A Fallacious Binary World

Greenist Folly

In Australia some commentators are arguing that the Greens are out for the count.  The party has lost electoral ground everywhere. For example, read Andrew Bolt's indictment of Green electoral and political failure, as published in The Telegraph:

The Greens are finished. They lost more than a third of their voters in Tasmania’s election and are everywhere in retreat. In Saturday’s election, in the Greens’ birthplace, the party’s vote crashed from 21 per cent to 13.  Last year’s federal election was little better. The party lost 500,000 voters — more than a quarter of their support — in the Senate poll.  In the 2012 ACT election, the Greens were also hammered, losing a third of their vote. In Western Australia last year, they lost a quarter. . . .

But the fantasy of the Greens taking over from Labor is over.

A fantasy, by the way, which has also been voiced in New Zealand.   Bolt continues:

The Greens have been exposed as great at striking fine poses but useless at the pragmatic work of government.  They are the party for dreamers, not doers.  Playing with real power has destroyed them. . . .   They are the party of unreason, and when the country ran out of money we could no longer afford them.

Same in Tasmania. The Greens were welcomed by Labor into government and took two ministerial positions.  Tragically, Tasmania became the nursery for the Green experiment, which Labor, gutted of its own vision, seemed unable to resist.  Tasmania is now the poorest state with the highest unemployment. No, the Greens are finished.

Greenism is a paralysing religion.  Not in the sense of not doing anything at all.  The Greens can be very active at criticism and things like protesting against an oil rig or two.  But their naive view is that the human species is an intrusion upon Nature.  The Greens have a binary cosmology.  Its either Nature or man. Man is not part of the natural order; he always disturbs it, unbalances is, destroys it by virtue of existing on the planet.  Thus, more human activity means less Nature. Ergo, more human activity always means environmental degradation and destruction. At its most basic premise, Greenist philosophy is anti-human. 

On this basis, any human activity can be protested, even halted, because somewhere, something in the rest of creation is being damaged.  If a human being goes for a walk, ants are at threat on the footpath.  Consistent Greenism would argue stridently for banning human peripatetics.  Human being emit carbon dioxide by breathing.  Consistent Greens would call for human reduction, if not eradication.  But of course Greenism has to pick its fights.  It cannot protest everything.  But herein lies the political problem.  When the Greens achieve political power or they get in a position of influence over government policy they find themselves in a cleft stick.  Anything and everything the government does degrades the environment in the Greens' binary world.  Therefore, Green support in government is always desultory and half-hearted, and quickly the Greens become riven with internal strife, let alone rifts with coalition "partners". 

For example, in an ideal Green world, everyone would bike everywhere.  But even closing down roads and making cycle-ways degrades the natural, unspoiled environment.  Greens feel hypocritical and compromised by such stuff.  There is a real-life example in California.  In response to the Greens, large investments have been made in wind farms to generate electricity.  Finally, when all was completed and the windmills started turning the Greens began to oppose them, wanting them shut down because . . . birds are being killed.

The more the Greens succeed in gaining political traction and even positions of governance, the more they will fail.  Their binary world view is false.  When it confronts the real world, their false construction is shamefully exposed like the emperor discovering he had no clothes.