I saw Peter Suderman’s post on global warming alarmism as anti-politics, but didn’t have a chance to remark on it earlier.  It seems to me that the Gourevitch argument he presents makes a good deal of sense, and the comparison with the “war on terror” echoes what I was saying along much the same lines earlier this year.  The reason that both are anti-political is that both presuppose that current conditions are so dire or the threat is so grave that special emergency measures are permitted.

Where I would disagree with Peter is over his claim that meaning itself is a luxury good.  Uncertainty may be a peculiarly modern luxury good, since part of the of the “brutal business of trying to keep on living” entailed having very clear and reliable certainties that provided meaning.  (Likewise, perhaps the hyper-certainty of ideologies that are profoundly destructive is only possible on a large scale in an era when people have had the luxury to grow dissatisfied with abundance.)  It may always be the fool who says in his heart that there is no God, but even the fool would not place such a dangerous wager, so to speak, in an era of scarcity in which dependence on the next harvest was all but absolute.  Likewise, it is probably only in a modern technological age when man begins to indulge in truly world-wrecking hubris that he can find his own salvation. 

What Peter is describing later in his post is are the people who have been raised in a culture that prizes the negation of any meaning provided by traditional authorities and who are now trying to build up some sense of meaning with the materials they have at hand.  The pursuit of transformation of the world without religious truth is what Voegelin called modern gnosticism.  Actually, that simplifies Voegelin a bit: his objection was to any doctrine, religious or secular, that preached the radical transformation of this world, which was to try the impossible of  bringing the parousia down to earth.  In the end, that is what these world-saving causes provide: a soteriology without a Saviour.  “We” become our own saviours, and this necessarily casts those who oppose us into the role of Ahriman trying to thwart the salvation of the world.  This gnosticism is founded on the hope that “we” can change the world radically.  Ultimately, the trajectory of progressive ideas (among which I would number Mr. Bush’s ludicrous promise to “end tyranny”), as Delsol explained in Icarus Fallen, is inherently anti-political in another sense: it aims to overcome the structural disparities of power that are unavoidable in this world.  As with every such fantasy, the end result will be like that described by one of the radicals in The Possessed, in which 10% of men are absolutely free, and 90% are absolute slaves.  That will also be the eventual result of any agenda, whether defined in terms of national security or planetary deliverance, that declares perpetual emergency and justifies an ever-increasing concentration of power in the name of preparedness and emergency response.