Essays in Idleness

Mr Carney and his NDP-Liberals, with the borborygmatic support of the Conservatives and all the other parties, share a belief in panic with the rest of the Western world. For various reasons — none of them cogent or thought through — they react to fears for the planet’s further existence. These range from “climate change” to falling population to Trump tariffs, and one panic can easily replace another in the election cycles. Curiously, all our problems are human-created, with causes that would simply go away were it not for politicians, except the environmental ones, which don’t actually exist.

Of course, the sudden return of the ice age, with the collapse of agriculture owing to the radical depletion of atmospheric carbon, while ice freezes many miles thick, and shrinks the oceans into salty slush at the equators, and the glaciers grind our cities away, would seem to be a problem — but only for human beings. I, for one, refuse to be panicked by this.

We should take it in our stride. For it has all happened before, in quite recent geological time, and what has happened before can happen again. We mustn’t be surprised.

From a universal point of view, we would be unnoticed collateral damage. The warm soft cuddly times might come back again, after enormous floods and tsunamis wash the gravel around, and if there were a tiny number of surviving humans we could then go about reinventing civilization, entirely from scratch, at our leisure.

For leisure, even in periods of discomfort, has always been the most important factor in the development of civilization. And leisure is the opposite of panic.