“People are never more sincere than when they assume their own moral superiority”
Thomas Sowell
In a way, it’s appropriate that this year’s global climate knees-up is being held in Glasgow, in winter. For those with eyes to see, miserable Glasgie ought to serve as a dire warning of our “net zero” future — especially if Britain’s rolling winter energy crisis leads to more blackouts. More importantly, Glasgow’s sole charm, its renowned “Glasgow Style” Victorian architecture should serve as a sobering lesson in the importance of resisting the wrecking-ball utopianism of “progressives”.
Because, in the 1950s, utopian progressives wanted to literally take a wrecking-ball to the city. Modernist architects convinced that architecture dictated social progress, wanted to sweep away the “relics” of the Industrial Revolution and build a magnificent “progressive” city of steel and concrete. Fortunately, the city planners intervened and reached a compromise: the architectural “treasures” were saved, but the working-class tenements were demolished. Their inhabitants were relocated to distant wastelands of modernist high-rise housing estates.
The working-classes live in squalor completely at odds with the “clean, beautiful and healthy society” the progressive architects had promised. The few remaining tenements, with their large and plentiful rooms and high ceilings, are much sought-after by middle-class hipsters.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose: like the 50s “urban redevelopment” revolution, the climate change revolution is a war of the utopian bourgeoisie — and the working-class are paying for it.
The worldwide planning crusade that despoiled numerous cities and wrecked countless lives in the decades after World War II shows what happens when a single-cause fallacy takes hold […]
Like the architectural determinists of the 20th century, the climate crusaders of the 21st are so convinced of their own righteousness that they minimise the obstacles in their way. The challenge looms so large in their minds that there is no time to consider the details or wait for other solutions to come along.
In the mid-90s, when “global warming” was still confined to the fringes of the meritocrat class, Thomas Sowell published The Vision of the Anointed, Self-congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy.
Sowell writes about the Teflon prophets who promote a view of the world concocted out of fantasy unsupported by evidence and impervious to real-world considerations. They make assertions of a great danger to the whole society, a danger to which the masses of people are oblivious and demand government action to avert impending catastrophe.
Arguments to the contrary are dismissed with disdain as either uninformed, irresponsible, or motivated by unworthy purposes.
The Australian
This is also why the likes of climate activists are always “disappointed” by their climate gabfests: politics, in the real world, is the art of the possible. But climate activists are utopians who don’t deal in the real world. Anything less than everything they want is never enough.
Yet, ultimately, it is the art of the possible which delivers, where all-or-nothing utopianism doesn’t. Utopian activists like Jacinda Ardern win the praise of the climate-botherers by setting “targets” that are nothing more than vanity promises which are never fulfilled. It will be as true of Ardern’s “net zero” promises as it was of Kiwibuild and child poverty. Scott Morrison, on the other hand, “disappoints” by sticking to already set-out, low-expectation targets: which Australia will almost certainly meet, if not exceed (as usual).
Even so, the poorest Australians will be the ones who pay, to appease the utopian fantasies of the utopian green bourgeoisie — every bit as much as the working-class tenement-dwellers of Glasgow.
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