Willful Stupidity

The most powerful determinant of human destiny is stupidity, someone said, meaning willful stupidity. He was teaching one of those newfangled courses in stupidity at a university down south--I forget which one. When I heard about our destiny I immediately sent away for a book on stupidity, and it should come soon. Meanwhile I'm on my own.

Let's look at one issue. On a scale of 1 to 10, Mexicans give the problem of climate change a rank of 9. Citizens of the United States give it a rank of 4.7. That's willful stupidity. For example, take Senator James Inhofe (please) who announced that global warming had ended when a snowstorm hit Oklahoma: "You know God's still up there. We're now going through a cooling spell."

I don't believe that Inhofe is that stupid naturally. His kind of stupidity is an act of will. He prefers to believe that we will be saved by a very large Person up in the sky. Inhofe himself need do nothing.

Inhofe also believes that the world's scientists have joined the liberals in a conspiracy of enormous size in order to do something bad, although what that bad thing might be remains hidden.

I have figured out what it is Inhofe should fear, although I have to give most of the credit to Steven Stoll in the latest HARPER'S. Stoll's theory is that the Little Ice Age that began about 1350 was caused by the partial disappearance of humans from the planet, brought on by the black plague. So much human activity ceased that the planet cooled off.

Stoll points out that global warming by humans began 8,000 years ago.

There are no good estimates yet about how many people will die in the coming climate wobble, but it may be as much as several billion. That's Mother Nature's way of cooling Oklahoma.

One result of the Little Ice Age was, after centuries of acute human pain, a massive shift occurred in the value of the ordinary worker--workers became scarce. The old social order crumbled. Forests sprouted around vacant homes. The surviving serfs demanded and won freedoms.

I don't suppose the specific changes were inevitable, but in this instance, centuries of economic catastrophe yielded the Renaissance, a social revolution. That's what Inhofe fears, a revolution that alters the system, perhaps ending the monopoly capitalism he serves, but he's too willfully stupid to help head off climate change. He's joined in this willed stupidity--to a lesser degree--by world leaders in general. We do know how to stop climate change, but China, the United States, India and the Palestinians aren't doing it. Too bad.

Gary Goss