Whichever way you look at it, Christmas is a wonderfully delusional time of the year. Whether it’s believing in Father Christmas or in the dubious obstetrics in Bethlehem two and bit thousand years ago, or deluding yourself that rampant commercialism mostly fuelled by personal debt will bring you happiness, none of it really stands up to close scrutiny. Even a tipsy feeling of general bonhomie towards your workmates (if you’re lucky enough to be in work) is, at heart, a delusion which dissipates with the next morning’s hangover, when you’re likely to recognise the true nature of things with a hideous clarity.
Still, many people have observed that humankind cannot bare too much reality, so none of this is really that harmful. Indeed, regular readers of this column may be surprised, given how often I’ve advertised my fierce atheism, to hear that I really like Christmas. We need a good, albeit delusional, midwinter festival to cheer us all up – whatever delusion we ultimately pretend justifies it. But beyond the gluttony, drunkenness, turkey and tat, there remain other delusions which can’t be dismissed so lightly.
As I write, the Copenhagen climate conference is about to enter its second, final week. Whether or not this particular bleak midwinter is warmer than usual and irrespective of how large its carbon footprint ends up being, this international jamboree has been either hyped up as the most important conclave in the history of humanity or dismissed as a monumental waste of time trumped up by a sinister conclave of deliberately delusional megalomaniacs. On the one side stands science, pure and simple. Except that science, even if you’re not a climate change denier, is neither pure nor simple. And we should be as wary of worshipping science as we should be of kowtowing to any of the other hegemonies we have imposed on us. It was science, remember, that gave us the phlogiston theory, eugenics, the atom bomb and Zyklon B, and its dumb cousin, technology, that’s got us into the mess we’re in now. Or so they say.
But the point, of course, is that science is merely a consensus of observation. And yet despite the shortcomings it shares with all the other gods human beings have elevated onto the altars of their own opinions, just contrast it with its detractors. Because on the other side, even with their laudable objections to being bamboozled by yet another elite, the average climate change deniers are standing shoulder to shoulder with Nick Griffin, Melanie Phillips, Saudi despots, multinational oil companies, Russian oligarchs, third world kleptocrats, conspiracy theorists and the kind of smirking right-wing contrarians who write for The Spectator. However furiously they blog or hurl abuse at the columnists (or the cartoonists, thank you very much) on The Guardian website’s Comment Is Free talk boards, what the deniers fail to ask themselves is the question we should all be asking ourselves all the time: cui bono? Who benefits from either side of the argument? Is the melting of the icecaps a lie invented purely to guarantee the rather paltry state funding received by hairy young man in pokey labs at the University of East Anglia? Or is it really happening because of the avarice and lust for ever-greater power of an already enormously rich and powerful elite?
Which brings us to the hub of the matter. Science is a tool, but the point is the politics. Just as the likes of Richard Dawkins have wasted years trying to disprove God through science, so in the bogus debate surrounding climate change the science can be bandied about forever. However, as with religion, it all boils down to opinion (dressed up, in the case of religion, as “faith”). And opinions are the province of politics. It may be no comfort that your ideals are ultimately “unprovable”; but that doesn’t invalidate them. So we should view climate change science as merely the portal to a deeper and, in a way, “truer” politics, at the heart of which lies the kernel of all politics, which is the struggle between power and freedom.
At the end of the day – which may be sooner than you think – the deniers are handing yet another carte blanche to the despoliation of the natural world, as well as its human inhabitants, to increasing wealth for a tiny elite, to increasing inequality and ever-increasing immiseration of the majority of humankind. Which leads us to another area of science, dealt with in Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level and Oliver James’ Affluenza among many others, and which proves that unequal societies are bad for everyone: they madden us, sicken us, drive us into addiction, desperation and crime.
So delude yourself on any number of fronts, if you like: delude yourself that our current economic model is the right one, that never-ending growth is an unarguable good, that massive overpopulation and eternal exploitation of the planet is sustainable or that industrialisation – invented to accelerate the transfer of wealth from the many to the few – hasn’t caused climate change. But if you do, it won’t make you happier. So, on the whole, give me the delusions of Santa in his sleigh, the little baby Jesus and goodwill to all men, even if only for a week or so, and as happy a Christmas as possible to you all.
