Climate fanatics never miss an opportunity
CONWAY IS, BASED ON THE ABOVE DEFINITIONS, CLEARLY A FANATIC. — MURPHY
It’s interesting, at least to me, to occasionally run through the history of a word — when it came to life and how its meaning changed over time. Words have life histories, they travel in meaning, some by such circuitous and serpentine routes that they end up their very opposite.
Any easy example is the word “nice,” which is now a term of approval, in many cases a compliment, as when we say of someone that “she is a very nice person.” In my personal view, to say someone is nice is a real tribute, as this is a time in which so many people, it appears, are not so nice. But when “nice” came out of the cradle, according to the complete Oxford English Dictionary ( OED), with its 20- plus volumes and 500,000 or so entries, it was as an abrasive, dismissive and insulting epithet.
The first entry in the OED is as follows: “Foolish, stupid, senseless. Obs. ( Common in 14th and 15th c.) Of persons.” Or, as we might say in the 21st century, “Of the panel members of ‘ The View,’ or any ‘star’ commentator on MSNBC.” The word “nice” passed from that to take a more sybaritic turn, becoming a favoured adjective for fornication obsessives: “Wanton, loose- mannered; lascivious.” It then morphed into a common adjective for those who wore “flaunting, extravagant” clothing.
I won’t go through them all, but it is a semantic pleasure to see how a word slides through its various incarnations. On the other hand, some words are steely stable, never changing their core meaning over time. Take the word “fanatic.” The same authority, OED, tells us that in the 1500s, it meant, “Of an action or speech: such as might result from possession by a deity or demon; frantic, furious. Of a person: frenzied, mad.” In the 17th century, it had this connotation: “a visionary; an unreasoning enthusiast.”
“Unreasoning” is the key term here. A fanatic is someone who’s elevated a belief to a certitude — he doesn’t have an idea, an idea has him. One other definition hits this point: “characterized by excessive and mistaken enthusiasm.” One of the most quoted lines in 20th-century poetry warns of the political fanatic. W. B. Yeats wrote, “the best lack all conviction/ while the worst are full of a passionate intensity.”
Jumping to the more modern and relevant understanding, there is this, from “The Panorama of Life and Literature”: “The man of one idea, who works at nothing but that: sacrifices everything to that; the fanatic in short.”
I was led on this little lexical romp by reading an article in the esteemed London Times. The headline was surely tantalizing: Coronavirus Can Trigger a New Industrial Revolution. I assumed it would be a kind of consolation piece, a hunt for a silver lining in this increasingly threatening time. It wasn’t.
The author, Ed Conway, got right at it in the first line: “Don’t take this the wrong way but if you were a young, hardline environmentalist looking for the ultimate weapon against climate change, you could hardly design anything better than coronavirus.” I had already guessed that someone, somewhere would somehow link global warming with this pandemic, but I never thought it would take such a grim turn.
The second paragraph is a real winner: “Unlike most other such diseases, it kills mostly the old who, let’s face it, are more likely to be climate skeptics. It spares the young. Most of all, it stymies the forces that have been generating greenhouse gases for decades. Deadly enough to terrify; containable enough that aggressive quarantine measures can prevent it from spreading. The rational response for any country determined to prevent loss of life is to follow China’s lead and lock down their economy to stem its spread.”
Conway is, based on the above definitions, clearly a fanatic. He’s possessed by an excessive and mistaken idea, one he subordinates to everything else, even a global pandemic. He sees the good side of all this. It will kill old people, but that’s a benefit because most of them ( not all, mind you) are climate skeptics. It’s “deadly enough to terrify.” Terrifying people, or attempting to do so, is what warming fanatics have chosen as their primary tactic for two decades now. The idea being that the terror they instill will force countries to shut down the entire 21st-century economy.
So Conway, a Sky News editor, can look at this pandemic — which is poised to kill multitudes, disrupt entire nations and frighten the masses — and find in it not an occasion to weep and sympathize, but to gloat about the right people being killed. And he does so because it might serve his fanatical cause — the extinction of the modern economy and the end of all carbon emissions.
Some people are so right, they should be locked up. And yes, as Yeats proclaimed, the worst are full of a passionate intensity.