An excellent article From The Australian
Elitism should not be a dirty word
Peter Saunders | August 13, 2007
WHEN 19th century liberals such as John Stuart Mill made the case for extending individual liberties, they argued it on moral grounds. They believed human beings are put on Earth with talents and potentials which they are meant to develop and exploit to the full, so they urged us to improve ourselves by becoming better educated and more enlightened. To achieve this, they understood we needed to be free.
In the 19th century there were many restrictions on freedom that hindered people from fulfilling their potential. Some of the worst were enforced by law: women, for example, could not own property, had no vote and were legally subordinated to men. Mill and other liberals saw such laws as indefensible, and they fought to have them changed.
Other restrictions were derived from people's social or economic circumstances rather than from discriminatory legal rules. The children of the poor, for example, were often expected to work from an early age, which made it difficult to get a proper education. This limited their opportunities for self-improvement, so children of labourers often grew up tobecome labourers themselves, even if they had the talent to achieve greater things.
Recognising these problems, liberals came to understand that legal equality may not be enough to enable people to fulfil their potential. What is also needed is access to an adequate education and a basic level of material resources so individuals can put their talents to good effect.
Today, most of the restrictions that limited people's opportunities in the past have weakened or disappeared. Race and gender discrimination are both outlawed. A minimum of 10 years' free schooling is guaranteed to every child. The welfare state delivers a basic level of income security and health care to everybody. Competition for jobs is relatively open, and corruption is minimal. There are still inequalities, of course, but if you are bright and strongly motivated, there is little to stop you succeeding.
Yet something is still hindering many of us from developing and fully exploiting our potential. The problem is no longer that we lack opportunity, it is rather that fewer demands are being made of us.
The opportunities are in place but the expectations have been lowered, and because less is demanded, we settle for less and our lives are less fulfilled as a consequence.
In a democratic age, egalitarianism has been redefined as mediocrity. The belief that Jack is as good as his master used to be a liberating idea, encouraging people to strive to succeed no matter what their origins. But the belief that lazy, ignorant Jack watching television all day is as good as his neighbour working all hours to get qualified or build a business is not liberating, it is a recipe for envy, sloth and passivity.
This perverted version of egalitarianism holds that the world owes us a living even if we make no effort to better ourselves. It emphasises our rights but has nothing to say about our obligations. It makes excuses for bad behaviour and derides those who try to maintain high standards. It encourages envy of those who succeed and it treats failure not as a spur to try harder but as evidence of victimisation requiring compensation and special treatment.
Today's egalitarianism makes us reluctant to judge or evaluate people's actions, even when some are clearly better than others. Welfare agencies refuse to discriminate between responsible people who fall on hard times and claimants who bring about their own misfortune through reckless, short-sighted or self-destructive behaviour.
Teachers feel uncomfortable grading students' performances, and they push increasing numbers of low-ability students into university while denying the inevitable dilution in standards this entails.
Psychologists stay silent rather than acknowledge evidence on the deleterious effects of single parenting and the decline of marriage; criminologists prevaricate rather than condemn law-breakers; even theologians hedge on the existence of good and evil. As standards crash, the experts have gone into denial.
Nineteenth-century liberals urged us to improve ourselves, and many working-class people did just that, forming educational associations, creating mutual aid clubs, sending their children to Sunday school to learn about morality. But today's egalitarianism panders to the lowest standards rather than demanding the highest.
TV is a major culprit. Chasing a mass audience in an age of multiple channels has led inevitably to cheap and dumbed-down content: Paris Hilton's drug habit, Shane Warne's love life, an exposed penis on Big Brother.
Crude and vulgar language which was never heard on TV is now indulged with a wry smile. Meanwhile, youngsters exchange videos of fights and sexual assaults recorded on mobile phones, and hard-core pornography dominates the internet.
In the 19th century, Mill warned against weighing the opinions of ignorant people equally with those of the best-informed, for people who make no effort to accumulate wisdom should not expect the respect of their peers. But today, ignorance is prized.
We oblige ignorant people to vote, and we enlist them to serve on juries, kidding ourselves that their judgment is just as valuable as anyone's else's. Then we act surprised when it turns out voters have no idea what the parties stand for, and that jurors are clueless about the cases they hear (research on Sydney jurors last year found many did not even know what verdict they had just delivered).
Politicians talk down to us like children, assuming (rightly in many cases) that they can buy our votes with handouts rather than winning our support with arguments. And on TV, they try to act dumb. Before he got the Labor leadership, hacks speculated that Kevin Rudd was too clever to be elected, but larking around on Friday mornings with Mel and Kochie on Channel 7 helped him over that obstacle. On Channel 9 recently, Health Minister Tony Abbott ridiculed himself for using the phrase "supping with the devil" after he realised nobody else in the studio had heard the term before. The worst thing for a politician is to stand out from the mob and set a standard. American research finds that candidates in presidential debates are using increasingly simple, child-like language as the years unfold. The Gettysburg address cannot compete with a 10-second sound bite.
There is only one area of modern life where we still celebrate excellence, demand high standards, insist on the virtues of competition and devote ourselves to self-improvement, and that is sport. The home page of the Australian Institute of Sport unashamedly uses the word elite three times in its opening paragraph.
Search the websites of our leading universities and almost the only place you will find them claiming elite status is in relation to the sporting achievements of their athletes.
So we are happy to praise elitism in sport but not, it seems, in areas of life that arguably matter much more.
John Stuart Mill must be spinning in his grave.
Peter Saunders is the social research director at the Centre for Independent Studies. He will chair a CIS Big Ideas Forum, "In Praise of Elitism", at the NSW Supreme Court in Sydney today.
Monday, August 13, 2007
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Maybe the sun IS the problem?
Nigel Calder: Relax, it's only the sun
- February 20, 2007
WHEN politicians and journalists declare that the science of global warming is settled, they show a regrettable ignorance about how science works. We were treated to another dose of it recently when the experts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued the Summary for Policymakers that puts the political spin on an unfinished scientific dossier on climate change, which is due for publication in a few months' time.
They declared that most of the rise in temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to man-made greenhouse gases.
The small print explains very likely as meaning that the experts who made the judgment felt 90 per cent sure about it. Older readers may recall a press conference at Harwell in 1958 when John Cockcroft, Britain's top nuclear physicist, said he was 90 per cent certain that his lads had achieved controlled nuclear fusion.
It turned out that he was wrong.
More positively, a 10 per cent uncertainty in any theory is a wide open breach for any latter-day Galileo or Einstein to storm through with a better idea.
That is how science really works.
Twenty years ago, climate research became politicised in favour of one particular hypothesis, which redefined the subject as the study of the effect of greenhouse gases. As a result, the rebellious spirits essential for innovative and trustworthy science are greeted with impediments to their research careers.
And while the media usually find mavericks at least entertaining, in this case they often imagine that anyone who doubts the hypothesis of man-made global warming must be in the pay of the oil companies. As a result, some key discoveries in climate research go almost unreported.
Enthusiasm for the global-warming scare also ensures that heatwaves make headlines, while contrary symptoms, such as this winter's billion-dollar loss of Californian crops to unusual frost, are relegated to the business pages.
The early arrival of migratory birds in spring provides colourful evidence for a recent warming of the northern lands. But did anyone tell you that in east Antarctica the Adelie penguins and Cape petrels are turning up at their spring nesting sites around nine days later than they did 50 years ago? While sea-ice has diminished in the Arctic since 1978, it has grown by 8 per cent in the Southern Ocean.
So one awkward question you can ask, when you're forking out those extra taxes for climate change, is "Why is east Antarctica getting colder?" It makes no sense at all if carbon dioxide is driving global warming. The best measurements of global air temperatures come from American weather satellites, and they show wobbles but no overall change since 1999.
That levelling off is just what is expected by the chief rival hypothesis, which says that the sun drives climate changes more emphatically than greenhouse gases do. After becoming much more active during the 20th century, the sun now stands at a high but roughly level state of activity. Solar physicists warn of possible global cooling, should the sun revert to the lazier mood it was in during the Little Ice Age 300 years ago.
Climate history and related archeology give solid support to the solar hypothesis. The 20th-century episode, or Modern Warming, was just the latest in a long string of similar events produced by a hyperactive sun, of which the last was the Medieval Warming.
The Chinese population doubled then, while in Europe the Vikings and cathedral-builders prospered.
Fascinating relics of earlier episodes come from the Swiss Alps, with the rediscovery in 2003 of a long-forgotten pass used intermittently whenever the world was warm.
What does the Intergovernmental Panel do with such emphatic evidence for an alternation of warm and cold periods, linked to solar activity and going on long before human industry was a possible factor?
Less than nothing. The 2007 Summary for Policymakers boasts of cutting in half a very small contribution by the sun to climate change conceded in a 2001 report. Disdain for the sun goes with a failure by the self-appointed greenhouse experts to keep up with inconvenient discoveries about how the solar variations control the climate.
The sun's brightness may change too little to account for the big swings in the climate. But more than 10 years have passed since Henrik Svensmark in Copenhagen first pointed out a much more powerful mechanism.
He saw from compilations of weather satellite data that cloudiness varies according to how many atomic particles are coming in from exploded stars. More cosmic rays, more clouds.
The sun's magnetic field bats away many of the cosmic rays, and its intensification during the 20th century meant fewer cosmic rays, fewer clouds, and a warmer world. On the other hand the Little Ice Age was chilly because the lazy sun let in more cosmic rays, leaving the world cloudier and gloomier.
The only trouble with Svensmark's idea - apart from its being politically incorrect - was that meteorologists denied that cosmic rays could be involved in cloud formation.
After long delays in scraping together the funds for an experiment, Svensmark and his small team at the Danish National Space Centre hit the jackpot in the summer of 2005.
In a box of air in the basement, they were able to show that electrons set free by cosmic rays coming through the ceiling stitched together droplets of sulphuric acid and water.
These are the building blocks for cloud condensation. But journal after journal declined to publish their report; the discovery finally appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society late last year.
Thanks to having written The Manic Sun, a book about Svensmark's initial discovery published in 1997, I have been privileged to be on the inside track for reporting his struggles and successes since then.
The outcome is a second book, The Chilling Stars, co-authored by the two of us. We are not exaggerating, we believe, when we subtitle it: A New Theory of Climate Change.
Where does all that leave the impact of greenhouse gases? Their effects are likely to be a good deal less than advertised, but nobody can really say until the implications of the new theory of climate change are more fully worked out.
The reappraisal starts with Antarctica, where those contradictory temperature trends are directly predicted by Svensmark's scenario, because the snow there is whiter than the cloud-tops. Meanwhile, humility in face of nature's marvels seems more appropriate than arrogant assertions that we can forecast and even control a climate ruled by the sun and the stars.
Nigel Calder is a former editor of the New Scientist. This is an extract from The Sunday Times in London.
Friday, February 09, 2007
Moral Pollution
The Church and the environment: address the moral pollution first
Recently in Rome, Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa, Pontifical Household preacher, gave a commentary on the well known passage in Mark's Gospel (7:1-23) in which Jesus raises the question: what defiles a man?
He points out, what is often drawn out from this passage, that Christ is critical of those those who attach more weight to external gestures and rites than to the heart's dispositions, and who place more importance on "appearing" good rather than on being good. Here Christ surveys the depths of the human heart in his litany of the defilements that can issue from it.
However, Father Cantalamessa goes beyond this traditional interpretation adapting this passage to our times. He says the distortion Jesus criticised, of giving more importance to external cleanliness than purity of heart, is reproduced today on a worldwide scale, in a preoccupation with the physical defilement of nature while "there is almost absolute silence about interior and moral defilement" (see www.catholic.org/featured/headline.php?ID=3602).
Moral pollution
It is true that many are more preoccupied with the purity of their water than purity itself, with physical pollution of the air more than the moral pollution of their souls.
Father Cantalamessa brings home this point when he remarks, "We are indignant on seeing marine birds emerging from waters contaminated with petroleum stains, covered with tar and unable to fly, but we do not show the same concern for our children, vitiated and spent at an early age because of the mantle of wickedness that already extends to every aspect of life".
He refers here to children who actually made it out of their mothers' wombs, who are then subjected to moral pollutants as others look on. This is not to mention the many children who do not make it beyond the womb having been killed by toxins that fewer complain about.
In this concern for the environment at the expense of spirit there is a danger, Father Cantalamessa reminds us, of forgetting the ecology of the human heart. In our times it is strange to note the preoccupation on the part of Catholics with natural ecology at the expense of spiritual ecology.
Is this the new form of pharisaism of our era? Have the visible shapes of trees and lakes lulled us into a coma about the inner terrain of our souls? It is not just that the language of the spiritual has been reduced to the physical, with the earth referred to as "sacred" and "holy" while omitting the Creator who made it, and water described as literally "life giving" with no reference to the life of grace without which the soul cannot live.
No it is not just that. It is rather that the greenie cause has mapped out a new religion, what Cardinal Barragan called the "new paradigm" which holds that the highest good is not what the Catechism tells us, but is now to be found in "sustainable development" (Zenit, 11 February 2003).
This pharisaism can be seen in the statements of those who say that climate change, sustainability and survival of the physical earth are the most important issues of our era. These issues are central to the new global ethic promulgated by the Earth Charter - a master plan whose "final solution" involves the blurring of all religious boundaries and implementing a "green agenda", with population control and universal access to abortion at its core.
In this eco-religion the greatest sin is not to take care of the physical earth. The theological virtues are supplanted by the three ecological virtues: revering the earth, conserving water and signing the Kyoto Protocol.
In an age when Catholics are often under attack, eco-activism can give a sense of social relevance in a society that does not want to hear about those "troublesome other issues", e.g., abortion, embryonic stem cell research, euthanasia and that taboo topic buried under decades of silence, contraception.
In fact there is an ecological terrain which the greenie- theologians have never visited, a virgin territory where the marginalised exist, among them pro-life Catholics, where there are minimal footprints as so few come to visit.
"Cultural" Catholics
It is hardly ever visited by the "social" or "cultural" Catholics who attend baptisms, funerals and weddings, but who can run faster than Speedy Gonzalez whenever the 'A' word is raised, not to mention barbeque-destroying topics like post- abortion grief, the frozen orphan- ages of surplus IVF embryos and the new weapon of mass destruction RU-486.
One is certainly more socially popular if one sticks to externals, denounces climate change and advocates love of the visible environment than if one exhorts love for the invisible child threatened with abortion in the womb.
Perhaps the social sin in our age is indifference to the greatest ever ecological assault on the vulnerable: in the abortion holocaust, in the frozen orphanages (the ultimate "stolen generation" if ever there was one) and euthanasia. Perhaps our era prefers to tend the trees outside our Auschwitzs and not listen to the muted cries of people within the wall.
But says US Monsignor Reilly, founder of the Helpers of God's Precious Infants, of his silent prayer vigils outside abortion clinics, there is a time and place to "shine the spotlight" on the new Calvaries where the dying is occurring. As an example he cites the Blessed Virgin who did not weep at home or in a synagogue at the time Christ was crucified on Calvary but stood where he was dying till the end.
In highlighting environmental degradation at the expense of moral degradation, eco-activists forget that it is possible to love trees and not be a formal greenie, to be a Catholic and not support the Kyoto Protocol, to care for whales and the "web of life" and yes, also pray outside abortion clinics.
Spiritual ecology
There is a spiritual ecology at the heart of Catholicism much more profound than the physical boundaries of rivers, forests and ozone layers. This ecology begins in acknowledging the transcendence of God and the specific details of what He asks of us through his teaching Church.
It is in the pursuit of personal sanctity that the beginnings of environmental degradation will begin to be addressed. If God holds back rain and makes the innocent suffer because of our sin - as the Gospels unequivocally say He does - it is not the Kyoto Protocol that will reverse this but our recognition that sin is a reality.
Personal sin degrades the environment, the universe. Pope John Paul II's 1990 World Day of Peace statement, much neglected by eco-theologians, says as much: "When man turns his back on the Creator's plan he provokes a disorder which has inevitable repercussions on the rest of the created order".
We need spiritual geographers to remind us of this deeper ecology of the heart. We need to listen to the Elijas of the new millennium pointing out what inner degradation and soul pollutants do.
We need to hear with our inner ears what calls to prayer, fasting and purity mean. And we need to tune into the greatest universal "protocol" of all, the Eucharist, Christ-with-us, and remember that this is the basis of any cosmic "web of life", the ultimate in interconnectedness, the basis of all ecological conversions.
Wanda Skowronska is a registered psychologist living in Sydney.
Reprinted from AD2000 Vol 20 No 1 (February 2007), p. 10
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