More a cause than a science

Global warming is the new Key to All Mythologies.

Causabon's relentless and sterile quest to write a universal book, the chimera of The Key to All Mythologies, first strikes the reader as vain and, then, as simply sad. Eliot's artistic triumph was to place Causabon and his mania within the circle of our sympathies.

There is no key to all mythologies. There was not one in the 19th century and there is not one now. Life is a radically complex phenomenon. The world is vast and intricate and human reason, for all its progress, is still stranded on the approaches to a full understanding of its processes, its myriad enigmas, its ultimate origins and perhaps even its point.

Since the days of Isaac Newton, Western science has advanced our knowledge of the world and the cosmos to an almost miraculous degree. We know enough now perhaps to say with the force of real truth what was not possible to say before our time: that now we know how little we know.

Certainly this was Newton's own attitude. Even after the titanic intellectual achievements of his work on gravity, planetary motion, and light he related in a letter how he saw his work. The quotation is familiar and eloquent: "To myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on a seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

It is also a very comforting quotation. When a mind of the reach and penetration of Isaac Newton measured with such exquisite proportion his great achievement ("a smoother pebble or a prettier shell") against what was yet to be discovered and explained ("the great ocean of truth") we were given one of the great signatures of real science. Its hesitancy, its deference to what remains to be said or explored, its horror of overstatement and its aversion to dogmatic certitude.

Newton — despite his wanderings into alchemy — was no Causabon. He saw the limits of what he knew, and knew the vanity of striving to know all.

There's not much of hesitancy, or deference, or horror of overstatement, in this the high noon of the global warming movement. Global warming as "explanation" is now tethered to the most minuscule of circumstances to the most macroscopic. A group called Pets Across America (which we may assume is not an assembly of climatologists) reported this week that "droves of cats and kittens are swarming into animal shelters nationwide, and global warming is to blame," and that since "global warming is probably not going to be slowing any time soon" it's best for pets to be "spayed and neutered" now.

This is of course ludicrous to the point of farce. Global warming as a key to randy cats. But it is but one illustration that could be multiplied by a thousand of the now nearly automatic linkage of the most particular or local circumstances to the available "explanation" of global warming.

Global warming is the new Key to All Mythologies. It is a vast and total reading of our world, and because it is vast and total it calls up responses from changing light bulbs to rearranging the economies — and the politics — of the world. It pits the industrial countries against the developing ones, it "relates" a flight from Ottawa to Montreal to the future impoverishment of some Pacific island, it speaks in the doom-laden accents of pure certitude of what will happen in 50 or 75 or a hundred years from now — and, with the same ferocious certitude, demands decisions of immense consequence be made now to forestall its bleak and definitive projections.

There is so much of blind or casual acceptance of global warming as the crisis of our time, or its high "moral" essence, and such an overwhelming pressure to accept its tenets and claims as to amount to a stampede.

There is, in other words, so much that is antithetical to the spirit of real science in the various campaigns being waged as to immensely discount the principal claim that it is science that is driving them all.

Global warming has some science at its core. But it has been overlaid with a vast engine of continuous alarmism, propaganda, relentless campaigning, facile projections, and not a little bullying righteousness by some of its celebrity proponents.

It is, for all that is shouted to the contrary, more a cause than a science.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Rex Murphy, "More a cause than a science." Globe & Mail (June 7, 2007).

Reprinted with permission of Rex Murphy.

THE AUTHOR

Rex Murphy is host of CBC Radio One's Cross-Country Checkup and contributes weekly TV essays on diverse topics to CBC TV's The National. (See Rex's TV commentaries). In addition, he writes book reviews, commentaries, and a weekly column, Japes of Wrath, for the Globe & Mail.

Rex Murphy was born near St. John's, Newfoundland, where he graduated from Memorial University. In l968, he went to Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. His primary interest is in language and English literature, but he also has a strong link with politics. His first book, Points of View, is described on Amazon: "With TV commentator and journalist Rex Murphy, it's easy to put a twist on the old parable: when he is good he is very very good, and when he's angry, he's awesome. Uncommonly dignified, relentlessly honest, unencumbered by de rigueur political correctness, and solidly grounded by his Newfoundland roots, Murphy is that rarest of TV types. He's an everyman who happens to be a Rhodes Scholar, and a personality treasured for his brain, not his looks...A cranky intellect, maybe, but an intellect just the same. It's Murphy's almost reluctant cynicism — delivered in language as sharp as shattered glass and aimed squarely at those in ivory towers — that makes Points of View a must-read."

Copyright © 2007 Rex Murphy