Fear Of Death

From American Thinker

(Liberalism in Australia is synonymous with left politics)

Liberalism and the Fear of Death

By Robin of Berkeley

Like most of you, I have several websites that I read on a daily basis. One of them is Lucianne.com, which is fondly known as Ldot. Last Sunday, I was shocked and deeply saddened to discover that Lucianne Goldberg's oldest son, Joshua, died of a fall at the age of 43. What a tragedy, and the unexpectedness of his passing adds a level of trauma to grief. My heart goes out to Lucianne and her family.

On a personal level, I'm also coping with the horrific news of one of my oldest friends being stricken with a catastrophic disease. So my mind has turned lately to heavy, sobering topics of life and death.

We can't live our lives perpetually thinking of potential losses; this would make our time on earth feel unbearable. However, there are reminders of mortality that startle, such as visiting a website and finding that families, both the Goldbergs and the L Dot family, are grieving. And then there are the personal tragedies that we must face in this all-too-human existence.

A while back, a reader wrote and asked me a question, and my response shocked him. He asked, "On the deepest level, what draws people to progressivism?" I answered this way, "There are so many reasons, but if you're asking me the very deepest one, I think it's the fear of death."

A bit unnerved by my response, the reader said he'd need to think about it. A few months later, though, he wrote back and said he was finding much truth in my unsettling words.

Ernest Becker devoted an entire book to the subject, a Pulitzer Prize winning tome called, The Denial of Death. Becker wrote that while we all know we will die some day, most people live their daily lives in a state of denial. Becker concluded that fear of death shapes every aspect of a person's life.

One might think that my field of psychotherapy is a rare exception, that psychotherapists can speak easily about death. Not true, though most therapists are adept at helping others with their loss and grief. We therapists, like most people, rarely broach the topic of our eventual demise.

I had a fascinating conversation once with a mortuary director, whom I contacted a few years ago after my parents died. Their passing, three weeks apart, blew the curtain off of my own personal denial. I decided I wanted to make my own funeral arrangements in advance in order to spare my loved ones -- and also to exert some control over the inevitable.

I mentioned to the funeral director that my friends were all aghast at the prospect of pre-planning their own burial. She responded that morticians were no different. Few, including herself, had internment plans, preferring not to think about it. What an astonishing example of denial, given that a funeral director is in the business of death and dying!

I mentioned earlier my email exchange with a reader, and how I explained progressivism as denial of death. Let me say more. While most people experience some level of denial, we all know that we will someday die. People may be drawn to the left to create meaning in their lives while they are still alive.

They have no other way to organize this overwhelming existence, to create order out of apparent chaos. By espousing leftist ideals and worshiping false idols, many progressives have discovered their own unique way to conquer death. Even if leftists profess to be staunch atheists, doubt may lurk; therefore, their activism offers the prospect of redemption.

Many of these progressives would never engage in vicious actions against conservatives, since this would be bad for their karma; I was one of those types, as are all my friends. (Of course, there are also the nihilistic progressives, another breed entirely. Believing that life is inherently meaningless, nihilists may act out, and then take no responsibility for their cruelty.)

It's true that people flock to the left because of misinformation from the MSM. And many progressives follow along, sheep-like, because of brainwashing by schools and the media.

But I think that the attraction to radicalism may go much deeper; being an activist offers a balm for some fearsome existential issues. For many, progressivism meets a basic, human longing to matter, to make a difference in this world before it all passes away.

While conservatives and progressives disagree about pretty much everything, there is one common denominator: everyone who is alive this very moment will one day no longer walk this earth.

Human beings -- Left, Right, and in the Middle -- all understand this truth, at least on some level. The knowledge of our finiteness lurks right under the surface, until, one day, tragedy shatters our illusions.

But the difference is that most conservatives have a well-worn path to liberation, with an ancient blueprint and a Savior to guide them. No so with those leftists who have rejected ultimate truth.

It's no wonder then that they embrace the Gospel of Liberalism. What other means do they have to still the voice of disquietude and to shine a faint light onto the darkness?

A frequent American Thinker contributor, Robin is a recovering liberal and a psychotherapist in Berkeley. Robin's articles are intended to entertain and inform, not to offer psychotherapeutic advice or diagnoses.

Climate Change

Article from the The Australian 7thFeb2010

History of science shows consensus can be mistaken

FEW things have more bedevilled the debate about global warming than the question of scientific consensus. About what the scientific consensus on the subject is, and about what degree of deference should be paid to scientific consensus as such. Both debates have been seriously aggravated by two other factors. Global warming seems to have colossal economic implications, which has activated the concerns of many interested parties; and the ecological nature of global warming has stirred up heated ideological passions that go well beyond the science. It's all very well to feel either passionate or sceptical about these matters, but how are we to think clearly about them?

David Weintraub's How Old is the Universe offers five useful clues. The author has nothing to say about climate science and all parties to the climate debate can, therefore, chill out and think dispassionately here.

His general argument is about how we can know the age of the universe. He asks: "How have 400 years of science brought us to this point at which astronomers, cosmologists and physicists can claim that the universe came into existence at a specific moment 13.7 billion years ago? And how much confidence should you have in this statement?"

These are similar to the big questions that need to be asked (and answered) regarding the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis. Just one of his chapters provides the five useful clues to which I referred.

That chapter is about the discovery that the Milky Way is not the whole universe, but actually a very tiny part of it. The early breakthroughs in modern cosmology had been the shift from a geocentric to a heliocentric view of the solar system and then to a realisation, as telescopes became more sophisticated and the understanding of the light spectrum more refined, that there were vastly more stars than anyone had imagined and that they were much farther away than anyone previously guessed.

Among them there were strange phenomena called spiral nebulae, wispy cloud-like formations that called for an explanation. In 1755, the philosopher Immanuel Kant, in his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, speculated that spiral nebulae might be what he called "island universes" outside the Milky Way. A debate about this went on for many decades, but there was no scientific consensus one way or the other.

However, in the first decades of the 20th century, a strong scientific consensus developed that the Milky Way was, in fact, the entire universe. A range of detailed studies in the 1910s by leading astronomers Vesto Slipher, Harlow Shapley and Adrian van Maanen seemed to confirm this. Shapley's work was especially brilliant. He upended the consensus that had reigned since Copernicus that the sun was the centre of the universe, showing that we should see the centre as being 40,000 light years away in the heart of the Milky Way. The debate now appeared to be over: Kant had been wrong. But it turns out he wasn't.

In Weintraub's words: "The steady accumulation of evidence from a decade of work by Slipher, Shapley and van Maanen appeared to have driven the astronomical community toward broad consensus. Spiral nebulae are part of the Milky Way. They are not island universes. The Milky Way encompasses the entire universe." A few years later, new observations proved this consensus completely wrong.

In 1923-24, brilliant young astronomer Edwin Hubble, having collected a great deal of data using the newly commissioned 100-inch telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory, wrote to Shapley to say that it looked as though Andromeda and M33 were well outside the Milky Way. "The straws are all pointing in one direction," he commented, "and it will do no harm to consider the various possibilities involved." Shapley responded with disarming humility, "I do not know whether I am sorry or glad - perhaps both." Quite suddenly, it had been shown that the universe was vastly larger than scientific consensus had allowed.

Weintraub asks, "How had the astronomy community, including Slipher, van Maanen and Shapley, been led so far astray?" Slipher, he points out, had made some good measurements but had misinterpreted them and also made statements that were "rash and not supported by sufficient evidence". Van Maanen's measurements had been simply incorrect. "Eager to discover what he believed must be true, he misled himself, finding the answers he thought should be in his data rather than the answers truly revealed by his photographs." Shapley had actually made "excellent measurements, but he did not make enough of them". Incredibly, he concludes, despite all these errors in trying to bring closure to the island universe debate, the research of Slipher and Shapley was to actually help provide the basis for the next momentous step in Hubble's research: the discovery that the universe was not only enormously larger than the Milky Way, but was expanding.

How does all this help in regard to the climate science debate? First, it shows that we are justified in being wary of foreclosing major debates based on scientific consensus, since it can be in error. Second, it shows that the way to challenge and correct scientific consensus is not through polemic or denial, but through specifying crucial variables and deductions and testing them scrupulously, in the manner of Hubble. Third, it shows that there is, nonetheless, such a thing as scientific consensus and that when handled in the manner just described, it tends to prove self-correcting. Fourth, it shows that ideally such correction will occur, as it did between Hubble and Shapley, on the basis of lucid examination of "the various possibilities". Finally, it shows that overwhelmingly human beings have always lived oblivious to the truth about the natural world and that only exacting and brilliant science has been able to discover what that truth is. In the climate science debate, we would all benefit from taking note of these five lessons as we seek to develop a rational consensus on the subject.

Paul Monk is co-founder of Austhink Consulting, the author of The West in a Nutshell: Foundations, Fragilities, Futures (2009), and a regular media commentator on public and international affairs.