Is our Pursuit of the Millennium pointless?

This blog has now moved. Please visit Zerochampion.com and update your bookmarks

I managed to get through A Green New Deal report released by the new economics foundation over the weekend, in between Olympics viewing and a niece's first birthday party. It's a utopian vision that draws on historical precedent to call for some pretty revolutionary activity to tackle climate change. And there's the usual urgent deadlines - we have 100 months to carry out such a plan before it's too late and the Government has a year to start to implement the proposals, many of which are by necessity pretty profound. Forced demerger of large banking and finance groups anyone? An orderly downsizing of the financial sector and reducing interest rates to a lower value? No wonder it has already inspired snorts of derision from libertaian thinkers, including Tim Wortsall.

You can wonder at just how realistic such a grand plan is but a reaction of mere ridicule is unfounded. The report is a serious attempt at integrating the climate crisis with the credit and energy ones. The lessons from history are instructive, from the oft-used World War Two to 1930-post Depression America, which given the current state of the Global economy couldn't really be more pertinent. I'm not an economist but was won over by the analysis of how the so-called 'debtonation day' came to pass on 9 August last year was convincing. The solutions? Pie in the sky given the dominance of finance and business in the 21st century? Or perhaps ahead of their time if we are entering a deep economic depression?

Reading it I wondered whether the catalyst for change related to the environment would be our unsustainable economic system. Or to put it another way the only way we would be forced to face up to climate change would be a deep depression. Would there ever be the political momentum and drive to act without such a crisis? I doubt it.

The reaction has been predictable, but I was struck by one of Worstall's final phrases in his dismissive post - he describes the group of like-minded journalists, economists and green thinkers behind the new report as "millenarian socialists". This is clearly the dangerous environment that such a debate can fall into (as Mel warned about in her post on the report last weekend) - a rather hysterical one that centres on dogma and political posturing rather than debating the proposals prima facie.

The use of the word millenarian is an intriguing one for me given my current reading, The Pursuit of the Millennium by Norman Cohn. I've just finished it and it offers a fascinating historical parallel that stretches way back from the examples of cited in the nef report. Cohn examines the wave of Millenarian fanaticists that sprang up on the Continent during the Middle Ages, preaching the imminent arrival of the Second Coming. Such movements were closely allied to or influenced by social unrest during the period but Cohn argues that such religious movement bear close parallels with political movements that dominated last century, fascism and communism.

I'm in no way suggesting such close ties exist such extreme beliefs and the current the green movement. However Cohn's book and thesis offer a lesson in over-reliance of grand predictions. The strength of the argument for radical and wholesale change in society is that it is an all-powerful and consuming one. In that respect it fits neatly into Cohn's definition of 'revolutionary millenarianism' which is a movement that's aims are "boundless". "A social struggle is seen not as a struggle for specific, limited objectives, but as an event of unique importance, different in kind from all other struggles known to history, a cataclysm from which the world is to emerge total transformed and redeemed," writes Cohn.

Clearly those of us are buying into the view that we are approaching a crisis would not appreciate being compared to crazed zealots from 500 years ago who proclaimed themselves Gods and urged followers to bear arms and battle against armed forces to usher in impending Paradise (cue failure, disaster beheadings, decapitations etc). But the historical precedent makes me wonder about the best ways of framing the climate crisis. The risk is that small millenarian movements spring up which appear increasingly extreme and irrelevant to the population as a whole, who remain largely indifferent to our fate. Or do we need such deadlines, D-Days etc to really raise our games?

Comments

[Tim Worstall]

The basics of publicity.

"It doesn't matter what they say about you as long as they spell your name right."

Tim Wortsall.

Sigh.

[Phil Clark]

You've got me there Tim