It’s hard to overstate just how dire a situation we find ourselves in, politically and culturally. The problems we face are of such scale and complexity that the prospects for any kind of humane and liveable future seem to grow dimmer by the month. The West is being drained of democratic energy, its liberal-democratic systems bled dry by a vampiric tech oligarchy and by increasingly rabid right-wing populist movements. In recent years, those of us disinclined to look away have witnessed daily evidence of an ongoing campaign of annihilation and destruction by Israel and its active European and American partners of the Palestinian people. The slaughter has been so relentlessly and luridly visible that it is hard to see how any of us – victims, perpetrators, witnesses, deniers – might emerge from it with any kind of collective humanity intact.

In the wake of this horror and degradation we are seeing the normalisation of war crimes, including the casual invocation by the US president of genocidal threats against his enemies. All of this is unfolding against a backdrop of imminent and intractable climate catastrophe. This knowledge is, culturally and politically, half-repressed by the political class and the public alike as evidenced by such absurdities, in an Irish context, of a “fuel crisis” arising not out of our continued reliance on fossil energy, but rather the cost of diesel.

Bad enough though all of this is, we must also acknowledge it is happening at a time of unprecedented cultural and intellectual vacuity. At the precise moment when we need to think and communicate with clarity and seriousness about our situation we are drowning in misinformation, transfixed by the phantasms emanating from the screens in our hands. We are reading fewer and fewer books, outsourcing more and more of the work of thinking to machines at an incalculable cost to democracy and to human........

© The Irish Times