Crushing Our Spirits

George Monbiot is at it again. Earlier he attacked the “neoliberals”, claiming that they serve the interests of the ultra-rich. Now, it is the turn on Objectivists. He writes in “The Guardian”, on the Copenhagen Climate Summit: “The summit’s premise is that the age of heroism is over. …This is a meeting about chemicals: the greenhouse gases insulating the atmosphere. But it is also a battle between two world views…. The angry men know that this golden age has gone; but they cannot find the words for the constraints they hate Clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy …. I fear this chorus of bullies.”

Robert Tracinski has written a brilliant post on Monbiots article in Real Clear Politics:

“Monbiot is right about the big question, even if he's on the wrong side of it. The goal of the environmentalist movement is not anything so trivial as capping our carbon. It's about crushing our spirits. It's about breaking the ambition of man the achiever-the explorer, the adventurer, the discoverer, the builder-and replacing him with man the meek, a modest little paper-shuffler constrained to live a small, inoffensive existence.”

“Monbiot's message is the same as Toohey's. He describes his opponents as "angry," but his whole column seethes with resentment at the independent man who defies social conformity-who the hell does he think he is? To dress up this ugly motive, Monbiot keeps saying that we need to be "restrained" in order to keep us from "trampling on the lives of others." But isn't trampling on our lives exactly what he advocates? He offers a scheme for universal control, not just of the economy, but of the human spirit itself. Behind everything he says is the motive Toohey confesses as the goal of his crusade against the independent man: "I don't want to kill him. I want him in jail.... Locked, stopped, strapped-and alive.... And he'll obey. He'll take orders. He'll take orders!"”

“Monbiot's column is environmentalism's real-life equivalent of Toohey's confession, and it indicates that what is at stake in the fight over global warming is much more than economics. Today's "progressives" have become the supreme reactionaries. They stand athwart history-the history of man's ascent from the cave to the stars-yelling "stop!" What is at stake is the survival of the human aspiration to achieve-and that is what we have to save from the environmentalists.”