Living a Leftist Dream

Young demonstrators hold placards as they attend a climate change protest opposite the Houses of Parliament in central London on Feb. 15, 2019. Ben Stansall/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing; they then become capable of believing in anything.” (Anon, but ascribed to G.K. Chesterton)

“... it is not possible to pierce the mystery of the religious mind, the religious conscience of another, with the sword of logic.” (Eugenio Zolli)

As Chesterton saw, and the great English historian Christopher Dawson likewise insisted, when belief in the Divine is forgotten or thrust aside, civilization is doomed, and the world goes mad. Everything is skewed. Dreams become nightmares.

The modern left is stacked with people who manage to believe any number of unseen and impossible things and who have left sense perception far behind.

To understand how their minds work, we need to recognize that these are religious people by temperament, though lacking any faith in God, and that, like the worst kind of religious people in every age, they can be vicious and intolerant heresy hunters.

To such people, climate change is an “existential threat.”

They have persuaded themselves that it poses a mortal danger to our actual survival, and they have convinced others, especially the young and less well educated, to fall in with them.

A woman prays at the cathedral of Lisieux, northwestern France, on May 15, 2018. Charly Triballeau/AFP via Getty Images

But there are greater existential threats: abortion and contraception are far more dangerous.

By contraception, I’m not pushing the reactionary Catholic button and talking about specific chemical or physical prophylactics. I’m talking about the general and deliberate avoidance of large families, restricting them to one or two children—or none at all—so that population growth falls below the rate necessary to maintain its numbers.

Now that seriously is an existential threat, an extinction scenario!

The people of China and Japan and the “first nations” people of some countries are at last coming to recognise the peril, though in some cases they’re probably doing too little too late to avert catastrophe.

More Instances Are Not Hard to Find

So-called gender fluidity is based on nothing in the visible world, human or animal. If there were any truth in it our agricultural industries would be in big trouble.

And in human terms, have you noticed that when archaeologists excavate bodies, they’re always either male or female? There’s no third (or fourth or fifth) option in the farm yard, or on the archaeological dig, or in the chromosome count.

How can people who deny the existence of the soul talk about being born into the wrong body? To believe such things you have to be some kind of mystic, even if a somewhat deranged one.

It used to be thought eccentric to admire the naked emperor’s new clothes, but in the last few years we’ve learned that it’s sometimes dangerous not to.

With due caution, I want to touch on the emerging mythology around the “First Nations” people in Australia.

I tell you with pride that I was one of the 91 percent who voted YES in the 1967 referendum, which asked if we should remove racist references to Australia’s indigenous people. I recall nothing but sympathy and goodwill towards Aboriginal people in my school days.

Younger people who weren’t there tell me I’m dreaming—making it up or lying—because they’ve seen a far worse situation unfolding in recent decades.

Yes, relations between the two communities have worsened, and Aboriginal elders are getting worried about the rising number of false or unfounded claims about aboriginal identity because, frankly, cultural appropriation can pay well.

This has got to be stopped in the interests of truth, and in fairness to the genuine Aboriginal community.

Indigenous Australian looks on after watching the live televsion broadcast from Australian Parliament in Canberra where Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered an apology to the Aboriginal people, in Sydney, Australia, on Feb. 13, 2008. Kristian Dowling/Getty Images

Other instances are legion. Island nations in the Pacific and Indian Oceans are said to be in danger of inundation.

Yet carefully maintained sea level records from various stations on the Pacific rim are inconclusive: for example, mean sea level records at Sydney’s Fort Denison show little change over the past 100 years.

Many reports of rising sea levels also fail to factor in rises and falls in land surfaces relative to the centre of the earth, movements which can clearly impact apparent sea level readings.

The Maldives are often cited as a threatened nation, yet their own government website reports an increase in land area in recent years. Is this due to reclamation from the sea—or have they just built on an upper storey? I think we know the answer to that one.

Time Will Bring Them to Reality

Many on the hard left can be best understood if we recognize them as sort of rogue platonists, temperamentally religious people for whom an imaginary world is more important than the world of facts and statistics.

Such people are, of course, ‘useful idiots’, manipulated by hard-line activists who haven’t got a platonic bone in their bodies.

Yet the godless mystics deserve our kindness not our anger. And our prayers, too, if that’s our inclination.

But if we want to combat them effectively reasoning alone won’t work. We need to be wary but also kind: we are treading on their dreams. We can’t win by persuasion.

Time will probably bring a tough solution as reality bites. Self-imposed energy restrictions will devastate the economies of Western countries that lived life on the hog throughout the second half of the 20th century.

The kind of mentality that refuses to use its own coal or uranium but is okay with exporting it for others to use is eventually going to wake up to its own folly without any prompting from us.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.