Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Mead on Gore, 3

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/07/01/the-failure-of-al-gore-part-three-singing-the-climate-blues/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+WalterRussellMead+%28Walter+Russell+Mead%27s+Blog%29
The serial rise and fall of these vacuous civil society movements and the peculiar grip they exercise over the minds of some otherwise intelligent people is an important subject: why do so many people who want to help solve global problems waste so much time and money and, sometimes, do so much harm?  Is there some way to harness that energy and idealism to causes and strategies that might do more good?  What does the repeated rise and fall of clueless but well educated and well placed enthusiasts teach us about the state of our civilization and the human condition?  Are there ways we could nip these Malthusian panics and idealistic feeding frenzies in the bud?  Is there some way we could teach future generations to be a little smarter about politics and power so that the 21st century, which is going to have plenty of serious problems, might spend less time chasing mares’ nests?


The trouble and even the tragedy of Al Gore is that he comes at the tail end of this tradition; he is a living example of what you get when a worldview outlives its time.  He presses the old buttons and turns the old cranks, but the machine isn’t running any more.  The priests dance around the altar, the priestess chews the sacred herbs, but the god no longer speaks.  Like President Obama watching a universal healthcare program that he thought would secure his place in history turn into an electoral albatross and a policy meltdown, Al Gore thought that in the climate issue he had picked a winning horse.  Judging from his Rolling Stone essay he has no idea why the climate movement failed, and no clue at all about how he could re-think the issue.


Beyond the South, the idea of better governance through specially trained and impartial experts has been losing favor from one end of the United States to the other.  In 1911, only a handful of Americans had a college education.  Southern sharecroppers and northern mill workers had little education and little leisure time for politics.  Today growing numbers of Americans resent and reject the tutelage of well meaning elites — and they view with suspicion the claims of ‘experts’ to be dispassionate and disinterested custodians of the public good.  They don’t see civil servants as unselfish and apolitical experts who can be trusted to regulate and rule; they see them as a lobby like any other, a special interest more interested in preserving fat pensions and easy working conditions — and at foisting their own ideological hobby horses and preferences on the public at large.


The public at large increasingly sees journalists as entertainers rather than arbiters.



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