Thursday, December 13, 2007

The Terror Follies

WINNING ON THE FOLLY OF MANKIND

Bonhoeffer’s decision to attempt the assassination of Hitler was to ‘cut off the head of the snake’ but can Kevin Rudd go out like St George to assassinate the unbelievably elusive and invisible dragons of Climate Change?

In her essay ‘ Bonhoeffer and the Sovereign State’ Jean Bethke Elshtain writes (Aug 1996 First Things) ‘The confluent forces of post-Enlightenment politics -the self-sovereignty of both the self and the state - deepened the overall quotient of “folly” in the human race. Demagogues found it all too easy to play to human weakness. Weak human beings are ripe for mobilization, ever susceptible to becoming tools in the hands of tyrants.’ This is the very weakness of the election campaigning in countries such as the recent campaign that brought a change of government in Australia, which relied on spin-doctors and propaganda to swing the Enlightened, the gullible, the foolish ...over the voting line.

The recent election of the Labour Government under Kevin Rudd is caught in the worst mess in the entanglements of this problem, for the Labour leader, a follower of Bonhoeffer, is, O God, nevertheless the fuehrer at the head of an Enlightenment-based party in terms of its ideological conceits. It is the self at heart in this state-salving world-view that fears and is increasingly foolish with fear.

This is an area of concern that comes straight from Bonhoeffer, who wrote: “Any violent display of power, whether political or religious, produces an outburst of folly in a large part of mankind.” We see that it is not just violent displays that attract folly to power, but alarmist and fear mongering displays are used to gain power by also attracting the folly of a large part of the populace. Elshtain again: ‘Exploiters and charlatans arise. Often they do only limited damage, but when they triumph, as they had in Bonhoeffer’s time and place, traditional ethical responses seem inadequate to oppose them.’

Clearly the State cannot save us. It does not have the means of Salvation. It cannot make the climate change, or change back. And it cannot make it rain. These alarmist based undertakings are simply there to placate us in our folly. The ironists know this. I see the Ron Tandberg cartoon in today’s The Age has Kevin Rudd in his Jesus Christ Robes standing in the desert before a gathering of robed Arabs etc who are all asking for a sign. A sign. It is the apparatchik covering the post Kyoto Global warming conference in Bali who comes forward asking more reasonably for a signature.

Elshtain writes: ‘It is in the ironies of the French Revolution, especially, that Bonhoeffer sees the first joinings of freedom and terror, a terrible godlessness in human presumption of godlikeness… But this is precisely what the deifiers of human sovereignty do: they become their own standard, with the result that human beings devour themselves. Western godlessness underwrites the triumph of modern totalizing ideologies that recognize no limits.'

Do we have any human sovereignty over the climate? Do we have human sovereignty over the rain? Unchecked and unchallenged human sovereignty will not save us, no matter how many policies we make. It might all end in follies like Rudd imitating Chamberlain by stepping out of the gas-guzzling plane with huge environmental footprints and declaring he has achieved some sort of “Peace in our time!’ or at least, somehow, saved us.

Bonhoeffer would jolt back up his rope at such salvation.

And then, when the unknown era-long weather cycles bring rain again, will the hot air of the discussions in Bali be claimed for the carbon tradings for a -let's say- 471 year rain? It will be self evident on the same terms as all folly. No fool will be able to prove such a claim wrong.