Watching reality win

In the end, it will be Christianity or chaos ~ and then it will be Christianity

Reality is one of the names of God, and in the struggle between opinions and reality, there is only ever one winner. Which is why for some years now, in discussions with nearest and dearest about the madness associated with gender identity, I have been confidently saying that the madness cannot last. Here in England, thanks be to God, reality with respect to questions around gender is now asserting itself strongly. The Cass report is the watershed, and now the NHS guidance robustly reasserts the reality of sex. Good.

I expect the following areas of mainstream consensus around nonsense to topple in the next few years, and possibly in even fewer years than I expect. This is a ranty post, so I’m not going to be footnoting or referencing!

1. ‘Climate change’ - or, to be precise, what I think of as CAGW, Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming - and the insistence upon net zero carbon emissions. The science around CAGW is much more complex and contested than conventionally accepted. This could run along as a mostly peripheral issue for most people because it didn’t have much direct effect. Now that the net zero ideologues are gutting industries, causing massive price rises domestically, and significantly curbing all sorts of human freedoms people are paying more attention, there is more at stake. The political will to resist net zero is going to strengthen, so the motivation for assessing the science dispassionately will arrive on the scene - and then the IPCC house of cards will collapse. I just wonder which western country will be the first to break ranks.

2. Immigration, and the cluster of issues associated with that problem, around the idea and legitimacy of the nation state (national conservatism) alongside the interchangeability of different human population groups and the moral equivalence of different cultures. This ideological consensus is already rupturing because the consequences are becoming so obvious - the levels of recent immigration so high, the associated pains too extreme. In particular the way in which the governing class doesn’t simply ignore the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the population but looks upon them with scorn and vilipends their moral worth, this is building such a pile of tinder! As readers of my HTR sequence will know, I am very concerned that when this delusion breaks down the consequence will be a scapegoating of the Muslim population. If that is to be avoided, there needs to be a healthy alternative available.

3. Technological progress and economic growth. Essentially this is just the Limits to Growth argument, but in the context of international striving for the remaining resources. We have passed the pinnacle of our present civilisation and have been running on spiritual inertia for some time. Our children and grandchildren will be sifting through the rubble. That could be a good life, and Tolkien has already written a guide for the necessary spiritualities, but only for those who make it through the bottleneck to get there. Yes I’m sympathetic to the Olduvai gorge hypothesis.

4. Secularism. Even Richard Dawkins is realising what is at stake, and that straw in the wind is the harbinger of a revival of Christianity in the West. This is for the simple reason that it offers the best fit to reality - it is the truest understanding that we have - and that is because, as McGilchrist in particular has so magnificently demonstrated, reality is relational. The relationship is prior to the relata. As the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of secular perspectives becomes more and more apparent, people will cast around for better guides through troubling times. We shall put our hands into the hands of God once more, that shall be for us a better light.

That will do for now. We are in the midst of the rapids, with battered canoes and splintered paddles. Let us pray.