Science of snobbery
Brendan O'Neill
GEORGE Monbiot, The Guardian columnist and predictor of the world's end, has undergone a metamorphosis of Kafkaesque proportions in recent years.
Some time during the past five years he went to bed a hysteric and awoke to find himself labeled a man of reason, a "defender of truth" no less, who is praised on the dust-jacket of his latest book for possessing a "dazzling command of science" (only by Naomi Klein, admittedly, but still).
His metamorphosis from green-tinted despiser of all things modern to man with a "dazzling command of science" reveals a great deal about the politics of environmentalism and how it has added a gloss of scientific fact to longstanding middle-class prejudices against mass modern society.
Pre-metamorphosis, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Monbiot penned mad-sounding tracts that said flying across the Atlantic was more evil than child abuse (eh?) and described how man-made flight would contribute to a climate calamity that would make "genocide and ethnic cleansing look like sideshows at the circus of human suffering". Back then, Monbiot was simply a shrill articulator of petty dinner-party prejudices: car drivers are selfish; fecund families are dangerous; supermarkets are evil; city workers are slaves and possibly even mentally ill. Pop into any soirée in the leafy suburbs of Britain and you will hear people saying similar things over their Nigella Lawson-inspired main course.
Yet now, after the metamorphosis, he's treated seriously (by some) as "one of the best informed people on the planet".
The metamorphosis of Monbiot is telling. It shows, in microcosm, how the politics and science of environmentalism have added a new, legitimizing coating to elite fears and prejudices. The most striking thing about the rise and rise (and rise) of the environmentalist ethos is how it has acted as a life support machine for the political and cultural elites' contempt for the lifestyles of the lower orders and how it has added a new scientific end of the world twist to the authorities' attempts to manage, control and change our behavior and expectations.
In our postmodern, anything-goes, Oprah-ised, non-judgmental era, it is increasingly difficult for elite elements to lay down the law on what is right or wrong, or to induce guilt and shame in the wayward masses, or to make nakedly moral judgments about the apparently soulless, greedy populace. Instead, ostensible scientific fact - "evidence" about individuals' disgusting impact on their surroundings - has become the main means through which the elites hector us and police our behavior.
Slowly, inexorably, instinctively, the apparently fact-driven politics of environmentalism has spread to fill the gap left by the collapse of traditional morality.
Everywhere one looks, longstanding snooty prejudices are being "scientised"; old-fashioned hatred for mass behavior is being replaced by new, superbly convenient scientific facts that apparently show - on spreadsheets, graphs and pie charts, no less - that mass behavior is quantifiably, unfalsifiably, unquestionably harmful. For example, a certain breed of middle-class writer and thinker has always hated the consumer society and the masses who patronize it. They talked about the rat-race and of the masses' brainless dash to buy more and more stuff they don't need.
Today, a new diagnosable, scientifically provable illness has emerged to describe the stupidity of the masses: "affluenza". Serious writers, researchers and policymakers claim that years of fact-gathering and scientific-style study proves that the rat-race and the stuff race makes people mentally ill.
Likewise, snobs have always detested mass tourism, all of those thousands of good-for-nothings tramping to some beach or to an unfortunate foreign city.
When British workers first started venturing to the English seaside in the 1870s, thanks to one Thomas Cook, an outraged writer declared: "Of all noxious animals, the most noxious is a tourist."
This prejudice, too, has been scientised. The idea of the mass tourist as noxious, that is, "harmful to living things, injurious to health", has been rehabilitated through the science of environmentalism. Now tourists are seen as literally noxious, farting out smog and poisons from their cheap flights.
Similarly, middle-class disdain for supermarkets and their cheap and garish wares (old Monbiot wrote of how the supermarkets were putting small shops out of business) is today expressed in the extremely dubious science of food miles: the distance a foodstuff travels and thus how much it affects the environment, before it hits the shelves.
Yet the "food miles" category is not an accurate scientific measurement of the impact of food production on the climate; it is a moral judgment about the right and wrong way of producing and consuming things. Old snobbery about overly fecund families, especially in the sex-mad Third World, has been given a new lease of life in the green-leaning language of demography and the science of resource depletion.
Even the hatred of football fans now has a scientific basis to it. In the past they were looked down on as a seething, heaving, potentially violent mob.
Now, serious academics and green reporters carefully measure how much football fans travel, eat and discard, and have worked out that a big football event can leave an "eco-footprint" 3000 times as big as the pitch at Wembley. Courtesy of the science of environmentalism, even one of the foulest expressions of British snobbery - that against working men and women who enjoy football - has been scientised; it is numerically proven that these people are, well, disgusting.
And what of the science of climate change? No doubt there is research that shows the planet has warmed and that humanity may have played a role in its warming; yet this science, too, has conveniently metamorphosed into a political and moral campaign to lower people's horizons and keep them in their place.
Call me a cynic, a doubter, even a denier if you like, I don't care; but when scientific research continually and conveniently, almost magically, "proves" that people are disgusting and must rein in their desires and change their habits - just as the elite caste, from priests to politicians, have been arguing for decades - then I get suspicious.
The new scientisation is defensive and censorious. It suggests an elite that has lost the nerve and the will to say what is morally right and wrong, and that instead continually hides behind dubious "facts" to justify its agenda.
And anyone who challenges these facts is put beyond the pale. When anyone stands up and says that travel is a good thing, that the desire for more stuff should be satisfied and that human ingenuity can and will make the planet a better place, they can be written off as anti-science, as liars, deniers, heretics. Well, when it comes to defending human ambition from the attacks of our pie chart-armed elite, that's a risk I'm willing to take: let the heresy begin.
Brendan O'Neill is editor of British on line magazine Spiked.