It’s a small, overcrowded world. While browsing through back issues of the monthly newsletter of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO), I came across a reference to an article by Colin Campbell (the eminence grise of the peak oil community) entitled ‘Petroleum and People’ and published in ‘Population and Environment’ v. 24/2 (November 2002). The former editor of ‘Population and Environment’ was Professor Kevin MacDonald, author of a trilogy on Judaism as a collective evolutionary strategy.
Contributors to ‘Population and Environment’ include such party-poopers as Richard Lynn, J. Philippe Rushton, Glayde Whitney, and Frank Salter – all of whom have been consigned to the leper colony by the liberal establishment.
My question: does ‘peak oil’ theory somehow attract people suffering from similar delusions? Are they suitable cases for treatment who should be approached, if at all, by men with white coats? Or is ‘dynamic silence’ the most advisable tactic? After all, if the silent treatment works with other deviants, why shouldn’t it work with the oil depletion Cassandras? [sarcasm off]
By the way, MR readers who wish to learn more about Kevin MacDonald should have a look here:
http://www.answers.com/topic/kevin-b-macdonald
Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 28 Jun 2005 12:54 | #
Carolus,
Thank you for the post. Sarcastic or not it deserves a considered answer. Mine is that the leper colony, besides being a Gramscian strategy, amounts at bottom to a most desperate response to unwelcome truths. The left did its best to respond to the truths from the right on a point-by-point basis with Stephen Gould’s “Mismeasure” - and, of course, failed. It does not possess a refutatory means. Bawling “Shut up! Shut up!” really is the best it can do.
The next two years will see something similar evolve out of its troubles with genomic studies. Again, it will dissimulate rather than die. On another thread here it’s been suggested that the left will simply transmogrify into a science-affirming socialism, in the same way it adopted economism after 1989. I am not convinced there will be a successful Fourth Way, but it will probably be tried.
It could only work in the short-term. The unwelcome truth will irrevocably spread - and become attached to popular conclusions, to real meaning. Average black IQ is l-o-w. There is a link between black crime and being black. Economism (and, much less, equality) is an inadequate reason to bestow your children’s birthright upon aliens. And so on.
Truth-speakers victimised today can draw strength from the fact that in all past contests between power and truth it is truth that has prevailed in the end. Power, in the present case, might have two more decades in which to dance with the devil. After that I wouldn’t be a leftist for all the gold in academia.