In The Age of Error and The West’s Undoing, Rupert Darwall examines the fundamental incompatibility between Western elites’ obsession with achieving net zero in the face of allegedly catastrophic climate change and the West’s capacity to safely navigate a twenty-first century world riven by geopolitical tensions, the increasing use of hard power, and the rise of China as a great power to rival the United States.
In the trauma of the 2008 financial crisis, Western democracies morphed into technocracies. Elected politicians lost legitimacy and sought to regain political authority by importing experts: central bankers, who failed to revive stagnant economies with ultra-low interest rates; public health experts, who gave politicians cover to impose draconian lockdowns during the Covid pandemic; and climate scientists, who justified economically disastrous net zero energy policies while the Global South, including China, powered ahead with carbonizing their economies. Along with a dependence on experts, Western democracies also developed a troubling censorship industrial complex and the tendency to aggressively silence dissent, especially with respect to pandemic policies, the cover-up of the origins of the Covid virus, and climate change.
In The Age of Error and The West’s Undoing, Darwall takes the reader back to 2006—the beginning of the age of error— and ultimately through the brutal return of geopolitics signified by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. He concludes by examining the West’s path forward: Will the age of error forge a new age of realism? Or will it beget only further dissolution and disintegration, earning the epitaph: “The West’s undoing was its own doing”?
