In last week’s Takimag column, our skeptical doctor critiques the obnoxious, self-serving, green ideology dominating much of Western intellectual thought nowadays.

But the environmentalists have a strange attitude to beauty: They are intimidated by it, which is why they so often wish to destroy it by their schemes, urban and rural, for saving the planet. Beauty (as the late and very great writer Simon Leys pointed out) confronts us with our own incapacity to create it, in short with our own mediocrity. We therefore desire to bring everything down to our own, not very high level.