The Id�e fixe of Global Warming on college campuses
Great essay by Stanley Kurtz at
National Review:
The Wannabe Oppressed
What do America�s college students want? They want to be oppressed. More precisely, a surprising number of students at America�s finest colleges and universities wish to appear as victims � to themselves, as well as to others � without the discomfort of actually experiencing victimization. Here is where global warming comes in. The secret appeal of campus climate activism lies in its ability to turn otherwise happy, healthy, and prosperous young people into an oppressed class, at least in their own imaginings. Climate activists say to the world, �I�ll save you.� Yet deep down they�re thinking, �Oppress me.�
In his important new book, The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse: Save the Earth, Punish Human Beings, French intellectual gadfly Pascal Bruckner does the most thorough job yet of explaining the climate movement as a secular religion, an odd combination of deformed Christianity and reconstructed Marxism. (You can find Bruckner�s excellent article based on the book here.) Bruckner describes a historical process wherein �the long list of emblematic victims � Jews, blacks, slaves, proletarians, colonized peoples � was replaced, little by little, with the Planet.� The planet, says Bruckner, �has become the new proletariat that must be saved from exploitation.�
Excellent stuff -- ordering the book from Amazon. Nice dig at Weepy Bill McKibben (who shops for groceries and uses the store's
plastic bags).
Id�e fixe? From
Wikipedia:
An id�e fixe is a preoccupation of mind held so firmly as to resist any attempt to modify it, a fixation. The name originates from the French [French : id�e, idea + fixe, fixed]. Although not used technically to denote a particular disorder in psychology, id�e fixe is used often in the description of disorders, and is employed widely in literature and everyday English.
Defines it pretty well...
Posted by DaveH at October 16, 2013 8:50 PM