Society Afraid Of Its Own Shadow

Scorning the Propaganda of Fear 
A review of Pascal Bruckner's  The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse

Emma-Kate Symons
20 Jul 2012 00:03:00
Australian Financial Review

When a celebrated French philosopher from the centre left assails the “despotic” politics of environmental fear he should expect a dressing down from his climate change-conscious comrades.  But Pascal Bruckner has incited such fury with a diatribe against green prophesiers of imminent planetary ruin, the reaction has surprised even this veteran of the trans-Atlantic culture wars.

“The planet is sick. Man is guilty of having destroyed it. He must pay,” is how Bruckner caustically portrays the received wisdom on environmental “sin” and damnation in his latest book Le fanatisme de l’Apocalypse (The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse).  “Consider . . . the famous carbon footprint that we all leave behind us,” he writes in his introduction. “What is it, after all, if not the gaseous equivalent of original sin, of the stain that we inflict on our Mother Gaia by the simple fact of being present and breathing?”


Subtitled Sauver la Terre, punir l’Homme (Save the Earth, Punish Human Beings) the book rails against a peculiar Western malady. Yes, concerns about the environment are legitimate, Bruckner asserts, but catastrophisme is transforming us all into children “put in a panic in order to be better controlled”.

It is a feistier-than-usual polemic for Bruckner, a leading member of France’s “new philosophers” who emerged from the 1970s left with searing critiques of Marxism. Later this year, it will be published in English as Fanaticism of the Apocalypse by Polity, Cambridge, translated by Steven Rendall.  As the Jesuit-educated philosopher sees it, extreme climate change alarmism, with its warning bells chiming “The end of the world is nigh, repent ye”, represents a worrying new doctrine of ideological purity that even has totalitarian overtones.. . .


“I do not attack ecology per se,” Bruckner says of his book. “I attack that degraded religion which emerges from it and turns into a culture of fear, hatred of progress and well-being.  Why must we renounce all the joys of life under the pretext of global warming?” . . . . 

But as Bruckner judges it, a panic is now gripping Western elites, as they rapidly lose power amid the rise of countries like China, India and Brazil.  “Since we no longer dominate the world, we live in a permanent terror film and every day they [ecologists] explain to us that it is a miracle that we are still alive.  “The absurdity of this propaganda of fear – which recalls that of [former US president] George W. Bush regarding terrorism – is that we have never lived so long.  We are living in a post-technological Middle Ages. Our mentality is that of the medieval peasant serf who sees maleficent forces in nature. 

“Everything is dangerous. Simply to live has become an impossible task.  We are afraid of everything – of mobile phones, of food, of dummies, of nappies, of antennas. We are living in a society which has a horror of risk and therefore is afraid of its own shadow.”

Intelligent responses to environmental degradation are therefore required rather than radical “belt-tightening” and “privation” in the form of a retreat from nuclear power and even domestic heating.  “There is this famous notion defended by the ecologists of ‘negawatts’: the best energy is that which we don’t expend,” the philosopher almost sneers.  Yes, we need to make some savings. But wealth reproduces itself and life cannot simply be a subtraction. It is like saying ‘the best life is the life we don’t lead’. This is a kind of neo-Malthusianism . . . .

“But they [political ecologists] are crazy. They propose nothing and are opposed to everything – the car, the TGV [French high-speed train], the atom, i.e. nuclear power, petrol, coal, natural gas. At the end there is nothing left!”

. . . . Still, Bruckner detects suspicion about the merits of industrial progress not only in France but across the Western world, wherever extremist environmental politics has taken hold of public debate and even language.  The credo consists of saying to developing countries “stay poor because we became rich, we did evil to the planet and therefore everyone must impoverish themselves”.  This discourse is a smokescreen to hide the anxiety of Westerners who have lost their supremacy in the world,  Bruckner retorts.

Emma-Kate Symons is a freelance journalist based in Paris and Bangkok.
The Australian Financial Review