The Fall of Syria & The End of Ba’athism

1.    What is Ba’athism?

Throughout most of its history, the Ottoman Empire existed as a patchwork of directly ruled provinces and indirectly ruled vassal states. When it was finally dismantled at the end of the first world war, after many years of gradual dissolution, most of the vassal states, especially those which had fought alongside the allies for their independence, were duly given it, while the administration of a number of provinces were simply taken over by Britain and France under the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement. This act of only very questionable legality was then retrospectively given legitimacy by the League of Nations, which referred to these possessions as the French and British Mandates, the latter comprising Palestine, Transjordan and Mesopotamia, the former consisting largely of Syria and Lebanon.

What really distinguished this carving up of former Ottoman territory, however, was not just that neither the Ottomans, themselves, nor the populations of their former provinces were consulted on the matter, but that their borders were drawn with very little consideration for the ethnic and religious makeup of the people living within them. When the area around Mosul was later added to Mesopotamia to form what eventually became Iraq, for instance, no one seemed particularly concerned that what would one day become an independent state was not only divided on sectarian grounds from west to east, with Sunni Muslims in the west and Shia Muslims in the east, but also divided ethnically from north to south, with Kurds in the north and Arabs in the south.

Similarly, in drawing up the borders of Syria, no one seems to have taken into account that, while 70% of the population may have been Arab Sunni Muslims, around 10% were Christians – most of them concentrated in the north, in and around Aleppo – another 10% were Alawite Shia Muslims, while the remaining 10% were either Druze, Isma'ili Shia Muslims or Twelver Shia Muslims, each of which had their own communities and areas of the country in which they predominated.

Not, of course, that it was particularly unusual for colonial powers to have so little regard for the ethic and religious composition of the peoples they governed. After all, what united these people from the perspective of their imperial overlords, was that they were all part of the same empire, even if all that really meant was that they shared a common antipathy towards their colonial masters. More to the point, no empire ever thinks that its day in the sun will eventually come to an end and that it will therefore leave a legacy, let alone that that legacy may be problematic. By the end of the second world war, however, not only were both Britain and France more or less bankrupt and unable to afford the cost of administering their respective empires, but in a world in which freedom and self-determination were increasingly being seen as the most important attributes of any acceptable political state, the concept of ‘empire’, itself, was losing moral legitimacy. Over the next two decades, therefore, both countries were more or less forced to divest themselves of their colonial possessions, including their mandates in the Middle East, which were among the first to go.

In fact, the French Mandate could have easily come to an end as early as July 1941 when General de Gaulle visited the northern Palestinian city of Acre to attend an armistice ceremony brought about as a result of Vichy French troops stationed in Lebanon and Syria surrendering to British and Free French forces operating out of Palestine. Although this was therefore a purely French hand over of power, at some point in the proceedings de Gaulle was approached by Lebanese leaders who, in what seems to have been an entirely opportunistic departure from protocol, asked him to grant Lebanon independence, which, whether or not he actually had the authority to do so, he duly did. Because the Syrians made no such request during the ceremony, however, they had to wait until October 1945 before finally bringing the entire French Mandate to a formal close.

Things were a little more complicated, however, with respect to the British Mandate, where, from the late 1920s onwards, the British not only had to deal with an increasing influx of Zionist Jews entering Palestine – where, of course, they were met with increasing Palestinian resistance – but where they also had to deal with increasing resistance to their own presence. Nor was this confined to Palestine. It also applied in Iraq, where, in August 1921, in defiance of the League of Nations mandate which had been awarded to Britain the previous year, the Iraqis proceeded to crown Faisal I bin al-Hussein bin Ali al-Hashemi as their king. The result was a fraught and very difficult relationship which only lasted until 1932, when the British clearly decided that, despite the economic benefits of access to Iraqi oil, attempting to rule a people who resented them and didn’t want them in their country simply wasn’t worth the effort and so asked the League of Nations to recognise the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq as a fully sovereign state.

Mercifully, relations with the successive Hashemite Emirs of Transjordan were far more cordial and remained so even after the Kingdom of Jordan was given its independence in 1946, which one would like to think owed something to the quality of British diplomacy and the fact that the Jordanian monarchy chose to model itself on that of Britain. One would also like to think that these factors go some way to explaining why, of all the independent states that emerged from the French and British Mandates, politically, Jordan has been the most successful. The probability is, however, that its success has had very little to do with Britain and far more to do with the fact that, unlike any of the other former mandate states, its population is almost entirely made up of Arab Sunni Muslims.

That this has been the key difference is demonstrated even more clearly by the fact that Iraq’s monarchy was also based on the British constitutional model. Yet that only lasted until 1958, when the last of a series of rebellions and military coups finally brought it to an end: an outcome which was almost entirely due to the fact that, being Arabs and Sunnis, the Iraq’s Hashemite kings could not command the allegiance of either the Kurds in the north or the Shi’ites in the east, with many of the latter actually being deported during the monarchy’s brief existence because, being ethnic Persians, they felt greater allegiance to Persia than they did to their Arab king.

This key factor in the stability or otherwise of post-mandates states can also be seen in the states that emerged from the French Mandate. After independence, Lebanon’s biggest problem, for instance, was not only the sheer diversity of its population but the fact that each group tended to be regionally based, with most of its 35% Maronite, Melkite, Greek Orthodox and Protestant Christians living in the coastal cities, its 5% Druze population inhabiting the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon mountains, most of its 27% Shia Muslims living in the Beqaa Valley, and most of its 27% Sunni Muslims concentrated in the north. With such ethnic, religious and regional diversity, it is a wonder, in fact, that it was ever able to produce a democratic, stable and effective national government, which also probably explains how the 21% Maronite Christian population were able to hold sway for so long before civil war finally broke their power. 

With a 70% Sunni Muslim population, Syria’s biggest problem, in contrast, was the fact that, being so outnumbered, its 30% Druze, Christian and Shi’ite populations could have easily found themselves second class citizens in their own country, making it hardly surprising, therefore, that it should have been a group of Syrian intellectuals, including Michel Aflaq, Zaki al-Arsuzi and Salah al-Din al-Bitar – most of whom studied together at the Sorbonne during the 1930s – who were the principal  architects of the political philosophy which later became known as Ba’athism and which was at least partly designed to solve this problem.

I say this because while Ba’athism is primarily regarded as a form of pan-Arab nationalism, rather than a solution to the Middle East’s post-mandate sectarian problem, it is actually both. For what all the originators of Ba’athism realised was that, if sufficiently elevated, Arab nationalism and a common Arab identity could transcend sectarian differences. In order to do so, however, they also recognised that Arab states which followed this path would have to forgo many of the institutions deemed essential to any political system in the west, including multi-party democracy. For they knew that, if one allowed multiple political parties to form in the context of the Middle East, they would almost certainly do so along sectarian lines and would eventually tear their respective countries apart, as indeed happened in Lebanon. They also recognised that, if Ba’athism was to transcend sectarian differences, it had to be strictly secular, not only placing itself above religious disputes but thereby allowing people from all sects and religions to join the party and take part in their nation’s political life: a feature of Ba’athism which made it particularly attractive to minorities, including the Alawites in Syria, for instance, to which the Assad family belonged.

All that was left, therefore, was to make it equally attractive to the majorities in each of the newly independent nation states. And this was where pan-Arab nationalism was especially important. For after centuries of being ruled first by the Turkic Ottomans and then by the British and French, who had each in turn divided them into multicultural provinces in which they had no common identity to unite them, the idea that all Arabs were part of a greater Arab nation not only gave them that identity but also promised them a voice in the world they’d never had before.

In fact, so alluring was this idea of a pan-Arab nation that, in February 1958, Syria and Egypt actually merged to form the United Arab Republic, after the populations of each country had voted overwhelmingly in plebiscites in support of the union. Due to the different circumstances in each country, the union didn’t last, of course, and the two countries separated again in 1961, but the mere fact that two sovereign nations were willing to  give up their sovereignty to form something greater is testimony to the power this idea had in people’s imaginations and explains, in no small measure, why, in 1963, Ba’athists, with popular support, were able to take power in both Syria and Iraq.

2.    The Problems with Ba’athism and the Consequent Antipathy Towards it in the West

There are two main reasons why the west is so averse to Ba’athism. The first, of course, is that, being a one party system, it is not democratic. For although it may have internal elections to select the party’s leader and fill places on its ruling council, for instance, given the power of patronage which all leaders acquire, as long as that leader retains the support of key allies and prevents the formation of significant opposition factions, in most cases he can remain in power for life and even pass that power on to a son, as in the case of the Assad family.

Not, of course, that this is necessarily a bad thing. If the leader is strong, intelligent and well-intentioned, a long and continuous period in office can actually be good for a country, bringing both stability and certainty to both the economy and political life. As Lord Acton famously remarked, however, ‘All power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely’, such that, without a formal opposition to hold the government to account and offer an alternative government to the electorate, the head of a one party state can very easily develop dictatorial powers sufficient to crush all opposition.

If the undemocratic nature of Ba’athism offended the west’s moral and political sensibilities, however, it was its pan-Arab nationalism that really horrified us. For until 1958, no Arab state had really presented a threat to the western powers. When Syria and Egypt merged to form the United Arab Republic, however, we briefly caught a glimpse of something that actually scared us: the possibility of a regional super-power that might one day challenge western interests. Worse still, it was a potential super-power that had no love for us. After all, until very recently, we had been the colonial masters of many of its constituent parts and had made no secret of the fact that we regarded Arabs as our inferiors. Then, to crown it all, we continued to maintain a festering presence in the region in the form of the state of Israel: a cuckoo in the Arab nest which we created despite Arab protests and which we populated with people from Europe who continued to act as if they were the region’s masters, displacing its native Arab population and treating them with disdain.

The result was an antipathy between the west and the Arab world that was clearly felt on both sides and which, combined with the geopolitical reality on the ground, shaped everything that was to come. For while the Americans continued to support their client in the region, supplying it with all the latest military hardware in order to defend itself against its clearly hostile neighbours, this continuance of the west’s imperial legacy more or less forced the Arab world – or at least the Ba’athist part of it – into the arms of the world’s other super-power at that time, the Soviet Union, which was more than happy to supply the Arabs with all the military equipment they needed, even if this constituted little more than a minor irritant to their cold war adversaries.

The problem was that while this arming of the Soviet Union’s Arab proxies may not have caused any real difficulties for either the United States or Israel, which was able to see off the combined armies of the Arab world in both the 1967 and 1973 Arab Israeli wars, it further added to the cycle of antipathy between these two antithetical cultures in which every act of obdurate resistance by Arab nationalists was condemned and punished more severely by the imperialist west, which, in turn, only led to greater Arab intransigence. What the Ba’athists failed to realise, however, was that this unyielding stance was only really tenable under the umbrella of Soviet protection, which they seem to have taken for granted. When the Soviet Union was dissolved in December 1991, however, and the economy of the Russian Federation then collapsed, they were suddenly left extremely vulnerable, especially after the one remaining super-power, the USA, the world’s ‘indispensable’ nation, took it upon itself to spread its own particular brand of liberal democracy to every other nation on earth, especially such illiberal and undemocratic one-party states as Iraq and Syria.

3.    The Overthrow of Bashar Assad

Why, of the two Ba’athist states, we decided to act first against Iraq is something we’ll probably never know. I say this because the one thing of which we can be certain, of course, is that it had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction, the putative existence of which was merely a pretext used by the British and American governments to ‘sell’ the second gulf war to their respective publics. Given that neither of these governments is ever likely to admit that they lied to us, it follows, therefore, that the real reasons for the war are always likely to remain hidden behind a wall of obfuscation.

In contrast, the reasons for the desirability of regime change in Syria have never really been a secret. For not only was Syria a long term ally of Iran – which is seen as the west’s preeminent enemy in the region – but it was also an important conduit for weapons supplied by Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon, which presented a significant threat to Israel. Removing the Syrian section of this supply line was always therefore seen as an important objective. All that was needed was a suitable opportunity to get the job done, which finally presented itself during the Arab Spring: that wave of anti-government protests, uprisings and armed rebellions which started in Tunisia in 2011 and quickly spread to Libya, Egypt and Yemen, the rulers of which states were all deposed. It also appeared to spread to Syria, though how much of the Syrian insurgency was spontaneous and how much of it was externally engineered is hard to say. For in either event it was quickly supported by outside agencies, including the Gulf Cooperation Council, which supplied it with both arms and finance, and the CIA, which, in 2012, launched an operation called Timber Sycamore, the openly stated objective of which was to supply the insurgents with arms, training and funding in order to overthrow President Assad.

The problem was that this huge injection of money and weapons into the region had, in itself, some rather unfortunate consequences, not the least of which was that it attracted jihadists from all over the war-torn Middle East, who poured into Syria and coalesced into two main groups. The first of these was the Al-Nusra Front, which, in April 2013, became the official Syrian affiliate of al-Qaeda, and very quickly became the leading group within the insurgency, displacing more moderate secular groups such as the Free Syrian Army. The second, of course, was the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, which, throughout 2013 and 2014, expanded the war eastward into north eastern Syria and western Iraq, its ultimate aim being to establish a global Islamic Caliphate.

It was at this point, therefore, that, following an alleged use of chemical weapons against the insurgents in Ghouta, President Obama attempted to mobilise support in Europe for a military intervention in Syria similar to that in Iraq ten years earlier. Having been deceived about the existence of WMD to justify that previous intervention, however, not only were the public more than a little sceptical about any such similar claims with respect to Syria, but given the nature and behaviour of the Syrian insurgents – especially the beheading of their victims on camera – it wasn’t clear to most people which side we should intervene on. After all, to anyone with any knowledge of history, it would seem that, prior to this western backed insurgency, it had been the strictly secular Ba’athist party that had maintained peace and stability in Syria for the previous fifty years.

While the Americans consequently had to settle for sending a small US force to help the Kurds and Iraqis fight ISIS in the north and east, this therefore allowed the Russians and Iranians to actually intervene to help the Syrian army fight Al-Nusra and other rebel groups in the west: something for which the USA has never forgiven either Russia or Iran and has further strengthened its resolve to destroy both countries. It also meant that the flow of money and weapons to the insurgents continued at pace, with the result that it wasn’t until September 2018, after several rounds of peace talks in both Geneva and the Kazakhstan capital of Astana, that a fragile peace deal of sorts was finally agreed, under which the insurgents would withdraw to a buffer zone in Idlib under Turkish control.

In August 2019, the United States and Turkey then signed a similar agreement covering north-eastern Syria, which, apart from an American airbase defended by less than a thousand US troops, was almost entirely in the hands of a Kurdish group called the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which, with American help, had defeated ISIS in that part of the country. Now that they were entrenched there, however, President Erdoğan feared that the SDF would declare the area an independent Kurdish state, which would almost certainly be joined by Kurdish northern Iraq and attract Kurdish separatists in eastern Turkey. To prevent this, the Turks therefore threatened to restart the war by invading the Kurdish enclave unless the Americans took responsibility for the Kurds in the same way that the Turks had taken responsibility for Al-Nusra – now renamed Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – in Idlib.

This, however, was a disaster for the Assad regime. For it effectively meant that the country was partitioned into three self-governing regions, with the northwest controlled by the Turks and their HTS clients, the northeast controlled by the Americans and their SDF clients, leaving only the south in the hands of the Syrian government. To make matters worse, the northeast was the area of the country which not only produced most of Syria’s wheat but contained all of its oil fields, to which the Syrian government no longer had access. In fact the Americans were actually selling the oil to the Israelis. Worse still, the Americans had imposed sanctions on Syria at the start of the war, which still hadn’t been lifted, which meant that, after seven years of destruction, there was no money for reconstruction.

To give the reader a sense of just what a parlous state the Syrian economy was in, at the end of November 2024, when HTS attacked Aleppo, ordinary Syrian soldiers were being paid just $7 a month. In contrast, HTS fighters were being paid $2,000 a month. What’s more, their equipment was new and in mint condition, whereas much of the Syrian equipment was old and poorly maintained, making it hardly surprising, therefore, that when it came to a fight, the Syrian army just melted away.

Nor was the poor state of Syria’s finances the only factor which more or less ensured this outcome. In fact, everything was carefully prepared and coordinated to bring about President Assad’s downfall. In May 2023, for instance, Syria was readmitted to the Arab League after more than a decade of suspension, which most people would have seen as a positive development. One of the conditions of President Assad’s rehabilitation, however, was that he lessen if not completely sever his ties with Russia and Iran, which meant that when the attack by HTS began, neither the Russians nor the Iranians were either inclined or in much of a position to help him. Worse still, the assault was carefully timed to coincide with an attack by Israel on Syria’s closest ally, Hezbollah, whose fighters were effectively prevented from crossing the border into Syria. The result was that, when the attack began, not only was the Syrian army a mere shadow of its former self, but President Assad was totally isolated.

4.    Winners & Losers

The biggest winner in all this, of course, is Turkey. For with his annexation of north-western Syria, President Erdoğan effectively began the process of rebuilding the Ottoman Empire, a long term ambition of which he has often spoken. In due course, what’s more, he will be obliged to remove the Kurds from north-eastern Syria in order to prevent them declaring it an independent Kurdish state, thereby acquiring even more Syrian territory along with the Syrian oil fields. In fact, given his control over HTS, which, at some point, he will almost certainly cease paying and supplying, causing it to disband or fragment into smaller warring factions with which the Turkish army will eventually be forced to deal, Erdoğan is already in control of most of the country.

The second biggest winner is then Israel. For in addition to acquiring more territory in the Golan Heights, it has physically separated Hezbollah from its biggest patron, thereby reducing its threat to Israel. Even more importantly, it has cleared the way to finish the task of levelling the Gaza Strip and building more settlements in the West Bank, displacing the Palestinians completely and creating the Greater Israel of which Prime Minister Netanyahu has also long dreamed.

Next, it might be thought that the USA is also a winner. For not only has it finally rid itself of a regime which, for decades, has been an affront to American values but, in so doing, it would also appear to have dealt a serious blow to Russia and Iran, especially Russia. This last point, however, is far less certain than it may seem. For while it might be supposed that, with the war in Ukraine, the Russians were simply too overstretched to come to President Assad’s aid, thus revealing their limitations, with Turkey’s full membership of BRICS still pending, it is highly unlikely that President Erdoğan would have unleashed HTS on the Assad regime without first obtaining President Putin’s permission, strongly suggesting, therefore, that Russia’s failure to act wasn’t entirely due to a lack of available resources but was also a matter of choice on the part of Vladimir Putin, who, after rescuing the Syrian president in 2015, may have finally given up on him as a lost cause. Even more importantly, when Erdoğan eventually moves against the Kurds in north-eastern Syria, the Americans may well have to withdraw from the area, too, thereby abandoning their long term allies, the SDF, and revealing to the world, not just their unreliability, but their ineffectuality, making them, perhaps, the bigger loser.

The biggest loser, however, is Syria, itself, which, although we will never admit it, no longer exists as a sovereign nation state. For while we may pretend that it has not been partitioned and is actually being run by a functioning HTS government, when the Turkish army eventually has to intervene to stop the brutal executions of Christians and Alawites – videos of which are already appearing on the internet – and President Erdoğan has to abolish the HTS government and install a Turkish backed interim administration in order to restore order and enable the country to recover economically, anyone with any understanding of geopolitics will know what is actually happening.

The other biggest loser, however, is history itself. For the fall of Syria almost certainly signals the end of Ba’athism, a political philosophy so flawed that no one could really lament its passing. Once it has gone, however, it won’t be long before hardly anyone remembers how anyone could have thought it the answer to their problem or, indeed, what that problem was. A whole century of history will thus be largely forgotten with the result that, at some point, another generation of ignorant and arrogant imperialists will again draw lines on a map demarking borders so bizarre that those forced to live within them will have no chance of forming a unified nation state and of hence living at peace with each other.

 

Language & Thought

 

1.    The Relationship Between Thought &Language

In terms of its consequences, one of the worst philosophical errors of the modern era is the implicit assumption that all thought is mediated by language: an error which it is all too easy to make due to the fact that most of the thoughts of which we aware are those which we either articulate or could articulate if asked to say what we were thinking. There are, however, times when we say something like ‘Wait! I’ve just had a thought’ and then take some time and effort to put that thought into words, strongly suggesting, therefore, that the thought preceded its articulation. What’s more, there are also times when, nagged by the feeling that we might not have got it quite right, we are then dissatisfied by the way we have actually expressed a thought, further suggesting that thoughts are, or at least can be, independent of language.

Of course, it may be argued that whatever subterranean cognitive processes go on prior to the articulation of a thought, these do not actually constitute ‘thinking’ in that the act of thinking actually consists in putting our thoughts into words. Even if one were to accept this as a definition of one form of thinking, however, it is very different from ‘thinking in words’ or using language to think, as when we construct a rational argument, for instance. What it does, in fact, is reveal three different levels in the relationship between thought and language: the pre-linguistic base level at which we have an unarticulated thought; the level at which we then struggle to make sense of this thought by putting it into words; and the level at which we then use language to examine, analyse and criticise the now publicly available ideas which, through their articulation, our thoughts have become.

For those who feel uncomfortable talking about thought in any way that hints at it being more primitive and basic than language, what we have done, however, is actually make the problem worse. For we now have two levels at which our cognitive processes our hidden from us: the base level at which we have a thought we haven’t yet expressed and cannot therefore identify or say from whence it came, and the almost equally opaque transformational interface between this base level and the fully articulated world of ideas, which T. S. Eliot famously described as a ‘raid on the inarticulate’ without thereby making it any more transparent.

Indeed, it is this lack of phenomenological transparency that is at the heart of all our problems when it comes to the relationship between thought and language. For it not only makes what’s going on at the subterranean levels of this relationship essentially unknowable but consequently precludes any further philosophical investigation of them. I say this for the very good reason that if something is unknowable, there’s not very much we can say about it. And as Wittgenstein stipulated at the end of the Tractatus: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’ The problem with this, however, is that if we eschew all talk of those aspects of the relationship between thought and language that are hidden from us and concentrate purely on the one aspect that is phenomenologically accessible, namely our use of language as a medium for thought, then we are in grave danger of forming a very distorted view of our relationship to language as a whole, which has some very unfortunate consequences.

One of the most glaring of these is that fact that if one fails to take it into account Eliot’s raid on the inarticulate, our creative use of a language would appear to be limited to the possibilities already inherent in it. That is to say that, while it may not be impossible to say something new, without being able to bend or repurpose words to new uses, typically through the use of metaphor – as I explained in ‘The Role and Importance of Metaphorical Truth’ – the use of any language is rigidly constrained by the current definition of its terms. Not only is this contrary to everything we know about the history of our intellectual development, however – to which I shall return later – but it also runs counter to Kant’s famous dictum in the ‘Critique of Judgement’ that true genius lies precisely in extending or developing a language so as to enable us to say something that could not have been said before.

Of course, it will be pointed out that no one is actually denying that we are able to bend language to our will so as articulate something that was previously beyond our grasp. Indeed, all that is being said is that we don’t know how we do this and so cannot really talk about it. There is, however, a huge difference between not talking about something and treating it as if it doesn’t exist. Even if we merely use it as a placeholder to fill in the blank created by its unknowability, moreover, there is a lot to be gained from acknowledging the existence of that about which we cannot speak if it consequently prevents us from making other philosophical errors, the most significant of which, in this case, is a tendency, reinforced by scientific materialism, to treat human beings as tropistic.

The best way to illustrate this is to use once again Dan Dennett’s example of the tropistic wasp, which he first introduced in a paper I heard him give at Birmingham University some forty-odd years ago and which I also used in ‘The Role and Importance of Metaphorical Truth’. The story goes like this. The female of this particular species of wasp excavates a nest into which she lays her eggs before going out to hunt for grasshoppers or locusts, which she stings and paralyses but does not kill so that they remain alive and fresh in order to provide food for her offspring during their larval stage. She then brings the paralysed grasshopper or locust back to the nest and leaves it on the threshold while she first checks inside to ensure that everything is as it should be. Satisfied that all is well, she then comes outside again, retrieves her prey and drags it into the nest.

On the surface, therefore, this not only seems like intelligent and purposeful behaviour but something akin to what we would regard as maternal. What entomologists discovered when they conducted further experiments on the wasp, however, was that if, during the time the mother spent checking the nest, they moved the paralysed locust a few inches away from the entrance, on coming back outside, she would drag her prey back to the entrance once again before going back inside to check the nest once more. If, while she was inside, they then moved the paralysed locust again, on coming back outside, she would once more repeat the process. And, as long they kept moving the locust, she would go on doing this over and over again, indefinitely.

Thus, what initially looked like intelligent behaviour is more like the product of a computer program, which, in this case, gets stuck in a loop. Professor Dennett’s point in presenting such a starkly clear example of tropistic behaviour, however, is the contention put forward by all materialist philosophers of the mind that, if one thinks of language as a kind of computer program – a fairly reasonable analogy – then while our own programming may be quantitatively more advanced and sophisticated than that of the tropistic wasp, it is qualitatively the same, in that both we and wasp are biological machines whose behaviour, it may be reasonably assumed, is entirely determined by our programming.

There is, however, a major difference between the two in that, whereas the wasp’s programming is entirely hardwired into its genes – as, indeed, is much of our own programming – our linguistic programming is acquired, much like software: a fact which, in itself, militates against the materialist position. This is because how we acquire this software, or learn a language, is as phenomenologically opaque to us as our ability to then alter or modify it to better express our thoughts. If we accept, therefore, that, even though we don’t know how we do it, we do, in fact, learn a language, there is no reason why we should not accept that we also have the ability to develop and extend that language so as to say something we could not have said before, even though we have no idea how we do this either.

In fact, the only thing stopping us from embracing this view of the relationship between thought and language is the fact that it also means embracing the idea that there are some things about the universe and even, indeed, about ourselves, that are unknowable but which must necessarily exist in order to explain things we do actually know, such as the fact that throughout our history we have continually found new ways to think and talk about the universe, as is particularly well demonstrated by the occurrence of paradigm shifts in science.

2.    Cultural Resistance to the Concept of Paradigm Shifts

Although I have written about this before, for those who haven’t read my previous essays on this and related subjects, the concept of a paradigm shift was first introduced by the American philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, in his 1962 book ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’, in which he put forward a new model or paradigm of the way in which science, itself, develops. Instead of proceeding incrementally, as the traditional paradigm would have it, with one building block being laid upon another, Kuhn argued that science proceeds in stages, some of which are necessarily revolutionary. In fact, the usual lifecycle of any given field of science almost invariably starts with a revolution, when someone puts forward a new theory. As this gains acceptance, older theories are then abandoned and the science enters a stable phase. As time passes, however, some of the predictions which the new theory makes turn out to be false, requiring additional subsidiary theories to be developed in order to explain these exceptions. Over time, however, the number of exceptions increases, requiring more subsidiary theories to be developed, to which exceptions may also be found, requiring further subsidiary theories until the whole thing becomes so unwieldy that someone eventually says ‘Wait! I’ve just had a thought. What if we have been looking at this whole thing the wrong way round? What if we look at it like this instead?’ thereby introducing a new theory and starting the whole lifecycle all over again.

One of the best examples of this is Lavoisier’s creation of modern chemistry in the late 18^th century: one of the most remarkable contributions to science in all of history, which most people still do not understand. In fact, the general view is that Lavoisier discovered oxygen. But he did not. Oxygen was discovered by Joseph Priestly, who actually taught Lavoisier how to isolate it. It was just that Priestly didn’t call it oxygen. He called it dephlogisticated air. It was Lavoisier who called it oxygen, just as he called hydrogen ‘the maker of water’ when he discovered that, when he ignited it in the presence of oxygen, the two gasses combined to form H2O. What Lavoisier did, therefore, was not just discover a new element but create a whole new language for thinking about and describing the material world, in which the ancient concept of phlogiston, which had dominated chemistry for more than three hundred years, was discarded in favour of the concept of elementary particles, called atoms, which are combined in different ways and quantities to form different substances.

That’s not to say, of course, that he did it all on his own or in a vacuum. The term ‘atom’, for instance, had been introduced into modern science more than a century earlier by Robert Boyle, who derived it from the Greek word ‘atomos’, meaning ‘indivisible’, which was first used by the Greek philosopher Democritus in the 5^th century BC. What’s more, there was still a long way to go. Other elements and a whole host of new laws describing how they combine and act upon each other had yet to be discovered. It was Lavoisier, however, who created the basic model or conceptual framework upon which successive generations of chemists were consequently able to build, an achievement far greater than the mere discovery of a single element.

In fact, if more people understood what Lavoisier actually did, he would be regarded with far more esteem than he actually is, which rather begs the question as to why he is not. The answer, however, is really quite simple. It is because most scientists or, perhaps more accurately, the very institution of science, itself, if such there be, doesn’t like the idea of scientific revolutions, much preferring the traditional paradigm of science in which science proceeds in an incremental and orderly fashion and where every contribution, no matter how small, adds to the sum total of scientific knowledge. Despite all of the historical evidence to the contrary, therefore, from Copernicus to Einstein, wherever possible, the institution of science refuses to acknowledge that scientific revolutions and their concomitant paradigm shifts occur.

One of the reasons for this is the belief that the very idea of scientific revolutions undermines science. For if scientific revolutions have happened in the past, they can happen in the future, replacing current scientific paradigms with new ones that have yet to be conceived, thereby placing all current science under a provisional cloud. Even if it is conceded that scientific revolutions have happened in the past, therefore, it is generally agreed that they cannot happen in the future: an article of faith based on the implicit assumption that all of science’s current theories – especially its more foundational theories –are correct.

This, of course, is nonsense and is made demonstrably so by the application of Sir Karl Popper’s irrefutable argument that scientific theories cannot be proven, only falsified, which means that even if all our current theories were correct, we couldn’t know this. For even if a theory has so far survived three hundred years without being proven false, there is no guarantee that it will survive another three hundred years or even three hundred days. All scientific theories are therefore essentially provisional, which the existence of scientific revolutions only makes more uncomfortably clear.

There is, however, an even more profound reason why the institution of science doesn’t like the idea of scientific revolutions. For at the heart of every scientific revolution, of course, there is the creation of a new scientific paradigm, a new way of thinking about the world which requires precisely the kind of creative genius Kant describes: someone who is able to extend or reshape the language so as to say something that could not have been said before, someone, indeed, like Copernicus, Lavoisier or Einstein. The problem is that we do not know how these geniuses did what they did or, indeed, how anyone can rewrite a language so as to say something new. The experience is simply not accessible to us and being inaccessible, is therefore unknowable, which gives the institution of science yet another problem. For if something is unknowable, it is also, of course, unteachable.

In fact, in order to be teachable, a process or method has got to be completely transparent. Any institution attempting to teach science, therefore, must teach a scientific method that precludes the need for genius. Indeed, any predisposition or tendency among its students to think outside the box has got to be discouraged and a strict adherence to the prescribed method and current orthodoxy cultivated.

This is principally achieved by fostering a culture of both methodological exactitude and cooperation within the student body, such that students work together in a clearly defined and highly disciplined manner, rather than compete against each other by thinking along their own lines. This fostering of a strictly disciplined scientific mentality is also significantly helped by the fact that the first articulation of a new paradigm, like the first expression of any new idea, as Thomas Kuhn himself was all too well aware, is almost invariably inchoate: only half formed and full of holes and therefore very easily derided. Anyone putting forward such new ideas consequently has to work very hard to make any impression on the established order, especially when it is that established order that is handing out the jobs and research grants. The result is that institutional science is almost invariably conservative science, which has no place for revolutionary thinking. The problem with this, however, is not just that it suppresses something vital in the dynamic nature of science and leads to a kind of ossification, but that it also leads to science becoming corrupted, not just in the sense of financial corruption – though this too – but in the sense that it is no longer scientific.

3.    The Corruption of Science

In fact, it is the corruption of science, itself, that actually leads to financial corruption and therefore comes first. And it does so primarily by inverting the relationship between empirical data and theory, such that empirical data no longer has primacy.

To understand how this happens, we need to go back to the most basic model of science in which theories are created to explain empirical observations. The theories are then tested by making predictions based on these theories and conducting experiments to find out whether the predictions are accurate. If the predictions are accurate, then there is a chance that the theory is correct, though only a chance. For it is perfectly possible that experiments conducted to test other predictions based on a theory may prove the predictions false, which may prove the entire theory false. On the other hand, we may attempt to explain these exceptions by either modifying the original theory or by creating subsidiary theories in the way described above. Indeed, in Kuhn’s description of the standard lifecycle of a scientific theory, it is only when the number of subsidiary theories gets out of hand, leaving us with more patches than original fabric, that we are eventually forced to abandon the theory altogether.

In today’s institutionalised science, however, the decision to abandon a theory altogether is even more difficult. For that would be to admit that for years, perhaps, the institution has been teaching something that it now regards as false. And this is something that it is very difficult for any institution to do. After all, people’s careers and reputations are at stake. What’s more, with revolutionary thinking having been institutionally suppressed in science for at least the last two generations, the chances of there being an alternative theory or paradigm available to replace the one that now needs to be abandoned are very slim. No matter how much empirical evidence has built up to prove a theory false, therefore, it is the errant data that must now always be explained away rather than the theory abandoned, which is to say that it is the theory, rather than the data, that now has primacy.

Once the primacy of theory has been established in a culture, this then has two further consequences. The first of these is that scientists no longer feel quite so constrained by the sanctity of data. If the data does not conform to the theory, therefore, they are now far more inclined to either discard or change it than was previously the case. Nor is this necessarily cynical. After all, if one sincerely believes in the theory one is putting forward or defending, errant data must surely be faulty data. Once selecting or modifying data to fit one’s chosen theory has become commonplace within an institution, however, it becomes very easy to start doing it, not because one particularly believes in the theory, but simply in order to get the results one needs in order to maintain one’s research funding and keep one’s job.

In fact, there is a considerable amount of evidence to suggest that such corruption is now endemic throughout most scientific institutions. The editor of one journal I quoted in a previous essay on this subject actually believed that up to 20% of all the papers submitted to his journal for publication were not just based on selected or modified data but on no data at all, it all having been made up. What is even more disturbing, however, is the fact that, believing in their theories rather than the sanctity of data, many scientists do not seem to think that there is anything wrong with this, a development in the very culture of science which has been further encouraged by the use of computer models which, themselves, have little in the way of empirical grounding.

Indeed, most computer models start with a theory which is turned into a set of algorithms, which it then uses to predict future observations and measurements under different conditions. Modifications are then iteratively made to the algorithms to improve their predictive accuracy, although this in itself can be very problematic. For while modifying an algorithm to make its predictions conform to reality may seem very similar to the development of subsidiary theories which Kuhn describes, in traditional science these patches developed to explain exceptions to a main theory had to have some theoretical basis. Simply modifying an algorithm to make its predictions fit the facts, on the other hand, can leave us in a position in which the model’s predictions are now correct but we have no idea why. Worse still, many large scale computer models are subject to continual development over many years, to which a lot of people may contribute, especially in a university setting, with the result that there comes a point at which it’s possible that no one single person actually knows how the model works. It becomes a magical black box which issues oracular prophecies without anyone knowing how it does so. And yet, believing in this magical black box, we still believe in the prophesies, even when they don’t come true.

One of the best examples of this is the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), in which 102 institutions from around the world were originally funded to predict future changes in the world’s climate based on two key assumptions: that such changes are primarily driven by the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and that, without a modification in our own behaviour, this accumulation will continue at a rate of 1% per year.

On this basis, the project’s first set of predictions were published in 1995 and covered the next twenty year period leading up to 2015. In fact, it was this first set of CMIP predictions that led Al Gore to predict that summer arctic sea ice would have disappeared by 2014. By the time 2014 arrived, however, it was perfectly obvious that the predictions of all 102 institutions taking part in the project were wildly inaccurate, with some of them being out by more than 1°C when compared with actual data from satellites and weather balloons, the two most reliable sources of such data we have. And yet it is the predictions of these models that the world continues to believe.

4.    An Absence of Critical Thinking

So how is this possible? In previous essays on this subject, I have put forward two possible answers. The first is that there are just too few people in the world who actually know the science, leaving the rest of us to just take their word for it. The problem with this, however, is that there are some people who know the science and one would expect at least some of them to say, ‘Hold on  minute, this isn’t right’. In fact, I have actually based some of my own essays on the work of two such upstanding scientists: Richard Lindzen, Emeritus Professor of Meteorology at MIT, and William Happer, Emeritus Professor of Physics at Princeton University.

This then led me to my second answer: that there is a much larger contingent of scientists who have a vested interest in the theory of anthropogenic global warming than those who are simply committed to honest science with the result that it is the former group whose voices are always heard. The problem with this, however, is that it would seem to entail what would have to be the biggest conspiracy in history. For it is not just scientists who would be required to continually espouse something they did not believe, but everyone who comes into contact with any aspect of reality upon which global warming should be having an effect. Anyone working in the arctic, for instance, would have surely noticed that this summer, ten years on from when Al Gore said it would all be gone, arctic sea ice was as extensive and as thick as it has been throughout the last century. While corruption and our predisposition to uncritically accept the authority of experts may both have contributed to inducing our current state of mass delusion, therefore, there is clearly something else going on here, which raises the possibility, indeed, that it is actually our current state of mass delusion, itself, that is that something.

After all, what is a mass delusion other than a highly prevalent way of thinking that is not actually supported by real world evidence, of which there have been hundreds if not thousands of examples  throughout our history. Indeed, it could be said that our entire history is a history of such delusions. We acquire them, they dominate our way of thinking for a while, and then a Copernicus, Lavoisier or Einstein comes along and says something that eventually makes us see the world in a completely different way. The problem, of course, is that it is never quite that easy. For not only are we resistant to such revolutionary changes in our world view but are so of necessity, in that language could not exist if we changed our way of thinking every other minute. In fact, language actually needs periods of stability in which everyone uses the language in the same way in order for us to explore the logical the ramifications of the prevailing paradigm, thereby revealing its flaws and paving the way for the next revolution.

The problem is that, sometimes, our resistance to the next revolution is so strong that it effectively blocks it, sometimes for centuries. No matter how much evidence accumulates showing that the old way of thinking is wrong, those who have a vested interest in perpetuating it continually prevent change from occurring, sometimes even going so far as to systematically kill the proponents of change.

Fortunately, we are not actually doing that at the moment. Because we do not understand the process by which one way of thinking replaces another, however, and refuse to accept that it even occurs, we have now become so trapped in our current way of thinking that we cannot get out of it even though its flaws are not just glaringly obvious but are starting to cause us real world problems.

Take, for instance, the quest to achieve Net Zero carbon emissions with which the west is currently obsessed and which is largely focused on two main goals: the decarbonisation of our electricity grids and the replacement of petrol and diesel engined vehicles with purely electric vehicles. If the objective of these goals is as stated, however, not only is this focus far too narrow, omitting such forms of transport as airlines and cargo ships, both of which have massive carbon footprints, but the goals themselves are incompatible, as any critical analysis very quickly reveals.

In fact the problem is almost immediately apparent as soon as one considers that in 2023, wind and solar power constituted just 34.3% of the UK’s total electricity generation. When conditions were optimal, there were indeed periods during which they actually contributed more than this; but this was their average contribution across the year. If the UK is going to completely decarbonise its electricity grid by 2050, this means, therefore, that it is going to have triple its wind and solar generating capacity over the next 25 years, an objective which, under any conditions, would be very challenging. If, at the same time, however, we are going to replace all of the 41.2 million petrol and diesel engined vehicles on our roads with EVs, we are going to have to increase electricity production by another 37.5%, which effectively means quadrupling our wind and solar generating capacity over this period. Even putting aside the cost, therefore, which, given the current state of our finances, presents yet another challenge, it is very doubtful whether this is even remotely feasible.

If our goal were solely to decarbonise our electricity grid, while keeping petrol and diesel engined vehicles on our roads, we might be able to manage it. Similarly, if our objective were solely to replace all petrol and diesel engined vehicles with EVs while continuing to power our electricity grid with natural gas, this too might be possible. Trying to do both at the same time, however, is something which only a religious zealot who hasn’t actually thought about it would even consider.

What’s more, this doesn’t take into account the very real possibility that running an electricity grid purely on wind and solar power is actually impossible. I say this because, being dependent on the weather and hence intermittent in their electricity generation, an entirely wind and solar powered grid would have to have some form of battery storage back up for when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. This, however, is far more expensive and difficult to achieve than advocates of an entirely decarbonised grid would appear to think. In my 2021 essay on this subject, for instance, I calculated that, using the Tesla Powerpack 2 4HR battery system, at that time the leading large scale battery storage system on the market, it would cost £550 billion just to store one day’s output from our then wind and solar capacity of around 32 GW.

This being clearly non-viable, people are now therefore talking about using ‘green’ hydrogen as our storage medium, the idea being that the hydrogen would be produced by electrolysis using wind and solar generated electricity on days when the wind does blow and the sun does shine and then burnt in modified gas fired power stations when an alternative source of energy is required. What this doesn’t take into account, however, is how much more electricity one would have to generate in order to produce the hydrogen, or the fact that it takes 50% more energy to produce hydrogen by electrolysis than one actually recovers by burning it. As a solution to the storage problem, therefore, this would only make sense if ‘free’ wind and solar power really were as cheap as people like to believe, thereby making their profligate use to produce hydrogen economically viable. The fact is, however, that wind and solar farms are only ‘viable’, themselves, if they are heavily subsidized. For as I have demonstrated elsewhere, they too consume more energy in their manufacture, installation, operation and maintenance than they ever produce in their lifetime, making the whole renewables industry an exercise in economic futility and corruption.

The entire Net Zero project is therefore a total fantasy, unsupported by either economic or engineering reality. Not only can it not be achieved, however, but if we continue pursuing it, it could easily result in a disaster. For not only is it inevitable that, if forced down this road, the electricity grid would eventually fail, along with all the computer systems that depend on it, but it is also fairly certain that this would be very shortly followed by the failure of everything that depends on a computer, which, in today’s world, is just about everything. With no power to heat our homes and no food in the shops, societal collapse would then shortly follow, with riots in the streets, widespread looting and the complete breakdown of law and order.

Not, of course, that it will actually come to this. For what can’t be done, won’t be done. The only question is how much damage will be done before the reality of the situation finally sinks in. For no matter how much evidence accumulates demonstrating that the whole Net Zero project is a fool’s errand, there will be those who will sill resist abandoning it. Nor will these diehard advocates of Net Zero be confined to those with a vested interest in having it continue, including those paid by government to advise them on the subject, who will no doubt insist to the very end that it can be made to work. An even louder voice will almost certainly come from those who believe that there is no alternative, the alternative being that the planet is destroyed. After all, 95% of scientists agree that the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the most significant cause of global warming and that we, ourselves, are the most significant cause of this accumulation. What’s more, based on our traditional view of science, combined with our current inversion of the roles of theory and data within it, this is not just regarded as a theory but as a matter of fact.

Nor does it help when faced with such a mind-set to point out that, before Lavoisier put forward a much better theory – one which more accurately predicted what happens in the real world – 95% of scientists believed that all non-metallic materials lost weight when heated because they gave off phlogiston. For in order to see these two situations as analogous one actually has to subscribe to Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm of the way in which science proceeds, which we, of course, do not. Indeed, one could say that this was our real or underlying problem if there weren’t something even more fundamental still yet underlying it. For our problem is not just our choice of paradigm for describing and understanding the activity we call science, but our entire view of the universe. For believing in an entirely material universe, entirely knowable and explicable by science, we are unable to believe that anyone could do what Thomas Kuhn claims Lavoisier did: rewrite his own linguistic programming so as to think and say something he was not able to think or say before, a feat which is not only phenomenologically inaccessible to those who are able to do it but completely inexplicable in materialist terms.

For those of us who are completely wedded to the materialist worldview, therefore – which is just about everybody in the modern world – giving up the traditional paradigm of science and adopting Thomas Kuhn’s is simply unthinkable. It would be akin to an atheist converting to Christianity and world require something just as revolutionary to cause it. Unless we undertake this philosophical journey, however, and accept that there are aspects of the universe that are fundamentally unknowable, including ourselves, we shall remain as trapped in our closed way of thinking as Dan Dennett’s tropistic wasp until our failure to see its flaws eventually destroys us.