Writing from within the environmental movement, these authors (who also wrote the essay “The Death of Environmentalism”, at http://www.thebreakthrough.org/files/DOE_Sun.pdf continue to create controversy with their ideas, which will be fleshed out in a new book this fall.
An excerpt.
Death Warmed Over
Beyond Environmentalism: imagining possibilities as large as the crisis that confronts us.
By Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus
James Howard Kuntstler begins The Long Emergency, his new book warning that the world is running out of oil, by quoting psychologist Carl Jung as saying, “People cannot stand too much reality.”
The quote is wrongly attributed. It was T. S. Eliot who said, “Humankind cannot stand too much reality.” But the quote and the Jungian slip speak volumes about Kuntsler and kindred, well-intentioned progressive authors. Like Jared Diamond’s Collapse, which purports to explain why once-powerful societies are driven into extinction, and Tom Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas, which faulted Kansans for failing to grasp their own economic self-interest, Kuntsler’s book contends that the ignorant masses are suffering from what the left used to call false-consciousness—in this case, about energy consumption. For the people to be saved, they presumably must let go of their irrational consumer, religious, or ideological fantasies and start recognizing their true self-interest.
When this kind of condescension fails to induce the desired behavior change, environmentalists and liberals become angry or bewildered and see the public as irrational, in denial, or just plain foolish. Which reminds us of something Jung actually did say: “If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.”
