Rex Murphy: The U of A isn't 'brave' for honouring Suzuki. Just the opposite
To award one of the knights of the warm table a degree is not controversial; it is joining the herd to moo in timid unison
At the deep centre of conventional wisdom no concept is more hallowed, more warmly cradled in the blanket-robes of political correctness than the Green dogma of global warming. For millions upon millions it is grant-subsidized Holy Writ.
Governments fatten its evangelists with unheralded largesse. Its advocate-missionaries are legion, gathering in ritual conclave every year in rich, well-lit capitals to renew their fervour and refresh their zeal. Rio, Geneva, Copenhagen, Rome are their jet-set Stations of the Cross, the United Nations their cathedral home, its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change a new curia stuffed with failed weathermen, cranky researchers, the blazing-eyed mystics of Gaia, all duly attended by a docile, uninquisitive, co-opted press corps.
Honours drop on its prophet-priests as do “the gentle rains from heaven.”
From tiny tots in the sandbox to the web Gatsbys of Davos, the support and acclamation is universal. The stream of awards and hosannas flows to the littlest Greenies and the very pin-prick peak of the planet’s one-percenters. Al Gore was bestowed the Nobel Prize and an Academy Award. Less prestigious perhaps, a Canadian hierarch in the same creed has accumulated 25 honorary sheepskins for his vapourings on the same cause (stitched together, enough to shelter a family of 10 over a long winter). This would be David Suzuki, lord of the carbon offsets.
The celebrity appeal of the prime minister of our thrice-blessed country, Justin Trudeau, owes more than a little to the general understanding that global warming occupies the deepest chambers of his wonderfully capacious social-justice heart, outranking there even his devout commitments to those cherished oxymorons, male feminism and gender analytics.
Therefore, to read the awarding of an honorary degree to an extremely prominent Galahad of global warming is “controversial” is to put the word on its head, hammer it into the ground, and dance on its lexical grave. Which is how the University of Alberta is constructing its defence of attaching Mr. Suzuki’s name to its long scroll of honorees. And further that the university’s reputation for “standing up bravely for freedom of inquiry, academic integrity, and independence — depends on it (awarding him the degree).”
Really? That’s a very small nail for a very laden academic garment.
There is no more anodyne, innocuous, vapid, stale and bland gesture for any university than to drape an honorific hood over a head that has surrendered its faculties to the projected terrors of apocalyptic global warming. An honorary degree to a global-warming gospeller has all the controversy of a Boy Scout merit badge. It’s the 21st century’s equivalent of the old convent school’s good-conduct medal, or the gold star on the spelling test.
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Rex Murphy: The U of A isn’t ‘brave’ for honouring Suzuki. Just the opposite | National Post
