Crichton the novelist was on C-Span just now. I didn't get all of it, so there's gaps. But the gist I think was clear.
If we have to lie to each other to pave the way for the ascension of the New Masters, we must certainly do so. This is too urgent a moment for the truth to hold full sway, our moral compasses must be set toward that one goal only - the apotheosis of the...
Well, I'm not sure what it is exactly that's being apotheosisized, that's the problem; and I think that obscurity's part of the campaign - hide behind the women and kids until it's safe to proclaim your collective New Masterhood, then assert it when it's too late for the deadwood to raise an objection.
So we/they have to do these things, follow these moral directives, absorb these pragmatic pseudo-facts and act on them, to protect our women and kids.
Crichton never came near saying anything even remotely close to that of course. What he did say that first caught my ear was that the computerized climate-modeling that has produced the electrifying news releases of the last few weeks - that we're in the beginning of a cycle of climate disruption right now and that it's going to get much worse than has been predicted - Crichton says those studies are trivial and inaccurate, they've been flawed into triviality, and gives as his reason that they lack the "double-blind" controls of proper experimental research.
As Crichtom explains it, all these climate guys know each other and use the same computer programs, plus they hang out. So they're influencing each other, and the bad news they come up with is politically-motivated - the result of a consensus, an agenda - not unbiased research.
Later on in his talk, he turned to the subject of human "manipulation of complex systems" - by which term he seems to have meant human domination of everything - starting with so-called "nature" and moving on to the weather and gathering up all the loose ends in between.
He asks the rhetorical question "Can we manage complex natural systems?" and answers in the bold affirmative. Can-Do!
To prove this arrantly hubristic assertion he cites the work of Dieter Somebody [I couldn't get the surname], in Germany, using a bunch of computers and working very very hard. Sadly, Crichton neglected to cite the double-blind controls Dieter S. used to come to his anti-mainstream-climate-science conclusions. We'll be taking that on faith I guess.
Somewhere in the firmly-bounded smoothly flowing irrigation canal of his C-Span presentation Crichton asked "Is there a 'balance of nature'?" And answered himself firmly - "No."
Asserting that Earth Day was the result of this core belief in a harmony of forces being necessary to sustain life, he proceeded to lay waste to it with his terrible calm sword.
He said the idea that "leaving nature alone" in damaged natural landscapes - withdrawing human presence to allow the return of non-anthropocentric dynamics - is good - is bad. He said that there are more old-growth forests in California now than there were in 1850.
Whups.
He did say that, on national TV, and he said it very very clearly.
Rather than approaching that controversial fact-o-rella from an arboreal, or sylvan, perspective, but coming from more of a logical kind of a take on it - is Crichton saying we can say that old-growth forests may be only 150 years old? Or less? Or is that the minimum? Can they be 100 years old? 75?
Because otherwise how did California get more old-growth forests in 150 years? Were they imported? From another dimension?
He said that the Yellowstone area is a worse place now than it was before it became a national park. He said raw sewage oozes up from the ground there. He didn't explain how the withdrawal of human presence would worsen the conditions in Yellowstone - a tenet of his faith again, something you believe or you don't - logic is not central to this; but then at the same time Crichton's whole trip is about him being Mr. Logic.
Then he said the natives had hunted the buffalo and elk there at Yellowstone to near extinction. That that's why Yellowstone was looking so good, to humans, at the beginning, when they decided to make it a park, he said. The meta-point being that the "natural"-living Indians had disrupted the ecology in a very damaging way, but a cute way just the same - pleasant to look upon it was.
I'm assuming the Indians he's talking about had guns and horses. I'm also assuming he can't possibly be asserting that bison were nearing extinction on the Great Plains before the arrival of Europeans.
He also said that it doesn't work to manage complex systems according to a philosophical point of view.
I think what he really meant by that is - approaching the management of complex systems with a prejudicial view formed by untested and unproven received ideas - doesn't work.
The trouble is I don't believe human beings are capable of acting without a philosophical p.o.v. Anytime.
Identifying the operant philosophy may be difficult or impossible, the humans in question may have no clear idea what their philosophy is, they may shift their phil. p.o.v.'s to suit their appetites and desires, but there will always be a philosophy working there, and it will always have shaped their point of view.
What Crichton really means is: approaching complex systems with a philosophical p.o.v. that is not aligned with the dominance of the universe by a power to which he is himself aligned and to which he has consecrated his children, won't work.
Crichton's philosophy seems to be out of the Ayn Rand School of Triumphalist Exceptionalism - relatively genially-explained, but potentially violent sociopathic responses to anything that threatens their agenda of total world domination.
Or, put more calmly - men and women who want to run the world and won't tolerate anything getting in their way.
Seeing morality as transcending biology allows this manipulation of philosophy to take place mostly out of sight. But as Cricthon makes all too plain - morality, which is a kind of philosophic point of view, has no place in something as crucial as the domination/management of complex systems such as the weather, or the oceans, or, come to that, the entire planet and all its myriad, and potential, lives.
