The new Dark Age

Only fools make dramatic predictions about the future, so let me tell you that within the next 30 years someone, somewhere will let off a nuclear bomb.

Make no mistake, I find my own prediction offensive but still feel compelled to make it. And I make a second prediction: the person who sets it off will be an anti-modernist.

But before I get on to anti-modernism, let’s briefly deal with the question of nuclear weapons.

We all seem to have become a bit blasé about their presence. This doubtless stems from the combination of the fact that a) a nuke hasn’t been unleashed in living memory… unless you’re over 70 and b) they are seen mainly as creatures of a Cold War that ended.

But this is a false sense of security. The history of weapons is that over time their use spreads. Once one warrior got an iron sword everyone else wanted one to replace their now-obsolete bronze one.

Today, there are thousands of warheads knocking about and the in the long term “non-proliferation” is doomed to fail. Most nukes are fairly secure, but it only takes a single one to escape into the hands of a skilled terrorist to doom a city and cripple a nation.

I veer off the point This post is not about nukes, it’s about the rise of what I call anti-modernism. Others may have identified the trend, but I’m not well read enough to have noticed so this is my home-grown take on it.

The dark ages, we are told, were filled with superstitions and beliefs. Then came the age of Enlightenment when logic and science and rationality became our masters.

Everything went a bit mental in the 20th Century when the old cultural anchors were removed without deploying new ones. Welcome to postmodernism. But it seems humans aren’t coping well with rudderlessness on the ocean of life.

Rather than returning to the bosom of rationality though, populations are driving Richard Dawkins nuts by retreating to pre-modern ways of thinking. An extreme example are medieval-minded Islamic fundamentalists. However, this is absolutely not something confined to Muslims. It’s global. Only 39% of Americans accept Darwin’s theory of evolution. Same story in Britain. New Age therapies and activities are spring up around the world. Aliens crash-landed at Roswell. And and and.

These are just different sides of the same anti-modernist coin. While some anti-modernists deliberately eschew modern technology, most are perfectly happy with their TVs and iPhones. They probably think of themselves as perfectly modern. They aren’t. The way they think is perfectly old. Their synapses dance to the tune of superstition and unsubstantiated belief, not to the jingle of logic and reason.

If you start looking out for it, anti-modernism can be found oozing out all over the shop.

Should we care? Well, yes.

At least in theory, a rational approach to things does much to limit conflict. We should only fight over things for a reason. Objective, provable reason doesn’t come into it much when you’re a Spanish Inquisitor turning the screw on a heretic.

In an anti-modern world there will be many, many more reasons to hate and to fight. This does not bode well for a world with an exploding human population wanting to make themselves richer while chasing limited natural resources.

As the last African witch is killed, so a new wave of irrational killing will begin. The pre-modern gives way to the anti-modern. Only this time they’ve got nukes.