APOCRYPHAL APOCALYPSES: PUTTING DEPLORABLES IN THEIR PLACE

“Apocalypse Now” doesn’t spook millennials given what they can see with their own eyes and the impossibility of avoiding destruction, but a global warming/climate change cataclysm in twelve years is sufficiently distant for kids near twenty as to be both believable and politically motivating.  Thus the rationale for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s climatological foray into the end times—a venture that is three parts political hokum and one part rehashed Gore blather.

Predictions about the apocalypse have a long history.  The year 1000 A.D. had a nice millennial rationale for terminating history, so much so that an anti-Christian 19^th century French historian, Jules Michelet, related a plethora of cases about benighted believers who awaited the final trumpet blast with a mixture of fear and expectation.  Michelet’s anti-clerical successors “added macabre and colorful details” to the mix, suggesting “that greedy churchmen had encouraged millennial fears deliberately so that people would give their material possessions to the church in hopes of salvation.”  These tales that were created to impugn religion as a baseless superstition now permeate the “educated” West.  Unfortunately for Michelet and his secular disciples, as later research would reveal (cf. Professor Peter Stearns) there was no widespread use in Europe of the calendar that for us designates the year 1000 A.D.  At most, there may have been a heightened sense of apocalyptic urgency in the decades before and after our Y1K.

   

Another apocalypse of sorts was loosed upon the West by the English economist Thomas Malthus in 1798.  His “Essay on the Principle of Population” made the mathematically bolstered prediction that population would inevitably outstrip society’s capacity to produce food, thus leading to a perpetual struggle for survival among the poor who would “be with us always.”  This vision was music to the ears of Charles Darwin and paved the way for his “survival of the fittest” theory of species development.  The twentieth century’s zero-population growth movement (ZPG) also found inspiration in the writings of the man who gave to economics its unwanted disciplinary moniker:  “the gloomy science.”  Not content to live with a scenario of endless poverty, ZPG upped the apocalyptic stakes so much that it foretold birth control by any means necessary!  These anti-begetting zealots must be tickled pink by the abortion-till-uterine-exodus law recently celebrated by New York’s Governor Cuomo.   And they doubtless view “Ethics” Professor Peter Singer’s proposal of “abortion” up to 30 days after birth (i.e. infanticide) as a positive step toward creating a pleasant utilitarian killing field.  

Never mind that Malthus’ prediction was spectacularly wrong—that world poverty has declined precipitously in the last forty years, thanks overwhelmingly to capitalist enterprise in Asia.  Nor have the dystopian predictions of ZPG doomsayers been realized in spite of moderate population growth on the planet.  But failed predictions seldom discourage secular apocalypticists.  Thus, in 1980 environmentalist Paul Ehrlich (The Population Bomb, 1968) made a wager with economist Julian Simon that in ten years the price of five non-government controlled commodities (chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten) would rise based on their increasing scarcity and growing population demand.  Simon, who anticipated a decline in prices, won the bet despite the fact that the globe’s population rose by eight-hundred million during the decade.  That wager was prudent compared to the professor’s other declamations.  In 1970 Ehrlich outdid even Malthus by predicting that population would so outstrip food supply that “at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next 10 years.”  That same year Ehrlich foretold “the Great Die-Off” in the decade of the 80s. Four billion people worldwide and sixty-five million Americans would perish.  Instead of “Mourning in America” what we actually got was “Morning in America” and the collapse of the economically, ecologically, and morally benighted Soviet Empire.  Amazingly, the 86-year-old Ehrlich is unrepentant and has not only jumped on the “climate change” bandwagon but also joined the anti-consumer, low-nutrient, low sperm count, end of civilization leftist brigades.      

As for Ehrlich’s cataclysmic soul-mate, Al Gore, the fact that ocean levels and global temperatures have increased by piddling amounts over the last twelve years, that polar bears are thriving, that the Gulf Stream is going strong, that Mt. Kilimanjaro is still snow-capped, that there’s been no significant increase in extreme weather events since the former VP’s dire predictions in 2006 (a finding that even the U.N.’s  Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admitted in 2013 based on data extending to the mid-20^th century) —none of that has discouraged the carbon-credit-guzzling, now super-wealthy Gore from peddling an apocalypse just beyond the horizon.  Nor has it fazed AOC, who has probably never heard of, much less read, MIT climatologist Richard Lindzen or other prominent “Climate Deniers.”  After all, for AOC the “facts” don’t matter.  Instead, it’s all about the “morality” of government control.  As former Colorado Senator Timothy Wirth confessed in an unguarded moment way back in 1988, “Even if the theory of global warming is wrong . . . we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”  In short, as long as the government can compel folks to do what Wirth and Gore and AOC want them to do, who cares what scare tactics are employed to put Deplorables in their place.

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle