Stop digging and enjoy life

Since it's soon going to be election time in the UK, I'd like to celebrate some of the fatuous nonsense spoken by politicians over the years.

Last week, there was a great example from Gordon Brown, who called high-speed web access "the electricity of the digital age". Does this mean I can use the internet to heat my house or charge up my bicycle light? No? Sorry, Gordon, but the electricity of the digital age is, it would seem, plain old electricity. Computers can't function without it, which is quite a problem given the fact of dwindling fuel supplies and your (and previous) governments neglecting to frame any coherent energy policy to deal with them. You can't solve the real problems of the physical world by escaping into the mental world of data and information.

And another, from former US President Calvin Coolidge, quoted with approval in this week's Big Issue: "The slogan 'press on' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race." Well, yes, except when the problem in question is (a) one of those that doesn't actually have a solution, or (b) one of those caused by our having chosen to proceed in precisely the wrong direction. There is another, wiser saying: "If you're in a hole, stop digging".

Unfortunately for all of us, the problem of "saving the planet" (actually saving ourselves -- the planet will still be there whatever happens) falls into both category (a) and category (b). Don't take my word for it; listen to Professor James Lovelock's interview with the BBC this week. We have pulled the trigger on global warming, and nothing we can now do will reverse that. We just have to hope that when the earth finishes its transition to the new state we have nudged it towards, it is one that will support at least some of our descendants. In the mean time, Lovelock says, all you can do is "enjoy life while you can".

Of course, the vast majority of people don't wish to know this, which is why no political party hoping to get elected can afford to tell people the truth or talk realistically about the most important issues. For example, a leaflet came through my door today from a party that claims it will "tackel climate change so our grandchildren don't have to suffer". The Greens at least have policies that can move us (or could have moved us, if applied in time) in the right direction, and to some extent reduce the degree of suffering that is to come. But even they seem wedded, in public at any rate, to the fiction that we are only facing a "category (b)" problem: in other words, that there is still time to sort things out without us suffering the very unpleasant consequences of our collective failure to take note of the warning voices of at least the last forty years. The nature of urgent warnings is that at some point, if they are not heeded, the thing warned about becomes inevitable, and the unpalatable truth is that we have now passed that point. Our problem has become a predicament, which can only be lived with and adapted to, not solved. We can no longer stop our canoe going over the waterfall. All we can do (perhaps all we ever could do) is prepare ourselves for the descent, practically, emotionally and above all spiritually, offer our lives to God, and do our best to trust the flow.