Despite their usual harsh rightwing ideology, the editors of the Washington Times came up with a curious editorial they wrote under the title: “Shivering implications of the UN’s climate confab COP27,” and the subtitle: “Only the coldhearted choose 'green' ideology over human survivability.” It was published on November 10, 2022.
The editors discuss facts, and offer opinions with regard
to Britain’s difficulties in providing the comfort of a warm winter for its
citizens during the coming season. This bucking of the ideology which says
survival to the fittest, forces us to ask the question: Does Britain – or any
country for that matter – owe its citizens a comfortable living?
In trying to answer that question, we find ourselves
taking a long detour through the uncharted territory of unsettled science. Here
is how that goes:
A concept that baffles scientists enormously is time.
Many dare to say that time is the product of our imagination because it has no
tangible existence — i.e. it has no physical existence. And yet, it so happens
that in nearly 100 percent of the mathematical operations we perform in physics
or the humanities, the X axis on the Cartesian Graph is made to represent time.
Thus, Time may be intangible, but it certainly is ubiquitous.
While that sort of discussion comes up from time to time
in science tutorials, what should be of equal interest and should come up in
the tutorials of the humanities, is the concept of debt. That’s because,
like time, debt has no physical existence. Yes, debt is not represented on the
X axis of the Cartesian Graph as often as time, but that’s because time often
substitutes for it, especially in operations where the debt increases with the
passage of time.
So, let’s ask the loaded question: Of all the things that
the natural world has created, did it contribute anything that’s meant to
represent the concept of debt? The short answer is that nature has made
no such contribution. As to the nuanced answer, it must be said that nature
made it impossible for organic life to exist without there being a concept of
debt to regulate the relationships that bind the various constituents making up
an organism.
For example, if parents did not feel they owe their
offspring a minimum level of protection and nurture, life would end after one
generation. If there is no expectation that when I scratch your back today,
you’ll scratch mine tomorrow, we’d all be running around with backs inflamed
with rash, and no one to scratch them. If human societies, prides of lions,
flocks of birds or schools of fish did not live in groups that serve the needs
of the collective by virtue of their gathering, the individuals would perish
separately trying to make it on their own. If Britain does not collectively
solve the problem of gas shortages, individual Britons are expected to die of
cold — at least according to the editors of the Washington Times.
What we deduce from all this, is that nature demands we
universalize the concept of debt by making the survival of organisms conditional
on them cooperating to pay a debt that may or may not have incurred or may even
never incur. Thus, in the same way that nothing would exist without there being
the intangible time to accompany it, nothing would exist either without there
being the debt that creates and maintains the bond of survival between the
organism’s constituents.
But at a time when this question seemed to have been
settled at the abstract level, the Times editorial opened a new area for
discussion. It was to answer this question: When presented with a choice
between letting nature solve a problem via the long term redemption of debt —
if this will ever happen — or by taking immediate practical steps to eliminate
the problem’s causes, how is a sovereign government supposed to choose?
The Times editors report on one such instance where the government
of Germany’s Westphalia Province, was forced to decide. Here is how the editors
put it:
“In Germany’s Westphalia, a wind
turbine farm is being dismantled to make room for a lignite coal mine
expansion. With no Russian gas to keep Germans warm this winter, the decision
was quickly made to swap clean but intermittent wind for carbon-based but
reliable coal. If officials had ‘given in to the demands of the fossil fuel
industry,’ as one critic characterized the move, they did it to keep citizens
alive. Who can blame them?”
Given that nature regularly solves the problem of
shortages by letting the weak perish so that enough will be left for the strong
to survive and produce a strong offspring, the Westphalia government has defied
the natural order. Was it the right thing to do?
Obviously motivated by human compassion, the editors of
the Washington Times say it was. This prompts the question: What happened that
convinced the editors to abandon their traditional ideology of survival to the
fittest?