{"id":27954,"date":"2015-07-06T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-07-06T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ashleydev.com\/2015\/07\/06\/the-future-no-doomsday-cult-required\/"},"modified":"2020-08-27T11:38:47","modified_gmt":"2020-08-27T15:38:47","slug":"the-future-no-doomsday-cult-required","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cna.ca\/fr\/2015\/07\/06\/the-future-no-doomsday-cult-required\/","title":{"rendered":"The Future: No Doomsday Cult&nbsp;Required"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>By John Stewart<br \/>\n<\/strong><i>Director of Policy and Research<\/i><br \/>\n<em>Canadian Nuclear Association<\/em><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-4153 alignright\" src=\"http:\/\/talknuclear.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/Doomsday-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Doomsday\" width=\"399\" height=\"266\" \/>My adult son, who is a wise, reflective, intelligent and well-read man, recently shared with me his view of the world in a few decades. It was apocalyptic: dead oceans, cities run by criminal gangs&#8230; you get the idea. (He was trying to persuade me to retire early and enjoy life while I can).<\/p>\n<p>Admittedly, there is reasonable evidence for his forecast. I happen to take a less pessimistic view. He and I don\u2019t disagree much on facts, but rather on how we project them into the future.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m also more historically conscious: I\u2019m more aware that it is not, and has never been, unusual to forecast that we are all doomed.<\/p>\n<p>Doomsday predictions have been with us since ancient times. They are doubly useful. They employ fear to recruit believers into whatever religion we\u2019re evangelizing. And they provide the satisfying glow of knowing what a terrible end awaits those who won\u2019t join us and how they\u2019ll realize, when that end comes, that we were right and they were wrong.<\/p>\n<p>There is always evidence that can be pressed readily into service. Religious cultists generally point to society\u2019s (always apparent) corruption and moral decline. Thomas Malthus noted the unrestrained fertility of the poor. Marx and the communist ideologues saw the clear drawbacks of industrial society, and predicted that capitalism would inevitably falter and collapse. 1960\u2019s environmentalists overextended Rachel Carson\u2019s solid, ground-breaking work on the effects of pesticides. The 1970\u2019s resource-exhaustion panickers distorted the Limits to Growth report; they took commodity price spikes as proof that the world was running out of natural resources.<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s a bit of moral superiority at work. Those who see the light, who invest in the new religion, are the wise and good. Those who don\u2019t agree wholeheartedly with them are mentally and morally deficient. If they can\u2019t be beaten in argument, at least they\u2019ll see the error of their ways on judgment day.<\/p>\n<p>These features have carried through from the ancient religious doomsday cults, to socialist ideologies, to present visions of Our Renewable Energy Future. The old system is doomed. The crash will come in our lifetimes (otherwise, why convert?). To save yourself and prosper in these dark times, you must commit to the new religion.<\/p>\n<p>Belief in society\u2019s moral decay gradually fused with belief in capitalism\u2019s self-destruction, which apparently now has become belief in our biosphere\u2019s demise. Indeed, the three have gotten quite muddled: consumerism is portrayed as a kind of moral and spiritual decay, which has been foisted on humanity by corporations. The system we\u2019ve built is now destroying not just our souls, but itself and Mother Nature too.\u00a0<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-4154 alignright\" src=\"http:\/\/talknuclear.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/EarthTimeBomb-277x300.jpg\" alt=\"EarthTimeBomb\" width=\"201\" height=\"218\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I realized this when listening to my son talk about the future: Our Renewable Energy Future is somehow mixed up with Original Sin, the population bomb, and the inevitable crash of the capitalist system. It\u2019s repeatedly characterized as \u201cinevitable,\u201d the speed of its arrival is overestimated, and of course we can\u2019t rely on failing corporate structures (or cities) to implement it. Somehow we\u2019re all going to achieve it in small cooperative teams in the countryside.<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s a lot of baggage here. But my son and I acknowledged it and got beyond it. And we continue to have the reasonable discussion we both want. It can be done.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By John Stewart Director of Policy and Research Canadian Nuclear Association My adult son, who is a wise, reflective, intelligent and well-read man, recently shared with me his view of the world in a few decades. It was apocalyptic: dead oceans, cities run by criminal gangs&#8230; you get the idea. (He was trying to persuade [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[537],"tags":[],"topic":[],"class_list":["post-27954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-talknuclear"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>The Future: No Doomsday Cult Required - Association nucl\u00e9aire canadienne<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cna.ca\/fr\/2015\/07\/06\/the-future-no-doomsday-cult-required\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"fr_FR\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Future: No Doomsday Cult Required - Association nucl\u00e9aire canadienne\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"By John Stewart Director of Policy and Research Canadian Nuclear Association My adult son, who is a wise, reflective, intelligent and well-read man, recently shared with me his view of the world in a few decades. 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