Age of Error and the West's Undoing

In The Age of Error and the West’s Undoing, Rupert Darwall examines the fundamental incompatibility between Western elites’ obsession with achieving net zero emissions to avoid allegedly catastrophic climate change, and the West’s capacity to safely navigate a 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.The trauma of the 2008 financial crisis led Western democracies to morph into technocracies, and climate policy became therapy for elites. Elected politicians lost legitimacy and sought to regain political authority by elevating experts to co-govern alongside them: 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 pushed economically disastrous and socially divisive net zero energy policies while China and the Global South powered ahead. Dependence on experts as purveyors of government-approved truth led to widespread censorship during the pandemic, the covering up of the origins of the COVID virus, and muzzling dissent on climate change.In The Age of Error and the West’s Undoing, Darwall takes the reader from 2006—the threshold of the age of error—to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the brutal return of geopolitics. He concludes by examining the West’s path forward: Will the age of error be followed by an age of renewed realism? Or will it beget dissolution and disintegration to earn the epitaph: “The West’s undoing was its own doing”?