Environmentalism or Individualism? (Part 1: America’s Enlightenment Heritage)
10 hours ago Guest Blogger 8 Comments
By Robert Bidinotto
Ed. Note: The ideology of environmentalism has proven itself to be, by far, the most persuasive enemy of the Master Resource, energy. Pollution … Health Hazards … Species Extinction … Ecosystem Destruction … Resource Exhaustion … Global Cooling … Global Warming … Melting Glaciers … Rising Seas … Climate Change. Why do the enemies of energy industries seem always to fall back, in the end, on environmentalist themes for their strongest and most effective stands? Is there something deeply embedded in our Western culture that makes the philosophy of environmentalism the most influential instrument for opposition to the energy industry?
Today, Master Resource begins a six-part series analyzing the philosophic basis of environmentalism, its enmity to the technologies of instrumental reason (especially energy technology), as well as its incompatibility with the foundational individualist philosophy of the United States. Written some years ago by the award-winning essayist Robert Bidinotto, this manifesto seemed worth preserving here at MR now that Bidinotto has moved on professionally to writing a political-thriller series.
Subsequent posts: “Conservation vs. Preservation” (Part 2) is here; “Inhuman Rights” (Part 3) is here; “Philosophic Conflict” (Part 4) is here; “The Value of Nature” (Part 5) is here; and “The ‘Ideal’ of Primitivism” (Part 6) is here.
The new Environmentalism was the complete antithesis of the American Founders’ Enlightenment outlook of reason, science, individualism, self-responsibility, personal freedom, private property, and capitalism.
Every culture and its institutions are the living embodiments of certain dominant ideas. At its birth, America’s basic premises were part and parcel of the glorious historical period that was rightly called “the Enlightenment.”
In his book The Empire of Reason, historian Henry Steele Commager wonderfully captured the spirit of the American Enlightenment. Men such as Franklin and Jefferson, he wrote, had “a prodigality about them; they recognized no bounds to their curiosity, no barriers to their thought, no limits to their activities.” Commager cited “their confidence in Reason, their curiosity about the secular world and—with most of them—their indifference to any other, their addiction to Science—if useful—their habit of experimentation, and their confidence in improvement…” Heroic achievers, these men “exalted Reason and worshipped at the altar of Liberty.”1
That linkage between reason and liberty wasn’t coincidental: men of reason require freedom to explore, to communicate their ideas, to realize their visions. And what is the goal of these activities? In Jefferson’s immortal words, “the pursuit of happiness”: that is, personal fulfillment and self-interest.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/08/17/environmentalism-or-individualism-part-1-americas-enlightenment-heritage/
