In The Inheritors, his 1955 follow-up to The Lord the Flies, William Golding masterfully and disturbingly paints a picture of a world on the very eve of its dissolution. The main characters, who it is obliquely implied are the last of their species, are a band of neanderthals who find themselves swept away by the coming of a new dawn – the arrival of homo sapiens. A fresh reality – one that encompasses both a higher culture and greater savagery than they can possibly imagine – is on the cusp of emergence, and nothing will be the same again.
Our times have taken on something of that aspect. The world which most of us grew up in – the world of agreeing to disagree, of reasoned debate, of ‘It’s a free country’, of mutual respect and civility – is disappearing. All manner of disconcerting opportunities seem to be arising in its stead. And the process of replacement threatens to be quite rapid. “How do you lose your civilisation?” as Hemingway might have asked. “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
The threatened cancellation of NatCon 2024 by various mayors in Brussels provides quite a stark illustration of the suddenness with which things are now moving. A decade or so ago (I am tempted even to say even five years ago) it would have been basically inconceivable to imagine that people spouting mainstream, fairly anodyne right-of-centre policy positions (the family is a good thing, marriage is a good thing, immigration should not be a complete free-for-all, religion is worthy of respect) would be being characterised as too dangerous to be allowed to speak in public. Yet now here we are: various public authorities in a European capital – admittedly quite an oddball, sui generis place – trying to shut down what is in the end a fairly humdrum opportunity for traditional conservatives to vent for a day or two together about the world going to the dogs before traipsing home again with a bad hangover. NatCon is many things (I was at the London one last year as an observer), but it is certainly not a forum for plotting by nefarious far-right conspirators bent on the restoration of 1930s style fascism. Yet we appear to have come to a position at which mainstream politicians are not actually able to tell the difference between one thing and the other – or at least have so little respect for the concept of civil discourse that flagrant mischaracterisation of the views of one’s opposition is considered a legitimate tactic for political victory.
There are I think four observations to be made about the whole affair.
The first is the marked insecurity and even frailty of the people that Matt Goodwin has aptly labelled the ‘new elite’. People who have the courage of their convictions, and who are confident that they are in the right, don’t particularly worry about people disagreeing, and don’t feel the need to shut down debate – indeed, they welcome it. For all that our public sphere is characterised by strict adherence to orthodoxy, then, it is obvious that that orthodoxy rests on very shallow foundations.
The second, related observation is that politics is becoming oppositional, and it is not difficult to see why. In a society in which people feel themselves to be bonded together by pre-political loyalty (to the nation, a religion, shared values, etc.) they make the effort to accept differences of opinion and rub along. But people across much of the West no longer live in such societies. Instead, they choose their loyalties precisely on the basis of political ideals which in many senses span borders – ironically, this is true both of what people call the ‘woke’ Left and the NatCon-style dissident Right (which insists on a kind of international nationalism). The result is that people no longer seem to want to rub along, but to crush their political enemies. Belgian mayors, then, don’t want to agree to disagree with anyone. They want to stamp NatCon out.
The third is the irony of the disjuncture between the sheer scale of ambition evident in the claims that our governments typically nowadays make (that they can save us from disease and from climate change, that they can alleviate poverty, that they can make us healthier, that they can decide what is true and what is not, etc.), and the vapidity and incompetence of the actual human beings who are engaged in the practice of government. What on Earth were these Belgian mayors thinking? If they had wanted NatCon 2024 to fail, the best thing to do would have been to politely ignore it, and thereby turn it into a damp squib. Instead, through their hamfisted efforts to cancel it, they have given the event, and the nascent movement surrounding it, a veritable bank vault’s worth of free publicity. Not only that, but it is free publicity which precisely vindicates a significant chapter in the entire narrative told by that movement, which is that ‘woke’ technocrats are trying to crush free speech. How profoundly stupid. (Indeed, one has to wonder whether the decision to host the event in Brussels was not a bit of a masterstroke by NatCon’s organisers in light of what has happened.)
The fourth and final thing to observe is that this is all getting dangerous. The picture that emerges is one of an incipient hegemony, which is increasingly intolerant of opposition, but which is at the same time very brittle, subject to bouts of histrionics, and not very competent or capable of thinking things through. Does that sound to you like a recipe for good, calm, strategically sensible government? It doesn’t to me. Rather, it sounds like all of the ingredients are present for a period of serious and sustained political instability. Buckle your seatbelts, then – it’s going to be an exciting ride.
Dr. David McGrogan is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. You can subscribe to his Substack – News From Uncibal – here.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
In a happier, simpler time, this would have been a rather boring academic discussion about temperature measurements.
Today it’s part of a battle to keep the state out of our lives and be able to live free.
Pretty nuts really.
This academic discussion is being controlled and as far as I can see, discussed less (ie detail) and sensationalised more! Very nuts!
Some time in the late 1980s or very early 1990, I was on a summer holiday on a farm on Bodmin Moor. By that time, it hadn’t rained in this area for 19 weeks in a row and some of the moor farms received water supplies from tankers. That was a generally hot summer, not the five weeks of no rain with mostly lovely temperatures we had this year.
Ha, my lasting memory of Bodmin is failing my first driving test there ( steep inclines + crap clutch control = going backwards when attempting a hill start. Not great when there’s a car behind you.
) but passing second time. I miss Cornwall though.
Real experts manage to do that after passing the test. I’ve recently encountered one (and waited patiently on the pavement until he had remembered which of all these pedals are supposed to be used in what order).
My brother’s instructor used to put my brother’s cigarettes, and later his wristwatch behind the back wheel. Made for really good hill starts!
The Met Office used the “break in the clouds” explanation to explain the Heathrow “record”, ignoring criticism that by amazing co-incidence three jets landed on an unusual approach (West to East) and promptly turned on to a taxiway and blew jet exhausts over the exact spot that the temperature sensor was positioned. These Mexplanations are getting tedious. In other news, some US “records” are held by sensors positioned a few feet from a municipal incinerator, or top of a black roof or in a car-park. They served their purpose, but that purpose was not as a measure of climate, and were then re-purposed to create bogus records to fill newspaper headlines and create climate scares.
More detail on the Heathrow 2015 “record”, including site map and aircraft movements: https://clivebest.com/blog/?p=6721
Don’t know if it’s of any use but by looking at Flightradar24 playback for that day, two RAF Typhoons were operating from that base around that time: Flights CHAOS011 (reg ZJ914) and CHAOS012 (reg ZK377). After a brief exercise over the North Sea, CHAOS011 landed just after 15:10. CHAOS012 landed 15 minutes later.
Of course, it must be sheer coincidence!
A weather event is not Climate.
A normal summer is not Climate Hell.
Putting an electronic measuring device at Heathrow on tarmac, near jet engines, behind a magnifying glass, next to a fire is not science. It is fraud. Move it 5 miles to the countryside and the temp was 36C.
The entire cult of warm and cult of the changing thingy is a fraud.
I had first-hand experience of such temperature anomalies during my working life. I knew this was bs as soon as it was published.
“The Met Office distorts data and lies” is not the surprise. That would be them telling the truth
My kitchen is usually a fairly cool room since it’s north facing. But strangely enough, after I’ve cooked a roast and I leave the oven door open, the kitchen quickly warms up a bit for a while and then fairly quickly the temperature drops again.
Must be climate change – so I’d better stop cooking roasts and start eating raw insects.
All these institutions that have been hollowed out by GangGreen termites must eventually realise that trust, once destroyed, take years of effort to reestablish. Witness also the Zro Covid, Lockdown and “Vaccine” enthusiasts.
So far as the “Climate” scam is concerned, it should be remembered that accurate records for a significant number of years is the exception rather than the rule, so suggesting that some weather event is “Unprecedented” is meaningless at best.
And that is without considering the multitude of proven cases where activist “Scientists” have had their smelly little thumbs on the ‘data’.
So we have Australia’ BOM admitting that under their regime, the temperatures of the past have been ‘discovered’ to be around 1°C colder than originally recorded.
Coming back to 2022 (and before), all the recent ‘unprecedented’ temperatures such as Coningsby are blatantly and deliberately fraudulent. If we had even a few honest politicians, all these MET chancers would have been sacked, long ago.
“Global Temperature” ??? “Warmest year” ???. etc etc . But what does any of that stuff really mean? Is there really such a thing as a “global temperature? If so, how is it calculated?—– But since most of the time we recorded temperatures using thermometers at individual places around the world at different times and mostly only in wealthy western countries (USA, Europe etc), how can we know what temperatures were where we did not have extensive coverage, which was really the case most of the time and over most of the globe? —-The answer is we cannot. Then we started to get temperature data from satellites around 1979, but how can you compare thermometer readings where coverage was sparse from let’s say 1925 or 1845 to satellite data that covers almost the whole planet? —You cannot.. —–So this idea that we have a “warmest year on record” or “warmest since records began” etc is misleading, especially when it is used to promote solutions to some problem that might not even exist, or that might exist but is not much of a problem. On TV I regularly see politicians and bureaucrats, eco activists and assorted “save the planet” people latch onto elements of the unreliable temperature record, like the one this summer where a temperature of 40C was apparently recorded. This ofcourse is what is known as “cherry picking” or “confirmation bias”, where someone only looks for things that support their preconceived idea and ignore everything that doesn’t.— The temperature record of earth is a jumble of data ,adjusted here and there for various anomalies, such as the build up of towns and cities around a site where temperatures may have been recorded for the last 100 years or more, and it is known that towns and cities are warmer, sometimes by several degrees. Out of all of this clutter of guesses, assumptions, missing data and different forms of data collection we are led to believe that some “scientists” know what year was warmer than some other year, often to accuracies of hundredths of a degree, when the thermometers used were never designed for such accuracies. It is also important to bear in mind that if something warms, it does not necessarily mean humans warmed it. To claim humans have warmed something requires evidence, and since there is nothing unusual about current temperatures that would simply be an assumption, and when the assumption is motivated by the desire for certain public policy’s then what we have is a “cautionary tale”.
So either the Met Office lie by sticking to their story, or lie by giving an unbelievable excuse why they didn’t quality check it thoroughly enough?
In 2015 I happened to be in North East New Zealand, when Cyclone Pam caused extreme damage and around 11 deaths in Vanuatu and some damage to other Pacific island states. The MET (using their extreme GangGreen technology) forecasted major problems next for NE New Zealand but, fortunately this turned out to be a nothingburger.
Although we are assured that The Science is absolutely Settled, it is, in reality, anything but. At that time, Richard Betts, now Head of Climate Impacts at the MET Hadley Centre, was presumably charged by his gaffer, Dame Julia Sligo, to occasionally go onto Climate Blogs and fly the GangGreen flag.
On the then excellent Bishop Hill Blog, I pointed out the inadequacies of their forecasts for Pam, the fact that the claimed wind speed was obviously inflated and that severe tropical cyclones were entirely ‘precedented’.
Betts replied pointing out that the attribution of extreme weather arising from burning “fossil” fuels was well established, quoting the UN’s IPCC Report. To which I pointed out that the IPCC’s latest report said nothing of the kind (as contaminated as it is by GangGreen assumptions) and that his quotation was lifted directly from the “Summary for Policymakers”, which is a 100% political document.
We then heard nothing more from Betts, who is obviously not any kind of scientist, just another GangGreen charlatan.