How the Irish Can Save Civilization Again
Part 1: Western Magnificence and Self-inflicted Insecurities
Wuhan’s plague has left trauma well beyond the physical, Putin’s war may have only just begun, and winter is coming while energy and food seem to be increasingly luxurious items across Europe. Trust in the very authorities that got us into this situation is going to be stress-tested to a degree not seen in generations. Things are looking rather ominous for the West.
My homeland of Ireland is part of the West, a quasi-civilizational collection of nations built upon two primary pillars. The first is the institutional and cultural package comprised of error correcting social technologies. These include science, democracy, freedom of expression, tolerance toward diversity of viewpoint, and the rule of law. This Athenian inspired elevation of the reasoned and reasonable individual, had provided much of the intellectual base for the Renaissance through the Enlightenment, as well as the post-Enlightenment consolidation and refinement of the aforementioned error correcting social technologies. This pillar is invaluable, not because it childishly assumes the existence of human infallibility or benevolence, but because it helps facilitate the systematic navigation of human ignorance and malevolence, by the collective, wherever it may arise.
The second relates to the radical equality of intrinsic worth afforded to each individual. This Jerusalem inspired recognition of sacredness in every person, no matter wealth or status, has led to many historical movements that some secular humanists among us may now take for granted: British Christians driving the 1807 Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade; the inspirational universalist preaching of Dr King in the mid 20th century; the creation of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights after the horrors of World War 2. On the topic of universal human rights—a miraculous moral innovation—I find myself in strong alignment with the core arguments presented by Michael J. Sperry in his book The Idea of Human Rights: “The conviction that every human being is sacred is, in my view, inescapably religious—and the idea of human rights, therefore, ineliminably religious.” (pg. 5) “There is neither Jew nor Greek,” wrote Paul in Galatians 3:28, “slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” To defend this viewpoint any further is beyond the scope of this essay. Moreover, there does exist a real risk of losing readers who are positively allergic to anything even remotely sympathetic to the idea that Christianity may have played some fundamental part in the best of aspects of our society.
For all its racially supremacist blemishes, arrogantly colonialist scar tissue, and painfully reductionistic warts, the West remains magnificent. This magnificence is illustrated nowhere more clearly than the embedded tendency of Western civilization to systematically facilitate criticism, from individuals, in the process of course correction across structural and moral domains. Western civilization is, however, only ‘quasi-civilizational’ since it is now inextricably interconnected with the rest of the world as evidenced by the recent pandemic, and the major global supply chain disruptions that followed. This is while still being tangibly identifiable as a specific entity outside of the geographical West in places like Australia, Taiwan, New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea. If the radical equality and error correcting social technologies that constitute the ideals of the West are lost in the vast chaos lurking on the horizon, or even in the insidiously banal mission creep of grey authoritarian-technocracy, countless more people will be negatively impacted than only those currently living in open societies with a free press and the ability to remove leaders with ballot papers rather than needing to pile up bullet shells. Hence, when I say that things are looking “rather ominous for the West”, I am obviously referring to Western open societies across Europe and the wider world, but also to those people in autocratic or developing societies who depend on the key role that the West plays in areas like the provision of disaster aid and human rights monitoring.
Plague and war are stern reminders that tough times call for great leaders. Yet, when it came to the pandemic response, sludgy bureaucratic failures and elitist epistemic arrogance across the West have served to provide ample confirmatory evidence to those already sceptical of the competence and nobility of the ruling classes. As did the war in Ukraine which, even more so than the pandemic response, has brutally collided decades of idealistic and atomistic energy and food policy against the rocks of reality. “Everyone has a plan”, as a surprisingly insightful pugilist once put it, “until they get punched in the mouth.”
Amidst the darkening clouds though, I genuinely believe that Ireland can play an important role in leading Europe, and even Western civilization at large, through the storm. Such a grandiose statement about my little island does, quite understandably, raise an important question given our meagre geopolitical independence: is Ireland even a nation capable of making its own decisions? Are we not a rudderless and floundering plaything of globalist ruling classes who ensure we obey like good little Paddies? Are we not a painfully compliant sock puppet with the five fingered hand of a strangely convergent steering group up its bottom? Firstly, we have techno-solutionist neo-feudalists who appear blindly content to maximise short term profits and externalise medium to long term costs, without realizing that, as I once heard Brown University economist Mark Blyth say in relation to growing inequality in the US, “the Hamptons is an indefensible position”. Secondly, we have NGO activists filling a God shaped hole with eco-puritanism and aspirational victimhood who often play the role of useful idiot in providing green-washing, Woke-washing, and other forms of moralistic camouflage for financial or power interests. Third, we have specific tribalistic loyalists from the expert and media classes who lend crusading authority from their cathedral like ivory towers and newsrooms. Fourth, we have Borg-like bureaucratic hive minders programmed to forcefully dissolve locally rooted ways of living through coerced assimilation into the Machine. Fifth, we have anywhere-ist politicians who are more concerned with using their station to enhance status and influence amongst other elites, than in securing the long-term future potential of their constituents and countrymen. This is without even mentioning power-hungry monkeys who, with primally erotic derangement, are simply drawn toward the reins of control for its own gratuitously hedonic sake—regardless of the ideological or political specifics—and so can be found dotted across each of the five fingers. From my plebian vantage point, this bizarrely aligned conglomerate can, at the very least, begin to describe the Rulers.
The exact identity of the Rulers is somewhat irrelevant. Demonising some cabal of dastardly villains is too easy. Besides, the very same demons that animate the Rulers may be present in every single one of us. Every time we cowardly scapegoat an outgroup as the source of our anxiety before facing the possibility that what we most despise in others may well be indicative of something we most fear in ourselves, every time we desperately cling to grossly oversimplistic solutions to highly complex problems because of ideological conformity, every time we arrogantly fail to notice that subjective experiential certainty is no indication of objective epistemic justification, every time we elevate belief guardianship over truth seeking, and every time we take darkly pleasant pleasure in asserting superiority or dominance over other people, we are animated by the same form of demonic possession as the hand up Ireland’s backside. ‘The line between good and evil runs down the middle of a man’s own heart’ and so on.
The actual actions of the Rulers, on the other hand, are of the utmost relevance in demonstrating the inadequacy of their demonic animation. In their book Sacred Cow, Diana Rogers and Robb Wolf provide a prime example of the Rulers at work through an utterly insane myopia regarding burping animals: “moose produce large amounts of methane and the Green Party in Sweden is now proposing that citizens should “shoot as many moose as possible and reduce the number of cattle,” for the sake of climate change.” (pg. 138) ‘Let’s destroy a species now so as to protect life in the future’ goes this neurotic logic. This myopic focus on animal methane becomes even more bonkers, when we remember that ruminants were burping long before we cared. According to Rodgers and Wolf, presettlement North America may have had well in excess of a hundred million large ruminants roaming the wild. This meant that “methane emissions were about 82 percent of current emissions from farmed and wild ruminants.” (pg. 136) Moreover, they describe a recent NASA study who found that “the largest contributors to methane are the fossil fuels, fires, and wetlands or rice farming.” (pg. 137) “Instead of Meatless Mondays,” Rodgers and Wolf dryly suggest, “should we call for rice-free Fridays?” (pg. 137) They then go on to describe recent studies by the Environmental Protection Agency in the US showing how all livestock in the country were responsible for somewhere around 3.9 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions, which, according to Rodgers and Wolf, is “far lower than the 18-51 percent that many plant-based advocates report.” (pg. 140) And many of these ruminant livestock would also, of course, contribute to carbon sequestration in the soil due to the biodiversity augmentation facilitated during grazing. (This is a beneficial carbon offset not widely considered in the too narrowly focussed discussions around methane emissions.)
Another prime example of the Rulers at work is the barring of tennis star Novak Djokovic from the recent US Open due to his refusal to accept Covid-19 vaccination. This bizarre ban—which one can reasonably assume to have been motivated entirely by politics—was despite the fact that he already had Covid-19 which affords natural immunity. Moreover, even if he did get the vaccine, we have known since at least October of 2021 that vaccines would not prevent him from catching and then transmitting the virus to anyone else (fully vaccinated people can still catch the virus and reach the same peak viral loads as the unvaccinated, thereby being just as contagious, but simply for a shorter period of time as they can clear the virus faster, on average, than someone who was naïve to both vaccine and virus). Furthermore, the dangers of severe illness are not equally distributed across the population which means that the vaccines are not equally necessary for every person, and no medicine is without its own potential for adverse events, including these Covid vaccines. This means that the risk to benefit analysis varies between individuals. It is this same context, that makes another action by the Rulers in North America seem nothing short of tyrannical: Justin Trudeau’s decision in February to freeze not only the bank accounts of truckers who were protesting vaccine mandates, but their supporters too. This was a shockingly authoritarian act which the Canadian Civil Liberties Association claimed "threatens our democracy and our civil liberties". Unfortunately, examples of pandemic mismanagement by the Rulers on this side of the Atlantic are just as bemusing. Some of which I have explored in an essay from late last year entitled Covid is Over, and more of which I will touch on in a later part of this series when discussing the topic of epistemic security.
Then came war. Notwithstanding the horrific human cost to the displaced and butchered people of Ukraine, or the indoctrinated cannon fodder driving rusty Russian missile magnets who think they are doing their neighbours a favour by “de-Nazifying” the place, energy and food are the area’s most worryingly affected by Putin’s war. These also happen to be, of course, the foundation stones of a functioning economy. If winter is coming and we can’t feed people or turn the heating on, we will starve in the cold. As such, it would seem rather strange that the Rulers have made Europe so dependent on Russian gas.
To be clear, the post-World War 2 notion that the ‘trading of goods and services helps prevent the trading of bullets and bloodshed’ is far from entirely lost on me. What is lost on me though, is the fact that many of the European Rulers—most notably in Germany where an almost unbelievable naivety has created a truly stunning disaster—have somehow adopted zero carbon goals for powering the economy whilst simultaneously shunning nuclear energy. A succinct Areo Magazine piece from late last year by Ralph Leanord addresses the benefits, costs, and common critiques of nuclear energy before calmly concluding:
“Today, opposition to nuclear power is based partly on outdated and incomplete information, and partly on magical thinking. If we want to solve climate change, the least we can do is to avoid closing existing nuclear plants that have been deemed safe, and to build more nuclear plants. We can, at the very least, make use of them to mitigate climate change until human ingenuity produces an even better, cleaner and more powerful alternative that can meet the world’s energy needs.”
A similarly idealistic attitude has also, of course, been applied to a strange vegan-centric scapegoating of cattle as if they are the main drivers of climate change. This is despite the fact that, as Rodgers and Wolf highlighted using EPA data, livestock accounts for 3.9 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions in the US, and that the largest sources of emissions come from transportation at 28.5 percent, electricity generation at 28.4 percent, and industry at 21.6 percent (pg. 141). This line of thought stems from the same place as the ludicrously atomistic focus the Rulers have on emissions, as illustrated above in the aforementioned moose genocide advocated by the Swedish Green Party.
With this undeniably anal sentiment as a guiding axiom, blunt agricultural targets have been instituted that functionally neglect the potential for what Dr Patrick Bresnihan of Maynooth University, has described as an “alternative agri-food system that prioritises agricultural livelihoods, ecological well-being, and affordable, healthy food, over corporate profits.” These smaller scale agri-ecological methods could include ways of farming that enhance carbon sequestration in the soil and overall biodiversity, decrease the need for artificial inputs (such as Russian gas derived nitrogen) due to a strategic inclusion of grazing livestock, and provide robust food sovereignty due to its inherently decentralized and localized nature. Instead, unfortunately, we have seen low resolution moves by the Rulers to simply decrease the Irish cattle herd by 30 percent, alongside attacks on the outrageously efficient and innovative Dutch farmers that have resulted in mass protests.
But alternative food systems aside, the short-sighted and incomprehensibly blinkered moves against expert food producers in Europe at a time of worsening global food shortages, increasing geopolitical uncertainty, and rising domestic tensions, make about as much sense as trying to extinguish a fire with petrol.
As per usual, however, the people worst affected by global crises in energy and food won’t be those of us in the wealthiest parts of Europe. (At least at first.) No, it will be those in developing nations who were already struggling more than they were in 2019 because of the economic impacts of the viral pandemic, and the responses employed to manage the virus such as lockdowns, which have had drastic iatrogenic consequences. “100 million people have been thrown into poverty worldwide as a consequence of the economic harms caused by lockdown.” So said Prof Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford in October 2021. A United Nations piece from July 2022 notes:
“After remaining relatively unchanged since 2015, the proportion of people affected by hunger jumped in 2020 and continued to rise in 2021, to 9.8 percent of the world population. This compares with 8 percent in 2019...Around 2.3 billion people in the world (29.3 percent) were moderately or severely food insecure in 2021 – 350 million more compared to before the outbreak of the pandemic. Nearly 924 million people faced food insecurity at severe levels, an increase of 207 million in two years.”
And this humanitarian horror show is without taking Putin’s war into account, which has, of course, made matters far worse.
‘When the princes are getting colds’, an old saying goes, ‘the peasants are dying of pneumonia’. Europeans in wealthy nations won’t just be hit in the pocket though. Worsening poverty and shortages of energy and food across already poor countries, may well result in mass migrations toward European borders over the coming years that make the movements of the mid-2010s look like a footnote. These huge migrations of the desperate and hungry will almost certainly result in increased civil divisions, and reactionary resentment that won’t be entirely irrational. We may also see increased violence by groups including ethnonationalists, Islamists, militant anarchists, and radical leftists who could reciprocally radicalize one another, whilst having increased access to high-tech weapons that were intended for Ukrainian troops but siphoned off to the European black market through the fog of war.
This chaos and strife will, quite likely, elicit panicked clampdowns on internet freedoms and public assembly across Europe which, even if initially well intentioned, will accelerate the existing trend toward technologically enabled mass surveillance, indoctrination, and coercion. Without freedom of speech and assembly by all, who watches the watcher? Freedom of expression and inquiry, with all its messiness, is the generator function of beneficial change; error correcting social technologies like democratic accountability, diverse heterodox viewpoints, and scientific truth seeking depend upon it. Given the bedrock importance of free speech to a society that honours error correction over dogmatic arrogance, there are no philosopher kings or queens who can be trusted with censorial control over the information ecology. And, even if such hypothetical Saintly Sages existed, they would inevitably be succeeded by tyrants. Centres of power attract psychopaths, zealots, megalomaniacs, narcissists, and other broken souls like rats to a corpse. “Power corrupts”, as Lord Acton famously put it, “and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
And so, we see three gargantuan problems facing the European West in particular: energy insecurity, food insecurity, and epistemic insecurity. Not all is lost though, a rock on the edge of the continent might yet save the day once again.
Part 2 soon.