A trip to York yesterday took my mind off the continuing turmoil that is the everlasting diet of news disseminators and consumers. A visit to Ken Spelman’s bookshop on Micklegate generally comes first. Bookshops of this calibre are havens of tranquillity indeed, although my visit was interrupted by some guy who came in expecting to find his wife there, meanwhile protesting that they had more books at home than the shop itself and that he didn’t need any more. What a wozzack, as we might say colloquially: you can never get enough books. I came away with Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained, which I hope will fill in a few gaps for me. At £6 I’m not minded to worry too much if I’m still left pondering the mystery of consciousness. It may just be a trick of the imagination. At the Oxfam bookshop down the road I bought John Gray’s Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions, published in 2004 and comprising some of his articles for the New Statesman. His first article in this collection concludes ‘Believers in progress are seeking from technology what they once looked for in political ideologies, and before that in religion: salvation from themselves.’ That article is dated April 9th, 1999—the eve of the millennium, now a generation ago.
Coincidentally yesterday I received an email from an outfit called ‘Energy for Humanity’ which was headed in strictly layperson’s terms PETITION TO INCLUDE NUCLEAR IN THE EU SUSTAINABLE FINANCE TAXONOMY (caps. in the original). We can live in hope can’t we? Isn’t this exactly what Gray was railing against, not secularism v. religion but secularism as religion? Redemption through technology, a kind of mass indulgence scheme that buys us individuals out of responsibility? Also, and fittingly in this particular case an impossibility given the short timescales on the climate change front and long timescales on delivering new nuclear. At least Energy for Humanity were honest enough to admit that their research was funded by EDF—although, of course, that didn’t influence their editorial control. I’m looking forward to reading the rest of Gray’s book. Yesterday’s heresy may be today’s fake news and tomorrow’s truth, and then we’ll find that what goes round comes round all over again. Meanwhile, some of us will be privileged (or not) to witness how nature deals with these anthropocentric dilemmas.
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