So, here we go. Another year older and once again, as in the old days, deeper in debt. Saint Peter don’t ya call me ’cos I can’t go. It’s been cold and windy and inclement but still, let me wish you all a happy New Year.

Make the most of what you’ve got, and now, because you’ll never know when it might go up in smoke. That’s the way of it now. All the old certainties have been replaced by new doubts.

These doubts are existential as well as political. For no good reason, even as science unravels virtually every mystery we have puzzled over, humanity has embraced unreason. It isn’t just fundamentalism of a religious or political nature (or both). No, you also find it in technically and educationally advanced societies as well, but often masked as astrology or New Age mysticism, or whatever.

Don’t misunderstand me. If you peel back the layers that humans have built onto religions, you will usually find ideas and thoughts that bear considerable reflection. A person who lives by the precepts of Christianity, Buddhism, Islam or whatever is likely to be a good person, and an honest and peaceful citizen with whom it would be a pleasure to do business.

But most western countries have moved on from there, even Ireland. The former Labour leader Ruairi Quinn referred to ‘post-Catholic Ireland’, and with some justification. Insofar as religion is growing, it is in the form of smaller religious groups largely established amongst immigrants.

Traditional religious practice is in terminal decline, and there aren’t enough postulant priests or nuns to replace the old ones who are dying out.

The skills shortages that have bedevilled many of our industries in the recent past have hit religion and, just like meat-packers, teleservice companies or hospitals, the Churches are starting to recruit overseas.

But even as this happens, a watery, vague and even less provable set of practices, or even superstitions, has taken root and flourished. People who wouldn’t cross the threshold of a church for a formal religious ceremony will pay to have their future predicted by someone throwing cards. People who wouldn’t read a priestly column in a paper, nor listen to a sermon, will read sermonistic advice from strangers if it’s dressed up as astrology. And so on.

I don’t get it.

So what hole in their psyches is being filled? Why this search for faffy, extra-terrestrial meaning? Why do people need to succour themselves with illusions? Or should that be sucker? Why do they need to believe in something that can’t be seen and can’t be proved?

Like little green men, flying saucers and alien abduction. I’m as fond of a good yarn as the next, but when people start believing in them, then we’re in trouble. Americans seem more prone to this credulity than the rest of us, but then that may be to do with having less of the other beliefs to begin with.

Somewhere deep in the human psyche, it seems, is the need for bogeymen, for beasties that lurk in wait for the unwary. They’re everywhere, in your neighbourhood, in your woods, in your tabloids, in your gossip. And they’re out there in the world.

Once again, America is especially prone. Always has been, since the Salem witch trial.

There was a nice line in Soviet bogeymen for a while, them and Martians. When the Berlin Wall came down, as well as economic opportunity, there was a strange collective loss of self-certainty in the USA. Because, I suppose, people there often define themselves in terms of what they’re not or who they’re against, rather than what they are and what they’re for.

You sometimes think that if Osama bin Laden hadn’t emerged he’d have been invented. Which in a way he was. But of course, such cynicism would be overlooking Saddam Hoo-sain, in whom you have not only an American bogeyman, but also George Bush’s personal bogeyman as well.

Then there’s North Korea, which so far has outwitted and outmanoeuvred the US administration. Right enough, the Americans have both eyes and all weapons trained on Baghdad. But, again, while the Iraqis may have weapons of mass destruction hidden away somewhere, they are not selling them to every murderous Tom, Dick and Harry with the money to buy, unlike the North Koreans.

On the other hand, there’s no oil in North Korea...

Am I being cynical?

Like I said, there could be trouble ahead.

Happy New Year.

The Hog