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THE COMING DARK AGE
Newsletter
January, 2004
1. INTRODUCTION
This month's edition describes how President Bush seems to be refuting
all the predictions of a coming dark age.
Past editions of the newsletter are at the following address:
http://www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk/Newsletter.htm
I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the
latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be
interested.
Marc Widdowson
2. PRESIDENT BUSH - WARRIOR OF THE COMING DARK AGE
Environmentalism is a classic illustration of the way western
civilisation is heading for a dark age. Through environmentalism the
west tends to prohibit its own economic progress. The industrial
revolution, of course, could never have got started if today's
environmental regulations had been in force. All those beautiful green
fields that were covered with houses and factories belching out thick
black smoke! It would never have been allowed. The environmentalists
have a pessimistic, static view of the world. They do not appreciate
that the human race learns from its mistakes and that the more control
our technology gives us over the environment, the better we are able to
protect it. For example, if human technological progress continues, one
day we may be able to put our factories and industry into space, and
open up new areas for humans to live in orbit or on other planets, and
all the environmentalist worries will become completely irrelevant.
Anyway, environmentalism is what you would expect for a declining
civilisation - that utter failure of imagination. Therefore it was a
shock to dark age theory when George W Bush became President of the US
and one of his first acts was to reject the Kyoto Treaty. President
Bush said that he was not going to hold back America's economic growth
just because of some half-baked environmentalist theories. This is not
what you expect in a declining civilisation! President Bush seemed to
be taking America in the reverse direction.
Since then, President Bush has had an uncanny habit of contradicting
dark age predictions. Sometimes I almost feel that he has read my book
and is deliberately contradicting each and every point. I said that it
was an illustration of the west's weakness that after the first Gulf
War and after the Kosovo crisis, Saddam Hussein and President Milosevic
were left in power - the allies did not leave Hitler in power after the
Second World War. However, Milosevic was then handed over to the war
crimes tribunal, and Bush, as we all know, launched a new war on Iraq,
winning it easily and eventually even capturing Saddam. (It is
surprising that Saddam, with all his resources, and with all the
warning that he had, never came up with a better escape plan than
hiding in a hole in the ground.) Not just in Iraq, but also in
Afghanistan, President Bush has shown that he is not afraid to pull his
punches and is determined to project America's power around the world.
He is reasserting American and western hegemony.
I thought that it was a clear indication of a civilisation in decline
that the highly ambitious space programme of the early 1970s had been
almost completely dismantled, and that there was no sign of humans
returning to the moon. It seemed like the way the Romans invented the
waterwheel but never brought it into widespread use. Future historians
will say:- western civilisation landed on the moon, but somehow it
never capitalised on its achievements - it was only after western
civilisation collapsed and the dark age arrived that space travel
became commonplace. But what happens next? President Bush declares that
America is going to return to the moon and go on to Mars (manned
missions).
Our eschewal of nuclear power is another example similar to the Romans
and the waterwheel. If we were a vigorous civilisation we would take up
nuclear power on a massive scale, so that electricity became incredibly
cheap and things like launching spacecraft into orbit would be
trivially inexpensive. But we are put off by those
environmentalist-style fears - fear of the unknown basically. If
nuclear power had existed four or five hundred years ago, in the days
of Queen Elizabeth I, private individuals like Sir Walter Raleigh would
have developed it of their own accord, not worrying about governmental
regulations which wouldn't have existed. They would have got the serfs
on their estates to build nuclear power stations, so creating a
fantastic new source of energy. Of course, nuclear power wasn't
available then, but they did basically the same, with windmills and
waterwheels. If we combined their attitudes with our modern technology,
nuclear power would now be expanding as rapidly as those medieval
technologies once did. In fact, we have anti-nuclear regulation, which
is a sign of our stagnation and decadence. Then what happens? President
Bush declares that he is going to scrap all the safety regulation that
now holds back nuclear power. He is going to let private entrepreneurs
do what they like, just as they did hundreds of years ago. Of course,
they may create quite a mess at first, but in the long run the whole
human race will feel the benefit. This Bush initiative is even more
surprising, given that Bush is an oil man, and so seems to have much to
lose if nuclear power takes over.
Many people feel that a dark age could not come again because of our
modern technology. The best argument against that seemed to be the case
of Somalia, whose government and economy collapsed over ten years ago.
Since 1990, Somalia has been in a dark age - and this is despite
globalisation, satellite communications and the rest of it. In
principle, there is no reason why the whole world could not follow
Somalia into a dark age. But recently American-sponsored talks have
secured peace among Somalia's warring factions, and they have agreed to
set up a new government. Yet again, President Bush seems to be turning
back the tide of the dark age.
So what does this mean? Is the Bush presidency putting an end to the
whole dark age thesis? Possibly. But I have always said that the
progression to a dark age is never smooth. History is constantly
fluctuating. There will be periods of seeming recovery even though the
overall trend is downwards. After all, in the 6th century AD, the Roman
emperor Justinian reconquered large parts of the empire, recovering
them from barbarian control. But the Roman Empire disappeared in the
long run. We need to see whether a truly stable peace returns to
Somalia. We need to see whether the US does actually make it to Mars,
and if it does whether it is more than an academic-governmental
gimmick. We need to see whether the American conquests in Afghanistan,
Iraq and other places to come, actually lead to a true civil peace like
the Roman and British empires, or whether it leads to an ongoing
Vietnam-like situation. It may turn out that far from turning back the
dark age, President Bush is actually bringing it on. Maybe he is
leading the world into the kind of warlike free-for-all that is the
basic definition of a dark age. If so he is to be commended. The dark
age is the first step towards the reinvigoration of human progress.