My book ‘The Grip of Culture’, subtitled ‘The social psychology of climate change catastrophism’, is now published.

“Climate change catastrophism is a cultural disease haunting Western society.  Andy West’s excellent study of this problem explains the different drivers of this disease. It is an important contribution to a debate where reason must prevail.” – Frank Furedi, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent

You can find it in paperback on Amazon US, UK and Germany, plus it is also available as a FREE pdf from my publisher, the GWPF, see here.

The rear-cover synopsis reads:

“Attempts to explain attitudes to climate change, and the refusal of large parts of society to accept the idea of an imminent catastrophe, have largely foundered. This ground breaking book overturns the existing literature, developing a powerful new model of public attitudes based on the interaction of traditional religion and a new culture – a new faith – of climate catastrophism, which is instinctively accepted or rejected. At its centre is a series of measurements of public opinion, culled from major international polls, which make a strong case that society is now in the grip of a major new religion. That case is made still more powerful because the model is able to predict real-world outcomes, such as the deployment of renewables and the prevalence of climate protest groups in different countries.

The book ends with a warning. Cultures can bind societies together and cause great civilisations to grow and prosper. But they can also lead them to disaster. If society is truly in the grip of a new cultural entity, we should be very concerned.”

See this review by Andrew Montford:

“I HAVE been working in climate and energy for nearly 15 years, and it’s fair to say that it’s not often I find something that makes me radically change the way I look at the domain. But a new book, by Andy A West, has done just that.”

My book overlaps with some social aspects explored in Judith’s book, including the catastrophe narrative, the social nature of consensuses, and the highly tangled territory where group biases interact with, and damage, the enterprise of science. However, regarding the social aspects generally I see my book as exposing the ultimate root cause of the biases and the deep social need for arbitrary consensus. It does not explore much detail about what specific institutions and efforts are undermined by which biased advocate individuals or organisations, and indeed it does not delve into climate science or the IPCC procedures at all (see the note at the end of this post). The main presence of climate catastrophism is outside of science, and its culture can be characterised and measured from its footprint in global publics (inclusive of public authorities). However, climate catastrophism works to undermine all institutions that provide ‘rationality at social scale’, including democracy, the law (chapter 14), and science (which is considered generically).

A short description of each chapter follows:

  1. Introduction

The opening paragraph states:

“This book is about the social psychology associated with climate change, which can be characterized and measured across national publics without reference to the physical climate system, its future state, or how it responds to human emissions of greenhouse gases. This is the case because the social psychology has emergent characteristics of its own, which are unaffected by mainstream views on the science of the ocean-atmosphere system… …or indeed the arguments of the small minority of sceptical scientists.”

  1. A potent new cultural entity in our society

The observed social behaviours associated with the issue of climate change (a couple of dozen are listed), circumstantially point to a ‘cultural entity’ – shorthand: ‘a culture’ – dominating the public domain with respect to this issue. Cultural entities include religions and secular ideologies – an appropriate label for this one is ‘climate catastrophism’. The chapter points out that we should be able to apply 150 years of accumulated knowledge on how cultures work, to better understand this new one. However, this obvious angle has not been pursued, apparently because the relevant social science disciplines wrongly deem  that certain global catastrophe (absent dramatic action) to be incontrovertible hard science. This chapter is based on the first half of my 2015 Climate Etc post ‘Climate culture’.

  1. Cultural entities: deep roots and key features

This chapter covers the origin of cultural entities in the evolutionary process of cultural group selection, and describes their features, including: emotive commitment to cultures and emotive hot-buttons, the cultural use and abuse of children, (irrational) cultural consensuses, cultural narrative (which is always false, and features a population of variants), cultural policing, demonisation and the pressure of fear, cultural rejection (innate scepticism), and more. The chapter also covers features of cultures that are more than the sum of their parts, and which imbue them with an agenda of their own.

  1. Child prophets and proselytisers

This chapter examines the cultural role of children as prophets and mass proselytisers. The approach is based on distinguishing these roles from reality-based (i.e. not cultural) scenarios. A detailed comparison is drawn between the pitches to authority of two girl prophets – Greta Thunberg and Nonqawuse – as well as a reality-based pitch from Malala Yousafza. A similar comparison is drawn between two child movements – the Alabama children’s crusade of 1963, and the current School Strikes for Climate campaign.

The vulnerability of children to aggressively promoted cultural ‘templates’, and climate catastrophism’s psychological abuse of children, are also covered. The chapter essentially consists of my 2019 Climate Etc post ‘Child prophets and proselytisers’.

  1. The Catastrophe Narrative

The ‘carrier’ of a cultural entity, its DNA so to speak, is an emotive cultural narrative that consists of a main ‘umbrella’ theme, under which sits a population of narrative variants linked to the theme. This chapter examines the specific cultural narrative of ‘imminent global climate catastrophe’, as propagated by a wide array of authority sources from presidents and prime ministers on downwards, and including examples of its most common memetic variants along with the details of how these work. The chapter is based on my 2018 Climate Etc post ‘The catastrophe narrative’.

The catastrophe narrative is ubiquitous in the public domain and propagated by virtually all authority sources; a companion file lists a couple of hundred examples of authority figures pushing the catastrophe narrative, categorized by variant type and with a clickable index of quotees.

  1. Demonisation and denialism

This chapter examines the mis-framed concept of ‘denialism’, which allows modern secular cultures (especially climate catastrophism) to demonise dissenters en-masse, yet without this being perceived as demonisation. The widespread use of the emotive and pejorative concept of denialism is in part due to its legitimisation by a scientific paper, which has given the concept a veneer of respectability. In this chapter I use that paper as a vehicle to expose the flawed framing of the term denialism. The chapter is based on my 2016 Climate Etc post ‘The Denialism Frame’, with significant additions.

  1. Innate scepticism

This chapter examines the critical mechanism of ‘innate scepticism’, an instinctive reaction against cultural invasion (or local cultural overreach). This is not rational scepticism (!) and may be apt or inapt. The bulk attitudes to climate change of publics across the globe cannot be adequately explained without taking this mechanism into account. Innate scepticism can be thought of as ‘cultural disbelief’, but is not merely the mirror image or opposite of cultural belief; it is semi-independent and possesses its own characteristics. The chapter is based on my 2017 Climate Etc post ‘Innate Skepticism’, with significant additions.

  1. Measuring climate catastrophism

This chapter moves from characterising cultural entities generally and climate catastrophism in particular, to measuring the presence of the latter as revealed by the attitudes to climate change of publics across the globe (from the polling of 64 nations). Leveraging the fact that cultures interact allows international attitudes that are otherwise incomprehensible to be easily understood. Plotting them against a scale of national religiosity confirms the straightforward categorical patterns that are expected from cultural causation. The patterns consist of a particular set of linear series (no complex models or even multi-variate analysis are required); these are generated from a range of independent sources yet they all fit into the same single framework. All the original charts, data and sources are available in a companion Excel file (the ‘Excel-Ref’).

  1. The cultural measurements explained

This chapter explains in detail why we expect the categorical patterns found in chapter 8, which confirm that a cultural entity dominates the climate change domain. At the top level, this is because the attitudes of international (non-US) publics reflect their cultural identity. In turn, only two identity components really matter here: the level of commitment to climate catastrophism, and the level of commitment to religious faith (of whatever brand). However, cultural rejection is also evident, which is not simply the opposite of belief; hence it is critical to take into account the characteristics of this ‘innate scepticism’.

Additionally, the validity of the Chapter 8 measurement is provided through a parallel example, which probes a different domain in the same manner, yet one that is inarguably cultural: the domain of religion. As expected, this produces the same type of patterns.

  1. The full model, a dismal failure, and ‘what if?’

The measurements above are sufficient to develop a basic cultural framework, but this chapter extends that framework by considering more response types and to a much wider set of survey questions than Chapter 8 employs. Although some classes of public response to questions about climate change are non-linear with national religiosity, even these remain predictable in the sense that they always occupy an ‘envelope’ between two linear trends. Hence in principle, and for measurements at the national level, the responses to all international (non-US) survey questions can be predicted via this fuller framework,* from knowing national religiosity alone, and with the linear series having predictor values that surpass by far the existing literature. (Latterly, the literature tends to evaluate groups of social predictors rather than single ones, in an attempt to increase predictive power). All data/sources are in the Excel-Ref.

This chapter also examines the reasons why the large and long-standing social predictor literature for attitudes to climate change, has completely failed to find the above outstanding predictor, and outlines the severely myopic way in which the literature perceives the nature of the domain it is attempting to measure, while presenting some results from representative papers.

* From 2015 onwards, and notwithstanding a modest reduction in average predictor values when Covid appears.

  1. The USA: same rules, unique factors

The situation is more complex in the US than in all other nations, because there are four cultures that matter. In addition to climate catastrophism and religion, the huge public polarization between Dem/Libs and Rep/Cons – on a whole raft of issues and inclusive of climate change – means that these two political tribes behave as additional cultures. This chapter demonstrates that nevertheless the same cultural rules apply, and maps the Rest-of-World (RoW) framework to the US scenario, which gives further insight on the latter. In agreement with the findings of social psychologist Dan Kahan, attitudes to climate change in the US are still about cultural identity, but not as he suggests owed only tribal political identity, instead as owed to all four cultures, two of which (climate catastrophism and religion) dominate the RoW picture. All data/sources are in the Excel-Ref.

  1. Climate catastrophism and policy: renewables

Having verified and indeed measured the presence of climate catastrophism, we can use the framework developed in chapters 8 – 10 to predict real-world outcomes, such as policy implementation related to climate change and Net-Zero. This chapter demonstrates that the commitment to renewables (wind-turbines and solar) across nations, is not owed to the climate or climate exposure of nations, or to science or technology or even to rationality, but to cultural motivation. The analysis of renewables commitment is executed step by step and supported by charts at each step; briefly, the end step is shown to be approximately same for the commitment to electric vehicles across nations. All data/sources are in the Excel-Ref. This chapter is based on my 2020 Climate Etc post ‘Cultural motivations for wind and solar deployment’.

  1. Climate catastrophism and society: activism

In addition to the policy prediction above, this chapter shows how the cultural framework can accurately predict the level of climate activism across nations. This is demonstrated both for Extinction Rebellion groups and the Childrens’ Strikes for Climate movement. It is further demonstrated that publics who are reacting culturally to the issue of climate change, cannot be educated with further information in order to rectify this undesirable situation. This is because publics also view all information on climate change as cultural in itself, and so will accept it or reject it on that basis, no matter what the content actually is.

  1. The characteristics revisited

This chapter further examines the list of social behaviours first introduced in Chapter 2, in light of all that has been learned from the rest of the book. It then focuses on how a burgeoning new cultural entity will undermine (prior) law, and even the moral foundations that the law and much else within society are built upon. A generic list of ways in which this occurs is assembled, and real-world examples are shown from the climate change domain that fulfil all of this list. This chapter is an expansion of a section in my 2015 Climate Etc post ‘Climate culture’.

  1. Historical comparisons and social impacts

This chapter describes some particulars of various historic cultural entities, especially with respect to their adverse impacts upon society. While strong caveats regarding historic comparisons with climate catastrophism (or other modern cultures) are emphasised, we can nevertheless learn from these, and for obvious reasons negative impacts are the issue that we most need to be alert to. The chapter also covers some thoughts about how much further the grip of climate catastrophism might extend and tighten, additionally and briefly how, if possible, the culture might be tamed.

Note1:

Apart from examining, in Chapter 5, some catastrophe narrative variants that are propagated by a small minority of scientists, this book does not delve into the disputes and positions of scientists about climate change, whether mainstream, sceptical, or luke-warmer. All the attitudes directly measured are public ones, as captured by mainstream pollsters and bodies such as the EU and the UN. Public authorities are characterised by their very many catastrophe narrative quotes (Chapter 5), and are effectively measured by proxy through the impact of their policies across nations (Chapter 12). Yet this likewise does not imply anything particular about the attitudes of climate scientists. Having said this, the gold-standard for a secondary confirmation that the catastrophe narrative is cultural, which we can see is the case from both textual analysis and public attitude measurements, is that it also contradicts mainstream climate science (as well as sceptical science).

Note 2:

Readers will be relieved to note that my first-rate and diligent editor, Andrew Montford, has enormously improved the readability of my text, including those chapters that are based on prior guest posts here. However, note that this is necessarily still an academic work, rather than having a popular science format.

Twitter:  follow Andy at @AndyWest_tweets

59 Comments

  1. Many thanks Mark for getting this up in short order 🙂

    Here are some more links related to the article:

    Daily Sceptic:
    https://dailysceptic.org/2023/07/13/what-will-end-the-grip-of-the-net-zero-cult/
    Tweets on above post as it also exists at Climate Etc:

    I loved Geoff’s accolade 🙂

    Andrew Orlowski from the Telegraph with a tweet:

    Another Daily Scepic – a pre-release trailer about a month back
    https://dailysceptic.org/2023/06/09/climate-change-is-a-doomsday-cult-that-threatens-us-all/

    Like

  4. Andy,

    Climate catastrophism has indeed become a full blown cult/religion, though I think this has happened rather late in the day, at least 30 years after ‘global warming’ was elevated to the status of a global issue. You say:

    “This book is about the social psychology associated with climate change, which can be characterized and measured across national publics without reference to the physical climate system, its future state, or how it responds to human emissions of greenhouse gases. This is the case because the social psychology has emergent characteristics of its own, which are unaffected by mainstream views on the science of the ocean-atmosphere system… …or indeed the arguments of the small minority of sceptical scientists.”

    But then you say:

    “The chapter points out that we should be able to apply 150 years of accumulated knowledge on how cultures work, to better understand this new one. However, this obvious angle has not been pursued, apparently because the relevant social science disciplines wrongly deem that certain global catastrophe (absent dramatic action) to be incontrovertible hard science.”

    This is what I have been arguing recently on here and elsewhere. The religion takes its justification from the widespread perception that catastrophe is inevitable because of the ‘inevitability of physics’. I’ve lost count of the number of climate worriers, especially young people suffering ‘climate anxiety’ who glibly state this ‘truth’ or some variation on it. Climate catastrophe culture I believe is unique in our history because it has sprung not from superstition or religious impulses, but from science, and in a real sense, science sustains its excesses, even though it has fully morphed into a religious cult.

    Liked by 3 people

  5. The bit that most struck me from your ClimateEtc articles and many discussions here is how the correlation between climate belief & religiosity changes sign depending on how you measure it (by asking an open ended question or asking to rank climate alongside other subjects.)
    Climate catastrophism apart, this finding undermines the very basis of much research in social science, based as it is on an incredibly naive epistemological model, according to which society is a bundle of individuals with a sheaf of opinions (or beliefs, thoughts, attitudes, feelings – social scientists aren’t concerned with such subtle distinctions) which can be read off & acted upon by politicians and other pundits like a shopping list.
    Your finding suggests that people, individually and in groups, can both believe & disbelieve at the same time. As far as social science is concerned, you’ve really put Schrödinger’s cat among the pigeons.

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  6. Jaime, I’m mainly with you, except that cultures can spring from anything that triggers a sufficiently emotive narrative, and science has been in the frame before. Though the fascist culture that arose in Germany and other parts of central Europe in the early 20th Century was a mix of 3 main ingredients, National Socialism (so extremist politics), anti-Semitism (very old cultural trend that keeps popping up in new combos), and Eugenics, the latter was indeed science, and was very important in the mix because its so called certainty about the evolutionary superiority of certain races (which just the same as for CC, became rapidly disconnected from its more genuine scientific roots), justified all the worst of the Nazi policies, including of course the Holocaust. Cultures will feed of anything they can use, and hi-jack its authority, and as science has plenty of ideas and authority in the last couple of centuries, then it will get a lot of attention from any cultures trying to make the big time. Extreme trans rights policy is nearly half way through capturing biology and sports science, and has certainly got to the point where it can cite science and scientists as a backup authority, even if there is still majority resistance at the moment. All it requires is that other scientists who know that the cultural narrative is not science at all, stay stum, which leaves a clear field for the hi-jack. This is what the big majority of climate scientists have done, probably through fear of demonization. Similarly few spoke out against the justifications of Eugenics, until WWII was won and the horrors were revealed, at which point lots of them were saying they never backed it anyhow! And while it hasn’t made it into too many full blown cultures yet because ubiquitous science is still young, it has inspired very many group-thinks (culture writ small) that have held back genuine scientific advance with the dead weight of orthodox thinking that was once the leading edge, but became too mired in authority and priviledge and emotive modes and stayed stuck. Indeed medical history is almost a litany of these things being finally overturned and broken up after far too long with calcified and disproportionate influence.

    Liked by 1 person

  7. Thanks Geoff. Perceptive as ever, spot on.

    Step 1, book achieved. Step 2, how to get social science to notice, especially regarding the pollsters and academics (virtually an entire industry) that work on social predictors for attitudes to climate change.

    The stark difference between the current way of thinking, and the model in the book, is marked out by Figures 15 and 17. Take a look, and weep 0:

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  8. And while it hasn’t made it into too many full blown cultures yet because ubiquitous science is still young, it has inspired very many group-thinks (culture writ small) that have held back genuine scientific advance with the dead weight of orthodox thinking that was once the leading edge, but became too mired in authority and privilege and emotive modes and stayed stuck. Indeed medical history is almost a litany of these things being finally overturned and broken up after far too long with calcified and disproportionate influence.

    As my wife is fond of saying, when the science is settled, it’s no longer science, and has become history.

    Liked by 1 person

  9. Mark if your very wise wife were totally correct, then either science textbooks ought to be reclassified as histories or alternatively they would be almost empty of any provable content.

    Liked by 1 person

  10. Alan, I take your point. I think her views are meant to be understood metaphorically, rather than literally.

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  13. Mark it has belatedly occurred to me that most of the material in science textbooks is indeed history. The material is that which has survived whatever challenges were thrown at it in the past. So in a very real sense your very wise wife has a very correct view about non controversial science.

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  14. Andy:

    Extreme trans rights policy is nearly half way through capturing biology and sports science, and has certainly got to the point where it can cite science and scientists as a backup authority, even if there is still majority resistance at the moment. All it requires is that other scientists who know that the cultural narrative is not science at all, stay stum, which leaves a clear field for the hi-jack.

    I’d say the resistance has increased markedly since I first encountered what you call extreme trans rights in June 2015, when the reputation and career of a close friend in software was attacked viciously because he said in a tweet that those advocating transitioning for kids as young as 12 (I think it was, though he also mentions kids as young as three) were ‘not accepting reality’. When I asked a few sceptical questions I was astounded how many people I respected in my field blocked me on Twitter without engaging at all. I was then helped by a well-known climate scientist (thank God for his sense of humour) to get help privately from a woman who was much more clued up than I was. Since then, led by radical feminists in the UK but now happening much more widely, including helpful voices on the ‘right’ in America, there has been some significant beefing up of the resistance to the trans cult. In sports science for one. And here are two examples this week I pointed out on my Twitter feed.

    Anecdotal, one could say, but my strong impression is that many have taken the route Paul Peace has since October 2015. And on a key moment of resistance from within the ‘science’ this week there’s this

    It’s a massive area but I think at the very least superficial parallels with the climate cult can lead us astray.

    Liked by 1 person

  15. Richard, interesting insights. I’ve been aware of it a bit longer, but it’s also true I gave it very little attention until I retired in 2018. Indeed its a massive area, and it’s also true that each main cultural narrative is different to any other, leading to a cascade of surface differences, which can blind us to the fact that the mechanisms beneath are nevertheless identical. It’s rare we can measure this though, and there is nowhere near enough social data to do so for Extreme Trans Rights. But there is for religion (and at a basic enough level all main faiths act the same), and there is for climate catastrophism too; obviously the book focusses far more on the latter, but it does measure the former too. [It’s also worth adding at this point that cultures can not only have huge benefits (which is why they are an evolutionary heritage), even in modern times they can still have long periods (for ‘settled’ cultures or phases) of net benefits. However, new / invasive ones are much more typically net bad, and some very bad]. I completely agree with you about there being a lot more resistance / pushback to the whole trans culture lately; I’m pretty hopeful this one won’t proceed to the kind of dominance that climate catastrophism enjoys, and abuses – but predicting the future is hard 0:

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  16. The trans cult is not so much the capture of science, more the rejection of human biology; it being the gender-bending evolutionary dead end of a trans-humanist cult which is ultimately destined to fail.

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  17. I haven’t paid enough attention to the trans debate; rather, I have looked on with growing bemusement and incredulity.

    I have an instinctive sympathy for anyone who feels that they were born in the wrong body – feeling male while having female sex organs, and vice versa. And of course no such person should be discriminated against; indeed, they should be supported.

    Yet that simple proposition seems to be nothing like enough for the activists, many of whom seem to want to push trans as a way of life, and display visceral levels of unpleasantness. And I also can’t help noticing that while lots of men who identify as women want to play women’s sports, I have never heard of women who identify as men wanting to play men’s sports. A cynic might say that there’s a reason for that.

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  18. Jaime. I know very little about trans people but one thing I’m sure of is that they do not reject their biology. Transgenderism occurs in nonhumans, like dogs and cats where mental rejection is not really possible.

    If I remember correctly the zoology taught to me, 50-60 years ago, the differences between male and female are originally rather minor. Given that human biology is rather complicated, it’s not really surprising that it sometimes goes “wrong”. I understand from reading that many who feel they are in the wrong body resist doing anything about it and so, to varying degrees, suffer.

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  19. Mark, Alan,

    Trans-activism is a very different animal from transgender. Trans-activists are not interested in equality, they seek supremacy.

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  20. For a profounder understanding of the evils and dangers of transactivism I’d recommend Helen Joyce’s book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, from July 2021, and her two conversations with Jordan Peterson in the last ten months here and er, disappeared by Google! You get the idea.

    Meanwhile did anyone see what I did to Andy? I felt he was being too certain in his statements in this area. It turns out, he says, “there is nowhere near enough social data to do so for Extreme Trans Rights” despite “the mechanisms beneath are nevertheless identical”. I don’t believe the second statement. I was certainly thinking the first had to be true. At the very least this should, I feel, have made Andy more reticent about his claims about Extreme Trans Rights to Jaime.

    (The stuff about religion I’ll leave to others to judge. But if Andy’s method is watertight he should, as I say, have made the point about the lack of necessary data before giving his layman’s opinion about transactivism.)

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  21. I’m completely with Jaime here. Trans-activism is a pernicious culture that is hoovering up loads of anxious youngsters and subjecting them to monstrous medical intervention, instead of some gentle counselling to set them right, as we would do if instead they had anorexia from anxiety etc. The anxiety is just teen angst in most cases, it has nothing to do with trans, but is easily vectored that way by the culture. And the whole thing has little to do with genuine trans folks as they would have been thought of prior to this explosion either; they just want to live their lives, but the activists claim to do everything upon their behalf, for their benefit. This is no more so than the climate activists who claim to be doing everything on our behalf, and especially for the Global South; it’s just a way that cultures gain the moral high ground. It’s also the case that intersex conditions in humans are a pretty stable 0.04% across the globe, that most of these people do not consider themselves trans, and that the current rate of people (mainly youngsters) claiming trans identity is running at 20 to 40 times this figure in various Western nations; which goes to show it is a social contagion not linked to any condition. [Nor is there a sexual spectrum as the ideology claims. Even with inter-sex errors in the biology, everyone still has a body-plan for producing large gametes, or a body-plan for producing small gametes, even if they are infertile due to the errors, and this is still true even with chromosome errors].

    “The trans cult is not so much the capture of science, more the rejection of human biology”

    The difference between these two is usually only time. I agree you’re right at the moment, and let’s hope it stays that way, but many biology text-books are being changed to put in stuff that is simply untrue on this subject, and some younger biologists are so blinded by the culture they are supporting it, though how the hell they accommodate that with what they learned, I don’t know. For those who learn from the altered text-books, that will no longer be an issue, but goodness knows what will happen in society regarding the products of biologists who are blind to some of its basic tenets 0:

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  22. Richard:

    ‘It turns out, he says, “there is nowhere near enough social data to do so for Extreme Trans Rights” despite “the mechanisms beneath are nevertheless identical”.’

    You’re right, of course. Where we don’t have the data, we can’t demonstrate it. However, I believe the reams of circumstantial evidence to be very persuasive. It is doing what culture do.

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  23. ‘Helen Joyce from Sex Matters says the “social contagion” of trans ideology “is being spread” as reports emerge that Government may approve gender-neutral toilets in schools.’

    Other writers agree, and some have now presented evidence for social contagion. New cultural entities rise by social contagion (although it may not always latch in, it can disperse, like a fad. I fear we are well beyond a fad in this case though).

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  24. I too have paid little attention to the ins and outs of the Trans argument. My understanding, for what it is worth, is that an awful lot of quite vicious intolerance has been employed in the supposed pursuit of tolerance. The science is straightforward in as much as there are only two sexes. However, each has traits that do not map perfectly, leading to individuals who identify to a greater or lesser extent with the opposite sex. Much of this has a biological and neurological basis, but there are also cultural pressures to consider. As I understand it, that’s where the concept of gender comes in, i.e. your gender reflects how you identify. So gender is not a scientific concept, it is a social construction. The problems occur mostly when individuals who identify with a particular group (male/female) then make claims for being in that group and demand to be treated as such in all respects. It’s just a recipe for endless argument, particularly when it involves children who are too young to have had their biological and neurological maturation completed.

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  25. The problem Jaime is that many an attack upon transgenderism does not discriminate (as you appear to be doing) between those who “merely “ consider themselves in the wrong bodies from those who feel superior by having changed sex. I have perhaps been fortunate in never meeting such a character but I would not have argued with such a person.

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  26. John: You might find Kathleen Stock’s book Material Girls helpful, which I’m in the middle of at the moment. Helen Joyce got a PhD in Maths and Kathleen one in philosophy, going on to be a professor at the university of Sussex. Brainy women. Stock also writes very well and was the person we discussed here long ago, including her (and my) interest in the linguistic and literary phenomenon of implicature. She was hounded out of her position at Sussex though. Many of these folk have paid a big price for speaking out. That’s why it’s been heartening to pick up that the tide has really been turning.

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  27. Andy: Words fail me on “social contagion”. Since 2015 I’ve seen it mentioned a myriad of times by countless writers, and tweeters, especially in seeking to explain the great and very worrying increase in young girls wanting to transition to being boys – and the clumping of these numbers in particular schools, Tumblr groups or the like.

    (I just googled ‘young people tumblr’ and second up see

    How Tumblr Helps Youth Continue to Be Seen And Heard
    JSTOR
    https://daily.jstor.org › Archive of Most Recent Posts
    8 Apr 2022 — “Tumblr is the platform of choice, for example, for queer and nonbinary youth, which has resulted not only in a tremendous amount of LGBTQ …

    )
    I totally accept the reality of social contagion as used by Joyce and many others. But does this fact justify your original statement “Extreme trans rights policy is nearly half way through capturing biology and sports science…”. It was the pretension of numeric accuracy (“nearly half”) which I found ridiculous – as well as the sense I had that things have been getting quite a lot better, from a dire starting position, as I saw and experienced it. With no caveat: “by the way, there isn’t enough data for me to be precise about such numbers, unlike in other areas”. How does the wide use of “social contagion” by people who do know what they’re talking about in any way put this right?

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  28. John, to add to Richard’s pointers, James Esses (psycho-therapist) is good to follow, and Maya Fortstater for the /legal/rights aspects, and Colin Wright for the biological angle and attacks upon it.

    Alan: “The problem Jaime is that many an attack upon transgenderism does not discriminate (as you appear to be doing) between those who “merely “ consider themselves in the wrong bodies from those who feel superior by having changed sex. I have perhaps been fortunate in never meeting such a character but I would not have argued with such a person.”

    Debbie Hayton, a long time writer in the Spectator, is a trans woman and regularly writes against the trans activist movement, saying that it is causing far more harm than good for trans people, let alone society at large. From my observations over the years, the vast majority of resistance to aggressive trans activism is not all about opposing those who have genuine gender dysphoria, whom they often explicitly support so that there is no misunderstanding on this score; it appears to be mainly motivated by protecting children from horrific interventions that they are way to young too understand or give consent for, and protecting women’s spaces plus women’s sport too. There is also now a growing community of de-transitioners, whose tales make one’s skin crawl, and who bitterly regret having irretrievably ‘ruined their lives’ (a very common expression with these people) by falling under the trans spell. They often blame complicit medical authorities who just went along with it rather than warn them of the potential consequences and the possibility that it was all just the effects of angst and puberty, which they would likely grow out of. It is also highly significant that a very large proportion of youngsters having medical intervention are autistic, which should ring major alarms on its own, and a number of detransitioners have said that they were merely gay, not ‘in the wrong body’, but did not discover this until way too late, and no-one told them that they might just be gay! Some trans activists are pretty much set upon erasing lesbians in particular, and also declare that any lesbian who won’t sleep with a (not medically altered) trans women, is wickedly transphobic. However, what is really the case is that such activists are misogynist and homo-phobic.

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  29. Alan:

    The problem Jaime is that many an attack upon transgenderism does not discriminate (as you appear to be doing) between those who “merely “ consider themselves in the wrong bodies from those who feel superior by having changed sex.

    Jaime needs to say whether you have expressed her view accurately. But for me this is a nonsense framing that will get us nowhere. Transgenderism is way more than a feeling of superiority. Though back in 2015 Germaine Greer did make a related point that in its extreme form it did involve delusional misogyny – “I as a man can be a better woman than you can ever be”. As I said in the tweet two days ago I totally agreed with Greer on this the moment I saw it. But there are a cluster of pathologies gathered around all this, which does quickly tend to violence against women. (Jordan Peterson is really helpful on this with Joyce last September.) That’s my view of the extreme – but there is also the legal aspect, the inflitration of the police, courts, academia etc. Reading at least one good book is needed to give the naive reader a perspective.

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  30. Richard, it was a casual statement, not a white paper. I do not know what the precise proportion of capture is and neither does anyone else. But follow Colin Wright – the biology text-books are being rewritten, for instance, and for all we know that may represent over half in a trajectory over time. (Especially since the culture has gained such a big hold in many schools and is busy teaching completely warped principles that defy biology). I sincerely hope not, but only time will tell. And how do we count the many biologists who don’t speak out, like the climate scientists who don’t speak out? How can proper knowledge and science be preserved when due to cultural pressure it is literally rewritten? 10 years ago I thought the that climate issue was the main danger to reason and science and other disciplines too; now these are being attacked on other fronts and bad stuff that I never would have credited before is happening.

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  31. Andy: Maya Forstater (note spelling) I agree is extremely helpful. Backed by JK Rowling at a key moment …

    My pinned tweet for many a month being all about that original moment when JKR came ‘out of the closet’ to earn the rage of transactivists worldwide:

    And Maya’s victory in the Appeals Court on 30th June was another turning-point in the past month. Happy days.

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  33. Alan,

    “The problem Jaime is that many an attack upon transgenderism does not discriminate (as you appear to be doing) between those who “merely “ consider themselves in the wrong bodies from those who feel superior by having changed sex.”

    I would not venture to suggest that particular individuals may consider themselves to be superior or not. What I do suggest is that the culture itself is elitist and that trans-activism, as a movement, is not concerned with securing equality for trans people, but establishing supremacy for ‘gender fluid’ lifestyles in general. The demand to respect people’s chosen pronouns is an example in point. Respect must be earned, not demanded.

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  35. Probably not so far off topic as one might expect Mark. The NHS, a ‘respectable’ taxpayer funded national health organisation, is obviously delegating the regulation and enforcement of its ‘diversity policy’ across the NHS Trusts to an unelected bunch of extremists. This government and politicians have done and are doing something similar, though not quite as blatantly obvious, with climate policy, allowing extremists like XR and JSO to dictate the direction of policy. Like Starmer for instance, though he denies it:

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/keir-starmer-has-become-the-just-stop-oil-candidate/

    Liked by 1 person

  36. Jaime, JSO-founder Roger Hallam wouldn’t agree with your comment or with that Spectator article. Yesterday he compared Starmer to Adolf Eichmann and said that he will probably be hung for ‘his involvement in the final holocaust’ (by which he meant the climate apocalypse).

    https://nitter.net/RogerHallamCS21/status/1680176709700558848

    Starmer’s involvement? Starmer has said that, if elected, Labour won’t revoke a Rosebank oil-extraction licence.

    (Incidentally, if it’s the final holocaust, won’t Starmer already be dead, along with the rest of us?)

    (Incidentally, Part Deux… In the second tweet in that thread, Hallam said that we must ‘remember that 2+2=4 because it just does, even when we so much want it to equal 5’. I think he first used 2+2=4 as proof that there’ll be a climate apocalypse unless we do as he says in April 2018. This was in a presentation he gave at King’s College London. Video:

    As in the recent tweets, he compared the upcoming climate apocalypse to the Holocaust – and also said that he was a ‘numbers man’ but was then unable to work out that 50×6=300.

    But OK. He knew that 2+2=4. Numbers man.

    It was a hypnotically bad presentation, full of wrong names, wrong history, wrong spelling, wrong graphs, wrong maths, wrong attitudes (some weird ones about rape)… and yet it helped launch Extinction Rebellion and thus Insulate Britain, Just Stop Oil and all the other XR offshoots around the world. Well done, Roger, you narcissistic dimwit.)

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  37. Nerdy correction: I should have said ‘hanged’, not ‘hung’.

    Hallam, the thought leader of XR, Burning Pink, Heathrow Pause, Insulate Britain, JSO etc, uses both versions when pontificating about death penalties, but that’s not a valid excuse for me. Hallam is a thought leader., so can say what he likes.

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  40. “But OK. He knew that 2+2=4. Numbers man”

    But one of the competing cultures to his says 2+2 = 5, and to state it is 4 merely demonstrates our white supremacism (or if you are not white, your ally-ship of white supremacism). So the total being 4 not 5 means we’re all dead from climate apocalypse, but 5 not 4 means no apocalypse but the dismantling of everything that was built on white supremacism, which apparently is nearly everything.

    Perhaps there is a faint hope that these two cultures will one day cancel each other out in a puff of pseudo mathematical smoke.

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  41. There’s a lot to take in here. We see superficial anomalies, like this one:

    to much deeper entanglements that Andy West is exposing. I found enlightening an essay by Kevin D. Williamson entitled Inside the Carbon Cult. It starts this way:

    “This is not a religious book in the sense of its being meant to convey a religious message or for people of a particular religion—it is a book containing three journalistic reports about a religion, or a sort of religion, that emerged from and then subsumed the environmental movement. Today, that movement is a kind of cult and not a political movement at all, if it ever was one. Those who profess one of the Abrahamic faiths have a religious interest in idolatry because it perverts religion and leads religion to inhuman ends—Norman Podhoretz, in his very interesting book The Prophets, describes the ancient Israelite “war on idolatry” as a matter that is not exclusively otherworldly but very much rooted in a campaign against the ghastly social practices associated with idolatry: cannibalism, child sacrifice, etc.

    And if idolatry makes a hash of religion, it is, if anything, even more of a menace to the practice of politics, which is my subject.”

    Pertinent excerpts:

    “End-of- days stories have long been a staple of religions and cults of many different kinds and characters, of course, and the environmental movement is fundamentally eschatological in its orientation, by turns utopian and apocalyptic. It is at the moment more apocalyptic than utopian, but that is a reflection of a broader trend in our politics and our society. The Western world, in particular, the English-speaking Western world, has been fervently praying for its own demise for a generation. Future historians will note the prevalence of zombie-apocalypse stories in our time—The Walking Dead has recently concluded its main series but will be supplemented by numerous spinoffs, while one of the most intensely anticipated television series of 2023 is The Last of Us, an adaptation of a video game that is based on yet another variation of the zombie-apocalypse theme—but beyond zombie-apocalypse stories we have alien-invasion- apocalypse stories, and, precisely to our point here, eco-apocalypse stories by the dozen (The Day After Tomorrow, Snowpiercer, Waterworld, Interstellar, Wall-E).

    What these stories have in common is not the particular source of anxiety, though environmental concerns are interlaced into many stories: The Last of Us is a zombie story, but the zombies are produced by global warming, which allows a particular fungus to colonize and control human brains. (One shared article of faith that is present not only in zombie movies but also from campy, anencephalic or macrocephalic aliens of Mars Attacks! and Independence Day—the enemy is the brain.) What they have in common, rather, is a two-sided fascination with social collapse, both the negative aspects—the inevitable suffering—and the positive—the possibility of a return to innocence and a shared born-against experience that retroactively sanctifies that suffering.

    Which is to say, what we have here is the old mythological cycle of suffering, death,and rebirth told at the social level rather than at the level of individual hero or martyr.”

    Williamson’s essay is
    https://cei.org/studies/inside-the-carbon-cult/

    My synopsis is:

    Inside the Carbon Cult

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  42. Andy suggested following Colin Wright. Doing that yesterday would have brought up yet another new academic initiative addressing various aspects of the trans cult message.

    There is a remarkable change going on. Selina Todd, Emma Hilton, Kathleen Stock and Jane Clare Jones are the other academics I feel I know best there. But my knowledge of this vast endeavour I know is very limited. It’s just immensely encouraging compared to eight years ago. And UK feminists have had a remarkable transformative role. We might even have something to learn from them in turning supertanker Net Zero round.

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  43. Mark: Agree with Jaime, that is entirely relevant to the warped sociology that should be a concern to all users of the NHS and many other public institutions. The Daily Sceptic as you can see is pointing to a three-parter in the Mail. The mass media is waking up, in a way that is not true (yet) with energy/climate.

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  44. This might be relevant here too:

    “Confirmed: The C of E’s Net Zero mania”

    https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/confirmed-the-c-of-es-net-zero-mania/

    CONFIRMATION services in the Church of England are about to become politicised after the General Synod voted to include a liturgical response to ‘the climate emergency’.

    The July sessions in York saw the bitter divisions in the C of E laid bare, particularly over sexual morality and in the row over the sacking by the Archbishops’ Council of two members of the Church’s Independent Safeguarding Board. It was on the last morning of the five-day hate-in that the Synod voted overwhelmingly for the ‘Responding to the Climate Emergency’ motion moved by the suffragan Bishop of Reading, Olivia Graham, on behalf of Oxford Diocese.

    A firm believer in the bulldozer as a means of achieving Net Zero in the national Church’s property portfolio, Bishop Graham intoned in her concluding remarks in the debate last Tuesday: ‘On buildings retro-fitting is not always the answer. We need bespoke solutions for each building clearly and sometimes the bulldozer is the best one but sometimes retro-fitting is and we have just completed our first retro-fit in Oxford Diocese at the cost, I believe, of £75,000 but we now have a Net Zero vicarage. We hope that it is the first of many.’

    She further proclaimed: ‘Ninety per cent of a church’s entire carbon footprint lies with the congregation . . . Let us be in no doubt, Synod, that we cannot invent or spend our way out of this crisis. It’s going to need us to change.’ …

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  47. This cultural upheaval has a number of dimensions to it. There is obviously a Green card in play, which the Williamson essay describes, as does Andy West in discussing the climate cult There is also a Race Card play involving pitting of racial groups against each other in the name of diversity. Another is the Gender Card, which seems to me a call to a New Garden of Hedon, since the grooming is so clearly intended for people to obsess over their personal sexual pleasure as their paramount identity and meaning of life (Hedonism). These three are sometimes bundled together as Wokism, though the term refers mainly to pushing Critical Race and Gender ideology, with the proselytizing rituals and symbols promulgated by means of a pervasive (in US and Canada at least) DIE network.

    And then perhaps the most powerful card is the Global Card. For all of the benefits that have come from a globalized economy and trade system, there has formed an elitist cabal as symbolized by WEF, but much more widespread than that. And these days the upper upper class is not dedicated to acts of benevolence as marked previous tycoons, but rather proclaims pandemic and climate emergencies in order to lockdown the hoi polloi. Their thinking is: Those freedoms you claim are not rights, they are permissions. I don’t know if Wokism and Globalism are in collaboration, but certainly a number of celebrities and jetsetters subscribe to both. And of course, the Wokist destruction of the family makes children wards of the state and facilitates the transition global technocracy.

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  48. Ron, the 3 phenomena you mention in your first paragraph all have well-defined emotive narratives, and with existential angles, ‘hope and fear’, narrative policing, demonization and more; all a mark of cultures in their own right. That climate catastrophism is a culture is indeed measurable (see the book :), but there is only circumstantial evidence for the other two, albeit reams of it. As surveys and studies gear up, maybe enough hard data will appear over the next few years. Wokism and Globalism have more fluid / less well-defined narratives, which as you note also appear to reflect the above 3 to differing extents. I think wokism is a manifestation of a loose alliance between the above 3 (cultures ally or oppose each other all the time, and can sometimes do both at once), and to some extent politics too (especially in the US with the Dem/Lib ‘tribe’). I can’t off the top of my head think of any wokist narratives that aren’t owed to the other 3 or to tribal politics in alliance, but shout if you can!

    The WEF existed long before the rise of Extreme Trans Rights and so-called Anti-Racism, whatever minor gloss they may have borrowed from these. I think in this case there’s maybe more going on that isn’t cultural too. But as with the long-standing alliance in the US of Dem/Libs with climate catastrophism (this also measurable), the WEF have similarly held hands tightly with climate catastrophism over many years.

    If you want to include Covid on the map as well, this introduces another deep instinctive motivator that is nevertheless not cultural (herd-instinct: many animals practice social distancing and I think it is unlikely that we have lost this instinct; rather we use our high tech society to implement it), which given that instincts whether apt or inapt in particular circumstances, are irrational, explains a lot. Also, once the first shock is past, existing cultures can incorporate or reject anti-covid measures as part of their (evolving) narrative sets, which means that such measures are not only entangled with culture from then onwards, but could stay around long after they could possibly be needed (even if they originally were, or at least we couldn’t at that time refuse the herd instinct that drove us to them).

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  49. Andy, that makes sense, that there are multiple cultures with some overlapping, maybe a lot. There’s another aspect to this I heard from Marian Tupy’s video “Climate Activism is a Religion” . He covers much of the same ground as you have, and notably he is not a doomster but on the sunny side of the street.

    “It starts with my birth in Czechoslovakia socialist republic. When I was a child my parents moved to South Africa. Later I went to Great Britain and studied at Saint Andrews University. I’ve been in Washington DC at the Cato Institute which is a Libertarian think tank for the last 20 years. And as you mentioned I run a website called viewingprogress.org which is basically just a website trying to document and promote the notion that the world is improving along many different dimensions of human well-being. That led me to writing a book about population and Innovation and natural resources.”

    He does have concerns:

    I have a concern about the democracies we still have here in the West. If our center right and center left simply refuses to acknowledge that by government design lives of our people are getting worse, somebody else is going to fill that void, and that is something I want to avoid.

    The reason why the public in this country and in yours holds the politicians in utter contempt is precisely because they see the level of hypocrisy that is going on in in both societies. You see them constantly raising taxes on air travel but they themselves fly around on private jets or first class which is much more carbon intensive. You see them telling you to drive you know little EVs while they enjoy being driven around in SUVs as big as a house. You see them telling you that the world is going to be swallowed up by by the oceans while at the same time they’re buying beachfront properties.

    He adds a technology dimension:

    We are very divided in Western countries and so while remaining optimistic: How do we manage some of the trade-offs of these technological developments? Because it seems to me in social communication, cultural programs and entertainment and particularly social media are areas where everyone knows there’s a big problem but no one quite knows what to do about it.

    When it comes to social media, I don’t like them and I don’t partake. I left Facebook in 2012 when I realized that it was making me unhappy. Because what I was putting up on Facebook was a curated picture of my life, and what I was consuming was a curated picture of my life. So basically I was posting lies in consuming lies, and once I realized that I left Facebook. That was a choice, a choice which can be made independently by any number of all 8 billion people

    I think that what we are going through right now is a period of adjustment to a new technology but that period of adjustment will resolve itself. You know it took us 50 years to figure out that drinking and driving was not a good idea. Now it’s sort of been internalized into us that cars are much better operated when you are sober, but it took time to to to to to square the human brain with this new technology. That will probably happen with social media as well or at least I hope that people are going to realize that much of it is simply unreal, what is making them unhappy, and they could be spending their time doing better things than than being on social media. We’ll probably figure it out in the way that we have figured it out with novels and bicycles and radio and television.

    Video and transcript is here:

    Climate Religion Eroding

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  50. Thanks Ron, that’s very interesting indeed. I’ve come across him in relation to humanprogress.org, but have never found the time to follow up on his work. Now the book is finished (a very intense 2 years) I hope to have a bit more time. I like his optimism towards the end that the power of free speech and democracy and innovation should triumph over the current negative cultural trends. I hope he’s right. But while of course the predicted apocalypse won’t happen, this doesn’t mean the culture will shrivel up and die; cultures seem to survive huge amounts of shaming and embarrassment and can still march onward like some kind of zombie machine 0: But it’s a great insight. I differ with him a bit on the technology angle, in the sense that I agree it’s a social shock which takes us a while to adjust to, like TV and radio and printing and indeed writing before that. But it seems to me that already both the cultural forces, and the rational force (rationality at scale: the law, democracy, science), are more or less equally benefitted by internet technology, leaving the ageless conflict between them to depend more upon the factors that it always has, i.e. the latest state of our bio-cultural evolution. Anyhow, your post is very timely; I know for sure Marian is reading a copy of “The Grip of Culture”, so I’m crossing my fingers and hoping he likes it, and hoping that something comes of this!

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  51. On the influence of technology on the trans debate, here’s a quick sample from Twitter today.

    What follows is a truly tragic tale of Stonewall’s pernicious influence on a couple of North Lanarkshire schools, to which the main author has sent her children. You can typically find one of these horror stories every day, if you show any interest at all. Nowadays the transactivists that used to control Twitter’s ‘moderation’ can no longer censor and shadow-ban such crucial empirical material. Just in this one area Elon Musk has done something wonderful for humanity, in my view. Though what is now being revealed as a result is both horrifying and daunting.

    The debate also rages on trans identifying males in women’s sports. That TIM term is in itself part of the battleground. Here are two famous retired women athletes, from swimming and tennis, who have taken sides strongly in the last few years.

    Martina also had this to say in reply to ‘famous’ and oft-interviewed TIM India Willoughby

    This goes back to the extraordinary thing Germaine Greer saw so clearly in 2015: these men think that they can be better women than the previous lot! Cue Ricky Gervais last year

    Another straw in the wind. That kind comedy would have been banned until recently. Mainstream culture is stumbling back to reality, in the teeth of elite madness. The other thing to note is that in the past calling Willoughby ‘he’ would have got you banned. No longer.

    I admit I don’t see the ‘big picture’ easily, let alone all the similarities and dissimilarities with the climate cult. But at least we’re now getting many, many small pieces of the picture in an authentic form.

    And on the issue of the battle over language itself, and how crucial it is, I recommend again Peterson talking with Helen Joyce:

    Note that isn’t the original, where you could see both speakers, which has been taken down by YouTube. This to my knowledge has never happened with climate sceptical material. The trans area is much more viciously policed. And Peterson’s insights on transactivist rage at being defied, in any way, being just the same developmentally as a two-year-old having a tantrum was a real eye-opener for me.

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  54. Mark: How do you know my password? 😉

    Ron: Funny – and also relevant. The stats are changing as TIMs attack women sexually, inside and out of women’s prisons, and these are classed as attacks *by women*. There’s so much here that’s hard to credit. But I have some other things to attend to for a bit.

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  55. Ron: Ahhggg… I just realised Marian isn’t reading a copy of the book after all! My excuse is two glasses of wine, but I now realise he’s next to another person with an exotic but short name on my reach-out / interest list of influencers, and I got the two mixed up. It’s the other one who is reading the book!

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  56. Talking of progress, this from Sky News was, to use the language of climate alarmism, unprecedented.

    Much more needed.

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  58. I was thinking of Jonathan as I tried to tell my own history of gradually realising the threat of gender ideology. June 2015 was very important for me (the month we began Cliscep, by strange and sad chance). But in August 2012 there was the Oxford BH Pub Meet for then-active Bishop Hill contributors. And (not mentioned there) Professor Jones talked about the power of the trans lobby on the editing of Wikipedia – far more vicious than in the climate area, he averred.

    So this was really rather profound for me, though I spotted it rather late. Stonewall’s days are I’m sure numbered. And what can we say of the Climate Change Committee?

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