Why I'm Revisiting Pothole of the Gods

You’d be forgiven for thinking this might be the end of days for the Islamic Republic that that was literally, not figuratively, founded to bring on the End of Days for the rest of us. I hope so, but I’ve never been sold on the idea that theology is a sound basis for foreign policy. In my experience, the Almighty has never been that easy to push around. Your milage may vary.

When I wrote Pothole of the Gods in 2021, it was to frame-out man’s fascination with one of his oldest - yet most enduring - bad ideas by putting it into the wider context. For me that was my experience in the Muslim world with a marauding pediatric cardiac unit. It’s not as random as it sounds: Hospitals, wherever Google Earth finds them,

have an excruciating tendency of putting bad ideas into a wider human context. Yet, it was always going to be tricky to write a book about something as atavistic as Holy War. Predictably, simmering distrust and adventurism ran beyond the events covered in the book.

Pothole was published a year before what future historians may well mark as the start of World War III. Like the first world war, this conflict will have its aspects of jihad, but this time the Middle East won’t be a side-show. The world is too addicted to the energy that fuels a truly global market. If Islam’s jihad is holy war in the traditional sense, it’s not the only one. China may not recognize a god, but we are their devil. The rise of drone technology has turned every lost cause into a quasi-holy war and given it an air force. Developing nations of the Global South may not be a match for America militarily, but they are well-suited to pester markets with what we might call “economic chaos arbitrage.”

An apt description, but hardly one to rally the masses. Perhaps the lure of jihad is more potent in a place where a bright future pursing happiness, peace and prosperity is pretty much achieved only after you die and go to Heaven. By Western standards America is a religious country but the promise of a fat heavenly pension is less of a pull when we’re all one tech start-up from a billion dollar pay-out here on earth.

Yet, with the possible exception to tech billionaire Bryan Johnson, the rich world is getting older and the developing world is getting younger. Why? Inflammation hysteria aside, it’s that the world’s poor,  put-upon and sans paid vacation are screwing like bunnies. This matters because those baseline cultural assumptions the West keeps telling itself are “universal” are becoming the ideological grand-parents of the world. Its earned experience – emerging out of the dark ages, rediscovering the ancient philosophies, getting stuck in our own religious wars, and stumbling through the Enlightenment – has allowed the West drew a fine bead on common sense. The US-led post-War order lifted more people higher out of poverty than at anytime in human history - by order of magnitudes. But if we can’t engineer some sort of ordered hand-off to a rising generation, the West and its institutions may be on its way out.

On a recent trip to D.C., I noticed this angst on full display. The kids, it seems, are getting unruly and have managed to find our pain points. What ever happens with this war, by closing off the Strait of Hormuz, the Islamic Republic has hit the core of the Western value system - not liberty and self-determination – but a free market and a reasonable rate of return. We may have slowed Iran’s nuclear roll under a mountain of rubble, but we’ve likely triggered a global black-market nuclear arms race. So it would be nice if they weren’t all trying to kill us.

I’ve been to some unforgiving parts of the world to see first hand systems functioning under stress, and how it affects people operating within them. Every situation is different - but with a wider lens definite patterns emerge. Even bad, irrational ideas fueled by fear and emotion tend to follow a rhythm.

So I revised and updates Pothole of the Gods, not to predict the future, but to cancel out the noise. Because the world is still going to hell.

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Pothole of the Gods: Holy Wars, Proxy Wars and Fake News will be available next month from Burnaby books.