By Crispin Sartwell
Last Saturday, hundreds of thousands of people stood gazing at huge flickering images of Al Gore and chanting slogans in unison. Perhaps you regard this as an inspiring spectacle of human unity. Personally, it gives me the willies.
     I am not a climatologist, but I am an epistemologist, and I know enough to be getting worried about the pressure for unanimity, the cult of personality, the whiff of hysteria, the apocalyptic structure of thought, and the totalitarian implications.
     In Nashville on 7.7.7, fundamentalist Christians were engaged in "TheCall," a huge collective prayer intended to bring about the rapture; at the same moment in NYC, Madonna and John Mayer were warning us that our sins would be punished. I'd say that we're a culture suddenly obsessed with The End, but we were the same in the 1830s. It mutates, but it's endemic: faith laced with a guilt at having failed in what the faith demands, a premonition that we'll get what we deserve.
     It is quickly reaching the point at which, through informal practices of ostracism and exile, no one can publicly voice dissent about the reality, nature, scope, or the danger posed by climate change. That is precisely the moment when the science and the politics are likely to become completely irresponsible, as everyone slaps everyone's back for believing the same, and for muttering ever more astonishing dire predictions.
    Already the rhetoric is revving up to absolute maximum - a kind of shrieking hyperbole - and Gore has taken to calling climate change the worst crisis in human history, the most important issue our species has ever faced, and so on. If it turns out to be nothing of the kind, you can blame the persistence of delusion on the atmosphere of unanimity, which is inimical to human thought.
    Belief that global warming is the worst crisis our species has ever faced is based on science, while belief that the return of Christ is imminent is based on faith. But for the people gathered before  gargantuan Gores, "science" refers at best to some kind of emerging social consensus, and at worst to absolutely nothing, to the merest assertion of a set of authorities.
      And at any rate, unanimity is inimical to good science, placing your flimsy results beyond practical criticism. We'll never have a clear idea of what's going on without the contributions of skeptics, gadflies, and eccentrics.
      Now I would have thought that a cult of Al Gore was about as likely as a cult of Orrin Hatch. But there, as they say, you are. Then again, there have been some pretty amazing little gods: ponder beloved leader Kim Il Sung, for example. I don't know why Gore would want to be president of the United States, when he can run a world regulatory regime, an emerging world government arising in response to the worst threat we've ever faced as a species.
    He's already conducting collective loyalty oaths. On Saturday people literally raised their right hands and took an environmental pledge together. In real Al Gore fashion, it was detailed, interminable, and written in prose flat as a Mercator projection of the world. The astonishing destiny of our planet is, if nothing else, bureaucratic.
    In a way, Gore proposes to put the whole world on a war footing, as though we faced an alien invasion and so had to band together as a species. Indeed, Live Earth, with its concerts on seven continents, was supposed to be an image of this ideal: a peaceful human unity grounded on mutual concern for and stake in the whole planet.
     This is liable to have its dark side. And just as when the Bush administration invaded Iraq, let's say, you would do well to think about questions like these: whose power does this serve and (same question from the other side) what freedoms does it curtail? Is the unity real or fictional, momentary or enduring, and what truths does it repress?
     And what the hell am I doing here, crushed in this crowd, gazing with shining eyes at a huge Al Gore?