The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science (32 page)

We can be born, then, with a kind of pre-set ‘mood’ – open or fearful.
Depending on what happens to us during childhood, aspects of this mood can be counteracted or encouraged. Our behaviour influences the behaviour of those around us which, in turn, re-influences us. Growing up, our personality draws those of a similar nature closer into our circles. Professor Chris Frith has already told me how we are barely aware of our automatic tendency to imitate the people around us, and absorb their goals, knowledge and beliefs. (‘This is why strange narratives work best when they are shared by a group,’ he added, significantly.) As an adult, these crucial choices – where we live, how we socialise, the newspapers we read – create yet more feedback loops.

In this way, our moods create our worlds. Although our destinies are not written in the codes of our genome, we are aimed in a certain direction before we are sluiced from the womb. Our emotions weave a breadcrumb trail of
advance
or
withdraw
responses, which we can hardly help but follow. They influence our experiences, which influence the way we understand the world. Unless dramatic life events intercede, we have a tendency to become what we are.

The stories that we tell ourselves are another essential component to all this. The model of the world that we build for ourselves to live within is made of observations of cause and effect that are soaked in emotion. These micro-stories, whose purpose is to explain and predict the world, can grow into staggering tales of magnificent drama and complexity.
In
The Political Brain
, Professor Westen writes
‘research suggests that our minds naturally search for stories with a particular kind of structure, readily recognisable to elementary school children and similar across cultures.’ In this structure, a crisis strikes a settled world, heroic efforts are begun to solve it, terrible obstacles are surmounted and dreadful enemies are battled, until a new and blissful state is achieved. According to Professor Westen,
the political left and the right each has a ‘master narrative’
that reflects this structure – a grand, over-arching plot that comes loaded with a set of core assumptions, that defines the identity of heroes and villains and promises a paradisiacal denouement.

A person who fears novelty might have an instinctive, emotional hunch that immigration is a bad thing. A charismatic politician who
tells of the urgent necessity of halting the hordes, promises heroic attempts at controlling the borders, and predicts wonders to come if their opponents are conquered is confabulating on behalf of the listener. He is weaving a story in which the right wing individual is on the side of heroes. He does so with passion and wit and drama and all these
amazing true facts
. How can that not be seductive?

In this way, each side tells a conflicting tale about how the world works. The two poles experience a different reality, recognise a different story with different heroes and villains, and join a different side. They become members of opposing cultures, aliens from warring worlds. Needless to say, when all this is happening, nobody is behaving especially rationally. As Professor Westen writes,
‘The data from political science are crystal clear
: people vote for the candidate who elicits the right feelings, not the candidate who presents the best arguments.’

This is why I want to meet Lord Monckton. His identity has a remarkable coherence; the stars of his beliefs seem to align in a perfect constellation of right-leaning thinking.

*

The Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley has powerful hands and he lets you know all about them when he takes one of yours to shake it. He wears pinstripes and a large digital watch that looks like the kind of device a runner might wear to check his heart rate. His tie shows the elements of the periodic table and a wide golden ring clutches to his left little finger. The cartilage and bones in his nose push out from his skin in the shape of an anchor. His eyes peer from either side of the anchor’s stock, and are not as bad as you might imagine from the newspapers: their startling fishlike bulbousness – his ocular proptosis, caused by Grave’s disease – has lessened dramatically thanks, he says, to the top secret cure he devised using his own ‘completely bonkers’ theory before concocting it ‘on the library table, test tubes, and stuff bubbling away.’ He believes his claimed breakthrough
‘shows much promise in curing everything from HIV to malaria to multiple sclerosis
.’

He leads me briskly through a corridor of the Oxford Union building,
where he is to appear later in a debate. We head up the beautiful polished-wood staircase, looking for a quiet place to talk. He opens this door and that, each time bowing and apologising to the people inside whom we have startled. He races up another flight, suit-vent flapping like the wings of a skate, and finds an unoccupied room that is hung with rows of pen-and-ink portraits of high-collared gentlemen and lined with extravagant red, green and gold William Morris wallpaper.

We each pull out a leather-cushioned seat. He sits, bolt-straight before me,
this liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Broderers
, this Officer of the Order of St John of Jerusalem, this Knight of Honour and Devotion of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, this former policy adviser to Margaret Thatcher, and I tell him that I am interested in heretics – those brave Davids who take the fight to the establishment Goliaths – and that I am really only here to listen to his story, about his battles and his heroes and his villains. ‘Yes,’ he says, smiling. ‘Certainly.’ He folds his hands in front of him on the table. ‘I was born,’ he begins, ‘at the age of nought …’

Christopher Walter Monckton became the first son of Major General Gilbert Monckton, Second Viscount Monckton of Brenchley and Marianna, Dame of Malta on Valentine’s Day, 1952.

‘I came of exceptional parents,’ he says. ‘My father was the army’s youngest general, my mother was the first woman high sheriff of Kent since the fourteenth century and my father’s father, the first Lord Monckton, had been the adviser to Edward VIII on his abdication, and had then served in Churchill’s last cabinet and Eden’s first. If we go back to my great-great-grandfather on my mother’s side, he was the model on whom
Sanders of the River
was based – a wonderful pro-imperialist film about a district commissioner. They were the people who really had the power in the empire, as you know.’

Young Christopher’s early years were a time of great happiness.

‘My mother would use the whip,’ he says. ‘The horse whip. I was disciplined severely. Far more severely than was normal, even for that time. She nearly broke my finger once.’

‘But you say you were happy?’ I ask.

‘It was indeed a very happy childhood. My parents gave me just the right amount of attention, which is not too much and not too little.’

From the whip of his mother he learned discipline, but from his father he learned a lesson of even greater value.

‘I remember, at the age of two, sitting on his knee, and he had a book with the alphabet set out on little bows on the tails of kites. When I went to nursery school, at the age of three, I already knew the alphabet and could read. It was my father, not my mother, who had taught me that. It gave me an edge which I never lost. I realised there were advantages in being ahead. And I stayed ahead.’

Through discipline and toil he achieved success at prep school and at Harrow and then Cambridge University. But the post-war years were dark ones for Great Britain, for she was losing her empire.

‘I felt infinite sadness. And nostalgia, of course. When I was at Harrow we had a wonderful school song which said, “From Harrow school to rise and rule.” The education was very much that you are going to be the rulers of the world and the masters of the universe and, therefore, you need to know how to do it. But in order to do it, you had to understand the people who were going to be in your care. That’s how it was – they weren’t your servants. I mean, if you go back to the philosopher George Santayana, he said, “The world never had sweeter masters,” and that’s probably true, because we weren’t really conscious of being masters. We weren’t there to grind folk under our heel.’

Sadly, for the millions of recipients of Britain’s gentle colonial care, not everyone had the discernments that were bred into the schoolboy rulers of Harrow. ‘We were taught this sensitivity which, unfortunately, turned out to be more or less wholly lacking in most of the political class. I could see, even from a very early age, that the empire – great though it had been – was over.’

The dismantling of our magnificent empire was, perhaps, the first victory for those who were soon to become Lord Monckton’s lifetime enemies. It was an act of grand vandalism, wrought by the selfish and irresponsible left.

‘Of course, it was all the consequence of the welfare state,’ he explains. ‘Britain was pretty bust after the Second World War. Then Labour got in on a “jam today, jam tomorrow, jam forever” manifesto. Very typical Labour manifesto – very appealing to those who are not used to making their own way in the world. Somebody else will provide. So
they got into office on this idea of a National Health Service, universal pensions, universal benefits, full employment.’

‘Free stuff?’ I say.

‘Sweeties!’ he nods. ‘Bread and circuses! The problem was, we couldn’t afford it and so we had to go to the United States to say, “Please can we have the money to pay for the welfare state and the health service?” They said to us, “If you want help, then you’re going to have to bring the empire to an end.” Which, of course, the Labour Party wanted to do anyway.’

It was in 1973, when he was reading classics at Cambridge University, that the richly educated young lord decided that he would no longer indulge the kinds of people who were not used to making their own way in the world. The left were attempting to reform the exclusive Cambridge Union by changing it into an ‘open’ one that
anyone
could enter. ‘It was going to be like any other students’ union anywhere else,’ he says. ‘Beer and sandwiches and the occasional pop concert, as I believe it is called. The traditions of what was still a civilised gentleman’s club would’ve been swept away. All that history, nearly two hundred years of it, would’ve been gone. Debating would’ve been brought to an end. I thought,
Our ancestors went to some trouble to establish this place and foster the techniques of debating, which I have learnt, in the chamber, against the most difficult audience you could hope to face
. I didn’t want it to be lost and I decided that, if nobody else would fight it, I would. I would disregard any consequences from my own Cambridge political career. I knew that one would never become president of the union because, at the time, unless you subscribed to the’ – he spits the word – ‘so-called
consensus
, you couldn’t.’

Lord Monckton went to work. He discovered that the union was protected by the Literary and Scientific Institutions Act 1854, which said that any major change had to be the subject of a vote. He began a public campaign which saw life members returning from all over the world. ‘On polling day there was a queue, almost as far as the railway station, which is a long way outside Cambridge.’ The leftist insurgents lost the vote. The young Monckton was victorious.

On another occasion, the fellows of his college – ‘all Marxists and atheists’ – attempted
to depose the chaplain. Lord Monckton launched another campaign. ‘And they caved in.’ That fight gave him a sudden and startling x-ray flash of the culture war that would define the politics of the latter half of the twentieth century. The left, he realised, were beginning to ally themselves with militant, atheistic scientists. ‘They were increasingly using the language of science,’ he says, describing a new, ‘unholy departure from anything spiritual. I fought that, very successfully, just as I fought the union thing. And what I learnt from those two episodes was that the lone wolf – provided he does not seek the approbation of his fellows and does not seek advancement or promotion to high office – can effect far more change for good than anyone who does hold high office, because he has not made the compromises necessary to get it.’

The history of this corrosive alliance between the left and atheist scientists had begun eleven years before Lord Monckton’s union campaign, when an American academic named Rachel Carson published her book
Silent Spring
, which warned of the potential dangers of the pesticide DDT. It was to became totemic, a foundational text for the modern environmental movement that ultimately influenced policymakers who banned the use of the chemical around the world, even where it was being used to kill malarial mosquitoes.

‘It was a stupid book,’ says Lord Monckton. ‘Carson was well intentioned, bless her little cotton socks, but stupid scientifically. A stupid book! The left had already decided that they were going to exploit science in a political cause, and they were totally unconcerned about whether the science was true or not. Even when they were putting this ban in place they realised that it would cause millions of children to die. In America they used to do massive sprays of DDT and the kids would run after the planes and play in the clouds. It didn’t do them any harm. You can eat the stuff by the tablespoon.’

‘So if they knew it was safe, and that banning it would kill millions of children, what was their motivation?’ I ask.

He leans forward.

‘Power. It showed who was boss. They would say, “We’re here to save the planet,” but they weren’t at all. It was pure naked left wing political power. They also wanted to whip up a cause which would
bring in money from well-meaning rich people like Bill Gates, who knows absolutely fuck all about anything.’

Why, I wondered, do environmental groups today still want all this power and money?

‘To shut down the economies of the West.’

Even in those days, when the two powers of the cold war were frighteningly evenly matched, the Soviet Union knew that they could not compete with capitalists. So they formulated a plan. To destroy the West and their systems of wealth, they realised that they had to attack our energy-making infrastructure. The KGB began secretly transporting influential British individuals to Moscow and Leningrad for training. Marxists infiltrated the new green groups, who were fomenting their own version of trouble. ‘I’ve been told that the left, the KGB, realised that energy was the soft underbelly of the West,’ says Lord Monckton. ‘They used twin attacks via the working classes and the environment movement. They thought, “That’s how we destroy the economies of the West.” Not compete with –
destroy
. It’s about nihilism, it’s about destruction, tearing down what we’re building because they can’t compete with it and they’re jealous of it. Jealousy is at the root of all socialism. Jealousy is at the root of all evil. Socialism
is
evil.’