.

They became COVID skeptics for many reasons, but mainly, I think, they were just honest and intelligent people. And they realized… there is a chance all that stuff you’re saying about masks and vaccines is true, but it certainly hasn’t been demonstrated yet, but you’re condemning anyone who thinks otherwise as a science-denier. (Skepticism and humility about what we can say is a mark of true science. Just asserting causal claims based upon anecdotes is a mark of ideological The Science.) Or, as our data got better, they realized this disease was clearly of little risk to much of the population, yet we stubbornly and cultishly refused to update our rules to acknowledge that fact.

Or, often, they realized that the CDC was putting out nonsense comments, being called out publicly for the nonsense, and didn’t seem to care, a “science” agency apparently unconcerned with facts and data, that’s interesting. Generally they noticed we were behaving in an unscientific manner while insisting with passion we were doing nothing but following the science - and they could notice many of the contradictions and errors without needing a PhD in virology, which is also encouraging. (Like even though you aren’t a climate expert, you can notice people acting like hot weather in summer is something bizarre and alarming and realize… this just seems off.)

In a nutshell, both COVID and climate change offer:

1. At the heart of it all, something real. A disease that really exists or, well, “the climate is changing” has been a true statement for the entire history of the Earth. It’s also certain human activity has at least some affect upon it.

2. But then, from what I’ve seen anyway, overstating the danger to the human population from the thing.

3. And overstating our human ability to control the thing.

4. Policing the discourse not with argument, but with insult. Anti-masker, vaccine denier, and climate denier are terms all employed for the same purpose, and by the same people.

We could add other markers as well, like just asserting causal claims instead of doing what is the hard work of science to actually prove, much as you can, those causal claims. Here is a popular tweet from this week claiming that a large amount of fish washing up on shore is because of our “climate emergency”. It’s noticeable that he doesn’t even attempt to argue the causal connection. He just says “look, it’s hot” and “look, fish dead”, and asserts this is part of the climate emergency. That’s not how science works. It might even be said that the hard work of science is to disentangle anecdotes and correlations and actually demonstrate causal claims. (It is noteworthy that in our day what looks, on the surface, like the worship of science, pairs so well with complete disregard of the methods of science.) An eye open for correlation = causation errors will protect you from a lot of ideological The Science.)

Indeed, and I thought this at the time, one thing we can be grateful to COVID for was showing all the same stuff we see in the climate change discourse and other discourses, but over a greatly accelerated timeline. With just a few years under our belt now, it seems clear that the “anti-maskers” and “vaccine deniers” (and now the people who thought it probably came from a lab) were, in fact, largely correct in what they claimed in their skepticism. (We have to notice too that credentialed scientists knowingly published in top tier scientific journals claims they thought were probably false.) It is harder to make that case for the climate change parade, just because many of the claims are about what will happen in the far future. (Though you can point to historical claims from the movement, like “hurricanes are going to get more frequent and dangerous” and note that… yeah, hasn’t happened.)

The language of perpetual crisis

How did we get here? I can’t find it now, but what originally prompted this post was a tweet from someone predicting that they’re going to start naming heat waves just like we’ve long named hurricanes and, more recently, snowstorms. (And then, someone pointed out, this is already done in Europe.) This is a language change designed to produce a sense of crisis for something that is actually not a crisis. As we saw with “tripledemic”, I think there is also a desire to rebrand people getting sick at totally normal rates as “pandemic”. This is all part of the same way of thinking.

One, the media, even ignoring their ideological problems for a moment, needs every story to be even more dramatic than the one before it. Ergo a constant state of panic and crisis is good for business. CNN might be mocked for running a series of stories about the Summer of Sharks, but there is a connection between the relatively benign and laughable Summer of Sharks, and the far more harmful “all of your friends are carrying a deadly disease, avoid all human contact!” to the large scale destruction of human life and freedom to be justified under the heading of controlling climate change. (Bastardi, above, asks media meteorologists to push back and offer the perspective that much of this summer has actually been cooler than normal, but media doesn’t usually want to say “what is happening is really no big deal, return to your life”.)

I remember reading concern years ago that Fox News was taking a sound effect / visual transition that had been designed for very high-importance news stories like “plane runs into building” and started using it for every little breaking story. This is the same thing, every story is now super important / dangerous, you must keep watching. It did make people turn their head, that’s what they wanted. (And the shift from “climate change” to “climate emergency” is also part of that.)

Or, put another another way, dramatically asserting causal claims on social media is great for clicks. Humility and patience and what this anecdote might mean won’t gain you any following.

And then two, of course, the state and its worshipers benefit as well. COVID saw one of the most remarkable and harshest controls of a population by the state probably in the history of the world, giving us a taste of what the technocracy would desire to have all the time. And since anything that uses energy - which is, if you’re keeping track, is everything - can be said to be contributing to climate change, this “crisis” is a great excuse for the state to control literally everything.

Or, to put it another way… again I’m out of state without my books so I can’t actually check this, but I believe a rather different Jonah Goldberg, in his book Liberal Fascism, wrote that progressivism desires to keep the populace constantly on a war footing without actually requiring the war. To be rather explicit about that:

Or, as Agamben and others have pointed out, it is a mark of dysfunctional modern governments to try to govern via a constant state of exception that suspends normal constitutional government. For a legal example of that, as I type this the United States apparently has 41 separate national emergency declarations that are still in effect, the oldest never-rescinded one dating back to 1979.

What more to say except that you’re either going to let yourself be led from panic to panic for the rest of your life, or at some point you recognize the game being played on you.

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