The Holy Mountain

An antidote to Computer-Thinking.

Mountains are unchanging. Not to the planet nor the universe but certainly to humans. They are standing when we are born and they’re still standing when we die. They stood for our ancestors and they will be standing for our children’s children. In this way, they reach back into our past and stretch forward into our future.

Perhaps that is why some of us turn to them in times of difficulty. When the world seems to be rent asunder we look to something constant and unchanging - something anchored in time and unmoved by the current turmoil. Something that connects us to our past and to our future and to the very Earth itself. Something solid, in other words.

That is, I think, why my father and I found ourselves on the side of Croagh Patrick in July 2020 with the rain pummelling us from above and a heavy wind trying with all its might to force us back. As all about us seemed to be dissolving into a Covid-shaped madness, we set out for higher ground to see if the world we remembered still existed. And what better place to look than atop Ireland’s holiest mountain?

---

In my last essay I wrote about how, as a species, our modern infatuation with pure rationalism has reduced many of us to human-shaped computers - beings as unfeeling and unimaginative as a calculator - and how this leads to our administrative and bureaucratic systems becoming enslaved to a robotic groupthink that is, in terms of its practical consequences, indistinguishable from the kind of all-controlling A.I. more normally depicted in non-human form by dystopian writers. This has been made possible by the post-Enlightenment abandonment of feeling, instinct, and intuition as viable ways to interact with and understand the universe in favour of purely cold, logical and dispassionate reasoning. Such a way of thinking has its value, of course, but this is not how the universe always wants to speak to us - in terms purely of measurables and quantifiables. Sometimes, its secrets are whispered to us rather than calculated.

When Covid arrived, I happily used data and logic to try to analyse and understand it. I read endless studies from all over the world that helped me quickly determine that Covid posed no extraordinary threat and that the measures proposed to combat it (lockdowns, masks, and mRNA vaccines) were, at best, overkill and, at worst, likely to lead to great harm. I did my homework in other words. I powered up the computer and parsed the data.

However, my father did none of this, at least not at the start. He read no studies. He didn’t slog through data and statistics nor did he sit at a computer scouring the internet for hours on end. But still, he recognised Covid for what it was all the same - and quicker than I. Call it instinct, call it intuition, call it the universe whispering one of its truths to him - but he knew. He knew there was nothing to be afraid of and he recognised the mist of hysteria descending on everyone around him. He didn’t need a computer-mind to see it.

Now, I suspect my father wasn’t the only one to have this “feeling”. But what made him different was that he actually listened to it. Where many of us push such things away, afraid almost to be tainted by such pre-Enlightenment “superstitions”, my father accepted what he was “hearing” and what’s more, he acted upon it. Instead of locking himself away with RTE’s reading of cases and deaths his only companion, he saw his family, he walked the beaches and the hills, and he greeted and met anyone who would do the same to him. He wore no mask even though he was cajoled, rebuked, and eventually forced from shops. And he took no vaccine even when it became the price of entry to society itself. All of this based on an understanding of the world that defies measurements and data. It is the opposite of computer-thinking, the opposite of A.I. It is what humans used to do and what separates us from the machines.

A computer can’t “feel” the truth.

That’s why it’s so easy to trick them. That’s why it was so easy to trick us.

---

Croagh Patrick was another nudge from the universe - a feeling my father had that that was where we should be as the Iron Curtain of Public Health descended. That by climbing that ancient mountain and standing where St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, had once stood (and where he fasted for 40 days) we could reconnect with our country in a way that seemed impossible in a locked-down city where fear stalked the streets. Each step up the mountain would be a step back to a world untainted by the current malaise and, in some way, a strike back against the force causing it.

And so, we set out for Mayo in the early afternoon. The plan was to complete the three hour drive in one sitting, check into the hotel we had booked and then enjoy the pool and spa before dinner in the restaurant and an early night. We would climb the mountain the next day when the forecast promised clear skies and sun. However, as it turns out, the universe had its own plans.

The full tyranny of Covid measures was still to come but there was enough at the time to put us at odds with our hosts for the night. The hotel insisted on us completing a health-screening form before they would check us in. “When were you last sick?” “Do you have a temperature?” “When did you last see someone who had Covid?” Given the absurdities that came later, it might seem like a form was a small ask. Just fill it in and head to the sauna but my father is not inclined toward compromise on things with which he disagrees. And certainly not on this trip - the whole point of which was to be an antidote to such things. He refused and so did I. We ended up back in the carpark.

I remember calling a few guesthouses as we sat in the car outside but only half-heartedly. It may have been late in the afternoon at this stage with heavy rain already falling and the promise of worse to come but the mountain was clearly calling us. We pointed the car at it and gritted our teeth. It would have to be now.

It was, of course, a non-rational thing to do. It takes 3 and a half hours to climb Croagh Patrick and another three and a half to come back down. It was nearly 6pm as we parked at the foot of the mountain and the weather was dreadful, both of us soaked by the time we had gotten our boots and our coats on and the wind was picking up sharply. But, at the time, it seemed impossible to do anything else. We had come to climb that mountain and we weren’t going home without doing exactly that.

I had never climbed Croagh Patrick before and it was much harder than I thought, not helped of course by the weather. Steep in parts, with loose rock running away beneath your feet much of the way, it demanded attention and respect. We passed a few people on their way back down, our mutual calls of greeting lost in the wind, but there was no one else going up. Why would there be? Before long, we had the mountain to ourselves.

I remember feeling at one point that the mountain didn’t want us there. Or maybe that it did but only so it could break us or kill us or drive us back down its side. Perhaps it was just the conditions but every step felt like a struggle, a fight between us and the mountain where each step we took was seen as an act of impudence that it sought to punish.

Another part of being unfamiliar with the mountain was that I didn’t know where the top was. In normal circumstances this would not have been a problem, the peak of most mountains being spectacularly visible as you climb them. But, of course, on that day the weather meant we could not see more than 10 feet ahead of us at any time. After some hours of climbing, we would reach a plateau of sorts and I would think we had arrived at the top but then, after a few moments, more mountain would emerge from the mist ahead and so on we went.

My father did extraordinarily well for a man approaching 70, climbing a 2,500 ft mountain in a veritable storm. But he did struggle as the climb wore on. A few times he shouted to me that were he to be unable to continue I should proceed to the summit without him. At the time, I thought he was perhaps just being dramatic but, thinking back, I don’t think he was. Reaching the top of the mountain was a mission and he was determined that at least one of us would complete it.

As it happens, when the peak came, I did know it was coming even though I couldn’t see it. I hesitate to say it but I “felt” it. The mountain seemed to feel our approach too and redoubled its efforts to drive us back. The wind roared louder than ever, the rain drove against us. If I sound less than rational in any of this, it’s to be expected. It’s a different world on top of a mountain in a storm. Everything becomes feeling and instinct - the perfect cure for the computer world far below.

We reached the top around 9.30pm. There’s a church there, if you’ve never been, and we walked around it once or twice and then paused for a quick picture. But there was little time to relax and enjoy the achievement. Irish summers have long, bright evenings but they have a limit. Darkness was coming and we had to get back down before we were lost to the night. Before we left, I snapped this quick picture. My poor father was holding onto the sign for balance as the wind howled against him and the rain soaked through to his skin.

My father atop Croagh Patrick July 2020

I did do one other thing before leaving the summit. I climbed on top of some rocks and faced into the wind and cursed the mountain for fighting us all the way up. But I feel bad about it now. The mountain was not our enemy. Like I said at the start of this essay, the mountain had been there long before me or my father. It reaches deep into our past and will stretch long into our future. I was really cursing the tyranny that had gripped the country in the guise of public health which was what had ultimately led us here in the first place, a tyranny the mountain would outlive and which, I think, I will outlive too.

As is often the way, the descent was much harder, the loose rock even more likely to rob us of our footing as we went. Darkness enveloped us and the journey became truly treacherous, my father’s small pocket torch our only source of light. We both fell several times and once or twice I worried that my father wouldn’t make it back and I would have to explain what madness had led me to climb a mountain in a storm at night with an O.A.P. But all the same we made it. Wet and sore, cold and hungry - having done something that defied all logic and reason - we made it. In the carpark, we dried off as best we could and then we drove through the night back home - back to the world of computer-minds and the A.I. State. But it felt a little easier, a little brighter. The real world still existed - we had seen it. We had felt it. And it would continue to exist, long after the current regime falls away and turns to dust.

The next day, the sky was clear and sun was shining.