In 1940 the poet Edna St Vincent Millay offered up a furious rebuke in verse to a still-powerful Isolationist lobby determined to keep America artificially distanced from the violent convulsions then rocking Europe, convulsions which would soon threaten to plunge the entire world into the abyss of Fascist nihilism.

Millay’s widely reprinted poem There Are No More Islands, Any More mocked the head-in-the-sand myopia which afflicted millions of Americans across the entire spectrum of political opinion on the eve of the Second World War.

But in the decades since it was written, the poem has taken on a more universal meaning.

In what is perhaps its best known verse, the poem targets those whose stubborn resistance to the encroachments of any uncomfortable or inconvenient reality will ultimately leave them singularly unprepared to meet the new challenges of changing circumstances.

“This little life from here to there --

Who lives it safely anywhere?

Not you, my insulated friend:

What calm composure will defend

Your rock, when tides you’ve never seen

Assault the sands of What-has-been,

And from your island’s tallest tree,

You watch advance What-is-to-be?”

In an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world, one in which distance, borders, place and time no longer matter, Bermuda’s geographic isolation is now entirely meaningless.

There really are no more islands any more in the globalised 21st century, including ours.

But there are still those among us who routinely retreat behind the barricades of insularity, parochialism and resistance to even the most necessary change.

There are those who would rail at modernity and the demands that participation in the global economy now make on us from the other side of some kind of mental reef line seemingly impenetrable to logic.

And they do neither themselves nor Bermuda any favours.

It’s been said that arguing with men or women who have renounced the use and authority of reason is as pointless as administering medicine to the dead.

But when elected officials claim, for instance, that Bermuda’s moribund economy can indeed be grown again without growing the population or that behind even the most non-contentious and long overdue upgrades to our Immigration laws lurks a sinister conspiracy to displace and marginalise the native population, it’s impossible to bite your tongue.

These are not the reliably overwrought and melodramatic pronouncements of newspaper letter writers or commentators on social media sites, after all. These are, supposedly, the considered and rational opinions of those who lead this Island. Banging the drum of nativism has always produced resonant echoes – and more than a few votes – in the Bermudian political culture. Given our history that’s not entirely surprising.

But while it’s incontestable that at one time a Bermudian elite jealous of its hereditary privileges and economic monopolies attempted to manipulate the Island’s demographics to shore up its own position, it’s also true that such self-sustaining oligarchic practices came to an end long ago.

For with the coming of responsible government a half-century ago and the enshrinement of democratic safeguards ensuring accountability and openness in the political process, such brazen power plays could no longer even be countenanced, let alone acted upon.

However, even when they know better Bermuda’s politicians have never been shy about embracing conspiracy theories, no matter how crackpot or extreme. In fact, if they serve to further a short-term electoral agenda even at the long-term expense of the Island’s interests, the more crackpot the better.

After all, nothing fosters dependency on a leader and solidarity among a party’s supporters like the threat of imminent persecution.

“Collective fear,” Bertrand Russell once said, “stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity towards those who are not regarded as members of the herd …

“Fear generates impulses of cruelty, and therefore promotes such superstitious beliefs as seem to justify cruelty. Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.”

Our more opportunistic political fear-mongers are intentionally encouraging Bermudians to take refuge in What-has-been rather than preparing them for What-is-to-be.

They are playing on our worst fears rather than encouraging our highest aspirations in a world where change is the only constant and adaptability is now the prerequisite for survival.

The bottom line is that Bermuda must keep in step with the times or risk being left entirely behind by them.

And hysterical conspiracy theorising will no more defend this particular rock against the tides of global change than the studied indifference to unwelcome but intrusive realities demonstrated by an earlier generation of Isolationists.