The View From 1776

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“The Da Vinci Code” movie is a purely fictional attack on Christianity employing, as part of the background material, one of the gnostic gospels to provide a patina of ancient, secret wisdom powerful enough to unravel existing civilization. 

Mr. Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” goes further, making the gnosticism of his book “Earth in the Balance” the whole content. 

Mr. Gore is the loudest spokesman for an elitist group who are dead certain that only they know the truth, a group prepared to impose their doctrine upon mankind regardless of the costs in human life and well-being.  In that respect, the Gospel of Al follows the pattern of gnostic irruptions from the earliest days of Christianity, through the 18th century advent of socialism.

Mr. Gore unites in a single personality the messianic pretensions of the gnostic mystic and the scientistic (pseudo-scientific) materialism of today’s liberal-socialist theoreticians. 

Karl Marx’s gnostic vision inaccurately predicted the inevitable, revolutionary triumph of socialism.  In the Marxian manner, Mr. Gore, a liberal-socialist, preaches a sweeping, gnostic revelation of earth’s End Times, a catastrophic destruction of life that will befall civilization, if we don’t repent and follow the Gospel of Al. 

Mark your calendars.  The Gospel of Al predicts that the End Times of atheistic materialism will commence in about ten years.

In his book, Mr. Gore writes, “But [writing this book] has also led me to undertake a deeper kind of inquiry, one that is ultimately an investigation of the very nature of our civilization and its relationship to the global environment.” He fears that, “...we will not be able to see how dangerously we are threatening to push the earth out of balance.”

This is the gnostic core: the deep knowledge revealed to Mr. Gore, without which we are doomed.  He stands ready to save civilization, if we will only heed his gospel and accept him as our savior (i.e., elect him President). 

This is remarkably similar to Auguste Comte’s founding The Religion of Humanity in the 1830s.  Comte was confident that he uniquely had fathomed the Immutable Law of History that was propelling civilization into the age of scientific socialism.  He predicted that all of humanity would abandon ancient traditions and forms of government to follow his positivistic philosophy.

To construct his Immutable Law, which has proved somewhat more flexible that he imagined, Comte took fragments of history and reworked them to fit his hypothesis.  Mr. Gore and his greenhouse-gas gang have used the same approach.

Evidence that contradicts the greenhouse-gas hypothesis is removed from consideration.  For example, Mr. Gore’s charts and graphs ignore the Medieval Warm Period, from approximately 1000 AD into the 1300s, and the Little Ice Age, from the late 1300s into the 1800s, both worldwide phenomena.  During the Warm Period, today’s uninhabitable, ice-covered areas of Greenland were cozy enough for Vikings to establish farming colonies.  In the Little Ice Age, glaciers advanced all over the world, in the Swiss Alps crushing whole villages.  Yet Mr. Gore belittles these massive phenomena with jokes. His followers dismiss them as fiction.

Mr. Gore is, of course, free to speak his mind.  The mischief arises from his call for us to repent our sins by abandoning use of fossil fuels and subscribing to the Kyoto Protocol.

When assessing the reliability of Mr. Gore’s all-or-nothing gospel, let’s not forget that the same crowd who now champion Mr. Gore’s word as revelation of gnostic truth were, thirty years ago, equally firmly convinced that the earth faced an imminent disaster from a new ice age.  In its April 28, 1975, edition, Newsweek featured an article titled “The Cooling World.” (see Peter Gwynne’s op-ed article in the Washington Times).

Let’s also not forget that these same liberal-socialists in the 1980s was firmly convinced that President Reagan was about to provoke the Soviet Union into World War III by re-arming the United States and branding the USSR an evil empire.

Becoming followers of the Gospel of Al will entail more than just piously mouthed sentiments.  There will be a real price to pay.

Many studies have documented the enormous economic costs from compliance with the Kyoto standards of CO2 emissions control.  All have demonstrated that the actual costs in lost jobs and reduced standards of living will far outweigh any theoretical benefits.  (See The Kyoto Protocol: an Economic Free Rider Problem).

In an article posted on the Slate website, “New Republic” editor Gregg Easterbrook wrote:

“This raises the troubling fault of “An Inconvenient Truth”: its carelessness about moral argument. Gore says accumulation of greenhouse gases “is a moral issue, it is deeply unethical.” Wouldn’t deprivation also be unethical? Some fossil fuel use is maddening waste; most has raised living standards. The era of fossil energy must now give way to an era of clean energy. But the last century’s headlong consumption of oil, coal, and gas has raised living standards throughout the world; driven malnourishment to an all-time low, according to the latest U.N. estimates; doubled global life expectancy; pushed most rates of disease into decline; and made possible Gore’s airline seat and MacBook, which he doesn’t seem to find unethical.”

A less respectful review of the movie can be found in Wesley Pruden’s column in the Washington Times.

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