WHERE THE TRUTH LIES

We search out, or are assailed by, torrents of “information” on the great issues of the day from the media or from the internet. Many of these issues are complex and beyond easy mastery. We listen to “opinion-formers”, often respected figures, but in time we discover their views are slanted, selective and partisan. How much would we prefer if issues were cut and dry, with a right and a wrong answer! But that is to ask for the Moon.

ISIL beheads a Western hostage

A current and gruesome case in point is the search for the truth about what the world can do about the activities of ISIL, the Sunni Muslim insurrection in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. The insurrection is directed against Sunni moderates, the Shia and any non-Sunnis living in these countries. It is jihadist, seeking to impose the full rigour of Sharia law and restore the long-defunct Caliphate. ISIL seems to have a core of support and I do not know enough about how badly these people have been governed hitherto to judge whether their insurrection has any justification. ISIL’s methods of terrorism disgust the West, mass shootings, beheadings, crucifixions, bombings, abductions and cruel tortures but much of that is the small change of Muslim Fundamentalism and is beyond outside Western influence. As a general rule, the West should leave the Muslim world to sort out its own sectarian problems and vigorously prevent them spilling over into our Western life. 

Military intervention is being loudly advocated but a proper caution is evident. The US has allied itself with some questionable Arab states against ISIL and is using its air power. The UK is confining its efforts to air support in Iraq and no doubt will have some local success. Yet a decisive outcome probably needs troops on the ground for the winning side; I am sure the West should stay clear of any such involvement and confine itself to assisting “moderate Muslims” - if that is not a contradiction in terms. Cameron should remember the painful Afghan and Iraqi precedents and how opposed the House of Commons was to a proposed intervention in Syria in 2013. Arab commitments tend to become open-ended and difficult to exit with scant political benefit earned. A victory for ISIL would certainly be highly undesirable and regressive, but would it pose any higher a threat to British or even wider Western interests than already exists? I doubt it.

More peaceful, but nonetheless alarming and close to home, has been the debate about the future of Scotland. Tossed into the wordy stew have been highly contentious statistics about the growth rate of the Scottish economy, about revenues from North Sea oil, about the fairness or otherwise of devolution arrangements, about taxation powers and about defence. The Scots happily voted 55%/45% in favour of the Union and independence is no longer an issue. Not only Her Majesty purred with pleasure (and relief) yet the wider governance of the United Kingdom remains a live issue and wise heads are needed to strike the right balance. Radical constitutional changes are inevitable to protect exclusively English matters and to reform the second chamber. The core SNP ideologues are now irreconcilable but they may in time revert to being an eccentric minority.

Cameron, Clegg and Miliband - Wise Men to trust?

Cameron has set up an “impartial” commission to examine these matters. Its final recommendations will always be a judgement favouring some sides and rejecting other sides of the argument. That elusive quality, absolute Truth, will not make an appearance.

Our perplexities are not much diminished when the issue is a scientifically measurable one like Global Warming and Climate Change. As far as Global Warming is concerned, there appears to be a scientific consensus that the average temperature of the world has risen about 0.8 C from 1905 to 2007 and that this rise is attributable to human activity largely thanks to carbon-dioxide emissions from power generation but also from butane emissions and deforestation. A few deny the accuracy of these measurements or challenge the methodology but much of this is established fact. Global Warming is an inevitable by-product of industrialisation, given current technologies, and most nations are not prepared to surrender the benefits of their industrial revolutions.

The controversy sharpens when “experts” pronounce upon what is to be done. Global Warming is a matter of degree: at what pace are carbon-dioxide emissions rising, how quickly will the polar ice-caps melt, what are sensible targets? A hundred conflicting answers emerge and dozens of policies to limit “greenhouse gasses”. The most damaging gas is butane but about one-third of butane emissions are delivered by farting cows, who will take some controlling. The answer, say the Greens, is to stop eating meat, not a policy with much appeal to me. 

While I can see the point of phasing out coal fired generation and I vaguely would like to see the planet saved, I am repelled by the proponents of Global Warming and Climate Change – the sandals and nut-cutlet brigade, the haters of capitalism and material progress, the scientists with a vested interest in exaggeration. The umbrella organisation gloating over Global Warming is the IPCC (Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change) working under the auspices of the UN, a majority of whose members are “developing”.

Surprise, surprise, when this body underwrote the infamous Kyoto Protocols, the proposition was that developed nations should be obliged to cut down their emissions at vast cost while developing countries should be exempt. Since the so-called developing countries included China and India, both huge producers of greenhouse gasses, it was inevitable that the US should not sign up to a massive loss of competitiveness. George W Bush was heavily criticised but he was quite right; irredeemably wet Europe of course signed on the dotted line at a heavy cost to its citizens. This debate will run and run.

Climate change propaganda

The world is always in conflict and we are born contrarian. Almost 80 years ago W. Macneile Dixon in his eloquent Gifford Lectures, given at Glasgow University, described The Human Situation;

Look where you will, the contraries, the antinomies confront you – the animate and the inanimate, heat and cold, summer and winter, day and night, body and spirit, man and woman, thought and the thing, appearance and reality, the conscious and the unconscious, the limited and the boundless, continuity and discontinuity, time and eternity.

Nature has ordained that we shall ever be troubled, puzzled and perplexed.

SMD

8.10.14

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2014