Watermelons, Limes - and Individualist ideologues like Nigel Lawson who are just plain wrong

There is a debate over on the Guardian about how to extract the politics from the climate change debate. Here's my 2p that I put up in the comments


As a Green of the Lime variety (green through and through) as opposed to the Watermelon variety, I'd say that the problem with both Left and Right lies in their concept of mankind as a self-existent being.

If Greens seem to lean somewhat towards the left, it is because the libertarian/conservative ideological position of individualism is just plain wrong.
It is wrong because homo sapiens is a social animal. Simple as that.

This is another inconvenient scientific fact for Nigel Lawson to splutter over, a fact that is incompatible with his philosophical idealism, so he will have to dream up more conspiracy theories to account for that unacceptable nugget of knowledge.

It just as well that we are a social animal, because it so happens that the solution to global warming and the many other environmental crises that we face involves a great deal of social co-operation at every level - from neighborhoods, businesses, local government, national government, right up to the international level.

The individualists hate this need for social co-operation, and will fight it all the way.

Fair play to Obama for having leaned over backwards to try to accommodate the Republicans, but all that we have learned from his presidency is that the Right, as it exists in 2013, is a rigid idealism that does not accommodate to anyone or anything.

The Right has two modes. It either dominates or it fulminates. We have to accept this fact, and go ahead without them. Decent conservatives do exist, and they will separate themselves from the ideologues and tag along with the rest of humanity as it wakes up to the task we have to carry out.

All of which is not to say that the Left as an ideology is any more accommodating. Leftists as sectarian ideologists do not even co-operate with each other. They certainly cannot collaborate with the Right, because Right and Left are two mutually exclusive ideologies. They share one notion, that Man, like the old God that went before, is a self-existent Being, but one side sees Man as an Individual Being, and the other sees Man as a Social Being. In those terms, ne'er the twain shall meet.

This is where the incoming Green ideology - based as it is on ecology, the relationship of mankind with our life support systems - offers a new framework where both individual and society can find a place where people can collaborate with each other in working towards a common goal - finding a viable, practical way for humans to meet their needs for life and happiness without destroying the very physical and biological system that sustains our life and happiness.