Dear Editor,
The Through the Glass Darkly (GA, Feb 20th ) column finishes with the claim “There is absolutely no way to drastically reduce carbon emissions in only 10 years.... without the appalling prospect of a massive global recession, which will impact the greatest on the poorest on the planet.”
Given the fuzzy logic of a column dealing with such generalisations as ‘Judeo-Christian’ and ‘traditional religion’ it is hardly surprising that it concludes by invoking absolutes, notwithstanding its side excursions into references to ‘science’ as though that word also embraced some absolute singularity despite its covering multitudinous theoretical speculations on approximations to possibilities as our sense organs coupled to our cranial processors, magnified by our ramifying technologies, attempt to unravel the mysteries of human existence without resort to assumptions unbased on evidence.
It seems to me there may actually be ways “..to drastically reduce carbon emissions in only 10 years..”, and even to do so “.. without the appalling prospect of a massive global recession, which will impact the greatest on the poorest on the planet..”, and that the failure to attempt the effort required will be the result of continuing to abdicate our responsibilities to future generations, and the continuing of our feckless mé féinist thinking fed by the indoctrinated wisdom of ‘greed is good’, ‘I’m all right, Jack’, ‘there is no such thing as society’ ubiquitous neoliberal theologising of finance capital ideology under the deified Invisible Hand of the Market uber a££€$; a.k.a. Oscar Wilde’s definition of rampant cynicism as being the belief system of someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, i.e. the elevation of the great god Moolah to supreme being in our pantheon of assessments of worth.
In some quarters solutions have been proposed under the shorthand label of a Green New Deal, referring as it does to FDR’s attempts to wrestle with the enormity of finance capital’s ca$ino-capita£i$t implosion which created the Great Depression after the squander£U$t of the Roaring Twenties. Meanwhile that same capitalism was indulging itself in the global arms race that fed European fascism and culminated in the mushroom stew of Hiroshima and their collective lunacy of ye olde napalm-raining Cold War, a demonically lucrative brainwave the usual suspects seem determined to resume.
The reason it is unlikely is due to the extent of the vested interests of greed, megalomanic militarist Mars-worship (often masquerading as Judeo-Christian crusades for ‘democracy and human rights’ ), the power of group-think conformity lest boat-rocking sink our sacred careers, the slow pace of our emergence from religious wishful thinking of some celestial father-figure wedded to our patriarchic societies galloping to our rescue while we light candles in the dark. Examples of this resistance to the necessitated changes range from the orchestrated smears against Corbyn to our east, Sanders to our west, and even the terror of our local complacent evolutionary dinosaurs and tories at the moderate democratic proposals of SF, which are reminiscent of apartheid Unionism’s militarising of the 1960’s civil rights campaigns for a semblance of civic equality in the stagnant north east, and the failures of imagination in post-Lemass Dublin.
As has been predicted for decades, these global crises are indeed coming to a locality near us all, and at an accelerating pace.
Yours,
Damien Flinter,
The Regressive Hypocrite Party,
Headford,
Co Galway
