Mayans and the end of the world

This intellectual summer pudding can only be understood in the context of a far wider and profound retreat from reason throughout the west. Across a broad range of issues, progressive intelligentsia and commentators have dumped the rules of evidence, objectivity and rationality in favour of fantasy, irrationality and up side down thinking.

Why do the hardline environmentalists have such a monopoly on virtue? This is usually the preserve to charlatans and the Catholic Church. Anyone who opposes the new guard is a right-winger and a neo-conservative. In other words, these are not propositions to be debated in a rational way, but are seen as self-evident truths with the infallibility of religious dogma.

As Paul Tillich wrote more that 50 years ago in The Courage to Be, we live in an anxious age at a time when the Church is at its weakest and where much media attention and anxiety is paid to the global movement of people. From a sociological perspective, it is not unusual that some have created Mother Earth as their new deity. But this modern day ‘Cult of Reason’, has some decidedly unreasonable aspects.

While I recognize the precautionary principle of acting as if global warming was real, I am also keenly aware that the most vocal heralds of this new Gaia are not conservatives in the Edmund Burke sense but rather in the visage of Robespierre.