makeshiftmind

By Keith Lockitch (Washington Times, January 9, 2008), reprinted with permission.

As environmentalism continues to grow in prominence, more and more of us are trying to live a “greener” lifestyle. But the more “eco-friendly” you try to become, likely the more you find yourself confused and frustrated by the green message.

Have you tried giving up your bright and cheery incandescent light bulbs to save energy–only to learn that their gloomy-but-efficient compact fluorescent replacements contain mercury? Perhaps you’ve tried to free up space in landfills by foregoing the ease and convenience of disposable diapers–only to be criticized for the huge quantities of energy and water consumed in laundering those nasty cloth diapers. Even voicing support for renewable energy no longer seems to be green enough, as angry environmentalists protest the development of “pristine lands” for wind farms and solar power plants.

Why is it that no matter what sacrifices you make to try to reduce your “environmental footprint,” it never seems to be enough?

Well, consider why it is that you have an “environmental footprint” in the first place.

Everything we do to sustain our lives has an impact on nature. Every value we create to advance our well-being–every ounce of food we grow, every structure we build, every iPhone we manufacture–is produced by extracting raw materials and reshaping them to serve our needs. Every good thing in our lives comes from altering nature for our own benefit.

From the perspective of human life and happiness, a big “environmental footprint” is an enormous positive. This is why people in India and China are striving to increase theirs: to build better roads, more cars and computers, new factories and power plants and hospitals.

But for environmentalism, the size of your “footprint” is the measure of your guilt. Nature, according to green philosophy, is something to be left alone–to be preserved untouched by human activity. Their notion of an “environmental footprint” is intended as a measure of how much you “disturb” nature, with disturbing nature viewed as a sin requiring atonement. Just as the Christian concept of original sin conveys the message that human beings are stained with evil simply for having been born, the green concept of an “environmental footprint” implies that you should feel guilty for your very existence.

It should hardly be any surprise, then, that nothing you do to try to lighten your “footprint” will ever be deemed satisfactory. So long as you are still pursuing life-sustaining activities, whatever you do to reduce your impact on nature in one respect (e.g., cloth diapers) will simply lead to other impacts in other respects (e.g., water use)–like some perverse game of green whack-a-mole–and will be attacked and condemned by greens outraged at whatever “footprint” remains. So long as you still have some “footprint,” further penance is required; so long as you are still alive, no degree of sacrifice can erase your guilt.

The only way to leave no “footprint” would be to die–a conclusion that is not lost on many green ideologues. Consider the premise of the nonfiction bestseller titled “The World Without Us,” which fantasizes about how the earth would “recover” if all humanity suddenly became extinct. Or consider the chilling, anti-human conclusion of an op-ed discussing cloth versus disposable diapers: “From the earth’s point of view, it’s not all that important which kind of diapers you use. The important decision was having the baby.”

The next time you trustingly adopt a “green solution” like fluorescent lights, cloth diapers or wind farms, only to be puzzled when met with still further condemnation and calls for even more sacrifices, remember what counts as a final solution for these ideologues.

The only rational response to such a philosophy is to challenge it at its core. We must acknowledge that it is the essence of human survival to reshape nature for our own benefit, and that far from being a sin, it is our highest virtue. Don’t be fooled by the cries that industrial civilization is “unsustainable.” This cry dates to at least the 19th century, but is belied by the facts. Since the Industrial Revolution, population and life expectancy, to say nothing of the enjoyment of life, have steadily grown.

It is time to recognize environmentalism as a philosophy of guilt and sacrifice–and to reject it in favor of a philosophy that proudly upholds the value of human life.

Keith Lockitch, PhD in physics, is a fellow at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, focusing on science and environmentalism. The Ayn Rand Center is a division of the Ayn Rand Institute and promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

For more articles by Keith Lockitch, and his bio, click here.

This is why we need to be thankful for Monty Python.

Immanuel Kant was a real pissant
Who was very rarely stable.
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar
Who could think you under the table.
David Hume could out-consume
Wilhelm Freidrich Hegel,
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as schloshed as Schlegel.

There’s nothing Nietzsche couldn’t teach ya’
‘Bout the raising of the wrist.

SOCRATES, HIMSELF, WAS PERMANENTLY PISSED…

John Stuart Mill, of his own free will,
On half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.
Plato, they say, could stick it away;
Half a crate of whiskey every day.
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle,
Hobbes was fond of his dram,
And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart: “I drink, therefore I am”
Yes, Socrates, himself, is particularly missed;
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he’s pissed!

Four prominent atheists (Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens) spend a few hours talking about religion and their own beliefs.

Hour 1

Hour 2

When I work on software projects, I use a tool commonly known as “version control” to help me keep track of changes I make to my code (or that other people make), so I have a “history” of my code over time. Version control is especially useful in group settings, where two people could potentially be changing the same files and not know it. Typically the version control repository is located on a server, and developers check out files from the server to work on them. When the files are checked back into the repository, version control is usually smart enough to see potential differences and attempt to reconcile them. If the differences can’t be reconciled, the files get flagged to indicate manual intervention is necessary to resolve the problem.

After the code has been stabilized for a scheduled release, it is then branched. Branches are important because they allow the developers to continue adding improvements to the main body of code (often referred to as the trunk), while having an exact copy of the released version of the code to which they can make bug fixes while new features are developed independently. When the new enhancements are ready to be released, the bug fixes in the branch are merged into the trunk, and a new branch is created from the merged files. And the cycle continues.

The interesting thing about version control systems is how they handle differences, both between individual files and entire branches. If version control made a copy of a file every time it was changed in order to keep a history of all changes to that file, the repository would grow to an unmanageable size. Most small/medium size software projects are literally composed of thousands of files. Instead of making copies each time something is changed (or branched), version control simply catalogs the actual differences that are introduced with the change. So if I add a single line of code to a file and commit the change to the repository, version control notes the original state of the file, and then notes the one line difference in that file’s history.

I wonder if our minds work like version control. We experience an enormous amount of mental stimulation every day, though our raw sense experience, and through the activity of learning new things. Perhaps our brains take the new information we receive daily, compare it to the information we already know, and make note of only the difference in the information in order to conserve “space”. This would explain why, at times, we have problems recalling details for a specific experience — because our brains never recorded the details, only the unique elements the experience provided. Our memory then, would operate recursively, starting with a particular experience and moving backwards to reconstruct it based on the other memory references the brain has created.

In primary schools we are introduced to basic concepts like shape and color, and from that point our learning becomes ever more refined, until we can exercise the ability to think in abstractions. Perhaps abstractions are difficult for us precisely because the brain must perform so much recursion — it must constantly work “backwards” to find the concrete origins for each abstraction.

What do you think?