Value Judgements

I consider myself a libertarian environmentalist. Of course, this would become clear to a regular reader without my explicit confession. But a simple confession provides a quick bridge to what is more interesting: the subtleties and details, the reasonings and implications of such a value system--the sort of political philosophy to which it may lead and the policies preferences that follow.

Unfortunately, the two greatest problems facing the world today constitute catastrophic threats to my primary values. Proliferation of WMDs is likely to destroy the semblance of liberty, even in the civilized realms; and global warming is in the process of causing a greater alteration to the earth’s environment than any that has occurred since humans became human. When I play out the chronological scenarios that we may witness over the next few decades, it seems to me that the proliferation issue will be so serious as to overwhelm concerns about the other, will, indeed, render the world so metamorphosized as to warp our value conceptions into far other modes than those prevalent today. It is, after all, one thing to lament the decline in the richness and diversity and beauty of our natural environment—but, it's quite another order of anxiety to fear for one’s life and the lives of one’s family and friends, to fear for the future of civilization and of the hyper-cognitive biological phenomenon that we are.
Given the bleakness of all this, I will try to add some occasional levity because, in the end, Hamlet was not speaking north-northwest when he averred: “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” Christ said much the same thing elsewhere. It is difficult to defy the mutually-reinforced moral wisdom evinced by the most brilliant of all literary characters and the most noble of men. Besides which, I recall that my attempt to read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States failed miserably precisely because I could not endure the unremitting negativity of his selective presentation and moralistic interpretation of the historical facts. (I might add that the more schematized or biased your context, the less truth it contains.) His book was unbearably repetitious and blatantly tendentious, a crude, tactless, rabble-loving monstrosity—a long variation on a whine: “why isn’t everyone else a nice little peace-loving herd animal like me, how could people dare to seek power or to compete with one another, why can’t we simply abolish the abominable theory and practice of the survival of the fittest”? In any event, it does seem apposite that Zinn's invitation to the advent of the last man (or perhaps it was the expression of the advent of the last man), that this particular heralding-forth should take the form of a mindless, moralated succession of whimpers that one fears will never, ever end.
I can no longer bear to read much history: the stupidity of it, the animalistic predominance of action over thought, the mundaneity of its interpreters, the poignant rarity of superior men (most of whom are crushed or distorted by their doltish contemporaries) melts my wings—more so even than the constant “evil” of it--evil is a subjective judgment and these characteristics of history constitute for me precisely that which is evil in it. Playing forward the neverchanging themes to be discovered through some historical immersion, one returns with the conviction that, in a world of proliferating power to inflict mass destruction, we will require more than just a few favorable variations on these themes to avert catastrophe. Somehow the themes themselves must change—but I suspect the only way to that end is to reprogram the species, to recode its DNA—that is, in order to change the patterns of human history, the traditional "human" type must be relieved of its historical privileges and responsibilities. And so it follows...