Back in the day, as only old-timey English majors would know, a dude named Jonathan Swift wrote A Tale of a Tub, which Swift, wrapping himself in multiple layers of irony, describes as a sort of prelude to a great work of immense learning that will resolve all the tensions of the age. In the meantime, while that great work is prepared, something must be done to allay the hysteria of the vulgar. It has been observed, Swift tells us, that “seamen have a custom when they meet a Whale to fling him out an empty Tub, by way of amusement, to divert him from laying violent hands upon the Ship.” His work is intended as a sort of intellectual-socio-cultural tub, to be butted about by the aimless and destructive wits of the age, leaving society and the state unharmed, until the great work is available.
Over at Politico, Michael Grunwald tells us, with considerably less ado, that the recent rejection of the Paris accords on global warming is Donald Trump’s “tub”. You see, Donald is making a great fuss these days, but he isn’t actually getting anything done. And he needs a distraction from all of this. And so he’s got one. The “great work” to come? Well, we’ll worry about that bridge when we get to it. In the meantime, we can watch the liberals scurry around like so many ants in a deranged ant hill, impotent and enraged, enraged and impotent, clicking their tiny jaws on thin air, while Big Donald smokes a big cigar and laughs.
My climate change “solution”? I don’t really have one. Over at Reason, Ron Bailey runs the data for us indicating that implementing the Paris accords alone won’t have much effect on global warming, which implies that the U.S. withdrawal won’t have much effect either, even though the U.S. is the largest source of greenhouse gases. Like Ron and Skeptical Environmentalist Bjorn Lomberg, whom I like1, I think it’s “reasonable” to expect technological progress over the next 80 years to do much of the heavy lifting, if we are willing to let it (because said technological progress and heavy lifting is likely to involve nuclear power, not to mention fracking, which so many dedicated environmentalists hate).
So walking out is not really a big deal? Well, as Daniel Larison explains at the American Conservative, telling the whole world to basically go fuck themselves is not a good idea, even if it makes you feel cool.
“One of the persistent flaws in Trump’s view of international agreements is that he seems to think that it puts pressure on other parties to walk away from an agreement that has already been made. Far from forcing a better deal from the other parties, this just demonstrates that our government isn’t interested in making a deal, and the other parties to the agreement respond accordingly. Trump can’t possibly improve on a non-binding agreement that calls for voluntary contributions, and the other signatories aren’t interested in talking to him about it in any case. This decision gains the U.S. nothing it didn’t already have, and it harms our relations with many allies in the process.”
Afterwords
I would so rather write about Jonathan Swift than Donald Trump, even though I don’t like Swift all that much. A Tale of a Tub, his first work, is Swift at his most Swiftian. The work bristled with mock dedications, mock footnotes, mock this, that, and the other. In its way, it much resembles Edmund Burke’s first work, A Vindication of Natural Society, which I rambled on about in my takedown of Mr. Boring, Russell Kirk. Both are books by young men who find it immensely amusing that the world makes absolutely no sense, and no one notices! Swift’s book was written ostensibly for the purpose of shoring up the English Monarchy and the Anglican Church, but his appetite for ridicule constantly got the better of him—if it’s funny it’s funny, goddamnit!—with the result that he’s also constantly reversing and contradicting himself—Don’t you get it? I’m making fun of atheism, not endorsing it!
- I read Bjorn’s book with interest. My opinion of the environmental movement was permanently altered for the worse by the hysterical reaction to that book, particularly by a “Special Issue!” of Scientific American that bore the head “Science Defends Itself Against the Skeptical Environmentalist”, as though “Science” were some trembling virgin who had to be protected the villainous Bjorn. ↩︎
