is this latter type of narcissism (“I know best”) that is the more dangerous for the citizenry at large and the culture. The MIT economist is one of the prime public exemplars of moral narcissism in recent times, a paradigm figure much in the way global warming is a paradigm theory or movement. Caught repeatedly on video asserting the American public was too ignorant to know what was for their own good, Gruber became a poster boy for elites manipulating the electorate for their own ends. These ends are at once antidemocratic and self-congratulatory and geared, again consciously or unconsciously, toward power, control and, quite often, economic gain.
It’s no accident that few, including then majority leader Nancy Pelosi, knew what was in the Affordable Care Act. It didn’t matter. They weren’t supposed to. The bill itself was written by a small group of unelected and largely unvetted elites like Gruber and Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of Barack Obama’s former adviser Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel. All the elected leadership had to do was cooperate with these elites, receive their wisdom, and profit from the appearance of doing something. What the elites wrote had to be good because the elites said it was good and because elites felt good designing it and the leaders felt good enacting it. It’s no more than a high-toned shell game—moral narcissism as legislation. And the more byzantine the bill the better because there was no intention that it be understood and debated. As Nancy Pelosi made clear, “You have to pass the bill in order to find out what’s in it.” The process is more emotional than intellectual or analytical and, while pretending to the practical, is the antithesis of it. Results are immaterial and may never be known. In fact, it’s better if they’re not.
Inherent in this too, and not so far below the surface, is a buried insecurity. You pretend to know best, because deep down you fear you do not. You also may fear you are unqualified to make the decision or write the bill in the first place, because what really constitutes a qualification? A PhD? (The famous quote from William F. Buckley applies here: “I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.”) All of the usual qualifications that define elites may indeed be merely pretensions, something to be mocked like the pompous Il Dottore (the Doctor) stock character in the Commedia dell’Arte. Your ideas may be defective and you will be unmasked as a fraud. Nevertheless, you have become so thoroughly identified with these ideas that you cling to them more strongly, while making them as complicated as possible, thus wrapping them in a cloak of invisibility. The preservation of power is all.
This process or pattern—famously dramatized by Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello’s It Is So If You Think So or Right You Are (If You Think You Are)—repeats itself over and over in many aspects of our political and social life. I could be polite and say to our detriment. Or I could be honest and say, particularly now, to our destruction. We are living in a time, it has been pointed out by commentators, of increasing global threat to our civilization, not unlike the 1930s. One of the enduring mysteries of that era is how so many allowed Hitler to carry out his dreadful work without forceful opposition until it was too late. There are many answers to that mystery, but moral narcissism is one of the keys to unlocking all of them, possibly the key. I will deal with that later, but first . . .
Grandmother always said, “In polite society, when you don’t know people, just talk about something neutral, like the weather.” That was then, this is now.
I am launching into this chapter on a particularly miserable day in Los Angeles, where it supposedly never rains; only today it’s been raining at a pace of approximately one inch per hour, enough to create a flood or floods. Traffic lights are out and cars are backed up everywhere. Local news hosts are broadcasting ankle-deep in mudslides washing down from the San Gabriels. Rainfall records are being broken. “Climate change” has struck!
Or has it? Is it just a stormy day the likes of which have ebbed and flowed forever? Or is Armageddon just around the corner? Nobody knows, although many say they do. A new film version of “Noah” was released in 2014, after all. Speaking of floods, 2015 was the year of the Lima Climate Change Conference, the sequel to the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference of 2009. I attended the conference in Copenhagen, which took place in a near blizzard, the furthest thing from global warming imaginable. Nonetheless, the topic was discussed incessantly to the exclusion of anything else, as if the oceans welling up and destroying islands was a foregone conclusion. When I was a kid in New York City, there was a jingle that played repeatedly on the radio at the conclusion of the hourly news as a lead-in to the weather report: “Everybody talks about it, nobody does a thing about it—the weath-ther!”
How times have changed. Now it’s “The weath-ther. Everybody talks about it all the time. And we have to do something drastic about it, right now, right away. Otherwise, the volcanoes will erupt, the glaciers will melt, the rivers will overflow, and we’re all gonna die—the weath-ther!” According to such scientific wizards as John Kerry and, needless to say, Al Gore, weather—excuse me global warming, excuse me climate change, excuse me whatever new euphemism has or is about to appear—is the great cause célèbre of our era, surpassing even income inequality or, needless to say, such lesser insignificant crises such as the spread of radical Islam throughout the Muslim world and across the globe, not to mention the Iranian nuclear bomb.
Well, not everybody believes it. There are those people—some themselves scientists, some not—known as “climate deniers.” They have been given a name redolent of the Holocaust to impute to them the status of those terrifying sociopaths who think Auschwitz was just a 1940s version of assisted living. These attacks began over a decade ago in an attempt to make the so-called deniers pariahs. They were often successful, although there has only been the most minor, if any, documented global warming—anthropogenic (man-made) or otherwise—in going on two decades now. Nevertheless, as recently as December 2014 a group calling itself the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry1 released a public letter to the media urging journalists to use the word “deniers” rather than the gentler “skeptics” to describe those—they particularly had Oklahoma senator James Inhofe in mind—who don’t believe in the science. The committee members—who include television “Science Guy” Bill Nye and Carl Sagan’s widow—evidently thought the word “skeptics” too respectable. In a May 2015 op-ed for the Washington Post, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat from Rhode Island, went further, calling for the fossil fuel industry and its trade associations to be prosecuted under RICO racketeering statutes for engineering supposed secret payments to scientists in the manner of the tobacco industry. None of this ultimately has to do with whether global warming exists or will exist—and if it does, whether it is man-made and, if so, to what extent. Nor does it deal with the question of whether warming is finally good or bad.
This is all arguable and has been argued ad infinitum. The ins and outs of the science are worth studying, but they are not my subjects here. Although my father was a radiologist who worked for the Atomic Energy Commission at its beginnings, treating the Hiroshima Ladies and inspiring me to want to be a physicist as a boy, I gradually turned from the subject as a teenager—in part because of lack of ability—toward literature. I am not remotely qualified to discuss the finer points of climate science in any depth, nor do I intend to. I am an agnostic on the topic of global warming, man-made or otherwise, though I assume climate changes eventually. It always has. There was an ice age, several, in fact, and, from what I understand, a medieval warm period with people growing wine grapes in Scotland. What interests me is why people’s belief systems arose on this topic and why they think what they do; why they are so certain when they have no demonstrable reason to be.
Most of those who have an opinion on the
