We cannot afford to take rigid positions on alternative power and against the EU, writes TONY KINSELLA
NOSTALGIA OFFERS us fuzzy cocoons whereas reality poses stark challenges. We can handle both, as long as we remember to distinguish between them.
One of the many oddities of a Catholic secondary school I passed through was its attitude to religion. It was really a state school, teachers were paid by the State and taught the state curriculum, but it operated in a building owned by a religious order. The vast majority of the teachers were lay, and of teaching priests the better ones taught exam subjects, while the B Team taught religion.
One of these grabbed our attention one afternoon by warning that “we would soon go out into the world and meet temptations”.
We were momentarily riveted – were we about to be told the whereabouts of Dublin’s nymphomaniac temptresses?
Unfortunately not, instead we would “meet people who appeared to be normal” until they “reached into their tweed jackets to offer a free pamphlet”. This was the moment of perdition, for they were “communists”.
Mick O’Riordan, the late Communist Party leader, laughed (he was wearing a tweed jacket) when, years later, I related the priest’s warning. He did, however, point out that Ireland’s handful of communists always sold their publications.
There is something nostalgically attractive about the absolute faiths of the priest and the communist. The problem was that their faiths were mutually exclusive. One had an absolute, if not uncritical, faith in the Soviet Union. The other believed that the world should become Catholic. They couldn’t both have been right, and maybe neither of them was.
It is almost 20 years since the USSR imploded. More importantly than the death of a state, this marked the demise of one global doctrinaire model.
The Catholic model struggles to come to terms with the statistical and ethical challenges posed by effective globalisation.
There are more than 6 billion of us on our planet today. That figure sort of includes about 2 billion Christians, 1.6 billion Muslims, 1 billion Hindus, 400 million Buddhists, and maybe 20 million Jews, depending on how you count.
Can Christians be viewed as a single bloc? If Roman Catholics, the various Protestant and Orthodox religions are all viewed as separate and competitive entities, the picture changes.
How do you count atheists, agnostics, non-believers and those who no longer practice any religion?
Nobody offers a proven monopoly on universal truth. Democracy should ensure that each of us has the freedom to explore, and embrace or reject, our personal beliefs.
There is something in us all that hankers after absolute truths, just as there is something in our hunter-gatherer inherited genetic code that urges us to consume as many fats and sugars as possible when they are available, lest we starve on the morrow.
The former exposes us to intolerance and, almost inevitably, to traumatic disappointment. The latter goes some distance towards explaining our obesity epidemic. We have to face the awkward reality that some of our inherited predispositions may threaten our survival.
Most businesses are quite happy, and successful, with profit margins in the 5-10 per cent range and many large retail outlets do very nicely on even tighter margins. Yet our stock markets pursued annual margins of 15 per cent and higher. In this doctrinaire pursuit of the impossible we allowed them to neglect their essential role of renting capital to those with good projects and products. Now we all have to live with the consequences.
Annual GDP growth of 5 per cent sounds wonderfully attractive until you do the simple sum that achieving it involves doubling national wealth every 20 years or so. Can we seriously anticipate a five-fold increase in wealth every century?
Every additional 1 per cent of economic growth used to trigger an equivalent rise in energy consumption. Although developed economies escaped from that 1:1 ratio in the early 90s, and the emerging economies did so around 2005, economic growth still requires additional energy supplies. US internet centres with their ever-humming servers in climate controlled buildings could consume 2 per cent of that nation’s electricity in 2009.
The energy/economy/climate debate would seem to attract more than its fair share of absolutists. Many who advocate renewable energy sources and semi-autonomous production systems decry heavy infrastructure as the devil’s spawn. Their disdain is reciprocated by some champions of heavy investment, be it in oil exploration or nuclear power. Yet experience suggests we need both.
Almost 20 per cent of Denmark’s electricity is wind generated, but over 60 per cent comes from coal-fired stations. Denmark is also integrated into the sophisticated Nordic grid where Norwegian and Swedish hydroelectricity blends with Finnish and Swedish nuclear supplies.
Ireland could become a major producer and exporter of wind-, wave- and tide-generated electricity. We would have to invest in the appropriate technologies and in the (political) creation of a sophisticated European grid. Such a grid where nations and regions confided their energy supply security to others presupposes a common political structure of governance.
If human survival depends on the success of renewable energies, then we will need lots of small generators, sophisticated infrastructures, and a European Union. Now there’s a blend of realities capable of driving most absolutists even more wild than usual.
We have inherited, largely through the struggles and sacrifices of our forebears, not only the right to make individual and collective choices, but the duty to do so.
In making those choices we need to distinguish between nostalgia and reality.
Ouch.