From our infantile fascination with our hands to our wandering as toddlers to see what lies around the next corner, we are inquisitive explorers. We want to know not only what is around the corner, but also why each place has a peculiar character. We might even want to know why a place exists. Asking is our brain’s heritage. To that inquisitiveness we add doubt. Doubt is our intellectual protection against slavery of the mind; doubt provides us with new corners to round.
What’s the Vatican up to these days? Why, the smart guys there held a conference on environmental matters, focusing especially on climate change. Hmmmmm. Theologians discussing the physical world. Seems they tried this once before with a guy named Galileo. He ended up having to deny his science just to earn house arrest for the rest of his life. Giordano Bruno was another guy who, like Galileo, ran against the consensus. They burned him. I guess the message is that disagreement isn’t acceptable in polite theological societies. Now there are some new Galileos and Brunos. They are called climate skeptics, and they are personae non grata in meetings centered on global warming.
Let’s shrink you to your toddler stage and put you in the Vatican meeting. You get in not because you are a supporter, but rather because you’re cute and seemingly harmless. Your stand on global warming or climate change is irrelevant. What could you, a toddler, know, anyway? But during the proceedings, you, as an inquisitive type, have a question. You want to know whether there’s a difference between what happened during past climate change that occurred without the burning of fossil fuels and the proclaimed contemporary climate change for which fossil fuels are blamed? Should you ask that question? You’re just trying to explore what’s around the next corner.
If you are a reader of this blog, you know that in 1315 northern Europe underwent a change in weather that led, over the ensuing few years, to a great famine. If you remember your history, you also know that prior to that “change” there had been a warming period that lasted long enough for modern investigators to give it a name: The Medieval Warm Period. And then, if you recall, a Little Ice Age supplanted the warm period, possibly giving George Washington shivers in the cold at Valley Forge. Also, you might recall that southwestern United States underwent, long before it was a country, a centuries-long drought that undid the civilizations of the Anasazi and other groups that had prospered under wetter weather. Ditto for people in Central America. So, there you are, sitting in a meeting where everyone is of the same opinion, an opinion that is sanctioned by a high theological body. And in your wobbling, toddler way, you want to round the corner just to get a look at a previously unknown place. Do you, having had that question pop into your brain, dare ask?
No matter where you are and no matter the company you keep, you have an obligation to yourself to ask when a question arises. It’s the toddler in you. In your short existence, asking is your way to explore place, cause, and effect. Preventing you from rounding a corner or from asking, even when it’s done by the highest theological authority with a consensus, denies you your exploratory nature and removes the safety mechanism of doubt. There’s an expression you probably don’t like applied to you: “We put him/her in his/her place. How dare he/she?” Or, “That’s something you’ll understand when you are an adult. You’re just a toddler now.”
So, when the Vatican denied Philippe de Larminat, a climate change skeptic, entrance to the conference on climate change, it guaranteed a consensus. It kept the toddler from wandering around the corner. Recognize that regardless of whether those who doubt the consensus that humans are changing climate are self-serving lunatics or reasonable people with doubt, they are, at the very least, just being the toddlers that we all were at one time: Inquisitive wanderers rounding corners doubting as they go as a protection against slavery of the mind.
What’s the Vatican up to these days? Why, the smart guys there held a conference on environmental matters, focusing especially on climate change. Hmmmmm. Theologians discussing the physical world. Seems they tried this once before with a guy named Galileo. He ended up having to deny his science just to earn house arrest for the rest of his life. Giordano Bruno was another guy who, like Galileo, ran against the consensus. They burned him. I guess the message is that disagreement isn’t acceptable in polite theological societies. Now there are some new Galileos and Brunos. They are called climate skeptics, and they are personae non grata in meetings centered on global warming.
Let’s shrink you to your toddler stage and put you in the Vatican meeting. You get in not because you are a supporter, but rather because you’re cute and seemingly harmless. Your stand on global warming or climate change is irrelevant. What could you, a toddler, know, anyway? But during the proceedings, you, as an inquisitive type, have a question. You want to know whether there’s a difference between what happened during past climate change that occurred without the burning of fossil fuels and the proclaimed contemporary climate change for which fossil fuels are blamed? Should you ask that question? You’re just trying to explore what’s around the next corner.
If you are a reader of this blog, you know that in 1315 northern Europe underwent a change in weather that led, over the ensuing few years, to a great famine. If you remember your history, you also know that prior to that “change” there had been a warming period that lasted long enough for modern investigators to give it a name: The Medieval Warm Period. And then, if you recall, a Little Ice Age supplanted the warm period, possibly giving George Washington shivers in the cold at Valley Forge. Also, you might recall that southwestern United States underwent, long before it was a country, a centuries-long drought that undid the civilizations of the Anasazi and other groups that had prospered under wetter weather. Ditto for people in Central America. So, there you are, sitting in a meeting where everyone is of the same opinion, an opinion that is sanctioned by a high theological body. And in your wobbling, toddler way, you want to round the corner just to get a look at a previously unknown place. Do you, having had that question pop into your brain, dare ask?
No matter where you are and no matter the company you keep, you have an obligation to yourself to ask when a question arises. It’s the toddler in you. In your short existence, asking is your way to explore place, cause, and effect. Preventing you from rounding a corner or from asking, even when it’s done by the highest theological authority with a consensus, denies you your exploratory nature and removes the safety mechanism of doubt. There’s an expression you probably don’t like applied to you: “We put him/her in his/her place. How dare he/she?” Or, “That’s something you’ll understand when you are an adult. You’re just a toddler now.”
So, when the Vatican denied Philippe de Larminat, a climate change skeptic, entrance to the conference on climate change, it guaranteed a consensus. It kept the toddler from wandering around the corner. Recognize that regardless of whether those who doubt the consensus that humans are changing climate are self-serving lunatics or reasonable people with doubt, they are, at the very least, just being the toddlers that we all were at one time: Inquisitive wanderers rounding corners doubting as they go as a protection against slavery of the mind.
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