...I believe Sharon Astyk (a rising figure in the Peaknik community) is *mostly* simply concerned about the rise of poverty in the United States, and how best for individuals to alleviate it (I don't really agree with her, but I don't think she's as misleading as the "Archdruid")
You should know that she just
glowingly reviewed a new Greer post. How did she get on ScienceBlogs, anyway?
No problem. I think it can be demonstrated a lot of the "Peakniks", both leaders and followers, oftentimes have a reason outside pure empirical observation for their beliefs.
I would agree, but actually by looking at the question the other way around.
Many of the science-based skeptics and rationalists I know, or that I have read online, seem to look at the facts first (or try to). Only then do they derive proposals for policy, social adjustment, or economic changes.
Other people, and perhaps the majority of people,
start from the other end, with a set of cultural desires, an idea of the kind of place in which they would want to live. It isn't a question about what is fact and what is fiction, it is about desires and values and cultural connections with other people who value the same things they do. Facts come later, and (by necessity) selectively.
In recent years I have come to the (tentative) conclusion that most skeptics imagine that non-skeptics think the way that skeptics do, only badly. "You're doing it wrong," they say. "Here are the real facts that you are missing." But these skeptics are mistaken to assume their method is universal.
Their debate partners are not usually making scientific arguments, they are instead making
cultural arguments for the way life should be lived. Objective facts are not central or the starting point, as they are in the minds and arguments of those of us with a scientific bent. But these cultural critics know they have to use scientific-sounding language because science has been so successful in the past few centuries it now has great authority. Their rhetoric has to use the "language" that has currency. They also try to hang their goals on whatever facts can be used to "objectively" justify them.
I thought of this first regarding creationism. I don't think that the creationists are making
or even trying to make a scientific argument. Instead it's about culture, a way to organize social life, and what social practices society should value and pass down. Since that is the "Truth", the facts must obviously support it. I also think the same could be said for doomers and primitivists.
So the more doomeristic peak-oilers are not making a scientific argument, even when they are using fancy graphs and charts. Instead, they are implicitly saying (1) the better life is this other way, (2) we are moving farther and farther away from being able to live how we want because the dominant way of life makes it impossible, so (3) only a massive collapse of the status quo will free us to live in a way that expresses our cultural values, so furthermore (4) careful discernment of the times shows us that the status quo will soon be shaken and we'll finally get to live free of interference, hooray.
You can see the logical fallacies there. But I think that that's what people like Greer and Kunstler and D. Jensen, and TFian here, are doing.
A parallel assumption seems to be that (1) we can't argue that our cultural desires should prevail because most people don't like them or don't even care enough to have an opinion, and (2) there is no way to win moral/value arguments through logic, but (3) objective facts trump beliefs so people will
have to listen to that, and (4) as we have seen above, the facts are on our side, so (5) we can do more to promote our cultural values by pointing out the status quo's inevitable self-destruction than we would by simply promoting our beliefs as good things in and of themselves.
I could say more, but this is already a very long post.
Does anyone think I'm seeing this correctly?
No defense of your leader? It was a great takedown which part got to you the most?
