Back to Babylon?

Although it's not a blog that I read regularly, I found an interesting post on Inhabitatio Dei, entitled “Does Protestantism Exist?” It asks some questions that I've been asking myself, and answers them in a manner with which I have been toying.

“To be a protestant is to be situated in a particular historical stream of the Christian faith. To be a protestant, if that term is to have any real meaning at all, is to live one’s ecclesial life precariously, in essential vulnerability while attempting to call for radical reform of the Roman Catholic church. There can be no severing of the churches of the Reformation from the Roman Catholic church. We cannot think of the heritage of the Reformation in abstraction from the Roman Catholic church. If protestantism can be truly said to exist, it most exist as an ongoing form of engagement with the Roman Catholic church for the sake of the proper embodiment of the gospel.

“However, if protestantism has ceased to be such a form of ongoing engagement with the Roman Catholic church calling for reformation, then protestantism as such seems to have ceased to exist and something altogether different has come into being. Insofar as protestant churches have ceased to see their particularly protestant identity as qualified by historical connection to the Roman Catholic church they have ceased to be protestant. So, the question I have is, does protestantism exist, and if so, where?”

I'm no historian of theology, but it seems that now is a great time to think very hard about this question. Of course, there's no denomination that goes by the name “protestant”: we're all Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Anglicans, etc., and as such we have our own theological traditions. For a time, the culture of the United States was saturated with these traditions, but the flavor is weaker now, and becoming more so. (One could conceivably argue that much of this cultural protestantism was vaguely heretical anyway…)

And so it is important for young protestants than to find out who we are, and precisely what it is that we are charged to carry forward through history.

“Ljubljana!”

The Society for the Promotion of Folly: Sign me up!

I'm really sorry, but I thought you should read this.

Found on Millinerd's blog:

This vastly entertaining blog is sort of like the Chapelle show, but less outrageous and about White People. Not all white people: basically, just the ones who like the Arcade Fire and shop at Whole Foods. The culture posts hit very close to home:

Wes Anderson Movies: “If a white guy takes a white girl to a Wes Anderson movie on their first date, and neither of them have seen it, they will immediately commence a relationship that is reflected in songs by Ryan Adams and Bright Eyes.”

Not Having a TV: “The number one reason why white people like not having a TV is so that they can tell you that they don’t have a TV.”

Arrested Development: “They also love it because there are a few references to white popular culture, and if there is one thing that white people love, it’s cultural references that they understand (see Garden State, The Onion, and Juno for examples).”

Indie Music: “To a white person, being a fan of a band before they get popular is one of the most important things they can do with their life. They can hold it over their friends forever!”

Apologies: “In fact, white people are so used to apologizing that they start all sentences that might cause disagreement with ‘I’m sorry.’ For example ‘I’m sorry, but Garden State was a better film than Hard Eight.’”

Standing Still at Concerts: “Remember, at a concert everyone is watching you just waiting for you to try to start dancing. Then they will make fun of you. The result is Belle and Sebastian concerts that essentially looks more like a disorganized line of people than a music event.”

The site mostly takes aim at the slightly sub-hipster folks who regard themselves as paragons of open-mindedness, global thinking, and ironic fashion. Of course, irony returns in this manner: I'm guessing that those very people provided a clear majority of the blog's nearly three million hits.

I say “those people”: clearly I am distancing myself from that crowd. In a number of ways, I hardly fit the bill. I don't drink coffee, consider myself spiritual-but-not-religious (i.e. I'm openly religous) read David Sedaris, do yoga, or have difficult breakups. And while most of my friends fit into some category on this list, it still seems blog describes a very small demographic. I thank God that I don't fit this stereotype to a greater degree, and I mean that literally: when I don't fit something on the list, it has to do with my membership in a certain Christian community. As Matthew Millener says:

“While the mockery (let's face it) is earned, how does one escape the scourge? The site, it seems to me, has a lot to do with what we white people - indeed, any people - become when we lose the gospel - that most reliable tool for relentless self-criticism, that trusty crowbar for prying oneself from the world.”

But I'll certainly think twice before talking about my Apple products or my Netflix queue in the near future.

I will live in someplace very cold…

There was snow falling when I woke up this morning. Much has been said in many places about the character and effect of city snow, so I won't try to describe it. But I think that at this point in the afternoon, the snow is turning to rain, and the air is warm enough that watery slush is now plopping down off the tall buildings. Sometimes it seems like all the magic left in this world is of the sputtering, fitful, and ultimately inadequate variety.

Goatees

John Hodgman is exactly right:

“…the goatee is the facial hair of the desperately ambivalent…”

And:

“The Potts Famous Beard Manual indicates that a GOATEE signifies ‘false hopes’ and ‘flash over substance.’”

Click through to see how this relates to election season.

Nine Stitches

Went out to the hills with friends this weekend, wandered back into the woods, slipped on ice, dripped red blood all over the nice white snow, and ended up with stitches over my right eyebrow. Now I look like a goon, and I very much hope that the swelling goes down before class tomorrow.

My friend Brendan (who is quite a talented writer) is making his way through the novels of Robertson Davies, and he seems to be enjoying them as much as I did. Our conversations this weekend reminded me of the ways in which Mr. Davies's books changed the course of my thinking. Here's to a writer with a real vision of the deep comedy in the world, and to my favorite of his characters: poor Hector Mackilwraith.

"Beauty is the true form of distance."

So I'm stumbling on through David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite, a work that I am only able to grasp by impressions, when I can grasp it at all. The first part is all about the narratives of the sublime in continental philosophy, from Kant and Nietzsche on up to Derrida, Deleuze, Foucalt, and Levinas. What is it that keeps me trudging through these wild grasses looming so high over my head?

Well, the prose is splendid. And when I cheat ahead with the index, I find sentences such as this:

“Bach is the greatest of Christian theologians, the most inspired witness to the ordo amoris in the fabric of being; not only is there no other composer capable of more freely developing lines or of more elaborate structures of tonal mediation (wheresoever the line goes, Bach is there also), but no one as compellingly demonstrates that the infinite is beauty and that beauty is infinite.”

Poor, poor Archbishop!

It's gloomy and dismal in New York right now, but I take comfort in the fact that I am not Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury. You'd think that being the head of the worldwide Anglican Communion would be something of a cushy job, but that's just not the case, certainly not now, with the American Episcopal church and the conservative African bishops at each others' throats. I'm sure that Archbishop Williams, a theologian and poet, doesn't want to go down in history as the man who let the Anglican church fall apart, but it looks like it might happen. So when things get bad, I think to myself: at least I'm not the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Then, last week, in a speech and a BBC interview, Rowan Williams allegedly proposed “constructive accommodation” for Muslim communities in Britain who wish to use Sharia law. At least that's how the New York Times reported it. But at least the Times reporter added this:

“The archbishop’s speech was made at the Royal Courts of Justice, before an audience of leading judges and lawyers. Typically, it was steeped in historical and philosophical nuances that risked being lost in the headlines.”

It seems that other newspapers were not so kind. There were calls for resignation. There was a delightful Chaucer spoof (“Whan in Februar, withe hise global warmynge / Midst unseasonabyl rain and stormynge…”). Spengler was vividly critical:

“Violence is oozing through the cracks of European society like pus out of a broken scab. Just when liberal opinion congratulated itself that Europe had forsaken its violent past, the specter of civil violence has the continent terrified. That is the source of the uproar over a February 7 speech by Archbishop Rowan Williams, predicting the inevitable acceptance of Muslim sharia law in Great Britain.”

I'll admit a cynical thought that crossed my mind: the Archbishop is trying to lose his job! He wants to get kicked out for something that doesn't have to do with gay bishops! But then I read the speech. Philosophical nuances indeed.

I wonder if the Archbishop could have made the same point using a less controversial example. His basic point seems to be that if the law treats religious duties as voluntary, it can't make sense of the claims of religious people for exceptions: religious holidays, conditions for employment, etc. There is, I think, an implicit condition running through the entire speech: if certain people are duty-bound to abide by religious law, and this does not bring them into serious conflict with the spirit of the national law, and religious authorities can tell the court that these obligations aren't frivolous or imaginary, then the courts should take these obligations seriously. A judge could distinguish, for example, between a Catholic doctor who won't perform an abortion, even to save a life, and a Catholic doctor who won't perform a tracheotomy, even to save a life.

Williams wanted to avoid the difficulties of the “primitivist” reading of Sharia in order to focus on the theoretical aspects of law and communal identity. It's right there in the beginning:

“Even when some of the more dramatic fears are set aside, there remains a great deal of uncertainty about what degree of accommodation the law of the land can and should give to minority communities with their own strongly entrenched legal and moral codes.” (emphasis added)

To which one could conceivably respond: what if in reality these dramatic fears are entirely justified? (This question is, of course, not one that I can answer.)

In the BBC interview, Williams seems very confident that there exists an interpretation of Sharia law that is largely compatible with the British common law tradition, citing Muslim scholars and legal theorists. But what of the situation on the ground? I don't know anything about religious life in Great Britain, and I don't think I learned anything from this speech.

I am so glad that I am not the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Culture, culture, culture...

My good friend Hope has requested that I resume posting, so I'll give it another shot, assuming that I can think of anything to say (and that I can finish learning how to type in DVORAK).

I love very much the old fellows over at Touchstone's Mere Comments, and never more than when they get cranky. I can't possibly do what they do, but it's not that I disagree with them. It's more that I don't have the life experience or years of pent-up frustration to write such beautiful diatribes: vibrant denunciations that, at moments, rise to the effect of poetry. Of course, for every jeremiad, they write scores of constructive posts, but these don't usually go beyond the realm of the very interesting. Incidentally, I've considered posting on their message board, but the folks who post regularly can be fairly ferocious.

One example was S.M. Hutchens's “Reverie in E Minor,” in which he discussed the havoc his generation wrought on the music of church culture.

“My generation, my abysmally stupid and culpably foolish generation, had the opportunity to keep the good--for there was very much good here--discard the bad, and bring in a golden age of church music, an age of beauty and invention, now in obedient harmony with the Great Tradition, with good theology instead of bad, and with an eye trained upon the history of whole Church and its music. Instead, however, it went as bad as it possibly could, seizing upon all the old mistakes it could find and amplifying them.”

I am no fan of the Baby Boomers – thanks for the Social Security burden and the national debt, jerks! – and it always warms my heart to see them called “abysmally stupid and culpably foolish,” but I probably shouldn't be too hasty to judge until we see how my generation turns out. The more interesting question is whether or not Mr. Hutchens is correct in his judgment of rock music:

“Instead of turning their people toward the richness of the Christian musical tradition, their teachers spent their time justifying and promoting the music of rebels and drug addicts, now half-converted into something called ‘Christian rock.’”

And a few paragraphs later:

“The argument is that bringing them in will get them to heaven--but how can you show them heaven when you are presiding over a little piece of hell--a place where people are given vast quantities religious stimulation under the name of the “gospel,” the end of which can only be the a vast burned-over district where they have been effectively inoculated against Christianity by Evangelical religion, just as one is inoculated against Mozart by a steady diet of rock, or the realities of the world, including its beauties, by drug-eating, or against the power of words by overwhelming waves of pictures?”

Rock music: created by rebels and drug addicts to inoculate the youth of the world against Mozart. As someone who likes the stuff, I'm loathe to agree with him, but I think that I have to do it. Last night, I listened to the first hour or so of Bach's Mass in B Minor, wishing that I could understand it better than I do. Some mathematical types love Bach, and it's not hard to see why. But even with the words and liner notes in front of me, I had trouble keeping my mind on the music. I don't have the descriptive vocabulary to follow the music in its intricacies, and my ear's patience has no doubt been destroyed by several years of listening to Guided By Voices. Ah, well. There's time yet for me.

So, I thought I had my fix for the week, until I came across Dr. Tony Esolen's “The World that Has No Music in its Soul.” He starts from the wonderful article that writer/composer Webster Young published in the latest Intercollegiate Review, which was, in fact, the article that gave me the inclination to get out my Bach CDs. At any rate, Dr. Esolen argues that Webster Young's hopes for a revival of a “common language” for classical music may be premature:

“When Palestrina wrote his Masses, he was inspired by prayers that washerwomen and plowboys had heard every week of their lives; it was part of their common, lived experience. Without that inspiration from something beyond Renaissance Italy, and something the composer shared with all kinds of people who were not composers or singers, you do not get the exalted music and theology of the Credo of the Mass for Pope Marcellus. . .

“But what happens when you don't have a culture? I've argued this before, but it bears repeating. I'm taking the word literally. You have a culture when you cultivate those beliefs, customs, celebrations, and virtues you hold most dear; and in this sense culture is by nature conservative and often proudly local. That's why totalitarian systems despise it; it stands in the way of the flattening of variety that the modern state demands. But this consumer society of ours despises it, too. It stands in the way of the itch for the new-and-improved, for novelty for the sake of vanity. The last hundred years, in part through no consciously evil plan, has seen the gradual replacement of culture with mass entertainment.”

Read the full essays for the full effect. I'm not optimistic that my generation can do any better, but at least it's nice to hear a warning from the older crowd.

On Hiatus

I like the name of this space, but I'm not making any headway on the blogging side. Perhaps I will return in some time, when I have something more to say, but what I know is and always will be just a tiny, tiny dot on the big basketball of what there is to know.

Yours,

-William

The Birth of the Consumer Republic

Michael Sandel, in Democracy's Discontent, sees the birth of the consumer-oriented political culture in the the writings of Walter Weyl and, more generally, in a strand of Progressivism that didn't quite match up with Woodrow Wilson or Theodore Roosevelt in the 1912 election.

In the republican tradition of political economy that informed nineteenth-century American debate, producer identities mattered because the world of work was seen as the arena in which, for better or for worse, the character of citizens was formed. Consumptions, when it figured at all in republican political economy, was a thing to be moderated, disciplined, or restrained for the sake of higher ends. An excess of consumption, or luxury, was often seen as a form of corruption, a measure of the loss of civic virtue. From Jefferson's agrarian republicanism to Lincoln's celebration of free labor to Brandeis' call for industrial democracy, the emphasis on producer identities reflected the attempt to form in citizens the qualities of character necessary to self-government.

A politics based on consumer identities, by contrast, changes the question. Instead of asking how to elevate or improve or restrain people's preferences, it asks how best - most fully, fairly, or efficiently - to satisfy them. The shift to consumer-based reform in the twentieth century was thus a shift away from the formative ambition of the republican tradition, away from the political economy of citizenship. Although they did not view their movement in quite this way, the Progressives who urged Americans to identify with their roles as consumers rather than producers helped turn American politics toward a political economy of growth and distributive justice whose full expression lay decades in the future.

I don't really know what to say about this, which is, I suppose, a terrible fault for a blogger.

In this book, I am stumbling on to these old arguments, stacked up and dusty in cobwebbed corners, and the nostalgic impulse to try to bring them down, to make use of them, nearly overwhelms me at times. Some might truly be warped and broken from disuse, but it can be hard to distinguish that which was unjustly forgotten from that which was put away for good reason.

I'm still in this book's headspace; I'll try to sort out its arguments when I finally get through it.

Sophistry, just in case

Truth can be manipulated for personal gain.

(From Dr. Boli's Celebrated Magazine, a wonderful little site.)

Done Packing

There is a 13-hour train ride tomorrow. I've got a stack of books in my rucksack. Might try to rip through Graham Greene's The Third Man, an "entertainment" that he wrote so that it could be made into a film. I haven't seen the film because I've wanted to find time for the book first. Then I've got the Barth and the Hart to work on.

It seems that with every page I turn these days, I find that I really don't know much of anything at all.

The Ocho Begins

Two nice starts which turned into two bad semesters, with a bad summer in between, and some terribly bright moments for contrast: that was my 2007. Good riddance.

At least I read some good books: Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, Witness to Hope by George Weigel, After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre, The Moviegoer by Walker Percy, and Watership Down (for the first time!). I love my friends as much or more than ever. I suppose I now possess bits of self-knowledge that I was previously lacking. Yet the good things I can carry with me, the bad I can leave behind. And so, onwards.

On another note, this country needs to consider quite seriously the possibility of switching to a parliamentary government.

Time Magazine: 100 best Novels

TIME Magazine's 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present

I've read 23 of them, and I'm glad that most of them made it, although I'm not quite sure about Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. I'm glad that William Faulkner and Graham Greene each got two novels on the list. And there's a few that I'd really like to read in the near future, among them: Joan Didion's Play it as it Lays and maybe something by Saul Bellow.

Also worth reading are the original reviews of many of these books. Some of them, such as Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, were at first reviled. Others were immediately recognized as masterworks. My favorite, however, is the 1966 review of The Lord of the Rings, which describes what was evidently a major Tolkien craze on college campuses:

The hobbit habit seems to be almost as catching as LSD. On many U.S. campuses, buttons declaring FRODO LIVES and GO GO GANDALF—frequently written in Elvish script—are almost as common as football letters. Tolkien fans customarily greet each other with a hobbity kind of greeting ("May the hair on your toes grow ever longer"), toss fragments of hobbit language into their ordinary talk. One favorite word is mathom, meaning something one saves but doesn't need, as in "I've just got to get rid of all these mathoms." Permanently hooked Ringworms frequently memorize long passages from the trilogy and learn how to write Tengwar or Certar, two peculiar and ancient-looking scripts that Tolkien invented on behalf of his mythical creatures. The most ardent readers of all are likely to join the nation's fast-growing Tolkien Society of America, which publishes magazines containing learned disquisitions on the elaborate genealogies and intricate rules of grammar that the author attached as appendices to the trilogy.

The Undemocratic High Church

I went to this morning's 9:00 service at St. Thomas Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue. It was a step out of reality, into some other, older world. Perhaps it was a taste of what Tolkien's hobbits felt upon their arrival in Rivendell. The church itself is a beautiful Gothic building, dark and immediate when compared with the light, wide-open glory of St. Patrick's Cathedral, just a few blocks away. Upon entering St. Thomas, one sees at the far end of the sanctuary a solid wall of beautiful statuary: Christ Jesus surrounded by the saints.

The service used the old, beautiful language of pre-modern liturgy. There was a small choir, consisting of little kids with angelic voices. But the musicians were mostly hidden from view; organ music flew out and over from the chancel. An acolyte swung the incense at the offering: something I had heard about but never before seen. And taking the Eucharist there was unforgettable. As we processed up the aisles toward the alter, I felt ever smaller and ever more unworthy. Kneeling only feet from the back wall, I had to crane my neck to glimpse the statue of Jesus high over my head. I took the wafer and wine, prayed, and made my way back to my seat, blinking my eyes and holding my face in my hands.

In short, this was the opposite of all the seeker-sensitive services I have ever attended. The recent Willow Creek revelations - that market research and focus groups somehow failed to yield authentic discipleship - almost seem to belong to a different planet. Indeed, after the service, I found myself reluctant to walk back out to Fifth Avenue, which is again styling itself as Christmastown, USA. So-called contemporary services, on the other hand, always seem to be of one mind with consumerism.

But a high-church mentality is also somewhat opposed to the democratic spirit itself, or at least to its overly individualistic manifestations. At St. Thomas there are vestiges of the old aristocratic culture, not in the sense that anyone is excluded, but in the sense that there is an emphasis on order and beauty, and there is a King at the center of all things. It's an ancient conception of authority: power derived, not from the people, but from above.

I suppose there's not much of a political point to this, except to say that we in a democracy probably need a few undemocratic institutions to help us along. When we know something of the alternatives, we can better evaluate our own democracy. Modern democracy, as well as several Protestant denominations, are rooted in opposition to this sort of aristocratic spirit. I'm not qualified to remark on the theological implications of this opposition, but I will say that encountering the old world can be refreshing to the soul of the beleaguered and wandering democrat.

Listening Plans

I've been using Pandora and last.fm to find new music. So, for no particular reason, here is a short list of musicians whose albums I will buy as soon as I have a large amount of money and nothing else to spend it on, which is to say, several years from now. It's all the exact same kind of thing, I suppose.

-Bonnie "Prince" Billy
-Richard Buckner
-Smog
-Iron & Wine

This is how I turn into even more of a boring indie-folkster.

Mr. McCaughan Goes to Washington

Have you heard of Mac McCaughan? He's a hero.

Mr. McCaughan spent the 1990s as the frontman of Superchunk, a rock band from Chapel Hill. At the same time, he helped found and build Merge Records. Merge began by releasing albums by Superchunk and some friends of the band. Over the years, some of their bands got pretty famous: Merge handled big releases for Neutral Milk Hotel, Spoon, M Ward, and The Arcade Fire, among others.

Do you know these bands? Spoon and The Arcade Fire both had top-ten albums on the Billboard charts this year. But you probably didn't heard them on the radio; they don't get much play.

Anyway, the Senate Commerce Committee invited Mr. McCaughan to talk about non-commercial radio at a hearing on "The Future of Radio". And his argument made sense to me.

Low-power, college, NPR and other non-commercial broadcasting enterprises are extremely important today, especially as local information and entertainment options become scarcer. Commercial radio is about aggregating the largest possible number of listeners in a targeted demographic. Community-based radio is about serving its audiences. It has the unique power and the desire to be a conduit for news and culture, and is essential to the diversity that defines cultural life in this country.

Commercial radio is an entirely artificial market. The government takes a narrow slice of bandwidth and allows people apply for licenses to use it. "Deregulation" of the airwaves is not a free-market measure. The government can easily price small operations out of business. But this is emphatically not in the public interest. It's not just music that suffers when the large conglomerates take a larger market share. Local news, opinion, sports, and culture also suffer.

This may be a moot point, as broadband wireless may soon enable people to listen to internet stations. But as long as the government has control of the available bandwidth, it needs to make room for the little guy.

The Rambler

I needed a break, so I stopped by the magazine store on 35th Street. I suppose my idea was to look for something with a CD in it, so I could find some new music (I've become hermetic in my tastes). Nothing looked interesting; everything was glossy and popular. You can't sell a magazine about unpopular bands, but that's what I wanted.

So I went back to the magazines about writing. And I saw the Rambler.

Last year, it caught my eye because it featured an article by a professor I knew in Chapel Hill. Sure enough, it's published in my favorite University town.

The November/December issue's cover shows a woman with an upside-down umbrella leaking rain on her. And the magazine isn't about much more than that. It's got articles about small things: old stories, food, fatigue, airplanes. No commentary on current events, no policy articles, no strategic national institutions. There are some very pretty photographs. It's evocative of real life, which is what we have left after our ambitions are spent, on the other side of dreams, when we can see the work of our hands and tell others how it came to be.

You strive, strive, strive, and need a break. Here is a place for small stories, inconsequential to big missions, but absolutely necessary to the good life.

Global Warming as a Noble Lie

In The Republic, Plato's Socrates argues that the citizens of his city-in-speech will never accept the class system that they need unless they are made to believe a myth about its origins. The founders of the city know that the story is false as can be, but they can’t allow the citizens to question the established order. In other words, sometimes you need a whopper of lie to get things done.

Could global warming be such a lie? It depends on what one means by “global warming.” If you say that human activity has changed the composition of the earth’s environment, and that this could potentially have unforeseen consequences, then there’s no argument. But if you say you know exactly what those consequences will be, then we have a problem.

As far as I can tell, the scientists know exactly what is going on. They know that very few systems are more complex or unpredictable than the weather, and they have done an excellent job showing that the earth’s atmosphere has indeed changed over time, going through both long and short cycles of heat and cold. A good scientist knows that mathematical models are approximations, often useful, but certainly prone to error.

These models are the source of all predictions of increasing global temperature, changing weather patters, melting ice caps, rising sea levels, and, finally, the submerging of Manhattan. All of these models must account for a staggering array of variables; they must balance effects that may work against each other – for example, the warming of the air and the melting of the ice caps both would simultaneously heat and cool the ocean. That’s a simplified example, but it illustrates the difficulty in any kind of prediction. And we don’t even know what would be happening to the environment even if humans never existed.

So all our predictions are in some way contingent. If one model proves to be accurate over time, then perhaps we could really start to trust it. For now, though, we should all be aware that something gets completely lost between the scientific papers and the headlines.

Why, then, are there so few vocal dissenters in the science community? Why don’t more scientists speak out against the blatant misinterpretation of their work?

Because the poisoning of our atmosphere is a real problem, but nobody will care unless there’s a catastrophic consequence around the corner. The real case – that we are making radical changes to our environment which may or may not be irreparable – would never be listened to by a population that is just fine with a national debt up in the trillions and a creakingly damaged social security system. Who cares if it might go wrong? No, to get anything done, you have to be able to show that there’s an impending crisis: in other words, people will die unless we do something.

So maybe global warming is a noble lie. We let the media trumpet its disaster-movie version of the truth, hoping that it will spur some kind of change.

But for those of us who aren’t comfortable with lies, no matter how noble their purpose, there is no other course besides a deep reexamination of our culture’s consumption mentality. And that, my friends, is a topic for another time.