JEREMIAD
on an ending to the world as we have until recently known it
For a time in the mid-to-late 20th century it seemed not inconceivable that the world might be destroyed in some sort of nuclear holocaust. That had certainly been envisaged in such novels as A Canticle for Leibowitz [1] and On the Beach [2].
Now that possibility seems somewhat more remote; though Neville Shute’s postulated Third World War beginning unintendedly in the Middle East continues to seem uncannily prescient.
However, I think it is now more likely that T. S. Eliot had it right [3]:
“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
Beginning roughly in the 15th century, the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment suggested that gaining knowledge and understanding and employing rational thought could bring Improvement to humankind materially as well as intellectually; and indeed there followed centuries of remarkable advances in knowledge and understanding of Nature and the Cosmos, including biology and specifically medicine. Quite commonly these advances were ascribed to impartial self-correcting doings of “science”.
Yet now, well into the 21st century, it happens that what is globally accepted as scientific understanding and knowledge turns out to be plainly and demonstrably contrary to the facts on several matters of enormous human and public importance.
One of those concerns purported global warming and associated climate change. National governments and international bodies and international agreements all promulgate the belief that these claimed changes are being brought about primarily by human activities, in particular the release of carbon dioxide as well as of other greenhouse gases, and other human activities affecting the environment. And yet many decades of accumulated knowledge in geology and related specialties show quite clearly that global temperature and atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are not correlated with one another [4] — one is not the cause of the other.
A second such concern is the global agreement that a sexually transmitted retrovirus, HIV, caused an epidemic of deadly disease (“AIDS”) in the early 1980s and remains such a continuing threat that people thought to be at particular risk, as well as those thought to be infected by the virus, should be treated with medications that are highly toxic [5] .
A third illustration comes from the recent so-called pandemic of COVID-19, when almost all national governments as well as the international World Health Organization (WHO) introduced or mandated “non-pharmaceutical interventions” (NPIs): mask-wearing, social distancing, and quarantining to degrees that sorely damaged economic circumstances, primary and secondary education, and necessary and important social interactions — among other things like hindering “elective” surgeries; even though for some two decades before the advent of COVID-19, all the expert knowledge had been quite clear that NPIs were not effective ways to stop the spread of an airborne respiratory virus [6].
In all three cases, well informed, well qualified maverick experts dissented publicly from the official approaches, citing the pertinent evidence [7], but the authoritative voices so discredited and suppressed the dissents that the general public as well as politicians and policymakers remained largely unaware of the existence of any disagreement with the authoritative views.
Journalism no longer provides safeguards against the general acceptance of misinformation, having abandoned service to the general public in favor of catering to advertisers and profit-making [8]. Scientific journals are no safeguard nowadays against misinformation because the mainstream view, the majority view, exercises hegemony in deciding what to publish. Hence serious dissent on important matters does not get published. How powerfully the majority view controls the intellectual public sphere is Illustrated by the fact that the gists of what I’ve written above was rejected by both the Journal of Controversies in Biomedical Research [9] and the Journal of Controversial Ideas [10].
For most people, there is no feasible alternative to believing either the authoritative voices or — just as biased and unreliable — what becomes virally spread by the undisciplined, unprincipled social media. My own recognition that the authorities are wrong in those three cases comes because my professional academic career was the study of scientific activities, with a particular focus on controversial issues. That provided both the reason to study these issues and the necessary institutional resources of instantly available journals and books; few people have any reason to doubt the authoritative voices on these matters, and very few of those few have the time and resources to inform themselves properly. As just one illustration, I had been interested in the controversy over HIV for some 10 years before I was able to reach a truly informed, evidence-based conclusion.
It seems that the spread of misinformation and disinformation will continue and expand in the absence of any effective hindrances; the long-suggested “Institution of Scientific Judgment”, more commonly “Science Court” [8], shows no sign of being adopted. Instead, machines and robots continue to invade the intellectual environment, as the unreliability of Wikipedia is supplemented by oxymoronic artificial “intelligence”.
One might well see this as the effective end of modern civilization described by Jacques Barzun [12]. That so highly effective and productive a human activity as Western intellectual culture could decay and peter out can also be seen as exemplifying one of Parkinson's Laws [13]. The best known of those laws may be that “work expands to fill the available time”, but Parkinson also noted that when a human activity has attained the peak of its possible performance, there sets in not simply stagnation but actual deterioration (citing the example of the British Navy early in the 20th century).
The suggested possibility that the decay of modern civilization might also mark an effective end to the control of Earth by the human species would provide one possible solution to Fermi's Paradox [14]: “Where are they? If the universe is about 3 times older than our solar system, there have likely been conditions potentially suitable for life on countless planets, on many of which space travel was technically achieved. Why haven't we been visited or “space-mailed”?
One conceivable answer is that species that have achieved the technical capabilities for space travel have failed to achieve successful societies, and decayed or even self-destructed before they could colonize throughout space.
The idea that hubris could bring an end to humankind might not have seemed impossible to Jacob Bronowski, who said the following in his book and video series, The Ascent of Man” [15]: “This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods”.
That last sentence brings to mind the Garden of Eden and the injunction against eating fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. As usual, some large number of different interpretations have been ventured about that prohibition. Whether or not — or to what degree — the written versions of Genesis and the Old Testament reflect direct inspiration from God, the actual human writers were the beneficiaries of some large number of generations of orally transmitted experience of human life and empirically based understanding of human nature, which might well have included the insight that advances in knowledge of the material world and in technology could and would be harnessed for evil purposes as well as for good ones.
“Artificial intelligence” (AI) and cryptocurrencies surely represent something like the culmination of electronic and internet developments, and these mark undesirable and harmful consequences that outweigh by far the supposed benefits parroted by besotted fans.
One of the benefits of the writing-and-books age was that one could be quite sure about some things. Clay tablets, papyrus and vellum scrolls, printed books, of known date and securely preserved, offered a way to detect attempted fakery. In the age of AI, out-and-out faking becomes impossible to detect. Politicians will be shown in “documentaries” doing and saying things that the real people never did or said or never would say or do; but only their confirmed supporters will believe that, while most of the electorate will find it difficult not to give some potential credence to the “documentary”. “Seeing is believing” comes very naturally, and it seems unlikely that the great bulk of humanity will acquire critical facilities some orders of magnitude greater than what is generally now the case.
We may have achieved the effective impossibility of gaining widely accepted genuine truth about anything at all; and thereby is lost any opportunity to achieve agreements through facts and reason — precisely what the Enlightenment seemed to have made possible at the Dawn of Western Civilization.
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[1] Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz, Lippincott, 1959
[2] Nevil Shute, On the Beach, Morrow, 1957; also fashioned into an unusually excellent film directed by Stanley Kramer, 1959; https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053137
[3] “The Hollow Men” by T. S. Eliot, published1925; https://www.owleyes.org/text/the-hollow-men/read/text-of-the-poem
[4] “Climate-change facts: Temperature is not determined by carbon dioxide”; https://scimedskeptic.wordpress.com/2017/05/02/climate-change-facts-temperature-is-not-determined-by-carbon-dioxide;
Richard Lindzen, William Happer & Steven Koonin, “Fossil fuels and greenhouse gases (GHGS) climate science”, April 2024; https://co2coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Lindzen-Happer-Koonin-climate-science-4-24-b.pdf
A recent book is a trustworthy analysis showing that the data in IPCC reports does not gibe with warnings of an “existential threat: Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled (Updated and Expanded Edition): What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesn’t, and Why it Matters, BenBella, 2023;
Other books of climate-change skepticism are listed at “The consensus against human causation of global warming and climate change”, https://scimedskeptic.wordpress.com/2018/03/18/the-consensus-against-human-causation-of-global-warming-and-climate-change.
Trustworthy continuing coverage is, for instance, at the Global Warming Policy Foundation, https://www.thegwpf.org; Climate Etc., https://judithcurry.com; Watts up with that, https://wattsupwiththat.com.
[5] See the indexed bibliography of some 20-odd books and >900 articles at “The case against HIV” (October 2013, last updated December 2017); https://thecaseagainsthiv.net
[6] Stephen Macedo & Frances Lee, In Covid's Wake — How Our Politics Failed Us, Princeton University Press, 2025
[7] Concerning carbon dioxide, there was the Leipzig Declaration, https://web.archive.org/web/20060827154912/http://www.sepp.org/policy%20declarations/LDrevised.html;
concerning HIV, the Group for Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV Hypothesis and its daughter organization Rethinking AIDS — “Virus Myth — a Rethinking AIDS website, https://www.virusmyth.com/aids;
with COVID mis-management, the Great Barrington Declaration, https://gbdeclaration.org.
[8] Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bad News: How woke media is undermining democracy, Encounter Books, 2021.
“Speak truth to power and be ignored, not heard, suppressed: Two books by Batya Ungar-Sargon”; https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/speak-truth-to-power-and-be-ignored
“Bad News: How woke media is undermining democracy”;
https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/bad-news-how-woke-media-is-undermining
[9] https://jcbmr.com/index.php/jcbmr
[10] https://journalofcontroversialideas.org
[11] “Needed: a specifically dedicated SCIENCE Court: Laws (and the legal system) should be compatible with the realities of nature”;
https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/needed-a-specifically-dedicated-science
“Covid-19 mistakes underscore the need for a Science Court”;
https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/covid-19-mistakes-underscore-the
[12] Jacques Barzun, From Dawn To Decadence: 1500 To The Present — 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, Harper Perennial, 2001
[13] C. Northcote Parkinson, Parkinson's Law and Other Studies in Administration, Houghton Mifflin, 1957
[14] https://www.britannica.com/science/Fermi-paradox
[15] Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man, Little, Brown & Co., 1973, p. 187
Brings to light, how insidious the internet has been particularly for the eradication of actual paper documents. Is this different from the "burning of documents/libraries"?!