The new epoch
Cop26 marked the definitive transition from a national and democratic order to a global and technocratic one.
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Glasgow has just played host to the crowning event of a new epoch in world history; the defining moment of the times to come.
Such moments in history are rare. In 1648, the Peace of Westphalia heralded the age of the nation state and recognised the sovereignty of both its external borders and its internal domestic sphere. In 1815, the Congress of Vienna heralded a century of (relative) peace and cooperation between Europe's great empires, as they sought to turn their energies inwards towards the often cruel and violent suppression of emergent social movements. In 2021, Cop26 at Glasgow heralded the new era of global, supranational, technocratic governance; and the end of the era of the sovereign, democratic nation state.
Of course, this has been a gradual transition. Globalisation is a process and not a single event; its path can be traced through a host of treaties that have gradually eroded the role of the nation state and assimilated it into continental and global bodies (EU, Nafta, UN, WHO, WTO, WEF, etc). The significance of Cop26 is that it represents a crowning event for all the world's elite that gathered in Glasgow; a watershed point at which we can definitively say that we have passed from one historical age to another.
Through the twin shock doctrines of climate catastrophism and Covid, man has found his old rights and roots and liberties and sureties swept away, in a far more complete and clinical fashion than ever witnessed before through war or brute conquest. He finds his nation and its democracy dissipated amid the clamour for 'global governance' to meet 'global challenges', as Covid and climate measures are rolled out in near-lockstep fashion by almost all governments across the world.
As a population readily assented to mass house arrest – faces covered, arms bare for the needle and smartphone ready – Cop26 served as the coronation of the global technocrat. Covid and climate catastrophism are his orb and sceptre. It is fitting that Corona is Latin for 'crown' (the Latin word vīrus originally denoted snake venom; Coronavirus therefore translates roughly as 'venomous crown').
Cop26 has set the tone perfectly for the new epoch. Some 30,000 jetted in from all over the world to rail against global air travel. Just two months after ordinary Britons faced price hikes at the pumps with the introduction of E10 petrol, US President Biden pulled up to Cop26 in a twenty-car motorcade; itself flown in from across the Atlantic. One Green council leader caught a flight from Brighton. Of course, these 30,000 attendees – including thousands from countries with higher Covid rates, lower vaccination rates and allegedly dangerous variants – were entirely exempt from the SNP Government's vaccine passport scheme to which all Scots are subject. Meanwhile, all around the sealed Cop26 bubble at Pacific Quay, ordinary Glaswegians were made to mask-up, socially distance, track and trace, show their papers for a host of events, and submit to the mass vaccination campaign.
'One rule for them and another for us' is clearly the order of the day.
Yet there are far deeper contradictions and darker facets to the new epoch than mere hypocrisy. It preaches nature, yet it divorces man from both nature and his own nature in a more total way than any past age of human history. We are told that man must be corralled into the artificial, plastic and concrete world of the smart city so that nature can be rewilded; that he must submit to ever more mass and alienating forms of social organisation. He must have few children, or none at all. He must surrender the relative independence of his car for the mass transit of public transport. He must cast off his roots and identity and assimilate into the urban melting pot. He must trade the deep and biological connections of family and kin for the cold and contractual relations of the modern conurbation. From infancy, he must surrender his natural immunity to the artificial injection of the needle, and submit to it ritually every few months now as an adult. He must cease to be – for all intents and purposes – a natural being, in order to save nature and his fellow man from himself.
The totalitarian nature of Covid and climate orthodoxy constitutes a new sort of public religion. It fills the void left by the dismantlement of public Christianity, and feeds a deep need within mankind for penance; for ritual and symbol; for authority, and the sacred, and the greater-than-self. The hysterical, bizarre (and clearly very well-funded) antics of groups like Extinction Rebellion mark them out as modern-day flagellants. The new movement even has its own child prophet in Greta Thunberg – a "prophet raised up by God" according to one former Archbishop of Canterbury.
Yet such fervour is not the preserve of an activist fringe. Millions of ordinary Britons eagerly bashed pots and pans and clapped their hands and sang praise to the NHS, at a time when churches were forced by the state to close their doors to worshippers. A new pantheon of key workers was erected. To the modern layperson, scientists comprise a white-coated, priestly caste which are trusted on mere authority much like the medieval priests or the ancient druids of old (of course, nobody can form a truly deep, informed and independent opinion on all the complex issues that the modern world throws at him – however, he ought to have the honesty to admit it, and not attempt to conceal his ignorance, and his deference to authority, behind nonsense statements about how he 'believes in science', and the like).
The new religious zeal permeates beyond Covid and climate catastrophism, and into all aspects of the modern zeitgeist. The act of taking the knee – of genuflection – in support of the 'Black Lives Matter' movement is a good example of this. Man no longer bows before God, but before other men. As a non-Christian religion, the new orthodoxy has no place for grace; only self-righteousness and condemnation. One denounces and is in turn denounced. Consider the case of cricketer Azeem Rafiq, who was given very widespread coverage for his accusations of anti-Asian racism in English cricket, and gave testimony before MPs; only to make a grovelling apology after some of his own decade-old messages came to light.
Therefore, just as Cop26 marked the definitive transition from a national and democratic order to a global and technocratic one; it also marks the definitive transition from public Christianity to a new religious orthodoxy, which is itself a rather incoherent mish-mash of dogmatic, authoritarian secularism and quasi-pagan earth worship.
In many ways, it doesn't merely do away with the commandments and principles of Christianity, but actually inverts them. The Christian command to go forth and multiply, to cherish children as a blessing; is replaced with a call to childlessness. The Christian call to stewardship over the earth, "to dress it and to keep it" (Genesis 2:15) is replaced with a call to "rewild" the earth. Just four months prior to Cop26, the World Economic Forum announced the Scottish Government's plans to give thirty per cent of Scottish land "back to nature".
Over half a century ago, the French philosopher Jacques Ellul wrote these prescient words:
"A consequence of technical propaganda manipulations is the creation of an abstract universe, representing a complete reconstruction of reality in the minds of its citizens...
"Men fashion images of things, events, and people which may not reflect reality but which are truer than reality. These images are based on news items which, as is the case in much of the world, are 'faked'. Their purpose is to form rather than to inform."
It is on this basis that the New Epoch was ushered in at Glasgow's Pacific Quay in November 2021.
Man now lives in the abstract, reconstructed universe of Covid and climate catastrophism. His means of escape is both effortless and near-impossible; immediately within him and inconceivably distant: that he should recover his senses; exit the digital world of constant information and propaganda; and perceive his world around him, unmediated, through his own eyes and mind.
