We've always thought George Monbiot, the Guardian columnist and predictor of the world's end, was a pretty nasty piece of work, so to find him described on a dust-jacket recently as having a "dazzling command of science" stuck in the throat a bit.
He hasn't got a dazzling command of science, or he wouldn't be such a prat about the alleged global warming, its alleged causes and its alleged effects. What he has got is a monumental contempt for anyone who … well, isn't him, really. He despises modern society and all its works because he didn't think of them first.
Consider some of his pronouncements …
• Flying across the Atlantic is more evil than child abuse
• Manmade flight will contribute to a climate calamity that will make 'genocide and ethnic cleansing look like sideshows at the circus of human suffering'
• He loiters in Liverpool Street Station and watches as City workers, who must suffer from 'a species of mental illness', hurry home: 'Stress oozes from them like sweat, anger shudders beneath their skin.'
• He is horrified at hearing the sound of human laughter. 'The world is dying, and people are killing themselves with laughter', he wails. So disturbed is he by the 'gales of laughter' sweeping Britain that he is moved to quote Kierkegaard: 'This is the way I think the world will end - with general giggling by all the witty heads, who think it is a joke.'
• Supermarkets are inherently evil because of (a) their effect on small local shops and (b) "food miles".
• Disney cartoon characters are sinister because they encourage us "to promote the hegemony of the corporations even when we have no intention of doing so." Yeah, right.
• 'Being gay is arguably more moral than being straight', because gays don't breed and overpopulate the earth. Monbiot is not gay, and has a daughter, which some might think is a bit selfish although I'm sure she's a nice little girl and deserves all our sympathy for having such a crap Dad.
I'm afraid that what it comes down to is that old Moonbat is a snob, pure and simple. A dazzling command of science he may have (and how revealing is that? He believes that science exists for him to command?) but he's just an upper-middle-class twat who thinks the working class should be seen and not heard, that all normal people live in the country and have a dog and a tatty old Volvo, that only intelligent people ought to travel, that there's this divine little shop in the village where you can still get authentic local delicacies made in some old dear's scullery, that two children called Giles and Hermione are quite enough for anybody, that we don't even have a television because we prefer to make our own entertainment, and that whatever goes wrong in the world is always someone else's fault, and that someone else is probably a lager-swilling lout in a shell-suit just back from two weeks drunken rout in Magaluf. I'd like to go on, but I think I'm about to puke in my wager-pagger.
As Brendan O'Neill wrote recently, "the politics and science of environmentalism have added a new, legitimising 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 elite's 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 behaviour and expectations. In our post-modern, anything-goes, Oprah-ised, non-judgemental era, it is increasingly difficult for elite elements to lay down the line on what is right or wrong, or to induce guilt and shame in the 'wayward' masses, or to make nakedly moral judgements about the apparently soulless, greedy populace. Instead, 'scientific fact' - 'evidence' about individuals' disgusting impact on their surroundings - has become the main means through which the elites hector us and police our behaviour … the … politics of environmentalism have spread to fill the gap left by the collapse of traditional morality."
The GOS says: One more thing. Monbiot is in the habit of rewriting his own biography on Wikipedia.
I rest my case.
either on this site or on the World Wide Web.
Copyright © 2008 The GOS
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