Hubris and the Threat of Climate Change

by Sir Arthur Foulkes

While prudence, knowledge and intelligence can help humans to avoid many mistakes, they are no guarantee that we will not occasionally fall flat on our faces. We accept that as part of the human condition.

What is mystifying though is the ease with which we can sometimes dispense with these valuable tools and rely on other influences that almost inevitably result in bad decisions and varying degrees of ill consequences.

William Shakespeare put these words into the mouth of one of his characters: “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

It is fourteen hundred years later and humans have acquired great knowledge and achieved things that would astonish the bard. But he would find Puck’s words just as relevant today as when he first penned them, because the world is still swimming in a sea of folly.

It is not too difficult to understand how individual members of the species can be seduced by hubris, ideology, greed, stupidity and even misdirected faith.

What is not so easy to comprehend is how groups of intelligent people, including governments, with all the knowledge now available to them, can still decide to plunge headlong into obvious disaster.

(Barbara Tuchman explores this phenomenon in her book The March of Folly).

* * *

To equate conviction with truth is on a list of mistakes a wise person once attributed to a fool. There is an abundance of faith-driven fools in the world today. They include some Christian leaders who advocate violence in the name of Christ and those Muslims who believe it is right to slaughter innocent people in the name of Allah.

That misdirected faith does not save us from the consequences of folly was tragically demonstrated here a few years ago when some well-intentioned persons attempted to help a woman they thought was possessed by demons. To exorcise the evil ones, they took the poor woman to the sea and held her under the water for too long. She drowned.

Many years ago a group of politicians watched with dismay, but with some amusement, as hubris took hold of one of their colleagues who had been elevated to what the late Eugene Dupuch described as the rarefied atmosphere of the Cabinet room.

The chin of the elevated one was suddenly inches further away from his chest, his walk had become an arrogant stride and he was suddenly an authority on all things political. What made it so funny was that he was by no means the most gifted of the lot. He was arrogant but possessed little to be arrogant about.

More recently, another similarly elevated and affected politician found it difficult to understand how a humble Family Island man could possibly calculate how many shingles he needed to repair his storm-damaged roof!

In the 1970s and 1980s a combination of greed and stupidity in high places exposed the Bahamas to the greatest threat in its history as a nation. The country was awash in drugs and drug money as the Columbian traffickers established transshipment bases throughout the country and the government failed to act.

The nation was corrupted from top to bottom and a new and callous criminal culture was spawned. At the time a perceptive religious leader lamented that the drug trafficking had become so entrenched and pervasive that “somebody in authority has to know something about it”.

He was right, of course, but it took exposure by the international media and a commission of inquiry to confront the Bahamian people with a problem that almost destroyed us. Greed had affected judgment in high places.

When the nation’s leader was confronted with all this in a press interview, he said it was an American problem and so the Americans should clean it up! Even now it is chilling to contemplate the utter stupidity of that statement.

We suffer still from that incredible mistake, and we will continue to suffer for many more years to come.

When greed, hubris, ideology and misdirected faith all converge at the centre of global power, the world is in deep trouble. That is what happened in the administration of US President George Bush. It led to the disastrous invasion of Iraq, the further destabilization of an already unstable region, the squandering of the vast reservoir of goodwill that accrued after the September 11 terrorist attack, and unprecedented animosity towards the US.

Most of the rest of the world saw and warned of the folly of invading Iraq but these intelligent and educated people insisted on going to war.

The price for that mistake has been high in terms of human lives and treasure, and still there is no end. Today some of the same people are rattling their nuclear sabre in the region while the military industrial complex and the oil industry rake in profits by the tens of billions.

Now the Bush administration is committing its greatest act of folly by failing to respond to a threat that is far graver than international terrorism and the war in the Middle East. It is the threat posed by global warming and the rapid degradation of the planet’s environment.

In a recent issue of Vanity Fair, Mark Hertsgaard deals at length with this troubling state of affairs and refers to the many powerful voices sounding the alarm. He quotes British environmentalist Tony Juniper:

“Everyone in this country, from the political parties to the scientific establishment, to the Archbishop of Canterbury, to our oil companies and the larger business community, has come to a popular consensus about climate change – a sense of alarm and a conviction that action is needed now, not in the future.”

Mr. Bush’s good friend and fellow Iraq adventurer Prime Minister Tony Blair has exerted relentless pressure on the US President but to little avail. Outsiders doubt President Bush’s desire to confront the issue, Mr. Hertsgaard reports. They point out that his right-wing political base agrees with Republican Senator James Inhofe that global warming is a liberal hoax!

So the pollution and the pumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere continues unabated and will no doubt intensify as huge nations like China and India become more industrialized and prosperous. Meanwhile the forests and coral reefs that help to balance nature are also under attack.

Some people believe that the developed countries can deal with the consequences of global warming which they attribute to a natural cycle. That means millions of poor people around the world will be left to suffer as storms become more powerful and more frequent, sea levels rise, and droughts and floods abound.

All of which could lead to mass starvation, huge migrations and wars over dwindling resources including food and potable water.

There is no getting around it, says Mr. Hertsgaard, “because humanity waited so long to take decisive action, we are now stuck with a certain amount of global warming and the climate changes it will bring…”

So where does that leave us? Bahamians are fortunate to be living in one of the real beauty spots on the globe with an environment that is still quite wonderful even though it is under assault.

We have a responsibility to conserve fossil fuel energy and to join the search for cleaner sources of power.

But most of all we have a responsibility to future generations to keep out of our country those who covet our marine resources, the polluters, and those who would sacrifice our environment and security on the altar of their greed.

We have the knowledge and the intelligence and if we exercise prudence today perhaps those who inhabit these islands a hundred years from now will not say of us: “What fools those mortals were!”

Comments

[anthony]

Sir Arthur

I sympathise with your lamentation on man’s confounding and unending march of folly.
However, I think you risk misleading your readers by implying a linear relationship between Bush’s march into Bagdad and his (indeed mankind’s) refusal to act to avert the purported looming environmental catastrophe of global warming. Because, with all due respect to Mr Juniper, where “popular consensus about climate change” might exist in England, no such consensus exists in the United States.

And, even though it’s fashionable to lampoon him on this issue, at least Bush has articulated his reasons for not siding with the alarmists on global warming. Moreover, he has support for his position (i.e., refusing to submit the Kyoto Protocol to the Senate for ratification) from such notable scientists as Dr. Fred Singer, Dr. Patrick Michaels, Dr. Robert Balling, or Dr. Lindzen (all of whom argue rather persuasively that scientific data show “statistically significant global cooling over the past 18 years”).

Whereas, his predecessor Clinton – who professed common cause with them – himself refused to support ratification of the protocol to deal with this problem that supposedly has Earth in the Balance. And even more disingenuous in this respect was his VP, Al Gore, the author of the bible on global warming alluded to, who – after the US Senate voted 95-0 not to sign the protocol – expressed most adamant concerns about the impact it would have on the US economy.

Perhaps it’s just another example of man’s folly that the two most powerful men in America, if not the world - who also happened to be two of the planet’s most informed people about global warming - did nothing during their 8 years in power to deal with this problem. Nonetheless, although I agree with you that we should be better caretakers of our environment, I am not at all convinced that “global warming” is anything more than a cyclical natural phenomenon.