MAHA Against the Reign of Quantity
The ghosts of Emerson, Thoreau, & Guenon are speaking through RFK, Jr.
RFK Jr, in a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, articulated the traditional American environmentalism embodied by the lives and philosophies of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir. I encourage everyone to listen to it. I’ve pulled his enlightening, opening statement from the segment and posted it below the video:
The Democrats have become subsumed in this carbon orthodoxy. And I have talked about this, that the only issue is carbon. It's forced them to do something that you should never do. If you're an environmentalist, which is to commoditize and quantify everything. So everything is measured by its carbon footprint, how many tonnes of carbon it produces. And, you know, you're basically, you're putting everything in that kind of box of of being able to quantify it and explain its value numerically.
And the reason that we protect the environment is just the opposite of that. The reason that we protect the environment is because there's a spiritual connection. I got into the environment because I wanted, you know, this connection to the fishes and the birds and the wildlife and, and the whales and, and the purple mountains, Majesty. And that, you know, I understood that’s the way, God talks to human beings. There are many factors: through each other, through organized religion, through the great prophets or the wise people, the great books of those religion but nowhere is the kind of detail, texture and grace and joy as through creation.
And when we destroy nature, we diminish our capacity to sense the divine, understand who God is and what our own potential is and duties are as human beings.
It's not about quantifying stuff. That's what the devil does. He quantifies everything.
We can imagine Rene Guenon listening to this and shedding a tear of joy.
Kennedy’s critique hones in on American environmentalism’s estrangement from its own founding. The current movement’s myopic obsession with carbon footprints and “net zero” has done two insidious things to environmentalism: (1) It inverted the original motivation, to preserve and promote the qualia of communing with pure nature, into a heavily quantized technocratic project and (2) greatly diminished its natural, broad appeal by severely limiting the scope of what environmentalism means and attempts to accomplish.
The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Emerson and Thoreau were the founding fathers of the first uniquely American intellectual movement, Transcendentalism. They stressed the great spiritual power of Nature for the human being, allowing us to connect with our personal intuition and individuality. Sociality and the emerging industrial society corrupted our ability to individuate and connect with God, which Nature was seen as the remedy for reconnecting what had been severed. For Emerson and Thoreau, being able to escape to untouched wilderness had tremendous spiritual and intellectual benefits that allowed people to become more authentic, healthier, and more creative individuals.
Like many Americans, John Muir was inspired by Emerson and Thoreau. While he hiked the Sierra Nevadas, Muir was known to carry the works of both men. He would later become the founding father of the famous Sierra Club and the larger American conservationist movement.
In wildness is the preservation of the world.
Henry David Thoreau
Kennedy, a New England grown Harvard man, is no doubt familiar with and inspired by Harvard’s first notable intellectuals. This is evident not only in this segment about environmentalism but also his willingness to be an individual in the face of great disapproval by his family and elite institutions. He follows his own guiding light to where it leads despite the personal blowback he receives from the groups he’s most familiar with. Emerson and Thoreau would recognize Kennedy as a kindred spirit.
Kennedy is doing something extremely important by integrating his movement into MAGA. He’s expanding the scope of environmentalism and thus the amount of people that could be rallied in favor of a more wholistic and inclusive environmentalism.
The modern movement isn’t a popular movement at all. It’s a white-collar complex of NGOs, government agencies, and ESG aligned corporates that act as revolving doors for ambitious brahmins to spiral up the social hierarchy. Predictably, this narrow, striving class of people has narrowed its concern to KPIs around what we’re feeding our global industrial machine. This could be one of many issues the movement could focus on while also coming back down to earth to address more concrete, smaller scale, and much more solvable problems.
For example, later in the Carlson segment, Kennedy mentions the importance of soil, something so tangible and self-evidently important, its mind boggling its never brought up. He also frequently focuses on the fuel and substances we’re using to power and heal ourselves. The environment is not just an untouched piece of forest and oil companies are not the only corporations that should be looked at skeptically. The environment includes our lived environment and what helps us live and thrive in those environments.
Our health and the health of the planet are not unrelated issues. MAHA brings them back together in a way that fuses the traditionally American view of Nature as a source of connection to the divine with an enlargement of the scope of environmentalism. MAHA includes concrete issues that merge the health of ourselves and the environment as an interrelated issue that concerns us all. This is a much needed upgrade to the current environmental regime powered by corporatism and thinly veiled marxist and malthusian sympathies.
