BY Andrew Montford/The Daily Sceptic

The Irish Government’s mooted plan to slaughter some 200,000 cattle has been getting a great deal of attention this week. It is said, implausibly, that doing so will help save the planet from global warming, although prominent commentators, such as Jordan Peterson and Elon Musk, have been quick to point out that, as policy measures go, it looks, well, quite mad

Sudden urges to slaughter herds of cattle are, however, not without historical precedent. In 19th-century South Africa, a child prophetess named Nongqawuse persuaded her people, the Xhosa, that if they slaughtered all their livestock and burnt down their granaries everything would be miraculously replaced. Of course, when they tested her claims out, the reality was very different and, cattle being the basis of their economy, the policy resulted in the utter destruction of their society. Ireland beware!

The story of the cattle killings is told in The Grip of Culture, a new book that will soon be published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (full disclosure: I am the book’s editor). Its central theme is that, like the Xhosa, our society is now being directed by what is known as a ‘cultural entity’ (or ‘a culture’ for short); the term covers both religions and extreme political movements – secular religions, if you like. The culture we are facing is, of course, climate catastrophism.

The book explains that cultures are a function of our subconscious and evolved alongside our genes as a way to bind groups of human beings together. They are an entirely natural feature of the human condition; they affect all of us. At the centre of each is a narrative of doom and redemption. Remarkably, this is always false, and indeed it is often scarcely even plausible. However, most adherents have never even read the core texts around which their culture has formed: this is as true of Extinction Rebellion supporters’ suppositions about the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as it was of a medieval peasant’s trust in the truth of the Latin Bible, or a Red Guard’s faith in the Das Kapital. A statement of belief in the climate catastrophe narrative is therefore not a rational, considered opinion; it is simply a way of signalling to other people that you are a member of the climate ‘club’.

The behaviors that make cultures so effective are seen across history. Demonization of opponents is one obvious example; accusations of heresy have done their work from time immemorial. Those within the culture are warned not to stray from orthodoxy, and those outside it are invited to join up and win the group benefits (or to face the consequences). The terminology may have changed – ‘denier’ is the current term of art – but the intent, to silence dissent and to prevent questioning of the narrative, is the same.

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