Ideology versus ideas

During my requisite five minutes of Sky News at breakfast, a chap sputtering spittle at the camera lens voiced his displeasure with COP28.

That conference committed 200 countries to achieving net zero by 2050. That, as far as the spittle-sputterer was concerned, was nowhere near good enough. He didn’t beat about the bush: if we wait that long, he said, “our planet will fry”. The target year should be 2024, not 2050.

Penelope, who only ever watches that awful channel out of wifely solidarity, asked: “Where is the opposite point of view?” The question was rhetorical. She knows as well as I do exactly where the opposite point of view is: in the dustbin of history, to borrow Trotsky’s phrase.

Here we touch upon the key difference between ideas and ideologies. The former appear at the end of a rational weighing of facts and arguments pro and contra. Whoever produces an idea has to take into account the possibility that someone else may weigh the same facts and arguments and come up with a different balance.

A dispute may arise, and it can be solved by any number of means, ranging from gentle persuasion to physical violence. But a dispute is always possible and usually likely.

Not so with ideologies. An ideology is a secular superstition based on infra-rational urges, usually political at base. If an idea is formed in pursuit of truth, an ideology is formed in pursuit of power.

Thus an ideology can only be defeated either by suicide or by another ideology, not by reason and certainly not by facts. A rational argument against an irrational urge is an exercise in futility. Facts are helpless against phantoms.

Although any ideology is by definition secular, most invoke some legitimising metaphysical entity. The ideology of climate change comes from the notion of inexorable global warming, which in turn is vouchsafed to the initiated by the God of Science.

He is a wrathful and vengeful deity, smiting infidels and apostates with the thunder and lightning of ostracism. When the God of Science speaks, we must all prostrate ourselves before him and vow never to lose faith.

Of course tens of thousands of real scientists around the world refuse to pay obeisance to that particular deity on this particular point. They publish serious articles and books, with each sentence referenced to scores of research papers, proving that the whole idea of anthropogenic global warming is anti-scientific claptrap.

These publications show that the Earth has been warmer than it is now for 85 per cent of its known lifetime. That carbon emissions have a minuscule, negligible effect on the environment. That 95 per cent of climactic changes are caused by shifts in solar activity, with contributions from volcanos, oceans, earthquakes and a myriad other factors.

Those infidels talk about the Roman Warming Period, when, under Julius Caesar’s watchful eye, vineyards were blossoming in Scotland. They invoke the Medieval Warming Period, when grain crops flourished and the world population more than doubled as a result.

However, those spoilsports miss the point, and it takes a hysterical teenage girl with learning difficulties to set them straight. The point they miss is that global warming is produced by the evil of capitalism fostered by Western countries that are themselves innately evil.

And evil will triumph unless good men, women and others close ranks and meet it head on. Dialectically speaking, the antithesis of evil is good. Hence every method chosen to defeat evil is itself good. Now, it so happens that at the moment the putative, self-appointed forces of good are using the weapon of global warming to great effect.

With any luck, this weapon will slay the bogeyman of capitalism, with all its attendant democracies, parliamentarisms and civil liberties. This ideal shines so bright that it dims any possible opposition based on such trivia as solar activity or assorted Warming Periods.

Even mentioning such things is ridiculous: it’s committing a category error at its worst. The issue isn’t about scientific truth. It’s, to borrow Humpty Dumpty’s explanation, “which is to be master – that’s all”.

Unlike both Penelope and me, Sky News understands how the cookie crumbles and believes this is the only way to crumble it. Not a single crumb will be allowed to fall off the table; no alternative sustenance is allowed.

In the past, I used to rant and rave about this sort of thing, but these days I’m more likely to look for a reason to laugh. COP28 didn’t disappoint.

Don’t know about you, but I loved the pictures of Arab sheiks and sultans grinning ear to ear at the conclusion of the conference. Seldom does one see such a saintly display of disinterested virtue.

After all, their wealth, power, perhaps even physical survival wholly depend on oil revenues. Yet there they are, joyously signing away those cherished things by committing their countries to the elimination of all fossil fuels by 2050.

Call me a cynic, but I detect a hint at some future compliance problems. Just stop oil? Those chaps would be more likely to swap their thawbs for B&D PVC costumes at the next COP get-together.

Yet the God of Climate Change is like any other ideology. It demands loyal service, but it will be content with lip service. The adherents are mandated to issue the right protestations of devotion, not necessarily to act on them.

Those sheiks and sultans are smiling because they know how to subtract 2023 from 2050. They come up with 27 years, and that’s a lot of oil under the bridge, or under the counter if you’d rather. Allah’s wisdom says that those Western infidels will abandon their silly notions when they realise that penury beckons.

If by that time they have succeeded in destroying or at least degrading their own oil-producing capacity, they’ll crawl into those brocaded and tasselled tents, begging the sheiks and sultans for help and promising the earth in return. One hopes they’ll no longer be calling it “our planet”.