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As I have explained here and more fully here (in English here), freedom is an important corrective that is indispensable in keeping a society supple, considerate, and imaginative. Freedom protects the population from the callous rigidity, imperious cruelty, and stultifying pretence of omniscience that characterise a totalitarian order.
Totalitarian structures are like a miracle lever that sets free unrivalled energy to insulate certain views and interests from contestation, according unrestricted license and plenipotentiary powers of implementation to them.
Totalitarian solutions appeal to our deep seated desire to be absolutely right (to be sure of what we know) and to control the things that matter to us—like the fire that our ancestors used to cook their meals or the wristwatch that we expect to be accurate all the time.
This is why there is an irresistible temptation in mankind to fortify their concerns with ideologies, simplified accounts of the world that appear to entitle us to unassailable rational leadership and a compelling right to act as we see fit.
In many contexts of ordinary, private life it is legitimate to follow up on our totalitarian urges: the wish to be accurate and to do the right thing properly and unimpeded.
The problems start when we apply totalitarian strategies to disencumber ourselves from control and criticism by others, quashing the known and as yet unknown persons, challenging debates, findings and refutations that prove our personal pretence wrong.
Ironically, science is a preferred excuse of the politically ambitious to switch over into the totalitarian mode. The stratagem is ironic, to say the least, since science is that tool and stage of human civilisation that is based on the recognition of the universal fallibility of our race. The "precautionary principle" of science tells us never to regard a scientific discourse to be settled, to always remain open to new ideas and insights, and in fact to seek actively information that will shatter our established convictions.
Thus, science properly understood encapsulates the essence of freedom.
Of course, totalitarians detest the freedom of science—they need ultimate knowledge to gain absolute power.
Totalitarians were loath to treat Marxism as a fallible proposition, in which capacity it may be of considerable interest and value; instead they celebrated it with devious immaturity and superficiality as "science", i.e. a token of infallibility, an end state of revealed truth.
After the fulminant collapse of communism all over the world, the terror of "scientific" Marxism has rashly migrated into the pseudo-scientific religion of environmentalism. Again "science" is supposed to advise uniquely determined, incontestably requisite action that disciplines us with the force of a life-threatening ultimatum.
The zealotry of the "environmental" movement, which has become one of the greatest threats to the classic aims of conservationists, leaves a trace of debris of ill thought-through memes, at the centre of which we find the dichotomy between man and nature. Here is our species, that suspicious form of life, and there, juxtaposed to it, the environment.
The environment is being presented as "a thing in itself", assuming the shape of das Ding an sich, an objective structure existing independent of human perception. This misconception corresponds to the unscientific notion of "science" as a receptacle of objective facts, conveying messages as indubitable and cast-iron as the laws of history postulated by Marxism.
The philosophico-methodological anachronism at the bottom of the Green movement serves as the totalitarian lever enforcing the illusion of a world in which incontrovertible insights and a uniquely determined course of action dictate the only possible way of avoiding apocalypse. It is a recipe for hysteria and ruthless power-wielding and a guarantee for terrible outcomes, perhaps on the scale of the greatest human-induced catastrophe: "the real existing socialism".
The totalitarian threat of "environmentalism" is the inevitable outcome of habitually ignoring the wisdom of freedom, which reminds us that whatever nature is, what it requires of us, and in what relationship it is and ought to be situated vis-à-vis human beings, all of these fundamental issues can only be decided by the discretion and interaction of fallible human beings. There is no such thing as nature outside of the purview of human consciousness and social exchange. Hence the question of what is nature and how to deal with it adequately is subject to the logic of human debate. We have to compete for the best answers—all of the time, with no end to the contest, no final conclusions ever to arrive at, and no exclusion of anyone who cares to participate in the challenge.
When the checks and balances afforded us by freedom, by free discourse and free science, get diminished, as is the design of the green bigot, zeal takes over, and people begin to construct false, self-centred and oppressive worlds from their preferred phantasmagorical premises.
Any serious scientist will tell you that she is busy precisely because it is not clear what nature is and what it still keeps in store for our unquenchable curiosity. Nature is a human construct, whose ongoing erection, demolition and rebuilding, whose continual capturing in terms of science and the social discourse is the open-ended fate of mankind.
The zealotry of the "environmental" movement, which has become one of the greatest threats to the classic aims of conservationists, leaves a trace of debris of ill thought-through memes, at the centre of which we find the dichotomy between man and nature. Here is our species, that suspicious form of life, and there, juxtaposed to it, the environment.
The environment is being presented as "a thing in itself", assuming the shape of das Ding an sich, an objective structure existing independent of human perception. This misconception corresponds to the unscientific notion of "science" as a receptacle of objective facts, conveying messages as indubitable and cast-iron as the laws of history postulated by Marxism.
The philosophico-methodological anachronism at the bottom of the Green movement serves as the totalitarian lever enforcing the illusion of a world in which incontrovertible insights and a uniquely determined course of action dictate the only possible way of avoiding apocalypse. It is a recipe for hysteria and ruthless power-wielding and a guarantee for terrible outcomes, perhaps on the scale of the greatest human-induced catastrophe: "the real existing socialism".
The totalitarian threat of "environmentalism" is the inevitable outcome of habitually ignoring the wisdom of freedom, which reminds us that whatever nature is, what it requires of us, and in what relationship it is and ought to be situated vis-à-vis human beings, all of these fundamental issues can only be decided by the discretion and interaction of fallible human beings. There is no such thing as nature outside of the purview of human consciousness and social exchange. Hence the question of what is nature and how to deal with it adequately is subject to the logic of human debate. We have to compete for the best answers—all of the time, with no end to the contest, no final conclusions ever to arrive at, and no exclusion of anyone who cares to participate in the challenge.
When the checks and balances afforded us by freedom, by free discourse and free science, get diminished, as is the design of the green bigot, zeal takes over, and people begin to construct false, self-centred and oppressive worlds from their preferred phantasmagorical premises.
Any serious scientist will tell you that she is busy precisely because it is not clear what nature is and what it still keeps in store for our unquenchable curiosity. Nature is a human construct, whose ongoing erection, demolition and rebuilding, whose continual capturing in terms of science and the social discourse is the open-ended fate of mankind.
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