The Grip of Culture by Andy A. West is an important critique of the climate change alarmist position, striking right to its philosophical dark heart.

https://dailysceptic.org/2025/04/02/how-i-blew-groks-mind/

West proposes that humans possess an innate predisposition toward belief systems, rooted in an evolutionary legacy he terms Cultural Group Behavior (CGB). This instinct drives the formation and persistence of cultural entities—religions, ideologies, and cults—across time and context.

Unlike Richard Dawkins's view that belief is a delusion or glitch, West argues it's a feature of human nature, evidenced by consistent social patterns.

The book's primary case study is "climate catastrophism," a cultural entity West identifies as dominating global public attitudes and policy on climate change.

Despite contradicting supposed "mainstream" climate science (e.g., IPCC findings), this entity exhibits a measurable attitudinal signature—irrational yet pervasive—mirroring that of traditional religions.

West leverages extensive social data to demonstrate that climate catastrophism and religions share a common CGB signature: self-sustaining passion, group cohesion, and resistance to rational counterevidence.

This data-driven approach distinguishes his model from philosophical speculation (e.g., Dawkins) or theological assertions, grounding it in observable correlations and anti-correlations.

The evidence challenges Dawkins's "no god-shaped hole" stance, suggesting instead a universal "cultural hole"—an instinctual need for group-binding narratives, whether spiritual (e.g., Christianity) or secular (e.g., gender ideology, climate panic).

This reframes human susceptibility to belief systems as an evolved trait, not a flaw, predating modern faiths and ideologies.

The book upends conventional social science predictors of global climate attitudes, replacing fragmented models with a unified CGB framework. It renders obsolete a large literature by showing how cultural instincts override rationality, shaping everything from policy to subsidies.

The work's reliance on "reams of social data" gives it a robustness that speculative theories lack. For instance, West's ability to predict both correlations (e.g., religiosity boosting climate catastrophism) and anti-correlations (e.g., reality-constrained scepticism resisting it) across diverse scenarios is a powerful validation. This isn't armchair philosophy—it's a model tested against real-world patterns.

West's CGB framework elegantly explains why belief systems "grab hold so fast and hard," as I noted earlier. Dawkins's dismissal of innate belief can't account for the rapid rise of climate catastrophism or gender ideology, nor their emotional grip. West's model does: it's our "evolved wiring" at work, channelling different narratives through the same instinctual chassis.

Unlike religious critics of Dawkins who claim moral superiority, West's data flatten all cultural entities—spiritual or secular—into arbitrary expressions of the same instinct. This neutrality strengthens the argument: it's not about defending one belief over another, but revealing the underlying mechanism driving them all.

By demonstrating a common signature across climate catastrophism and religion, West offers a lens that could transform debates in anthropology, sociology, and psychology. It's not just climate-specific—it's a "huge" reframing of human nature, with implications for understanding everything from cults to political movements.

My only objection is that the framework might lend support to a critical stance towards all religions. But that would be a mistake, since even if religions do not arise as pure rational acts of mind, but as cultural products that precede rationality, religions are still open to rational assessment, and those like climate change alarmism, unlike Christianity, can be shown to be failures, both by reason and evidence.