Risen indeed

 

An Egyptian-American Muslim colleague of mine  received an e-mail from his Egyptian-American Coptic friend, addressed to a roster of friends and acquaintances both Christian and Muslim.   The message read, in its entirety:

Have a blessed Easter.

Risen indeed.

Now, my colleague occasionally has difficulties with nuances of English, even after a couple of decades of residence in the U.S.   But he did understand that this terse and telegraphic phrase asserted the Resurrection of Jesus.

Though Muslim to the core, he is quite accepting of the other Abrahamic faiths (indeed, has more than once attended services with Christian friends), and he was happy to receive this blessing from a friend.   He then asked me, in confidence (since he knows that I am candid about such things), whether all Christian denominations believed in the Resurrection.

            “Um … yes,” I replied.   (The “Um” part was to stall for time while the taken-aback-sensation passed.  In a similar fashion, some years ago, a young woman colleague, university-educated and soon to be well traveled, asked me out of the blue, “Do Jews believe that Jesus is the Messiah?”   -- “Um … no,” was my reply.)

His own reply was a surprise.  “Then we believe the same thing!” he exclaimed, beaming.   For the Koran (he went on) proclaimed that God “lifted” Jesus up to Paradise (rafa`a).   I expressed satisfaction at this congruence, and privately desired that the message might spread to outfits like ISIL and Boko Haram, who might, please, accordingly  knock it off.

He went on to inform me that (according to Muslims) Jesus of Nazareth (upon whom be peace) had not actually been crucified.   I had heard this motif before in connection with the Ahmadiyya (a pure simulacrum had been crucified in his place); but my colleague added a neat twist, reminiscent of the trope wherein the executioner hoists with his own petard:   God had caused the very soldier leading Jesus to Golgotha  to suddenly take on the mild carpenter’s appearance.  

“That’s not in the Koran,” I frowned.  -- “No,” he conceded.

“Hadith?”  (There are tens of thousands of these, some sounder than others, you never known what might be found in some of the doubtful ones.)  --  He considered.  “In the culture,” he finally said.

Which is to say:  Folklore, like “December 25”.   (None but the most ignorant Christian will take offense if you state that we really have no idea what day Jesus was born on.)

Well -- He is born, and He is risen.  Peace on Earth, good will to men.

A vision common to Christianity and Islam

(Nur mit ein bißchen anderen Worten)

~

[Philological footnote]  The Arabic, rafa`, is literally ‘raised’.   Thus, it is not quite equivalent to resurrexit, in what might elsewhere be a small  but is here a crucial difference:  rafa` is comptabile with Jesus having been raised to Paradise while still alive, like Elijah.  There is nothing in the Koran saying that he was risen from the dead.

~

With our linguistic caps on, let us look more closely at the wording of that greeting.   To a Muslim with an uncertain grasp of English, it might seem no more than you might find on a Hallmark card.   It is thus the perfect two-tier or encapsulated expression:   no more than a smooth rock, or black box, to the uninitiated;  but a treasure-chest  which springs open at the click, to initiates.

The standard American greetings that those of my generation grew up with  were “Happy Easter” and “Merry Christmas”.   But as those holdays became increasingly commercialized, some observent Christians have come increasingly to say “Blessed Easter” or “Easter Blessings”, to make it plain that they are actually referring to the holy-day and not simply a time to hunt eggs or find discounts at the Mall (or as a counterpunch to the latterday degradation of even “Merry Christmas” to “Season’s Greetings”).  You would not say it to someone you knew to be an atheist;  though you might say it to a kindly stranger.

 

“Risen indeed”, by contrast, is not used  even by the generality of Christians, let alone to those of other faiths or none.  It specifically echoes the antiphonal style of worship, priest and congregation:      

    

   “The Lord be with you” 

   Rx: “And also with you.”   

   “Christ is risen.” 

   Rx: “He is risen indeed.”    

 

And by leaving off the first two words of the latter formula, pronoun and auxiliary verb, the writer made it clear that he was echoing the ritual greeting, which you may hear in Orthodox, Catholic and Episcopal services, but not among churches whose liturgy or worship-style is not antiphonal.

Among the Eastern Orthodox, this formula is known as the Paschal troparion:   Χριστὸς ἀνέστη.

The English Wikipedia has a particlarly nice article on this topic, as does the Russian version:

       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paschal_greeting

Christus resurrexit! Resurrexit vere!

[Update]  The whole offering-and-response style recalls, actually, Arabic.  There are dozens or scores, if not hundreds, of formulaic greetings and blessings, each with a prescribed response.   This scarcely exists in English, apart from “Thank you” -- “You’re welcome”.  (Arabic:  shukran. -- `afwan.)

Thus:  To al-salaam `aleykum, you reply Wa-`alaykum al-salaam.  (“Hello.” -- “Hello back.”)

To SabaaH al-xayr (“Good morning”), SabaaH al-nuur (literally “Morning of light”;  with many further variants.)

To na`iiman! (a salutation to someone who has evidently just bathed, or shaved, or had a haircut):  Allah yin`im `ayleek.

And so on.

There is thus, both a theological aspect to the responsory mode of worship, and a cultural/aesthetic one:  both typical of the Mideast.

[Further update]  Apart from the context of worship, such ritualized exchanges are typical of traditional societies, and indeed help constitute their social cement.   Contemporary American is sadly lacking in these:  a lonely survival is “Thank you” -- “You’re welcome” -- and even this may go the way of the dodo  as the custom of so much as thanking  fades, along with that relic of our mother’s day, the Thank-You Note.

(As, https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2025/08/26/carolyn-hax-cash-gifts-thank-you-notes/

Nieces prefer getting cash gifts and not sending thank-you notes.   Sending cash feels like paying bills  to this aunt, and nieces’ lack of response to gifts  makes it even worse.)

 

But the forefathers of our ancestors in the northern isles, were replete with these.   A fossil of one survives in the mysterious word wassail, now known to most speakers only in some old Christmas carols.  In origin, it is a salutation; grammatically, an imperative.  And it came with its own antiphon:

 

Host:  Wassail!  [cognate with Old Norse ves heill ‘be hale’, as in “hale and hearty” and “to your health”]

Guest:  Drink-hail!

 

Ah, the days, those were the days;  those were the days  indeed.

 

Implicit Knowledge (nursery edition)

We earlier shared an anecdote of implicit or “chrysalis-enclosed” knowledge, from an introspective five-year-old of our acquaintance:

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/09/implicit-vs-active-knowledge.html

Compare this childhood reminiscence of a boy growing up on the Upper East Side:

I remember my grandmother’s house quite well.  It was a very cold formal place.  There was an enormous marble entrace hall …

We behaved extremely well.  We knew the rules inside out  without knowing the rules.

Jeff Kisseloff, You Must Remember This:  An Oral History of Manhattan  from the 1890s to World War II (1989), p. 120

“Friending” -- Then and Now

In a book  valuably organized by neighborhood, we hear an Upper West Side resident, Olga Marx (b. 1894):

On New Year’s Day, all the women stayed at home  to receive callers. … When a man would call, it was a sign of gentility to leave an engraved visiting-card in an urn at the door.  Then my mother would use them to compare with friends.  Of course, it was very important to have more cards than anybody else.

-- Jeff Kisseloff, You Must Remember This:  An Oral History of Manhattan  from the 1890s to World War II (1989), p. 203

[Note]  Most of the testimony in Kisseloff’s engaging collection  comes from ordinary folks, but often with a solid street-eloquence.   The woman looking-back in the above quotation  was Olga Marx, one of the more observant of Kisseloff’s informants (or “witnesses”  as he calls them).   Also one of the better educated -- Barnard, then a Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr.   There followed a modest literary life.  But what caught my eye  was this detail:  she published “several mysteries for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.”    Salutations from across the decades, Dr. Marx!  That magazine is also where I got my start, chronicling the saga of the Murphy Brothers, Private Investigators.   You can check out the action  here:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

Mega-Minimalism

In The New Yorker for February 3, 2020, in an article titled “The Decluttering Dogma”,   Ms. Jia Tolentino portrays the current fad of Minimalism as a lifestyle, one simultaneously self-righteous and self-mortifying.  There have been many such episodes in mankind’s history, though usually not so well catered-to in online shopping.

Beyond that aspect, Minimalism is a label for trends in the arts, both visual and audio;  in literature;  even in science (as, latterly, linguistics).  And if you’re a Minimalism maven, you’ve come to the right place:  we offer the richest snippets of Minimalism  on the whole World Wide Web!  Clowns -- Jingles -- Animal acts! 

Review the roster of our offerings  here:

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/Minimalism

Nuances of Narcissism

From an American novelist,  keen observer of the social scene:

He had seen enough of music and the stage  to know that, as a matter of course, the people connected with them  reached heights of conceit and pretentiousness,  that painters and writers, for instance, hardly dared dream of.

-- James Gould Cozzens,  Ask Me Tomorrow (1940)

People outside the arts will be surprised.  Tiens -- Are musicians actually more self-involved than are painters?  One had not known.

But such occupational psychological fault-lines  exist indeed.   As:  To anyone on the “Marketing” side of the Dilbert Divide,  or in the arts scene,  tech guys are simply a vague gray mass of computer-nerds, whether they be in software or hardware.   Yet my own observations  working in the R&D half of Franklin Computer  revealed such a subtle scission.   While as a group overall, engineers are generally more relaxing and enjoyable to work with  than are academics,  hardware engineers are notably straightforward and devoid of drama-queenery;  while software engineers, though sometimes more interesting intellectually and with a better sense of humor, include a certain number of cranks and unclubbables  within their ranks.

My present place of employment has a huge range of specialties -- soldiers and civilians, mathematicians and cyberneticians, pen-pushers and policy-wonks.  Most are splendid, a few do bad things.  But when it comes specifically to preening and whining -- alas! -- thát you find among my own tribe -- the linguists.

There are likewise a spectrum of stereotypical personality patterns among chemists versus physicists -- nay, experimental physicists versus theoreticians -- and many others.   When shrewdly observed, these lead to the best of all genres of jokes based on disciplines.   As,

“A soldier, a sailor, an airman and a marine  walk into a pet-store…”

or

“An engineer, a physicist, and a mathematican …”

“A zoologist, a mathematician, and a positivist  …”

(for some reason, both of those crucially involve cows).

[Update:  Scientists and Cows ]  This just in!  -- Well, just-in to my ken;  the joke actually dates back to the Sputnik days, back in the ‘fifties.  First, those pesky Ruskies put up a satellite.  And then:

The next satellite had a dog.  And there was a joke:  the next one’s going to be a cow, and then they’re going to put up several cows, and the joke was, it’ll be the first herd shot round the world.

[Photo credit:  NASA]

[Quoted from Ann Finkelbeiner, The Jasons, 2006.]

~

There have been some memorable journalistic portraits of the relatively healthy and bracing atmosphere in engineering start-ups (e.g. Soul of a New Machine).   A more recent, low-key but rewarding study is by Tom Wolfe, “Two Young Men Who Went West”, printed (reprinted?) in Hooking Up (2000).

For a still more recent account of what happens when an engineering firm is handed over to a narcissist, try this:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/fiorinas-record-at-hp-defines-her-candidacy--which-could-be-a-problem/2015/09/26/5a5b5e16-6174-11e5-8e9e-dce8a2a2a679_story.html

[Appendix]   Hey cows turn out to look really cool in outer space, here's another one:

Cow in its natural element

~

Back to the correlation to narcissism, of various scientific disciplines.  

It is beyond contest, that (say) chemists and civil engineers have a reputation for very low doses of Drama, compared with (say) physicists.   But what are the traits that gave physicists such a rep?

It is seldom really narcissism, for that is a matter of individual, personal psychology.  If there is self-regard, that among physicists is more that of the guild -- a corporative trait, which might strike outsiders as arrogant. 

Ann Finkelbeiner, in her fine history of the elite advisory group known as the Jasons (who were overwhelmingly physicists), gives an anecdote from an oceanographer (p. 138), recalling an uncharacteristic foray into oceanography by the Jasons:

I did resent this “the ocean is a wonderful summer playground for smart physicists who can do it in their spare time”.  You may know this thing called physics arrogance.  It’s real.

Indeed, Finkelbeiner reveals (p. xvii) that at one point “I wanted to call this book The Arrogance of Physicists.”

Now, arrogance can co-exist with narcissism, and flavor it;   but they by no means need be co-present.  Thus, the eponym, Narcissus himself, was not arrogant in the least:  he was dreamily, solipsistically folded-in on himself.

Consider the humble confession of quantum wizard Wolfgang Pauli in 1925:

At the moment, physics is again terribly confused.  In any case, it is difficult for me, and I wish I had been a movie comedian or something of the sort, and had never heard of physics.

Yet many anecdotes are told about Pauli’s arrogance -- within physics : e.g. “What Professor Einstein says” (he concedes) “is not so stupid”.  Or the damning phrase “Not even wrong” (recently the title of a book attacking the very integrity of String Theory).   Or consider this joke (quoted by Ann Finkelbein in The Jasons, 2006):

A physicist gets to heaven  and God asks him if there’s anything he’d like to know, and the physicist says, “Yes, please.  Why is the Fine Structure Constant 1/137?”  God gives him the explanation, and the physicist says, “No, that’s wrong.”

Ironic note:   Any such explanation from God  would in fact have been wrong -- since (as we now know) the value of the Fine Structure Constant, though close to 1/137, is not exactly that, and thus is not a ratio of (small) integers at all:  it’s just one of those boring physical parameters that drone on and on, and could (for all we know) just as well have been somewhat different.  The conjecture that it might actually be a pure integer ratio  caused a certain amount of numerological excitement back in the day, but that turned out to be a false alarm.

~

We have frequently written about the related but distinct notions of depth  versus difficulty (in math and science).   This comparison/contrast of narcissism versus arrogance (the former being key to our American culture, the latter to our politics) may likewise prove fruitful.

The Ontology of Sociology

The present post is simply a sort of by-trifle to The Ontology of Psychology.   It might alternatively be dubbed “The characterology of individual action in a multiperson structured setting”.

The unit of analysis  in Goffman’s accounts  is always the individual role-player  striving to effect his will  within a role-structuring situation.

-- Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981; ²1984), p.  115

This put me curiosly in mind of the ‘sociology’ of chessmen.  (Here we speak, not of the vision of grandmasters, which is doubtless far more holistic, but of patzers, which is the only one I know.) 

Originally, the game was a metaphor or rather ‘video-game representation’ for medieval warfare.  Thrilling stuff.   And to a beginner, at least, it really does feel as though individual pieces are venturing out, or ignominiously retreating,  issuing powerful threats or just pushing pawnily along.   Sometimes, a noble warrior even ventures to be ‘sacrificed’ for the greater good.  I can testify that, as a scrappy lad first learning the rudiments, the queen, rather than just a factor among many, in a sort of multivariate algebraic equation,  was dizzying in her potential power -- “Wait’ll I sic my queen on ‘im!”  It was reminiscent of the culture of trading baseball cards -- Trajea a Mickle Mantle for a Yogi Berra plus a Roger Marris.    An archive of children’s chess-matches  would probably back this up, showing far more early-game forays by that dominating dame, than in expert play.

Compare, from Nabokov’s chess-novel:

…palpable pieces whose quaint shape and wooden materiality  always disturbed him, and always seemed to him but the crude, mortal shell  of exquisite, invisible chess forces.

…

Luzhin removed and placed on the table beside him  what was no longer an incoporeal force, but a heavy, yellow Pawn.

… The weightiest elements on the board  called to one another with trumpet voices, and again there was an exchange, and again two chess forces  were transformed into carved, brightly lacquered dummies.

-- Vladimir Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense (1964)

~

In Go, by contrast, the counters are all blandly interchangeable in themselves.   They pop out of nowhere, one by one (indefinitely); and once placed, have no power to move from the spot.  A holistic view is imposed even on the beginner.

Mysteries of Cricket

Cricket matches occasionally end in a tie, and often in a draw;  but that does not make it a futile game;  if no side ever won, the game would lose its point.

-- John Watkins, Science and Skepticism (1984), p. 279

Assignment:  Distinguish tie from draw.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6FdBZQw2zQ

I am at last resigned to the fact that I shall never understand String Theory;  and a grasp of cricket  must likewise remain  forever beyond my means.

Given that, Kipling’s dig about “the flannelled fools at the wicket” was quite unfair;  you practically have to be a barrister to make sense of the game.

~

More re the point of a given genre of game:

Within the vocabulary of chess, it makes no sense to say ‘That was the one and only move which would achieve checkmate, but was it the right move to make?’  … as someone might ask, whose purpose in playing chess  was to amuse a small child  rather than to win.

-- Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981; ²1984), p.  125

(And what is the point, of this game of life? --  Perhaps, to amuse the gods.)

It would be interesting to imagine extragalactic sociologists or philosophers, provided with a complete, objective and uncommented, play-by-play record of every cricket game ever played, and every chess game ever played; we wonder whether, from these, they could deduce what the point was.  Cf. & contrast the card‘game’ that we children called ‘War’, in which again, the ‘point’ is to ‘win’,  only, each player’s moves being completely determined, the resemblance to any normal game is but feeble;  it’s really just a long-drawn-out, inefficient way  of staging a single coin-flip.

~

Back to cricket, with its arcane distinctions and welter of rules -- surely exceding those of tennis (let along ping-pong), basketball, soccer  and much else.    These come at a cost (we want to shout, Just play the game!), but indeed to such an extent, that what would, from a practical point of view, be counter-productive, must surely serve some sociopsychological purpose, delineating the cultural boundaries of the Tight Little Island.   Rather like the Japanese language, with its complex system of grammatical honorifics, which no-one can master who hasn’t grown up in the culture from birth.  Or Anglo-Catholic worship ritual: unlike in an evangelical church, where anyone can wander in off the street and fit right in, for an outsider to attempt to participate  is continually to find yourself sitting when (suddenly, inexplicably) everyone else is standing up,  or standing up when they are sitting down, or kneeling, or crossing themselves.

For an American analogue, we would suggest, not so much our National Pastime of baseball, which physically most resembles cricket, but American football, with its ever-expanding rulebook, its minute schedules of differing penalties for everything from twitching (on the offensive line -- “false motion” -- or the defensive -- “offsides”) to spiking the ball; and its many game-interrupting circumstances. -- What physically most resembles football is rugby;  but here the playing of the game -- the continuous unscripted motion, as in soccer or basketball -- quite trumps the courtly ceremony characteristic of football.

~

There is generally a core of rules that characterize the essence of a given kind of game.  As for the rest, they contribute to its aura of spectacle,  but are not constitutive of the game.

The essense of football is simply that one guy runs with the ball toward a goal, and the other guys try to stop him.   Early football (and kids’ football even today) was largely just that.   Then they added the possibility of a forward pass:  that was a significant addition to the core, constitutive of an extension of the game (Football  v. 2.0), but one in which the earlier nucleus remained aufgehoben:  after all, there are plenty of running plays even in the NFL, and if you laid them all end-to-end, you’d have a simulacrum of original football (though to be sure, they are subtly different, since each play is instinct with the possibility that someone might throw the ball).

The constitutive rules of chess are the powers of the pieces.   That much is sine qua non -- you couldn’t very well specify the moves of all the pieces except the knight, letting that fellow to joust around as the mood might move him.   But now you’ve got a game, which could just as well exist without niggling side-rules like that of castling, or capture en passant (let alone purely ceremonial, non-structural rules like “j’adoube”).

Phrase of the Day: “skimmity ride”

I am currently taking-in an audiobook of Thomas Hardy’s novel The Mayor of Casterbridge (18), expertly read by Mr. Simon Vance, whose mastery of various voices, and of the island dialects  (both Saxon and Scots)  adds much to the performance.

At one point in this densely plotted book, we learn of plans by the local lumpen, to subject a certain rather flighty/haughty  dame of the town (and her hardworking but enveigled husband) to what they call a “skimmity ride”. That turns out to be Dorset dialect (which, indeed, figures even as a plot-element in the book, when the ingénue professes herself ‘leery’ in the local sense, and is rated by her stepfather, who demands that she restrict herself to Hochenglisch) for this:

skimmington: one publicly impersonating and ridiculing a henpecked or cuckolded husband or his shrewish or unfaithful wife

-- Merriam-Webster

It is reminiscent of, but vastly milder than, the early American custom of tarring and feathering, and riding out of town on a rail (literary classics depicting this:  Huckleberry Finn; and Hawthorne’s haunting “My Kinsman, Major Molineux”)  since, here, the miscreants  are represented only in effigy.   Moreover, the practice enjoyed here no legal sanction, though the feckless local constables shrink from halting the procession.

As for what-all is involved in a skimmington, and the related charivari, you may top up the cup of your Wissbegierde  here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skimmington

In the matter of public shaming, devotees of literature (or high-school grads who had the book assigned) will recall Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter.  But that stigma was imposed top-down; whereas (as Hardy makes clear) the skimmity-ride in Casterbridge  was instigated by a slyboots, and implemented by the dregs.

So much might put us in mind of a current practice, distantly related to the moral(istic) Tyranny of the Village:  anonymous online mobbing

-- public shaming by complete strangers -- capriciously, via the Twittering carrion-birds of the Erinyes.  Thus ratifying the paradoxical formulation of a “global village”.

Exercise for the student:  To develop this idea further, explore the traditional distinction between shame cultures and guilt cultures.  The latter are specifically Judeo-Christian, and are generally reckoned an advance by those familiar with both.  Our own society is devolving toward that earlier standard:  not a sense of guilt, but of embarrassment;  not at having done wrong, but having offended anyone.

Signs vs. Substance

Headline in a recent  Saint Louis Today:

       Dining with your phone at the table  is a sign of bad manners

That formulation goes to the semiotic metalevel, which is uncalled-for.   Laying your cell on the table when dining with others, is in itself  bad manners, or else it is not;  it is not (or need not be) a clue to further misbehaviors. 

(Conceivably there is, empirically, in this case, some actual correlation between phone-flashing   and such other too-busy-to-care-about-you behaviors  as cutting people off in traffic, or going through the express lane with twice the number of posted items, but the article does not assert these.  It is interested purely in the etiquette of conversation and telephony.)

To make the distinction clear:   It is not, per se,  bad manners to drive any one particular marque of automobile, or to wear any given brand of clothing, or to patronize any special restaurant.  But such choices do indeed track statistically with other behaviors:  indeed, most readers could readily come up with a profile of which SUVs are driven by louts and boors, while how clad,   on their way to what deplorable eatery.

Where does linguistics fit in?

[Our essay  Consilience in linguistics has been considerably updated, including this latest addition:]

Where does linguistics fit in -- among the humanties, or the sciences?

Um die Sprachwissenschaft   haben sich bekanntlich  die Natur- und die Geistes- (order Geschichts-)wissenschaften gerissen,  wie in der mittelalterlichen Legende  die Teufel und die Engle  um die Seele des Menschen.  Jetzt pflegt man sie  ihrem Inhalt nach  zu den Geisteswissenschaften,  ihrer Methode nach  zu den Naturwissenschaften zu zählen;  mit fast dem gleichen Rechte  könnte man das Umgekehrte tun.

-- Hugo Schuchardt, (1892), in Leo Spitzer, ed., Hugo Schuchardt-Brevier (1921; 2^nd edn. 1928), p. 105

Contra sociological-anthropological structuralisme:

… eager souls who think they can easily borrow  and fruitfully adapt  a formal model  from simpler and perhaps more fortunate fields such as linguistics  or even phonetics.

-- Ernest Gellner, Contemporary Thought and Politics (1978), p. 122

(Here he means rather phonology;  it is phonology, and not phonetics, that is structuralist.)

[For the full essay, click here.
For linguistics-internal constitutive factors, this:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-ontology-of-linguistics.html ]

The Psychology of Meteorology

  

Science would be complicated and distorted  by being given a sociopsychological twist.  [But] Popper had suggested that, in some cases, such as that of flying saucers, ‘the explanation needed may not be of flying saucers, but of reports of flying saucers.’

-- John Watkins, Science and Skepticism (1984), p. 248

Les faits ne pénètrent pas dans le monde où vivent nos croyances;  ils peuvent leur infliger les plus constants démentis  sans les affaiblir.

-- Marcel Proust, Du coté de chez Swann (1913)

A while back, I conceived a series of essays, to be titled “Depth Psychology of the Electorate”;  but abandoned the project as too difficult.   Since then, I have simply been downloading the stray articles that attempt something of the sort.  The most recent is one by Paul Krugman, “Interests, Ideology And Climate”;  and it is worth calling out  since, apart from such merits as it inherently may possess, it is currently the #1 Most Emailed article on the website of the New York Times.

The problem he sets himself is to explain the intense opposition (or, to change the emphasis in a subtle way that points to the real problem here, the intensity of the opposition) to scientific assertions of global climate change, and political attempts to do anything about the current and projected environmental consequences.

Now, let us not follow Dr. Krugman  immediately into that maelstrom,  but prepare the ground logically;  which in this case, means also psychologically.

Whenever someone X maintains some proposition P,  we may ask ourselves, Why does X maintain that P?   For ease of reference, let us label the questioned state-of-affairs “A”:

            (A) X maintains that P.   

The simplest proposal -- the most (psycho)logically parsimonious, the most epistemically (as well as humanly) charitable -- the epistemological Null Hypothesis, we may say --  is this:

            (B)  X believes that P.

And the simplest explanation for B (whose truth in turn we now assume, for the sake of the argument) is

            (C)  P is true, or anyhow likely or at least plausible.

If, then, we were somehow to learn the falsity of (C) (thus, the truth of “Not-C”), we would have the problem of explaining  (B) -- X’s belief in P despite all that.  That explanation might involve his being ignorant, misinformed, unintelligent, debarred by ideology from admitting something like (P), psychologically traumatized against entertaining the possibility of (P), or what have you.  (Such causes need not be nearly so invidious as they might sound:  Prior to the 19^th century, virtually everyone including scientists disbelieved a host of propositions which we entertain today, in Quantum Theory or what have you.  Ignorance is, broadly, simply the absence of omniscence.)   And if, by contrast, we were somehow to learn the falsity of (B),  then the truth or falsity of (C) would become irrelevant, and we would seek an entirely different explanation for this abnormal state of affairs, namely that of someone publically proclaiming something he does not in fact believe.  As: X is joking; X is lying for some self-gain; X was paid to maintain that P, or threatened with bodily harm were he to fail to maintain it;  X is delusional, and says things without even realizing their meaning, etc. None of these states of alethic/cognitive dissonance, are especially interesting for the general theory of political economy or psychology.  But at least we have set up all our chessmen, on a clean board.

[Note:  As regards (C) => (B), I am well aware of such refinements as this:

True as well as false beliefs  require explanation, as Gibbon insisted.  None the less, the strategy of explanation must take into account whether or not the beliefs are true.

-- Ernest Gellner, The Psychoanalytic Movement (1985; 2^nd edn. 1993), p. 219

but in the interests of keeping things as simple as possible -- which is to say, alas, not very -- I shall ignore such details here.]

So, we have arrived at our first level of analysis:

(1) The denialists maintain P  -- here: the denial of the thesis of ongoing and continuing Global Climate Change -- because the thesis that they are denying,  is bogus.

Such is the analysis  of the climate-change-denialists themselves, such as Michael Crichton.  (That is:  presumably  that is their stance, barring an aberrant A-though-not-B scenario such as discussed above.  But the reason we dismissed such scenarios as being of any general interest, is that they are, by nature, the sort of thing that typically obtains  only of a person here, a person there, and not half the citizenry.  --  Although, at a deeper and murkier level, we shall ourselves actually suggest something of the sort.)

Now we move away from the generally valid (psycho)logical, and consider the contingent empirical situation we find ourselves in today.   In brief and without argument (for nothing depends on the precise degrees of justification of the various subpropositions that compose the overall position),  the general scientific (and, lagging behind it, political) consensus is that:  eppur’ si mouve;  something is afoot; there are rumblings and grumblings on Mount Olympus, from whence cometh our weather.  In short:    Not-C. 

So now those who accept “A but Not-C” are obliged either to shrug in annoyance, or to attempt to explain this curious state of affairs.   For purposes of anaphora, let us label it  in turn:

            (Conundrum I)  A but Not-C

  And the prevalent hypothesis among the liberal commentariat, is pecuniary:   The denialists are less concerned about the planet, or future generations, than about the plenitude of their present pocketbook.

So, we have arrived at our second level of analysis:

(2)  The denialists deny the thesis of global climate change [despite its truth or plausibility] for reasons of economic self-interest.

Satisfied that they have adequately debunked the position of the denialist -- content that they have torn aside the mask, such as that which might shroud the vote of a legislator who pushes public support to a shaky enterprise  that turns out to be owned by his wife -- most newspaper-readers and op-editorialists will go off and celebrate with a drink, the day’s work done.

Dr. Krugman, however, is not satisfied with that.   For one thing, he is an economist, and has examined the numbers, which turn out not to amount to all that much.  Here he tells it in his own words:

I’ve noted in earlier columns that every even halfway serious study of the economic impact of carbon reductions — including the recent study paid for by the anti-environmental U.S. Chamber of Commerce — finds at most modest costs. Practical experience points in the same direction. Back in the 1980s conservatives claimed that any attempt to limit acid rain would have devastating economic effects; in reality, the cap-and-trade system for sulfur dioxide was highly successful at minimal cost. The Northeastern states have had a cap-and-trade arrangement for carbon since 2009, and so far have seen emissions drop sharply while their economies grew faster than the rest of the country. Environmentalism is not the enemy of economic growth.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/09/opinion/krugman-interests-ideology-and-climate.html?src=me&ref=general

So!  We have a problem;  though at this point it might seem no bigger than a man’s hand.    If we are curious about the way the world works, and the mind, we are obliged to ask the following question:

The owners of coal mines and coal-fired power plants do have a financial interest in blocking environmental policy, but even there the special interests don’t look all that big. So why is the opposition to climate policy so intense?

(And for "intense" read here, additionally,  emotional.  That is an additional explicandum -- an additional datum to be explained.  Many people, for example,  quite stoutly maintain that 2 + 2 = 4, but they are not ... emotional about it.  There is more of a puzzle here than might at first appear.)

Krugman now moves beyond a crudely economic or ‘vulgar Marxist’ explanation of Denialism, and attempts a foray into analysis in terms rather of ideology:

Well, think about global warming from the point of view of someone who grew up taking Ayn Rand seriously, believing that the untrammeled pursuit of self-interest is always good and that government is always the problem, never the solution. Along come some scientists declaring that unrestricted pursuit of self-interest will destroy the world, and that government intervention is the only answer. It doesn’t matter how market-friendly you make the proposed intervention; this is a direct challenge to the libertarian worldview.

So far so good.   But one thing our logical-framework, if-P-then-Q approach fails to do, is to give any sense of the feeling-tone connected with these various propositions.   Dr. Krugman goes on:

And the natural reaction is denial — angry denial. Read or watch any extended debate over climate policy and you’ll be struck by the venom, the sheer rage, of the denialists.

And that, indeed, introduces yet a second, or deeper, explicandum, which swiftly takes us beyond the limits of ordinary economic or political analysis.  Namely

            (Conundrum II)  Not-C, yet A-while-foaming-at-the-mouth.

(You see that mere logic  is helpless here.  Aristotle must now pass the baton to Freud.)

Krugman adds the following richly suggestive remarks:

 The fact that climate concerns rest on scientific consensus makes things even worse, because it plays into the anti-intellectualism that has always been a powerful force in American life, mainly on the right. It’s not really surprising that so many right-wing politicians and pundits quickly turned to conspiracy theories, to accusations that thousands of researchers around the world were colluding in a gigantic hoax whose real purpose was to justify a big-government power grab. After all, right-wingers never liked or trusted scientists in the first place.

And there, basically, his analysis ends, at least for now.

~

And so:  I downloaded that article, saving it to a “Depth Psychology of the Electorate” file for possible future use, should I ever to return to the subject.  Krugman’s article takes an honorable place beside the book by Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas (which we examined here).

And yet and yet …  The more I pondered the matter, the more it seemed:  Our spade has been turned too early.

The attempt to dig beyond that recalcitrant layer  where our honorable excavator chose to stop, will take us into deep waters, with nothing like certain answers.   Indeed, my goal will be simply, properly to frame the question (being in this influenced, in part, by the philosopher-historian R.C. Collingwood, whose autobiography I just finished reading).    In the meantime,  fasten the seatbelts on your (psycho)analytical bathyscaph, and join us in a dive to the depths:

TAKE SHELTER

(Additionally, there are some miscellaneous musings about climate change in general here, though these do not go very deep.)

~

To resume:

Dr Krugman’s quest for an explanation that went beyond the glib and shallow pecuniary one (“They just don’t want to pay anything to address the problem”) began with a purely empirical look at the economic facts.  And while, at a stretch, those facts might extend so far as to explain (I), it could not explain (II) -- a much more interesting conundrum, to anyone psychologically inclined, though not the sort of thing normally addressed by economists.

So let us do likewise.    And indeed, we have not far to look, before we encounter a problem with the “miffed Libertarians” argument.   For indeed, there are literally hundreds if not thousands  of government regulations  that limit absolute economic freedom, and that generally cost somebody something (if only freedom of ill-advised action, as in the requirements that banks maintain at least a little something in the till, or that drivers be licensed and have insurance),  from antitrust legislation, truth-in-lending regulations, the Pure Food and Drug Act, expiration dates on the labels of medicine bottles, et cetera et cetera.   And while these may produce some grumbling (mostly from those whose pocket-books are impacted -- major and minor polluters and the like), they do not produce anything like the frenzy, the fury, that characterizes the rants of the Denialists.   So what is going on?

First, it seems clear that the intensity of fury directed by the Denialists against proponents of the reality of climate change, must have something to do with

            (i) the role that climate itself plays in their lives
            (ii) the nature of said proponents.

(ii) is surely a lesser matter, but I mention it  both because  Krugman himself points to that factor (Populist hatred for the proponents in this case, quite apart from what they are proposing:  viz. scientists and intellectuals), and because, more generally in America these days,  a certain category of the electorate -- and to a great extent it is the same category of the electorate -- can be relied upon to attack virtually any proposition if the proponent who champions it equals “Obama”.

So, let us look further at (i).

As worded, it seems bland;  but at that level of generality, it is nearly useless.  For after all, in a practical sense, climate (and weather generally) affects all of us.  That’s why folks retire to Florida or Arizona.   Simply on that basis, you would expect the most vociferous alarm at ongoing global warming  to come from penguins and polar bears (who have not been polled) and from Gulf states like Texas, which are being especially hard-hit.   And yet, not so:  those Americans who are already most being hurt by recent climate developments, are not by any means in the forefront of demand for action. 

We need, therefore, to proceed beyond the practical role that climate plays in our lives, and consider the metaphorical/spiritual/psychological role it plays.  

~

Once again, let us first step back, and consider a simpler case.   Suppose that the proponents (and, here, actually the enforcers) of a certain suite of regulations affecting the townspeople of a given town, are the elected authorities of that town, and that their authority is widely seen as legitimate (thus eliminating consideration of that pesky condition (ii)).   Such regulations might include:

            (a)  Put out your garbage at the curb, no earlier than Monday, for collection on Tuesday.

            (b)  No building-materials, dead cats, or TV sets  permitted among your recyclables.

            (c)  Keep your sidewalk shoveled and your lawn mowed.

            (d)  No loud parties after midnight except on Saturdays.

            (e)  If you repaint your house, the color must be pre-approved by the town council.

            (f)  If you own a dog, you must pick up after it poops on the sidewalk, keep it on a leash when off your own property, and not let it bark all night long.

All  of these will cause grumbling from some people.   (To take a wry example from our own town:  A friend of mine, call her X, was annoyed at having had to pay a fine for putting garbage out by the curb too early, the evidence for this being a photograph supplied to the town council by her neighbor Y, a woman with whom she had been feuding.   Adding salt to the wound was the fact that the refuse in question was actually put there by Y, in front of X’s house.)   But usually no more than grumbling.   For instance, (e) [an actual rule of our nanny-state town] might inspire the most widespread opposition, because it seems like overreach, but the resistance will be largely of a Kantian kind, rather than intensely personal and emotional.  (With exceptions:  Back when my family lived near Springfield, Massachusetts, one notorious case involved a homeowner who, enraged at the restriction, painted his house purple and nailed white paper plates to serve as polka-dots all over it.  But the point is, such exceptions are outliers, statistically rare.)

Of greater interest to observers of political psychology, are cases where the opposition is intense and personal, even if not widespread.    
 Thus, consider (f).  A number of citizens might object to this fairly strongly;  unsurprisingly, this cohort will correlate strongly with the population of dog-owners.  So far, no surprises.  But now consider those who are absolutely enraged by that regulation.   That is more interesting.  I would predict that such intense wrathful resentment will correlate with … think about it… the breed of dog owned:  relatively strong among owners of pit bulls and dobermans, relatively weak among the owners of cocker spaniels.  This correlation, then, will itself require explanation, and is at last sufficiently specific to lend itself to interesting and probing analysis, where the more vague and broad-brush states of affairs  would not produce cogent results.   And the analysis in this example would have to go well beyond considerations of political-party affiliation, acknowledged pronouncements, and probably even of the subjects’ conscious awareness.   Here the analytic path leads deeper, downwards -- descensis Averno (noctes atque dies  patet atri ianua Ditis).  But that path we shall not tread.

~

In a sense, I ought to stop right here, since I have no real elucidation to offer, for the depth-psychology of the Denialists.   Further, it is not a matter I should even care to investigate, since that would involve wading  hip-deep  into the fever-swamps of some pretty cognitively challenged and rebarbative people.    (As it happens, I am obliged by professional necessity, every day, to analyze the communications of a different set of cognitively challenged and rebarbative people, but at least I get paid for that.)  But before falling silent (or rather, like a proper cobbler, returning to my last, which is mostly linguistics), I shall toss out some suggestions for possible lines of inquiry, by those more inclined or qualified to pursue them.

~

To begin on the relatively firm ground of statistics rather than depth-psychology: 

Most of us Americans who are of middle-age or older, will not personally experience great changes in our day-to-day lives as a direct effect of global climate change -- certainly not as compared with a hundred other vicissitudes and factors.   Being personally alarmed, then, at the prospects of possible ravages that such change might effect  fifty or a hundred years hence,  will relate strongly with how closely we identify with the interests of future generations. 

Now, that is a deep-rooted and gnarly question, by no means exhausted by what anyone would state explicitly, or would even be conscious of.   So  pursuit down that path is largely blocked, for the same reason that investigation of any matter relating to the depth-psychology of large populations (as opposed to an individual analysand, whom the analyst can probe at will) is blocked.   But a much simpler scenario arises when you believe (when you believe that you have reason to believe) that there aren’t going to be any future generations.

Thus, if I were to come to know with certainty, that an asteroid the mass of Mars was hurtling on a direct and undeflectable collision-path with Earth, with impact predicted to be on such and such a date one year from now (far too short a time for scientists and engineers to devise and test effective counter-measures), that would certainly affect my attitude towards all sorts of matters concerning the future of terrestrial affairs.  I would not be fretting about the prospects for my grandson’s getting into Stanford;  indeed, I would not even (mirabile dictu) give a hoot about recycling.
Now, that scenario is far-fetched, but a related one is in fact quite widespread, among folks who doubt there will be future generations much longer, since the Rapture (or Armageddon) is expected any day now.   And that population is especially well-represented among the ranks of climate-change deniers.   The effect is even heightened if, more than mere indifference towards future generations, you nurse an actual hostility:  as, a Rapturist who positively looks forward to gazing down from Heaven upon those no-good infidel Left-Behinders, writhing in the blazing heat and plagues of insects. (Too hot for them, eh?  Gonna be a lot hotter where they're going!)

But now, have a care.    Harboring that belief  would certainly go a long way towards explaining a person’s relative indifference to the eventual effects of climate-change, but (at least logically) not to the denial of its factuality -- that is, not to Conundrum I.   For some individuals (but by now the numbers must be falling off), it might further lead, from sheer orneriness,  to irritated dismissal of all this talk about such change (rather the way, from sheer annoyance, an impenitent meat-eater may brush aside wifely warnings that that next cheeseburger will likely kill him, without actually going into any evaluation of statistical probabilities).   But it would not clarify Conundrum II -- it would not explain the rage.

So, a blind alley.  

Let’s try a somewhat different approach -- though related, since still touching upon the “I’m alright, Jack” factor.

Among those Americans most likely (though still, not very) to be affected by global warming in their own lifetimes, are those who own a beachfront home.  (Even then, they have less to worry about in the short term  from rising seas, than from the ordinary effects of wind and waves.)   So, on that purely pecuniary/prudential basis, you might expect such a population to be somewhat more likely to be found among the Denialists, than those who live a safe distance from the shore.

And yet, here the statistical facts are (I expect) exactly the opposite:  Inhabitants of places like New York, or Martha’s Vinyard, or San Francisco, are less likely to be Denialists than their fellow-citizens off in Omaha, not more.  -- I am pulling the stats frankly out of my ass, here, but the point is, this is the sort of thing which is easy to investigate, with no psychology or clever analysis involved, via simple polling techniques.  Find out who-all are the denialists, and where-all they reside.  I predict (a nicely "falsifiable" prediction) that the mere actuarial statistics of geography-related vulnerability to the effects of climate change, will not correlate neatly at all with attitudes.

~

So let us recircle back to that original question, “the role that climate itself plays in their lives”, and --suitably instructed by our results thus far -- broaden this notion of the role played in lives past the simple empiricist considerations of the effect on the price of tomatoes and whether certain noxious weeds and diseases are creeping ever further northward.   Let us consider -- and not specially from a tree-hugger perspective, either -- that what the proponents of the reality of global climate-change are claiming, is that it is indeed global -- that it will affect the globe, this terraqueous orb on which we live and die.

And now things begin to get interesting …

Signs in the sky ...

Quite apart from any present discomfort to ourselves, or future discomfort to our progeny,  the prospect of a significant change to the surface of this planet  points to the possibility of extinctions:  of Man, to be sure, as a distant contingency, but more immediately of other creatures, such as our vulnerable friends the amphibians, who are already dying off here and there.   In particular, it means that our planet is still evolving;  and thus, the question of each individual’s psychological connection with this planet and its evolution.   This leads to two quite separate considerations.

The first is comparatively superficial:  namely, that being a climate-denialist correlates fairly strongly with being an evolution-denialist; and climatic evolution is one kind of evolution.

Not, however, of the kind that has historically been most sensitive.  And of all the possible challenges to Creationism, certainly the idea of Global Warming must rank very far down on the list, compared with extant geological and paleobiological evidence.   No, this cannot be the smoking gun -- not for the denialists’ outright rage, at any rate, though it might help explain the general feeling of discomfort and distaste associated with the climate-change scenario.   (In a similar fashion:  I am averse to vegetarianism, practically because I like my steak -- and like it rare, its red juice seeping richly into the fries -- but psychologically, also, because I dislike its association with soupy, moping, hippy-dippy noöbotanical tie-dyed bead-wearing neurasthenic gynocratic renunciationism.)

The second goes deeper, parting from the conscious realm:  and here accordingly, we depart from firm ground.

So let us focus on this image of extinction,  not as a cognitive, evidential element in the question of Natural Selection, but as a deeply personal and unsettling gut issue   -- for however controversial on the public square, Darwinism is not an issue of fear for the young, unless they are specifically taught to fear it. 

Now, the prototypical extinction, even for adults, and the only one that really matters to children, is that of the dinosaurs.   And the classic imagery of that, burned into memory from the first time you see it, is in Fantasia;  you can witness this indelible masterpiece here:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JO1dtHJF5bc

It is, notice, an extinction by heat;  and it is unbearable.   (True, here we are but casting about, and grasping at straws;  yet we do believe that Dr Freud and Dr Jung might be pricking up their ears at this point.)

It wasn't supposed to end this way ...

Small boys like dinosaurs, and don’t mind a spot of violence, even if one of the dinosaurs has to die:  say, in a ferocious battle between mean Mr Tyrannosaurus and brave little Triceratops.  (We shall not go on to speculate, with the Viennese, whether our young fantasist harbor in the back of his mind, a thought of turning -- the tyrannosaural patriarch slain -- to the comely and gracile Coelophysis  who has been all the while beaming admiringly from the background.)  But we never wanted to see all of them die -- all of our parents and aunts and uncles --   let alone in that degraded way.

(Dinosaurs represent our powerful parents, and our own young dreams of potency.  For oneself to perish alone in some heroic act, can fulfil a universal archetype.  But for all the generations to die together, obliterating all degree, and that passively, miserably, is intolerable.)

(All this is, of course, extracted from that same orifice, from whence I produced those demographic statistics about climate-change deniers.   I simply release the ideas  into the noösphere, like blue balloons;  for others, better positioned, to pursue  as they see fit.)

Alright -- dismiss this as the Disney Theory of Climate-denial.  (You got a better one?)  But there is more.

First, there is the very odd fact, the really baffling fact, of a subpopulation of what are known as Dinosaur Denialists : those who deny that any such creatures ever existed, that the whole thing is just some elaborate hoax.   I would predict that there is a vastly more than chance correlation between being a Dinosaur Denialist and a Climate-Change Denialist.  (That is:  Most of the former will also be among the latter.   Not vice versa, simply owing to the relative sizes of the populations.)  Indeed, this subspecies of Homo insapiens appears to be particularly thick on the ground in the state of Texas -- again contrary to naive empirical predictions, since dinosaur fossils are also especially widespread in that state.

One celebrated dino-denialist reportedly did so on the extraordinarily stupid grounds that the Bible does not mention them.  Of course, that worthy book likewise makes no mention of penguins, or racoons, or hundreds of other fine creatures whom we can observe every day (nor of iPads, for that matter).   And I do not say that by way of  logical refutation of his thesis (which lies beneath the necessity of that), but of pychological observation, that he cannot be that dumb--  that therefore something else must be going on.

[Oddly enough, there also exist Penguin Denialists;  we presented an actual text from one here:    On the Existence of Penguins. ]

[Now that we have arrived at our penguin friends (where all roads on WDJ lead eventually), it is clear that we are losing our analytic focus, and it is time to close.  As an envoi, you can view irrefutable evidence of the existence both of dinosaurs and of prehistoric penguins  here:   When Penguins Ruled the Earth.]

Something further to ponder:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/06/11/the-five-biggest-threats-to-human-existence/?hpid=z4

(Note:  Climate change does not figure in this list.)

[Update]  I just happened upon the following passage, posing exactly the same meta-question that we do here (too much sound & fury for the controversy to be really about no more than what is mentioned explicitly), and again with the intersection of climatology and extinction:

Re the heated debate over what happened to dinosaurs (and other life-forms) at the K-T boundary:

All this might seem to be the huff and puff of scientific debate, but what has surprised me is the vituperation with which the arguments have been prosecuted .  … It is a curious parallel  that the supposed violence of the Cretaceous end  is matched by the violence of the twentieth-century exchanges. … There is a degree of outrage here which is out of proportion to the stimulus. … I can suggest something darker and more subconscious as a reason for the anger:  this is the apocalypse.

-- Richard Fortey, Life (1998), p. 252-3

[To resume]

[“Zoom out”]   Conundrum II (Prairie Populists are dreadfully upset about the assertions of climate science, despite ambiguous evidence) is in fact a special case of this:

(Conundrum III)  Prairie Populists are dreadfully upset about a lot of things;  and have ever been so.

[Examples (going back in history a bit):  bimetallism; Eastern bankers; fluoridation; UFOs and anal probes …]

Formally/arithmetically, explicating (C III) presents more of a challenge, since there is more to explicate;  a priori, each obsession requires its own separate explanation.  However, there is some chance that the specificities -- the quiddities -- of these separate obsessions, might have a common root:  exradicating which, would provide a rung towards a general explanation of all its daughter-shoots.

[In a few happy cases, just this sort of thing has happened in mathematics.  Thus, the long-standing “Fermat’s Last Theorem” (misnamed ‘theorem’:  rather, Conjecture) resisted the best efforts of analysts  until finally Andrew Wiles settled the matter, not by a frontal assault, but by proving the more general [and thus, in principle more difficult] Taniyama–Shimura conjecture, which had Fermat as a special case.]

But that is small consolation.   Just as Fermat had to await the centuries of accumulated wisdom, finally synthesized by the Sitzfleisch and genius of Wiles, so this “Conundrum III” dumps us right back in the lap of the general problem of the Depth Psychology of the Electorate, which continues to elude our own poor powers.

~

And thus, adjusting our headlamps,  let us descend yet another level.

Difficilis  descensus  Averno 

The Earth  -- la terre, die Erde -- is Mother Earth, la terre mère;  she is not just some tarmac to tread on.

It is bad enough that we were expelled from the womb, where we had been getting along quite nicely, thank you;  worse, that we were ever weaned;  no wine nor usquebaugh  can ever quite compensate that loss.

Any hurt to her, is a wound as well, to our own most least worst best-most  -- Ah!   But it is intolerable, to consider such things.

And to imagine that … that we might have harmed her, as proposed by those who (curse them!) speak of “human-caused” global warming…

nay but the tongue fails;  withers within dry lips.

Such a thing were past repentence.   Past wailing grim.

nothing   left    but          to          DENY  IT  (!!!)

like pummeling a lesion, to hurt the pain !!!!!!!!!!

Mor, gi meg solen!  

[The above, quite surgically calibrated effusion, is an attempt to probe the depths beyond the cortex,  guided by that most curious detail, which we hitherto have not mentioned,

that the rage of denial is especially fierce, when that clause “human-caused” is in focus.

Quite obviously, that detail would be the target of the smokestack owners;  but their calculated ire  goes small ways to explain, the bubbling bursting chest-burn of the populace at large …  As we elsewhere observed, the percentage of the effect that might be ascribable to human agency, is quite beside the point, in the matter of treating the ill:  just as we can administer aspirin, without quite knowing what caused the fever.]

~

Well, time to turn aside;  our toe now touches the fever-swamp of eisegesis and speculation.  And turn rather to the general (mostly conscious) area of “The best défense is a good óffense”, along with the (mostly preconscious) area of arrière-pensées.   (Here I have in mind that well-attested phenomenon, whereby the ex-Catholic or ex-Communist becomes, not an Episcopalian or Socialist, but an out-and-out atheist or neo-con:  suggesting that they had been harboring severe reservations about their own life-governing world-view  all along.)

For another conjecture presents itself, though its validity would be quite difficult to elucidate, since polling, for instance, would here be of absolutely no use.  Namely, that in their heart of hearts, many of the Denialists suspect that the Climate-Change thesis is actually largely true;  yet the thought is (for whatever reason, shallow or deep) intolerable;  and the greater the possibility that the thesis is true, the louder must be the denial.

Evidence for this conjecture (since mass individual psychoanalysis is not an option, and might not work anyway), must come from … ah but who can say … Late-night confidences in darkened bars;  revelations whispered from the pillow  while the spouse is asleep;  deathbed confessions …

~     ~     ~

So far, our analysis of climate-change denial has focused on the particularities of weather and climate in relation to the psyche (the "Take Shelter" approach).  Let us now try a different tack, more sociopolitical and less depth-psychological, and consider the following hypothesis:

(Conundrum IV)  Climate-change denialism may be an aetiological offshoot of science denialism in general.

Let me parse out what is being suggested here.  We are not claiming a syllogism of the following sort:

(a)  Population A denies thesis X.

(b)  Thesis X is currently well-supported by scientific testimony.

(c)  Ergo, Population A is likely to deny other theses Y  that meet criterion (b)

-- e.g., X = ‘climate-change is underway’, and Y = “vaccines are in general effective, and safe relative to the dangers of not getting vaccinated”.

That syllogism might have a lot of truth to it or a scant amount, but it is not our quarry here.   For indeed, each such thesis X, Y, …  there are obvious psychological and political particularities which could easily swamp the effects of a general inclination or disinclination to accept what guys in labcoats say on TV.  So, (IV) should not be taken in any glib sense as being evidently true or whatever.

Anyhow, the hunch was prompted by an article written by a physician, which just now appeared in the Washington Post.  Here is the gist of it:

The ethical negligence of parents who refuse to vaccinate their children

1 in 10 parents in the United States now forgo or delay vaccinations for their kids.

The anti-vaccination movement is a relatively new one that has taken hold over the past decade. Started by a small community of parents, it is based on myths that have been perpetuated by the power of the Internet and endorsements from celebrities such as actress Jenny McCarthy, who has suggested that vaccinations may have caused her son’s autism.

the number of people with measles had reached a record for any time since the disease was declared eliminated in this country in 2000. According to the CDC, much of the outbreak is attributable to unvaccinated people who acquired the disease during travel abroad.

Although medical facts show there is no evidence to support the argument that vaccinations aren’t safe, they aren’t enough to persuade those who are committed to their beliefs. The real problem is that the medical community is a victim of its own success: We’ve been lulled into a false sense of security when it comes to disease and vaccinations. People under the age of 50 didn’t come of age in an era when these now-preventable infections were deadly. So it’s very easy for them to believe that there aren’t any ramifications to not vaccinating their children.

Hard scientific facts and trends show that couldn’t be farther from the truth. In addition to the measles outbreaks, nearly 10,000 cases of pertussis (whooping cough) have been reported to the CDC since the beginning of the year. With the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, it’s even more important to make sure children are immunized.

Some parents believe that vaccinating their children is a decision that only affects them and their families. Not true. Vaccinations are based on the premise of “herd immunity.”  A certain percentage of the population must be immunized to fully protect against the disease. Once that number falls below a certain level, people are at risk, especially children too young to be immunized, pregnant women and immuno-compromised individuals such as those being treated for cancer.  Parents who choose not to vaccinate their children also are putting other peoples’ children at risk along with their own younger children, whose immune systems may not be developed enough to fight off these infections.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2014/06/26/the-ethical-negligence-of-parents-who-refuse-to-vaccinate-their-children/

Here we do notice a common theme between the climate-denial stance  and that of the anti-vaxxers:  namely, the “I’m all Right, Jack” attitude.  Whether it’s future generations, or Other People’s Children -- no skin off my nose, bubba.

As for the psychological profile of anti-vaxxers (assuming that it might turn out to be other than a strict statistical sample across all races and genders and ages and state-of-residency etc. in the U.S. population), I know nothing about it.  But let’s take a look.

There is just one named star anti-vaxxer in the Post article;  and her profile is important  well beyond that of any randomly selected anti-vaxxer, as being the figure that drew many others into the anti-vax movement.  To whom do these folks listen, if not to their doctors?

Ms McCarthy launched her career beginning with a gig as a nude model;  thus, in respect of qualifications for guiding the medical choices of American parents, similar to those of Dennis Rodman’s basketball background  for his current activity as State Department Minster-without-Portfolio for North Korean Affairs.   The saga is sordid beyond belief;  depressing details here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_McCarthy

Biochemical details:

As doctors say, dosage makes the poison. The amount of, say, formaldehyde in a typical vaccination is much less than you’d get eating an apple. The same can be shown for the other ingredients claimed to be toxins in vaccines as well. The truth is vaccines contain far too small a dose of any of these things to cause any of the problems McCarthy and other anti-vaxxers claim exist.

Also, botulinum is the single most lethal toxin known to humans. Yet McCarthy has enthusiastically praised injecting this toxin into her face.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/04/13/jenny_mccarthy_responds_to_claims_she_s_not_antivax.html

The profile whose outlines are thus shaping up, resemble those for the Pre-School Molestation Satanic Ritual scare of the Reagan years  [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial ]:

a kind of low-rent right-wing feminoid, sharply contrasting with the Michael-Crichton-et-alia outline of the climate-change deniers.

[Update 16 Feb 2015]  A nice survey of science-denial, by Joel Achenbach:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-science-is-so-hard-to-believe/2015/02/12/2ff8f064-b0a0-11e4-886b-c22184f27c35_story.html

[Update 26 Feb 2015]   Although the social dynamics in Germany are quite different, there is a curiously strong anti-vaccination movement there as well:
  In Berlin grassieren die Masern – und die irrationale Angst vor dem Impfen.
 Im Blick auf die Schweinegrippe-Impfung von einem »gewaltigen Verbrechen gegen die Menschheit« die Rede, »das offenbar nur ein Ziel verfolgt: den Genozid breiter Teile der Bevölkerung«.
  http://www.cicero.de/salon/medizin-und-verschwoerungstheorie-die-wirre-gedankenwelt-der-impfgegner/58918

[Update 30 May 2015]  Re evolution-denial & climate-change denial:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/05/29/this-fascinating-chart-on-faith-and-climate-change-denial-has-been-reinforced-by-new-research/

The chart in question:

[Update 14 Sept 2019] More on the odd psychology of anti-vaxxer activists:

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-09-13/california-senate-vaccine-bill-protest-red-liquid-thrown-onto-lawmakers

A woman was arrested Friday on charges including assault after dropping what authorities said “appeared to be blood” on members of the California Senate from her seat in the visitor gallery. The disturbance occurred as lawmakers were wrapping up their work before adjourning for the year, forcing them to evacuate the chamber to continue in a nearby committee hearing room.

The woman, who was identified by California Highway Patrol officials as Rebecca Dalelio, 43, was among dozens of protesters who were inside the state Capitol to oppose a pair of bills signed Monday by Gov. Gavin Newsom to impose new oversight of childhood vaccine exemptions.

The CHP later said in a statement that the blood-like substance was contained in “a feminine hygiene device” reported to be a menstrual cup held by the woman.

Once again, the strange feminist angle.