California, Wildfires, and the Foundational Myths of the Left

As Southern California burns, it grows increasingly clear that something—perhaps several somethings—is not right in the Golden State, and that those who were elected to enact sensible and effective public policy have failed miserably, with deadly results. While it is probably too early to assess and apportion blame definitively, one can still address the wooly mammoth in the room, the ideology that underpins California’s entire political zeitgeist and that enabled the creation of the conditions that likely made these deadly fires inevitable.

For decades, California has been at the fringes of the environmental movement. Even under nominal Republican governance (the erstwhile conservative Arnold Schwarzenegger, for example), the state has instituted a radical regulatory regime, the goal of which has been twofold: to signal state politicians’ righteousness and to encourage others around the country to emulate their actions and adopt their “environmentally conscious” approach to politics in the twenty-first century.

Among other things, state leaders have spent the last several years fundamentally changing state water policy in order to protect various species of fish, including chinook salmon. They also turned much of the state into a tinderbox by banning logging in much of the state in order to protect several birds, most notably the spotted owl. By failing to build reservoirs demanded by voters, destroying countless existing dams to achieve environmental goals, and neglecting basic forest management practices, California’s government made it far more likely that wildfires, which are common and frequent, would become massive and deadly disasters.

All of that said, “environmentalism” is not the core problem in California. Rather, it is a symptom, a symptom of the inanity inherent in much of political leftism. Leftism, as we understand it today, is based mostly on myths and (sometimes intentional) misunderstandings. Two myths in particular help to explain what is happening in California.

The first of these is the foundational myth of the left, the core premise of its worldview, and one of the most persistent social myths in Western civilization, that which the historian Norman Cohn has termed the myth of the “egalitarian State of Nature.” This fantasy hinges upon the notion that man’s natural, prehistorical state was a “Golden Age” “in which all men were equal in status and wealth and in which no one was oppressed or exploited by anyone else; a state of affairs characterized by universal good faith and brotherly love and also, sometimes, by total community of property and even spouses.”

This myth of a prehistorical utopia is critical in Western thought and the development of Western civilization for a variety of reasons. Most importantly, as Cohn notes, it is the foundation for contemporary political utopianism. It was only natural that the “egalitarian State of Nature” would eventually give rise to the “egalitarian Millennium.” As Cohn put it, the social myth became a revolutionary myth over time as the “Golden Age irrecoverably lost in the distant past” was replaced by a Golden Age “preordained for the immediate future.”

From the 14th century on, the idea that human society was on the verge of a great revolution that would end the current mean state of affairs and return mankind to its natural, prehistorical condition was ascendant in Western civilization. Countless Reformation-era social upheavals—from the Hussite (Taborite) rebellion in Bohemia to Thomas Muntzer and the Peasant’s War in Germany and militant Anabaptism throughout central Europe—were anarcho-communistic movements. They all assailed the powerful institutions of human society—the “prince,” the “rich,” and especially the Catholic Church—and promised their adherents the elimination of these “unnatural” institutions and a return to the true, egalitarian natural state.

In turn, these movements served as the intellectual and spiritual precursors to later, post-Christian endeavors that also promised egalitarian utopias. As Cohn put it, “the old religious idiom has been replaced by a secular one,” as the revolution against “the great ones” (i.e., “the powerful”) was revised to fit a purely secular context. That is to say that the intellectual roots of the post-Enlightenment, quasi-religious radical egalitarian movements—from Utopian socialism to Marxism—can be traced backward through the early peasants’ revolts and the overtly religious eschatological rebellions, right back to the State of Nature myth. The fundamental tenets of modern revolutionary egalitarianism, including the belief in the primacy of the struggle between “oppressed” and “oppressor” and the repudiation of religion, were anything but modern creations and, in fact, predated Marx by some four hundred years.

The second myth—a derivative of the first and the intellectual fountainhead of the type of environmentalism that is destroying California—is the myth of “the noble savage,” which dates principally to the mid-17th century and to the proto-philosopher of the left, Jean Jacques Rousseau. Emile, Rousseau’s classic “Treaties on Education,” begins with the author’s insistence that “Everything is good in leaving the hands of the creator of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.” In his Second Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Rousseau put meat on the bones of this skeleton and developed a fully formed worldview based on the idea that “savage man” was perfect, that “original sin” was a heinous lie, and that man’s institutions were the cause of the corruption of his otherwise perfect essence:

Observation fully confirms what reflection teaches us on this subject: Savage man and civilized man differ so much in their innermost heart and inclinations that what constitutes the supreme happiness of the one would reduce the other to despair. The first breathes nothing but repose and freedom, he wants only to live and remain idle, and even the Stoic’s ataraxia does not approximate his profound indifference to everything else. By contrast, the Citizen forever active, sweats and scurries, constantly in search of ever more strenuous occupations: he works to the death, even rushes toward it in order to be in a position to live, or renounces life in order to acquire immortality. He courts the great whom he hates, and the rich whom he despises; he spares nothing to attain the honor of serving them; he vaingloriously boasts of his baseness and of their protection and, proud of his slavery, he speaks contemptuously of those who have not the honor of sharing it.

These two conjoined myths—the egalitarian state of nature and the noble savage—undergird much of the post-Enlightenment leftist project, especially the enviro-leftism on display in California and throughout much of Europe. Ideas such as these are explicitly divorced from reality. They are pure fantasy, based on things that never existed and that never could exist. Man’s nature is imperfectible and so, by extension, is the society he creates. Pretending otherwise and enacting policies based on myths leads only to death, destruction, and societal collapse.