The world is large and old - at least by local experience - and humanity is diverse.

It is not often that large-scale crises are due to intellectual error, but a single erroneous belief runs through all of the successive delusions of the past decade. With few exceptions, both left and right seem to think that history is a directional process whose end point - after many unfortunate detours - will be the worldwide duplication of people very like themselves. . .

But whereas this confidence-boosting notion was still genuinely believed a decade ago, today it is a kind of comfort blanket against an unfamiliar world. The reality, which is that western power is in retreat nearly everywhere, is insistently denied. Yet the rise of China means more than the emergence of a new great power. Its deeper import is that the ideologies of the past century - neoliberalism just as much as communism - are obsolete. Belief systems in which the categories of western religion are reproduced in the guise of pseudo-science, they are redundant in a world where the most rapidly advancing nation state has never been monotheist. . .

For secular western intellectuals to accept this fact would rob their life of meaning. Huddled in the tattered blanket of historical teleology, which tells them they are the leading lights of humanity, they screen out any development that demonstrates their increasing irrelevance. Religion is resurgent in many parts of the world, not least emerging powers such as Brazil and China, but for the secular intelligentsia this is just an unfortunate lag, a temporary setback in humanity's slow march to join them on the sunlit uplands of reason. The hysterical stridency of evangelical atheism - one of the most characteristic phenomena of the Noughties - is symptomatic of a pervasive cognitive dissonance. Like everyone else, these intellectuals assert their beliefs all the more adamantly when the only reason for holding them is a well-founded suspicion that they are not true. . .

The intellectual default of politicians cannot be remedied by returning to the ideologies of the past. It is shared by much of the public, and comes from a chronic inability to engage with reality. . .

But the omens are not encouraging. The make-believe that surrounds climate change - epitomised in the empty statements of intent regarding unachievable goals that will be the only outcome of the Copenhagen meeting - shows that the biggest challenge for the future is being evaded. It looks as if we may be wandering in the ruins of the Noughties for some time.

One of the reasons that heretics intrigue me is that the debilitating effects of staying inside the canon make one vulnerable to catastrophic failure as well as ordinary embarrassment: it makes one provincial. As an antidote I study weird science, the historical views of distant cultures and other alternative (contra-factual) histories including those found in speculative fiction. It ain't necessarily so.

Still, one must resist every temptation to conclude that the search has been a success and that knowledge has at last been gained. Everything one knows is still wrong.

I find this comforting in an odd way. I never arrive but I wasn't going anywhere in any event, I'm just out for a stroll.

Update: Nice Rant

. . .everything taking place in Copenhagen is contrived. The outcome of climate talks -- no treaty, no emissions reductions -- was known in advance. And yet participants pretend there is an unfolding drama. As such, Copenhagen is history's first completely postmodern global event. It's a festival of phoniness. . .

Lacking any power to effect reality, Copenhagen has thus become a kind of spiritual pilgrimage. But the pilgrimage is postmodern and the faith is bad.

European delegates will pretend to have reduced emissions and other nations will pretend to believe them. Obama will promise to reduce emissions by 17 percent even though he has neither the votes nor a policy to do so. China will issue a promise to reduce the growth of its emissions even though it is identical to business-as-usual projections.

The result is what the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche described over a century ago as cultural nihilism, something that happens when the old systems of meaning -- God, progress, nature, science -- lose their power. We no longer believe in them, but we continue to behave as though we do.

Nihilism is the phenomenon of going to church, saying confession, and sometimes even praying to God, even though you no longer believe that God will do anything for you. Climate nihilism is the phenomenon of going to Copenhagen, promising to reduce emissions and pretending to believe the promises, even neither though you nor anybody around you has any intention, plan or funding to do so. . .

lying would require, as Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt observed in his essay "On Bullshit," a concern for the truth that is nowhere evident. The nihilist/bullshitter keeps going to his church -- either of God or of Science -- and keeps making promises without care for whether he can keep them.

In a world that appears to be increasingly without meaning, the nihilist can claim that something means anything, and that nothing means everything. As free-floating signifiers in a simulacrum, images and words can be used outside of their original context by the nihilist/bullshitter for whatever purpose he chooses.