Rifkin-mania in Germany

Clo[w]ning Controversialist

It’s astonishing that one of the greatest frauds in modern writing gets so much acclaim in Germany. Jeremy Rifkin is the author of numerous cranky works — all of them hodge podges of pseudoscience presented in breathless prose, but he always has a new book out so quickly that no one notices that his previous books have been shown to be completely without merit. He has been a major opponent of genetically engineered foods (“Frankenfoods”) and wrote extensively on the subject, always presenting himself as on the cutting edge of both science and moral philosophy. I recall, however, one occasion when he had the legs cut out from under him by a geneticist who responded to Rifkin’s assertion that to eat lamb from an animal that had had a human growth hormone gene spliced into it was morally horrifying because it would be “cannibalism,” since it would mean eating human genes. The geneticist pointed out that humans and sheep share the overwhelming majority of their genes; that’s what it means to be closely related species. So whenever someone eats a lambchop, he or she is “eating human genes.” Rifkin was not aware of that fact.

Stephen Jay Gould wrote of Rifkin’s book Algeny in 1985 that “I regard Algeny as a cleverly constructed tract of anti-intellectual propaganda masquerading as scholarship. Among books promoted as serious intellectual statements by important thinkers, I don’t think I have ever read a shoddier work. Damned shame, too, because the deep issue is troubling and I do not disagree with Rifkin’s basic pleas for respecting the integrity of evolutionary lineages. But devious means compromise good ends, and we shall have to save Rifkin’s humane conclusion from his own lamentable tactics.” (He’s also written books on time, entropy, beef, biology, etc., etc. He first surfaced as the leader of the “People’s Bicentennial Commission” in 1976, when he promoted a Marxist alternative to the celebration of the American bicentennial.)

Now he has a book out that shows a misunderstanding of economics as breathtaking as his misunderstandings of biology: The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream. Der Spiegel has been promoting Rifkin’s econo-ignorance for the last week. If anyone wants an easy chance to shoot some fish in a barrel, here are the links to the English-language versions of the Der Spiegel essays and interviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

A good source of verifiable data that refute Rifkin’s bizarre claims is Olaf Gersemann’s Cowboy Capitalism: European Myths, American Reality. (I know that I’ve promoted Gersemann’s book before, but it really is an exceptionally good work, and the best alternative around to Rifkin’s claims.)