December 29, 2004

AUGURIES AND OMENS: NEW AGE RELIGION FOR THE NYTIMES READER

        The NYTimes op-ed page, so alert to the dangers of Christian fundamentalism, offers up new age religion for the West Side liberal. Simon Winchester finds meaning in the latest eruptions of nature. Naturally we're to blame for messing with Nature and arousing her wrath. Like a primitive aborigine, Winchester personifies nature and imagines her a hapless victim of human depradations. Had we paid attention to such omens as the fact that, according to the Chinese, this was the Year of the Monkey, we might have prepared for "terrestrial mischief". Winchester mingles just enough scientific data with his bizarre New Age fantasies to qualify as an 'intellectual'. He speculates about far reaching connections with events occurring around the globe, and in a masterly bit of obfuscation, asserts that "There is of course no hard scientific truth - no firm certainty that a rupture on a tectonic boundary in the western Pacific (in Honshu, say) can lead directly to a break in a boundary in the eastern Pacific (in Parkfield), or another in the eastern Indian ocean (off Sumatra, say). But anecdotally, as this year has so tragically shown, there is evidence aplenty..." Of course, the scientific method is designed precisely to avoid the foolishness of reliance on anecdotal evidence. I can offer anecdotal evidence that my dog is highly intelligent, with an extraordinary range of emotional sensitivity---but anecdotes don't hold up in the face of scientific evidence that her 'understanding' of my moods disappears when she realizes I'm not going to give her a treat.
        Winchester's pop science for liberal environmentalists includes an obligatory reference to Gaia Theory---so named to give prominence to Gaia, earth goddess of the Ancient Greeks. This pseudo scientific construct asserts that Gaia, mother of us all, must be protected from her disruptive children, hell bent on ravaging the natural world. This is a variant on Rousseau's idealization of the state of nature---an Edenic fantasy of pre-lapsarian bliss before capitalist greed and avarice prevailed. It fits perfectly with the New York Times's fantasies of a lost. but still attainable egalitarian social world. Mother Nature, for the New York Times, is a liberal Democrat--Gaia in Guccis--and her wrath at mistreatment is understandable. The deaths she inflicts are, naturally, regrettable, but such are the consequences of our failure to embrace the NY Times's environmental policies.