There’s a wonderfully dorkish bit in Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol when a scientist attempts to prove the existence of the human soul by weighing a man’s body moments before and after his death. The difference must be the weight of the departing soul.

This begs a truckload of questions, of course, not least that the soul may not be physical at all. However, the author’s “noetic” scientist reports an infinitesimally small difference so, Eureka!

All great fun. The trouble is, something similar is happening across most of the conventional sciences. The recent swine flu pandemic scare is a good example of vested interests skewing the truth and driving massive public expenditure for no other reason than greed. So is “catastrophic man-made global warming” with its vast new global infrastructure, all paid for by you and me in the middle of a long and crippling recession.

I was thinking of that passage in Dan Brown’s book last week while watching someone blowing bubbles from washing-up liquid. The bubbles seemed to be weightless, even though they are made up of physical substances. But then that’s the nature of bubbles, they appear to be miraculous at first … then they come down to earth or just burst in the air. One should never invest hard coin in bubbles.

Unhappily, lots of people do, and go on doing so even when countless bubbles have burst down the centuries.

Human bubbles are made up of ideas and mental states composed of wishes and deceptions. They form into powerful psychological contagions as they mature, and even take on an apparently material basis as they grow, often posing as something different.

The two current global bubbles are, 1) the myth of catastrophic man-made global heating, and 2) the notion that global decisions are self-evidently better than local ones. Both are underpinned and given force by one of the most lumberingly under-performing institutions in history: the United Nations.

In the economic realm, there are the surpluses of cash built up by exporting countries, China and Japan, matched by the gaping deficits of the US, the UK and many European nations.

Bubbles define our world. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Trillions of our electronic banknotes are now being thrown at the global boiling hypothesis by unrepentant politicians, some well meaning, others self-promoting. The problem is, that bubble has burst.

Global warming by man-produced carbon in the atmosphere has been found not to exist, at least on any timescale we can measure or plan for. The data has been shown to be wrong, or deliberately tampered with. The politicians and their less-than respectable allies — hordes of anti-capitalists and unwashed any-cause hysterics — have gone too far down this road to pull back now. Most will retire to rewrite their personal histories, leaving a new generation to clean up the mess at huge further costs to us.

Here’s a proposition. All new ideas involving the spending of public money should be examined painstakingly for speculative (imaginary) content:

1. What do we actually know, and what are we being advised to believe?
2. Is there a real problem that we can see before our eyes?
3. If it becomes necessary to spend public money to avert an apparent threat in the future, let’s spend it on things that will be useful even if that threat is found to be baseless.

A good example from the past is London fog. In Victorian times, right up until the early 1950s, London was often draped in a pall of yellow smog caused by the burning of cheap sulphurous coal. Millions of lives were lost early from respiratory diseases, heart problems, and simple misery. China and India are still burning this stuff.

The solution was the appliance of science at its best: practical technology. The National Coal Board, then a nationalized industry, brought in two eminent philosopher-scientists: Dr Jacob Bronowski, best remembered for his stagey, but brilliant, BBC series, The Ascent of Man, and E.F. Schumacher, author of the evergreen Small is Beautiful, which was based on Burmese Buddhism. Polymaths both.

They developed the first smokeless fuel. Politicians did their bit and passed laws making it an offence to burn anything else in the big cities, and hey presto, problem all but solved.

The trillions now committed to various schemes for carbon reduction, dreamt up by naive politicians, including the fraudulent brokerage schemes and the “new industries” devoted to pulling wool over our eyes, should be re-evaluated by incoming hard-eyed administrations looking for real value, not notional empires in the stratosphere.

Once again, reducing smokey particulates in the air is worth spending money on for solid health reasons. But the vast array of wind farms and new French nuclear reactors, should be replaced by cheaper, simpler, and more reliable, home-grown alternatives: for example, natural gas derived from Britain’s own methane beds and oil shale deposits. While the Americans and others are pioneering this new technology, Britain — led by the proboscis by bureaucrats in Brussels — is prevented from doing so by self-inflicted barriers reaching as far ahead as 2050. Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble.

By what natural right do these people boss future generations around? The answer lies in the feeble compliance of our lacklustre politicians.

Why not cut free from the whole ridiculous rigmarole and go our own way for our national interests alone. Everyone else is secretly doing this to some degree. If we succeed, you can be sure others will follow. That’s real influence, not the shadowy, pretend kind put forward by Gordon Brown.

Summary: Always be aware of bubbles as they form, and only ever spend public money on what is immediately apparent. Speculation on thinly-based science is rarely profitable. Nature is cyclical and comes and goes, rises and falls in roughly predictable ways. Mankind’s lives are too short to grasp the full picture. Some kind of trust in the future is essential. Most of it is unknowable. If we accept our limitations, we will be happier here and now.

Solution: Replace the top tier of government scientists with practical philosophers who can think any situation through without spending money.

John Evans

Recent Related Commentary
Saturday Ramble: Gordon Brown’s Invictus rictus
Saturday Ramble: Pre-Budget frog spawn
Saturday Ramble: My word, you do look queer!
Saturday Ramble: Rotten information – Part 2

Last week Gordon Brown ditched what limited enthusiasm he had for free markets. Only government intervention will do now, he suggested, preferably by unaccountable global institutions. But what is really the best answer to the failures of the past decade?

It’s a truism that a root-and-branch reformer must admire, even love, the object of his reform if he is to be successful. Anyone who despises the area they are attempting to change will often destroy it. Gordon Brown’s running of the British economy is a classic case in point. Having failed catastrophically to create a lasting Golden Scenario, he now proposes a return to the inadequate socialism of his baby-boomer youth.

While it’s true that market economics has not covered itself with kisses in the last three years, it failed only when pushed beyond the limits of human psychology to cope.

As I have written here before, Up-To-A-Pointism (UTAP) is the answer. It works within levels humans can safely handle. That must now be the criterion of choice for policy-makers.

We know now that ordinary people don’t make rational decisions when acting in economic situations. The old idea that multiple incidents of a choice smooth out variations to a near-rational mean, is only true within limits. That’s where UTAP comes in.

I’ve long been an adherent of what I call, Up-To-A-Pointism. If something works, it only works up to a point. Thereafter it yields diminishing returns, followed by negative consequences.

Government intervention is like that, as are free markets. Both have a limited bandwidth within which they operate well.

Politicians and economists seem largely unaware of this iron rule of nature. They should be. Our future rests on it. It is vital that some attempt is made to determine the limits that constrain every policy decision.

I’ve also come to the conclusion that the overwhelming majority of people are programmed to operate within a rather narrow band of experience — even the high-flyers among us. Once activity breaches the limits of that band, whether above or below, they are like fish without water, humans without oxygen. They rapidly lose all sense of reality.

No-one can really be trusted to behave well in the wider interest when events are excessively good or painfully bad. Unfortunately, we are moving rapidly from the former to the latter condition, where we will be no better served than we were in the wild, expansionary phase.

Whereas in the growth period we could at least fend for ourselves, we are now largely dependent on other people to lift us out of the communal mess. Many of our fellows will be in thrall to people they never intended to imbue with such power over them.

Already, politicians are behaving erratically. Gordon Brown wants to sideline market economics despite its record of success when operated within human-scale limits.

He, and others, are striving to get one-size-fits-all decision-making set up at world and continental level, areas of only the most limited applicability to what happens locally. You only have to look at how unsuccessful Brussels has been at regulating almost all of Western and parts of Eastern Europe. Not to mention the deep resentment of any laws that come from Brussels.

Up-To-A-Pointism applies to globalization too. Decisions deemed undemocratic are not accepted by large swathes of modern populations, more especially if they are seen to fail, as they often do.

It’s easy to force subprime mortgage lending on reluctant financial institutions if they can mash them up into Triple-A securities and dump them around the world like toxic waste. Here again, the limits of psychological adaptation were not appreciated by politically-motivated individuals.

For the future, there is a need to devolve decision-making to levels of clear awareness of those on the receiving end. Only they will know how real people in real situations will react.

This is no time for policy wonks, rocket scientists and Harvard alumni.

Let the people decide for themselves.

John Evans

Recent Related Commentary
Saturday Ramble: Six days to party time or Armageddon
Saturday Ramble: We need an emphatic Irish No vote
Saturday Ramble: From Camelot to Atlantis
Saturday Ramble: Is there anything left for Labour to break?

I’ve just watched David Cameron deliver another accomplished speech at the Conservatives’ Spring Conference at Cheltenham.

Gradually — a word also used by George Osborne this morning — he’s beginning to give shape to the message that will take him into the General Election.

“Thrift” loomed large, while “tax and spend” becomes the natural enemy. Sensibly, he didn’t put too much skin on the flesh and bones. Things could take many turns for the worse before election day arrives, however soon it comes.

The speech was a good mix and plays well with the mood of the times, especially after last week’s atrocious Labour Budget. It sounded pitch perfect to me, as far as it went.

I would have liked to hear something about an association agreement with the European Union, but recognize the constraints he’s under. Maybe a little dog whistle in code to us genuine Conservatives would do the trick?

Here’s my suggestion. In his next speech or TV interview Cameron could mention former French President Giscard d’Estaing by name, in any context, and we will get the message.

I’ll be listening out intently.

The following is my contribution to the debate on the standards adopted by our Members of Parliament.

As an author I sometimes despair of publishers. And yet, as a former book publisher, I know the problems publishers face. So I’m posting this little cri de coeur I found on the web.

It’s written by a publisher, obviously, who shall remain anonymous, largely because I’ve lost the reference. But it does provide some insight into the always tortuous relationship between author and publisher:

Authors really don’t like publishers. They don’t like us because we change their work, or force them to. We reject their titles. We dress their books in jackets they hate.

We take custody of their manuscripts and refuse visitation rights. We don’t let them see or comment on marketing plans. We spend very little money or time promoting their books.

Our royalty statements might as well be in Aramaic. We don’t return their voicemail or email. We don’t communicate and we don’t care.

Sure, that’s an over-generalization, but it’s too close to the truth for comfort. It should concern us that so many authors feel this way about their publishers. And it’s our fault, really, for not communicating better about exactly what we do, and why.

Why can’t our MPs demonstrate such exquisite self-knowledge?

Continuing with the ever present thorn in the public foot of MP’s expenses, something glaringly obvious (to me, at least) has been missed by many.

MPs on the left of politics spend a lot of energy denouncing “fat cats” in industry and commerce, as well as the City of London, for their huge paypackets. Consequently, they have induced a phobia about putting up their own salaries to appropriate levels.

A kind of Freemasons’ nod and winkery has been covertly put in place across party lines to use the expenses system to compensate them for what they regard as inadequate remuneration.

Such a system encourages corruption because it is fundamentally corrupt to conceal and disguise payments received — of any sort.

Thus most MPs cross the line between fair reward and brown envelope practices. The system itself is corrupt, therefore those who take part are corrupted.

As Iain Martin writes in today’s Sunday Telegraph, the answer lies in Members’ own hands — they are meant to be sovereign, after all.

How can they hold the Executive to account, when Chief Whips know everything about the jiggerypokery going on all around them? Francis Urquhart would have had a field day. “I know about that bathplug, Jacqui.”

Pay them £100k and be done with it. After all, if a 5-a-day officer at Warminster-on-Sea Parish Council gets that, why not our legislators?

Oh, I forgot. They aren’t our legislators any more, are they? Brussels has taken that prize.

Okay, promise them £150k if they pull us out of the EU. That should get things moving, don’t you think?

Down here in the South West of England we have three football teams: Exeter (the Grecians), Torquay (the Gulls), and Plymouth (the Pilgrims).

Mostly they languish towards the bottom of the Football League, which I believe has four divisions.

Usually one of them manages bottom spot in the fourth division, before disappearing, through relegation, into a bottomless pit of poverty and amateurism.

However, our local supporters are rarely downcast, taking it all in their stride as an Act of God. One cheery soul told me how he deals with the constant stench of defeat.

“Easy,” he said. “When you get your football paper at the weekend, turn it upside down before looking at the tables. My team is usually top of the whole football league.”

Is that a glimpse of Gordon Brown’s political philosophy?

Remember the “world car”?

It could be a Ford, a Range Rover, or a Chrysler, but its parts were made all over the world, from Brazil to China, before being assembled into its final incarnation, when someone would stick a badge on it proclaiming its proud provenance.

This was globalization in the raw. A ruthless, yet profitable, use of comparative advantage to drive the costs of motoring down — however carboniferous the footprint as all those parts criss-crossed the globe on smelly bits of shipping.

Then the socialist left — devoid of purpose after the collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s flight to capitalism — spotted a gap in the market. The old International Socialist movement, now describing itself as “Progressive Internationalism”, subverted the word “globalization” to describe its own activities.

Many normally astute commentators fell for this subterfuge and eagerly jumped on the global bandwagon, little knowing that it is, in reality, their worst nightmare.

Syntagma has been one of the few voices to proclaim this dirty trick from the rooftops.

Listen very carefully, I will say this only once: Globalization has ceased to be a technical term of economics and is now a pernicious political doctrine of the old left hiding under a thin veil of modernity.

Anyone using the word “global” more that once a year should be sacked immediately from high office.

Finally, on the new 50p tax rate for anyone earning more than £150k a year:

Both David Cameron and George Osborne said today they will put it on a list of taxes to repeal, but priority will be given to National Insurance increases for people earning just £20k and more.

Fair enough, but given the rate of attrition 50p will cause (see Nigel Lawson’s piece in today’s Sunday Telegraph), perhaps they could turn the list upside-down when deciding which tax to drop first.

Some of the best people do this, I’m told.

PS: I shall be listening out for a Cameroon mention of the secret codeword: Giscard d’Estaing, over the coming week. PMQs would do very nicely.

John Evans

Recent Related Stories
DIARY: Tory lead, Cambridge connection, Vince Cable, Royal Academy, West Wing Hazel, Queen and Duke
DIARY: Water droplets, Dirty tricks, David Starkey, Liddle’s Lent, Carbon storage
DIARY: Editors at large, Easter, Hoffman, Andrew Neil, Iain Dale, Autumn election
DIARY: Wishful spending, He has bottom, Brown’s fall, Combustion stinks, One world

Here they are, the G20, a merry grouping of the world’s most powerful leaders, photographed in the wasteland of London’s depressing docks area. How did they do?

The dismal surroundings must have affected their collective judgement.

I’ve been writing here about protectionism for months, while others have dutifully mouthed the mantra: “free trade is good, protectionism is bad”.

Let’s start with some common sense: nothing is as good or as bad as it seems. Applied to the above: some free trade is good, some protectionism is bad. The reverse polarities are also true.

Walk down a street of terraced houses. Although they give the impression of a single, continuous building, they are in fact a series of individual ecosystems.

Each household has its own income, makes its own choices, decides its own way of life within the law, and is governed by its own head. The block is not a single organism in the way ants or bees live. Each property is a self-governing entity whose inhabitants may not even know most of their neighbours.

Generally, humans don’t behave like bacteria or, except at football matches, like flocks of starlings. The best of them are, above all, individuals. The best people like to be in charge of their own affairs and households.

Modern politicians, still suffering from WW2 hangovers, believe they have the right to behave like pushy neighbours and interfere in everyone else’s affairs. They don’t. It would be a better world if other people’s boundaries were respected by everyone else.

The G20 failed because it was fighting 20th-century battles. Some of those principles are worth learning, but many are out of date.

The great problem we face now is the growing divide between exporting, surplus States — China, Germany, Japan — and importing, debtor countries — the US, UK, and many of the rest.

The surpluses and deficits were very large even when the world’s economies were booming, but in a slump, they appear insurmountable.

Countries like China and Germany know they will never get their full value back. The debtor countries will simply inflate their economies — the real reason behind quantitative easing — and/or, like Britain, devalue their exchange rates to improve their international competitiveness and export themselves out of trouble. Import substitution will also push this along at the expense of the surplus exporters.

The effects of this sleight of hand dodge will be to increase tensions in the world, especially between surplus countries that lose out, and debtor States that clawback their deficits by retreating from the moral high ground. Bystander countries will draw the obvious conclusions and the world “trust index” will slump, creating ominous conditions for a new century than may turn out not very different from the last.

Back to the terraced houses, and we can see that many inhabitants are trying to improve their lot by “beggaring their neighbours”. The ecosystem where each household runs itself has collapsed in a welter of indebtedness between families, with some seeking to write off debts unfairly, and the most prudent suffering the most. Some kind of local civil war is inevitable.

The solution, clearly, is to return to individual household responsibility, not to increase the socialization of the terrace and cross indebtedness between houses.

Point One: The “progessive internationalist” approach to the world has broken down. Governments gave us this crisis, the G20 is offering more global governance.

While some countries have vast surpluses, most of it invested in dollar assets or euro bonds, their perceived prudence has now become their undoing.

Point Two: The recent high peaks of international trade were ransacking the world of resources at an unsustainable rate. Whether you believe in man-made global warming, or not, or partly, the rate at which the Earth itself was being consumed to provide shiploads of whimsical products for world consumption, has become the road to hell.

Point Three: The surplus countries created mountains of debt in the deficit countries, way beyond their annual incomes (GDP). This was clearly unsustainable. Sooner or later the bubble had to burst. It did.

The G20 has not solved the enormous problem of how to tackle the aftermath. Creating a “central bank for the world” — a beefed up IMF — with its own “global currency”, will prove as crass as previous decisions by this non-Sovereign body. The G20 has also voted for a ballooning increase in international indebtedness, with unaccountable bureaucrats overruling individual democratic nations.

It has forgotten the important lesson of the 20th century: the “great and the good” on their pinnacles of vanity don’t make better choices than the “small and the mean” at ground level.

The lesson of the early 21st century is that Nation States, which balance their books and their trade accounts, both surpluses and deficits, are vital to a stable and war-free world. Only nations can be approximations of single “organisms” … the world can’t, especially at the current level of individual human development and the great disparities between them.

The surplus nations have the biggest lessons to learn, since they will be at the receiving end of the slump. China kept its currency too cheap too long, hollowing out much of the West’s manufacturing industry. It is now reaping the whirlwind.

Germany over-specialized in sophisticated metal-bashing and is suffering a grievous loss of income as the willingness of others to buy collapses.

For us at the debtor end of the spectrum, our mistakes were general, across government, corporates and individuals. We signed up freely to a psychological contagion, promising endless wealth, and got ourselves deep in debt as a result. British authorities are allowing the exchange rate to fall and pushing up inflation by “unconventional means” so that our debts are reduced. It may well come back to bite us, but so far so murky.

The heart of the problem is not being tackled at all, except through vacuous soundbites.

The verdict on the G20 then, with its irrelevant headline decisions on tax havens, more debt, and the vapourware trillion dollar infusion “to save the world” is negative. It will do no such thing.

It will probably make it worse.

John Evans

Recent Related Stories
Sensible protectionism is not a sin
The world needs Up-To-A-Pointism
Globalization destroys necessary bulkheads

Foreign Secretary David Miliband was on the Andrew Marr programme this morning and in subdued mood. The only memorable thing I recall is: “We have to inject demand into the economy.”

Does he know what “demand” actually is? And can it be injected?

The Keynesian left often uses mechanical words and phrases to describe nebulous processes. The aim in this case is to increase spending in the real economy to boost employment and lower social security payouts. There are many ways of doing this, mostly they don’t work.

For example, if civil servants went to a typical High Street to hand out briefcases full of banknotes, what would happen?

Two years ago most recipients might head for the nearest celebrity chef restaurant and drink the menu. On the way home they might pop into a jewellery shop to buy a bauble for the missus. That would push money into the real economy and boost employment. But it wasn’t needed two years ago.

Today, by contrast, a hollow-cheeked citizen would probably open the case and exclaim, “Now I can pay off the mortgage arrears, pay down the credit card, and put the rest into a savings account.”

Since all that money will end up back in financial institutions, it’s not going to affect unemployment at all. And since banks are hoarding cash while asset prices are falling, it’s not going to improve credit either.

Typically, Keynesians call this “priming the pump”. When was the last time you used a pump?

Demand is not a mechanism that can be turned on and off, it’s a psychological idea and depends on many unknown unknowns. Even then, is it actually “demand” we’re discussing here?

Do we walk into a supermarket and say, “I demand you sell me these eggs!” Or a car dealer’s forecourt: “I demand to own that car”. Of course not, demand is not involved at all, unless we’re robbing the place.

Our “needs” will generally be met in a downturn because we can tailor them to our resources, and we don’t actually need very much.

In a modern economy, it’s our “wants” that add the froth and pump up economic activity. By engaging in “demand management”, the government is really making us spend on inconsequentials, fripperies and other luxuries we can well do without. It’s trying to create “disposable income” which we can dispose of without a qualm.

Moreover, our wants are viewed from a different perspective when times are hard. The puritan side of our nature re-emerges and we scorn our previous spendthrift activities. We become rational again.

Odd, isn’t it, that our elected representatives prefer us to be irrational, and use our own money to bribe us into exuberant expenditure. How are they different from the pushy credit card companies at the height of the boom?

But it’s still not Demand, is it? Wrong word. Let’s use Wishful Spending instead.

I know it’s not as impressive or managerial as Demand, but at least it means what it says, and we would know what the authorities were trying to make us do.

Wishful spending management: the infantilization of the population completed. Mission accomplished!

Politicians have their own terminology of praise, faint or otherwise. One favourite is: “He has bottom”. Strange, it’s never used about a woman.

Does Gordon have bottom?

Well, you could do worse than glance at Gerald Scarfe’s wicked cartoon in today’s Sunday Times. Brown is depicted as demonstrating quantitative easing to members of the G20.

I’ll leave you to imagine the scenario … or pay the £2 price of the paper.

The roasting of Gordon Brown proceeds apace this weekend.

Yesterday it was Matthew Parris’s turn to take aim and fire. In The Times (London) he eviscerated, excoriated, then practically excommunicated the man from all polite society west of Margate and south of Dunfermline.

Today, Matthew d’Ancona of the Telegraph squeezed him dry till the pips squeaked: “The spandex-clad superhero has lost his aura of power. Mervyn King has cancelled his credit card.”

Peter Oborne also weighed in on Saturday with more thudding blows to an already bruised body. Following Daniel Hannan’s surprise rapier attack on European soil, the commentariat is piling in for the kill.

It’s not surprising. The world is expecting its Saviour-in-Chief to pull a giant rabbit from a small hat on Thursday. The G20 has been massively over-promised, thanks to Brown.

The decline is over, only the fall is left. Will he walk away now from the defeat that’s coming? Or will he limit the pain by calling a June General Election?

He’s no William Wallace.

The enigma at the heart of the hysterical response to supposed man-made global warming, is that paradoxically, its goals are so limited.

If carbon is indeed the problem, why keep trimming away at the edges? Why not ditch carbon completely?

At present, every human activity results in the production of carbon. Every morsel of energy we use, for light, heat, propulsion, manufacturing and servicing, somewhere down the line involves the burning of long dead trees.

It’s an astonishingly primitive process for a so-called advanced technological society. If we explained to a Stone Age caveman where our abundance of energy comes from, he’d remark drily, “We do that too. You’re not so clever after all.”

Where is the new motive power source for a truly innovative age that doesn’t depend on combustion of some sort? Wind and solar power require large areas of land to serve a small population, land that will be needed to grow food on in the future.

Greens want to chip away at the usage of carbon burning sources while the human population is doubling every century or so. It doesn’t add up.

All effort and investment should be directed at eliminating the combustion phase in the production of energy, not spending vast sums shoring up defences against future events which may never happen. If all the resources devoted to “green” alternatives were switched to that one objective, do you suppose it would fail?

Why pauperize whole economies in a futile attempt to empty the sea with a bucket?

Niall Ferguson’s thoughtful lecture to the Centre for Policy Studies (Get pdf here) on the trilemma of modern politics, prompts a lot of questions. Here’s one of them:

What halted the Doha international trade agreement was India’s veto. They were worried about the possibility of mass suicides among Indian farmers helpless against huge surges of imports into their country. Once again it was a clash between local sensibilities and a theoretical set of principles set out by the world’s power brokers. Local versus global.

The notion of “one world” is valid only on a spiritual level. As a philosophical Idealist, I certainly hold that view. However, on a practical level, it’s not true at all. Go and talk to those Indian farmers to find out why.

C.G. Jung’s description of a Collective Unconscious tells a complicated story. Many of the “archetypes” found there deal with self-preservation and can be terrifying to behold. He warned Westerners in particular not to lose themselves in this psychic realm because, as rationalists, they have no defence against the symbolic nature of it.

The nearest we have to a world mind is the internet. Jung would have been fascinated by it. However, his warnings ring true when some people get so caught up in the web of social media sites that they become unhinged and separated from reality. All those teenage suicides in the small town of Bridgend gives us an inkling.

People need feet of clay to be contented in this world. A satisfactory local environment is needed for mental harmony. It’s not speculative. It has actuality.

Our minds are not constructed to deal with planetary affairs, however much half-deranged politicians like Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson may insist the contrary.

One World is forever an aspiration, never a finished construct. Only swamis in caves in the Himalayas can contemplate the cosmos as a unity.

For the rest of us, it’s business as usual, right here, right now. The G20 will produce only sporadic results papering over many cracks.

It’s the cracks we should be celebrating, not the glue. They are the real thing. The stuff of freedom. Wabi sabi, as the Japanese say.

When the world can live with its cracks and fissures, then a kind of unity is possible.

John Evans

Recent Related Stories
DIARY: Signposts, Adair Turner, Ayn Rand, 45 percent, Jonathan Porritt
DIARY: Clegg, Burke, Chocolate, Labour copycats, High centre ground, Pointers
DIARY: Kennedy, Mandelson, Public sector, Prince of Wales, Birdtweets, Canadian meltdown
DIARY: Maitlis, Tories, Spring offensive, Education, Hendry, Eurozone
DIARY: Captain Mainwaring, God and bicycles, Psychological contagion, Prediction, Blakemore, Gilbert