The Greatest Danger of the Concept of Social Justice Is That It Undermines and Destroys the Concept of a Rule of Law

The greatest danger of the concept of social justice, according to Hayek, is that it undermines and ultimately destroys the concept of a rule of law, in order to supersede merely “formal” justice, as a process governed by rules, with “real” or “social” justice as a set of results to be produced by expanding the power of government to make discretionary determinations in domains once exempt from its power. While Hayek regarded some advocates of social justice as cynically aware that they were really engaged in a concentration of power, the greater danger he saw in those sincerely promoting the concept with a zeal which unconsciously prepares the way for others—totalitarians—to step in after the undermining of ideological, political, and legal barriers to government power makes their task easier. Thus he regarded Nazism as “the culmination of a long evolution of thought” in Germany by socialists and others whose goals were vastly different from those of the Nazis, but who promoted the erosion of respect for legal rules in favor of the imperatives of specific social results.

--Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 221.

Green Extremism Is Rooted in One Conviction: Continued Economic Growth Is Absolutely Impossible, Given the Limits of a Finite Planet; Only If This Notion Is Discredited Can Eco-Radicalism Be Shaken

In the pages that follow I will argue that each of the four essential postulates of radical environmentalism outlined above is directly contradicted by the empirical record. “Primal” economies have rarely been as harmonized with nature as they are depicted; many have actually been highly destructive. Similarly, decentralized, small-scale political structures can be just as violent and ecologically wasteful as large-scale, centralized ones. Small is sometimes ugly, and big is occasionally beautiful. Technological advance, for its part, is clearly necessary if we are to dev elop less harmful ways of life and if we are to progress as a human community. And finally, capitalism, despite its social flaws, presents the only economic system resilient and efficient enough to see the development of a more benign human presence on the earth.

But a critique of these notions, however sound, misses the fundamental point. Ultimately, green extremism is rooted in a single, powerful conviction: the continued economic growth is absolutely impossible, given the limits of a finite planet. Only if this notion is discredited can the edifice of eco-radical philosophy be shaken.

--Martin W. Lewis, introduction to Green Delusions: An Environmentalist Critique of Radical Environmentalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), 9-10.

Radical Environmentalists, Like Biblical Millenarians, Scan the News and Popular Science Journals Eagerly for Every Scrap of Evidence that the Ecological End of Days Is Upon Us

Naively, one would think that environmentalists should welcome news that the planet is, in some respects, not in quite as much danger as we might have thought. This neglects, however, to allow for the psychodynamics of an apocalyptic vision. Radical environmentalists scan the news pages and the popular science journals eagerly for every scrap of evidence that the ecological End of Days is upon us. As with biblical millenarians, objections of logic and fact have little effect. They are already convinced that the world is in calamitous decline. They believe, and seem to enjoy believing, that nature is being violated—blasphemously—by their neighbors, and that ultimate retribution is on the way. Evidence to the contrary is viewed as a terrible letdown, not as a reprieve.

Similarly, inasmuch as ecoradicalism is a movement with a worshipful view of the primal, it takes little heed of sober findings that, in many cases, uncorrupted, nonwhite, primitive peoples have been just as contemptuous of what we call environmental values as are greedy Euro-American industrialists. As the geographer Martin Lewis notes in Green Delusions, “a large proportion of eco-radicals fervently believes that human social and ecological problems could be solved if only we would return to a primal way of life. Ultimately, this proves to be an article of faith that receives little support from the historical and anthropological record.”

--Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), e-book.

The Much Admired “Progressive” Writers Gave Up the Essential Idea of the Enlightenment: Freedom of Thought, Speech, and Communication

Lacking the power to think logically, and ignorant of history as well as of theory, the much admired “progressive” writers gave up the essential idea of the Enlightenment: freedom of thought, speech, and communication. Not all of them were so outspoken as Comte and Lenin; but they all, in declaring that freedom means only the right to say the correct things, not also the right to say the wrong things, virtually converted the ideas of freedom of thought and conscience into their opposite. It was not the Syllabus of Pope Pius IX that paved the way for the return of intolerance and the persecution of dissenters. It was the writings of the socialists. After a short-lived triumph of the idea of freedom, bondage made a comeback disguised as a consummation and completion of the philosophy of freedom, as the finishing of the unfinished revolution, as the final emancipation of the individual.

The concept of absolute and eternal values is an indispensable element in this totalitarian ideology. A new notion of truth was established. Truth is what those in power declare to be true. The dissenting minority is undemocratic because it refuses to accept as true the opinion of the majority. All means to “liquidate” such rebellious scoundrels are “democratic” and therefore morally good.

--Ludwig von Mises, Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution, ed. Bettina Bien Greaves (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), 45.

Global Temperatures Have Flatlined or Fallen Since about 2001, Throwing a Monkey Wrench into Global Warming Theory that Doesn’t Allow for Cooling, so Global Warming Became Climate Change

Science is under attack like never before, especially by global warming alarmists. The alarmists would have us believe that doomsday is near, that a catastrophe awaits the Earth unless we stop pumping carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. It’s CO2 that is causing the climate to change, insist the believers. If we don’t do something about this pesky gas right now, our planet and our way of life will be destroyed.

This is utter nonsense. Global warming may be real, but there’s hardly a shred of good scientific evidence that it has very much to do with the amount of CO2 we’re producing, or even that temperatures have risen as much as warmists say.

Today’s climate change hysteria began 25 years ago with United Nations discussions that created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). To climate change alarmists, the climate bible is a series of assessment reports issued by the IPCC about every six years. Based on the collective opinion of several hundred climate scientists, these reports are the source of the widely held belief, promulgated by Al Gore and other alarmists, that higher temperatures are the result of human activity.

Unfortunately, nature has not been cooperating. Global temperatures have flatlined or fallen since about 2001, throwing a monkey wrench into global warming theory that doesn’t allow for cooling because the CO2 level is constantly going upwards.

Not to be put out, the global warming faithful simply changed their tune. Global warming became climate change, despite the fact that the Earth’s climate had already been changing for thousands of years, long before industrialization boosted CO2. And the telltale sign that CO2 causes climate change became weather extremes instead of rising temperatures. Widespread wildfires in Russia, severe flooding in Pakistan, deadly tornadoes in the U.S., even harsh winters and record snowfalls – all of these are the result of man-made CO2, according to the alarmists.

How convenient. Just ignore the current cooling trend and blame every unusual weather event on CO2 and global warming. That may help drive political action on climate change, but it’s not science. True science is based on rigorous logic and evidence, not blind faith in quasi-religious dogma.

--Ralph B. Alexander, Global Warming False Alarm: The Bad Science Behind the United Nations' Assertion that Man-Made CO2 Causes Global Warming, 2nd ed. (Royal Oak, MI: Canterbury Publishing, 2012), Kindle e-book.

Afrocentrist Scholars Ward Off Criticism and Discussion of Their Claims and Theories by Calling Their Opponents Racists; Students Were Being Indoctrinated Along Party Lines

At first I was amazed that what I wrote had provoked hostility far beyond the range of ordinary scholarly disagreement. I was accused of being inspired by racist motives and later of being the leader of a Jewish “onslaught.” An influential Afro-centrist writer, Professor Molefi Kete Asante of Temple University, dismissed my whole discussion as an expression of white prejudice: “Lefkowitz and those who share her views are not interested in understanding Afrocentricity. Their intention is fundamentally the same projection of Eurocentric hegemony that we have seen for the past five hundred years.” Asante tried to cast doubt on everything that I said in my New Republic article. For instance, I reported that I had been surprised when one of my students told me that she had always thought Socrates was black and was concerned that I had never mentioned his African origins. Asante suggested that I had invented the incident, and that my surprise was motivated by “white racism.” Apparently Asante believed I could not endure the thought that Socrates might be black, whereas in reality I doubted that he was black because there was no evidence to support such a contention. Asante, in fact, is aware that there is no such evidence and says that for him the matter is “of no interest.” Why didn’t he imagine that I was responding in the same way as he was? Because there was no evidence, it was not an interesting question.

If Afrocentrist scholars could ward off criticism and even discussion of their claims and theories by calling their academic opponents racists, there seemed to be little hope of sponsoring the kind of debate that has until recently been a central feature of academic life. Rather than being encouraged to ask questions, to read widely, and to challenge any and all assumptions, students were being indoctrinated along party lines. What could be done to improve the situation before Afro-centrists walled their students off into a private thought- world of their own? It is not enough simply to raise questions about some of the more outlandish Afrocentric allegations. There is a need for explanation. There is a need to show why these theories are based on false assumptions and faulty reasoning, and cannot be supported by time-tested methods of intellectual inquiry. There is a need to explain why this misinformation about the ancient world is being circulated, and to indicate that the motives behind it are political, and that this politicizing is dangerous because it requires the end to justify the means.

--Mary Lefkowitz, preface to Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (New York: BasicBooks, 1996), xii-xiii.

The Merging of these Two Developments in Epistemology and the Political/Economic Spheres Yielded the Surging to Prominence of Non-Rational and Irrationalist Left Socialisms

While some on the Left modified their ethics, others set to revising Marxist psychology and epistemology. Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s there had been some early suggestions that Marxism was too rationalistic, too logical and deterministic. In the 1920s, Mao had urged that will and assertion of the peasants and especially of the leaders counted for more than passively waiting for the material conditions of revolution to work themselves out deterministically. In the 1930s, Antonio Gramsci had rejected the belief that the Depression would necessarily spell the doom of capitalism, and he had argued that finishing capitalism off would require the creative initiative of the masses. That creative initiative, Gamsci argued, was however neither rational nor inexorable but rather subjective and unpredictable. And early Frankfurt School theorizing had suggested that Marxism was too wedded to reason, that reason led to major social pathologies, and that less rational psychological forces had to be incorporated into any successful social theory.

Those voices were mostly ignored for two decades, swept aside by the dominant voices of classical Marxist theory, the Depression and World War II, and by the conviction that the Soviet Union was showing the world the true path.

By the 1950s, however, two developments began to merge, one epistemological and one political-economic. In the world of academic epistemology, both European and Anglo-American theorists were reaching skeptical and pessimistic conclusions about the powers of reason: Heidegger was ascendant on the Continent and Logical Positivism was reaching its dead end in the Anglo-American world. And in both theoretical and practical politics and economics, the failure of Marxism to develop according to the logic of its traditional theory was reaching a crisis. The merging of these two developments yielded the surging to prominence of non-rational and irrationalist Left socialisms.

--Stephen R. C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Tempe, AZ: Scholargy Publishing, 2004), e-book.

Human-Induced Global Warming Is Where One Camp Attempts to Demolish Basic Principles of Science in order to Install a New Order based on Political and Sociological Collectivism

When science was born, the consensus at that time was driven by religion, politics, prejudice, mysticism and self-interested power. From Galileo to Newton and through the centuries, science debunked the consensus by experiment, calculation, observation, measurement, repeated validation, falsification and reason. Appeals to consensus are not new. The methodology of science allows problems to be solved, whereas the science of the global warmers is designed to confirm a political opinion. There is a consensus regarding the science of global warming but only amongst ascientific environmental activists.

Scientific fact now no longer seems to be necessary. Human-induced global warming is one such example, where one camp attempts to demolish the basic principles of science and install a new order based on political and sociological collectivism. Science is becoming a belief system wherein the belief with the greatest number of followers becomes the established fact and received knowledge. This belief is sustained by consensus and authority. With this new authoritarian science based on consensus and espoused by UN’s IPCC and other agencies as authorities, it appears that true science does not matter any more. If Mann’s “hockey stick” chart showing rising global temperature is based on fraud and invalid statistical methods, it just does not matter because we still have a consensus.

--Ian Plimer, Heaven and Earth: Global Warming; The Missing Science (Ballan, AU: Connor Court Publishing, 2009), e-book.

Granting the State Plenary Power to Determine the Truth Is to Unwind the Enlightenment; the Platforms that Are Otherwise Given to Academics and Experts Are Denied to Dissenters, No Matter Their Credentials

Lavik argues (ibid.) that the utilitarian justification for free speech first propounded by John Stuart Mill does not apply to ‘a well-organised and wellfunded campaign by a person or group with authority in society, which keeps repeating the same untrue and damaging claims about climate change, without mentioning conclusive counter-arguments’. This is so because while freedom of speech generally advances the pursuit of truth, this is not true for utterances that are not sincerely meant.

Not stated is how it is that the truth of a claim, and the sincerity behind it, are to be judged. By what principle might a threshold of sincerity be set, above which speech is permitted and below which it is prohibited? The establishment of that standard is itself to make a truth claim and therefore to prevent debate about whatever is in contention.

In short, granting the state plenary power to determine the truth is to unwind the Enlightenment. No dissent from established truths could ever be tolerated.

For this reason, it is not an exaggeration to say that climate change alarmists are attempting to establish themselves as a kind of clerisy. If that sounds hyperbolic, consider the following argument, presumably made sincerely, by a pair of Australian academics (Shearman and Smith cited in Berg 2007):

[T]here is some merit in the idea of a ruling elite class of philosopher kings. These are people of high intellect and moral virtue … These new philosopher kings or ecoelites will be as committed to the value of life as the economic globalists are to the values of money and greed.

An elite class of people to protect unimpeachable truths, to proselytise the good word to the unconverted, and to tend to the needs of the initiated – climate change has taken on a quasi-religious quality. It shouldn’t surprise then that since climate change sceptics are dissenters from the high church of scientism, they must be silenced and banished.

The elite cabal of scientists who dominate climate change research have been militant in shunning those with whom they disagree. Their instinct is to protect their turf rather than to engage in free debate. This contributes to a powerful chilling effect that, in concert with the state’s campaign of harassment, discourages dissenters from voicing their opinions.

For example, the platforms that are otherwise given to academics and experts are denied to dissenters, no matter their credentials. Danish statistician Bjørn Lomborg came to prominence in 2001 with his book The Sceptical Environmentalist, in which he argued that many policies advocated by climate change alarmists would be ineffective and wasteful. In 2015, Lomborg agreed to move his research centre to the University of Western Australia, with funding coming from the Australian government. But under pressure from academic staff and student activists, the university’s vice chancellor pulled out of the deal. Subsequent discussions with Flinders University floundered immediately as staff and students reacted angrily to the idea that someone might ever produce research they disagreed with (Hasham 2015).

--Simon Breheny, “Free Speech and Climate Change,” in Climate Change: The Facts, 2017, ed. Jennifer Marohasy (Melbourne: Institute of Public Affairs, 2017), e-book.

If All Privilege Is Abolished, Learning Is Abolished Too; a Society MUST Be Barbarously Ignorant If There Is No Privilege in It at All, Only Equality All Round

Are you an opponent of privilege? It is ten thousand to one you are. In that case you are, though you may not know it, an opponent of learning too. The reason is simple: leisure, quiet, and access to the learning of others are privileges, and they are also three things without which learning cannot exist.

No two of those three will do on their own. Leisure and quiet will not save learning if the learning of others is not also accessible to you—in short, if there are no libraries. If you have libraries and the leisure to use them, but every moment of waking life is filled with loud noise from Red Guards, rock music, or some other source, the libraries and leisure might as well not exist as far as learning is concerned. If you have the libraries and the quiet which learning requires, but no one has enough leisure to profit from them, then learning will be extinguished just as surely as if you simply shot every educated person in the head, Khmer-Rouge style.

So, if all privilege is abolished, learning is abolished with it. A society in which privilege exists may be a barbarously ignorant one; we all know many instances of that. But a society must be barbarously ignorant if there is no privilege in it at all, only equality all round.

Are you inclined to dismiss this proposition as belonging to the age of illuminated manuscripts? You should not, because it remains equally true in the age of word-processors. It is also true of every branch of learning indifferently: physics, history, philosophy, mathematics, or whatever. A life largely devoted to any of these things need not be privileged with respect to wealth or power, but it must  be privileged with respect to leisure, libraries, and quiet. This is simply a fact about Homo sapiens. It may be otherwise with some other species on another planet; but it is not otherwise with us.

--David Stove, On Enlightenment, ed. Andrew Irvine (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003), 3-4.

Stewart Taught Future Prime Ministers to see the Legislator as an Experimental Scientist or Inventor; “the Science of Legislation” Removed the Obstacles to Commercial Society and Its Social Order

Of course, other Scottish thinkers had talked about politics as an exact science—David Hume had even written an essay on it. But they had looked for a scientific model as a way to understand politics and human conduct. Stewart was looking for a scientific way to organize it, and perhaps even create something new and better. He taught his students, including future prime ministers, to see the legislator in almost the same position as the experimental scientist or the inventor: applying mind and method to matter, in order to facilitate human happiness. Stewart was no utopian; this was not a blueprint for building a new society from scratch. Rather, he saw “the science of legislation” in Adam Smith’s terms, removing the obstacles that hinder the natural progress of commercial society and its social order. But he did introduce a new notion to the Scottish school. Political progress could take place in the same way it took place in mathematics or chemistry: by exhaustive investigation and research, by developing a clear theory that explained the facts, and then applying it.

--Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001), 271-272.