The Conceptual Conditions of Ruin
by David McGrogan, The Daily Sceptic:
To be alive in Britain in the mid-21st century is to constantly be exposed to the half-baked opinions of half-educated people who purport to have expertise; it is to be relentlessly confronted with debased and incoherent ideas. This takes its toll – it has a large, cumulative, demoralising effect on society to be force-fed a diet of intellectual gruel. And it is suggestive that we have a very bleak future in store, because it indicates that we are in the grip of a way of thinking – which psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist recently called “deluded” – that can lead us nowhere but down.
This was brought home to me viscerally by a recent news story concerning Wildlife and Countryside Link (WCL), a “coalition” of conservation and environmental charities and other such organisations, which includes some of the biggest and most familiar names in the charitable sector – Greenpeace, the National Trust, the RSPB, the WWF, etc. WCL submitted a written response to a call for evidence issued back in November 2023 by a group of MPs (the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Race and Community) on the subject of ‘Racism and the Environmental Emergency’. For whatever reason (a slow news day, perhaps), this response was dug up by journalists last week and paraded as being an accusation that the British countryside is a racist, colonial white space, or words to that effect; outrage has, entirely predictably, followed.
You can read the document in question here. It is important to say that the WCL has since issued a statement calling the news reporting a “misrepresentation” and pointing out that the document was only signed by 11 out of a total of 82 organisations represented by the Link. It is hard to know how to interpret this – it could be that the 11 organisations in question genuinely went off on a ‘frolic of their own’ in submitting the evidence, but it could be that they were actually representing the WCL as a whole and are now being thrown under a bus by the bigger member organisations who are embarrassed by the story. Whatever is the truth of the matter, it is I think the case that there is a bit of exaggeration going on in the news reports: the document doesn’t actually label the British countryside “a racist, colonial white space”. But acknowledging that it is an exaggeration shouldn’t cause us to overlook the very important fact that the WCL’s submission is still appalling drivel.
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