As it’s Good Friday we spent the morning discussing sages — as you do. The topic arose from the death of Arthur C. Clarke (pictured), the science fiction author and inventor of synchronous-orbiting satellites.

I once partly collaborated with him on a book project I was writing for BT. He kindly gave me full access to his library and archives in Taunton, the family home town. He always struck me as a sagelike character interested in shaping a better future from a troublesome present and even worse past. Maybe that’s a good definition of a sage.

But are there any other sages left, especially in the online world which most of our readers inhabit?

A number of living sages sprang to mind. For example, Warren Buffett, the Sage of Omaha, whose advice on investment must be worth a bob or two.

Bill Gates? I think so. He’s veered far from his specialism during his long career and always has views on the shape of things to come. As indeed has Steve Jobs of Apple.

But are they too self-interested to be real sages? Shouldn’t sagacity float free of any self-partiality? That doesn’t leave many to choose from, does it?

I think we should accept the above three figures as sages, with minor reservations. Although they are never going to be Mahatma Gandhis — money just gets in the way somehow.

So who then is The Sage of the Blogosphere?

Dave Winer pops up from beneath the parapet. He writes long and often at Scripting News. If you eliminate the endless links — none has ever come Syntagma’s way, incidentally, but we’re above all that — his longer pieces tend to have a careful, sagelike quality about them.

His problem is that he’s a bit too liberal (in the UK read “left-wing”). A sage should surely not support a political party. Their manifestos are written for idiots by half-baked zealots.

Does zealotry crush sagacity? I think so.

Who else? There are lots of authors in the tech blogosphere who write long articles of a philosophical and speculative nature — Jeff Jarvis, anyone? And I can think of a dozen more. John Battelle, Robert Scoble, Jason Calacanis …

And how about Tim Berners-Lee who “invented” the Worldwide Web, the internet as we know it. He also writes persuasively about its future as the Semantic Web — Web 3.0 — and was recently given the Order of Merit by the Queen, one of the highest honours in the land.

However, sages should stand out more than just being brilliant at what they do — shouldn’t they?

Questions, questions.

In the political blogosphere Andrew Sullivan writes deeply and never uninterestingly about matters of the day. Last week was a departure when he covered the future of video blogging. But is he a sage? Would he want to be?

Maybe the internet is not the right medium for sages of the old school. Are there sages of the new school?

Perhaps we don’t recognize them yet. Only hindsight will make them stand out from the pack. After all, Arthur C. Clarke was not regarded as a sage when he wrote wildly about satellites in the 1940’s magazine Wireless World. It was only later when small bits of technology were dumped at 22,000 miles above the planet that his foresight was spotted.

I think I’d better leave the question open : who is The Sage of the Blogosphere?

To paraphrase that undoubted sage, Albert Einstein, “Not everyone that counts can be counted, and not everyone that can be counted counts”.

Update : After much thought on this question, I’ve decided that my candidate for The Sage of the Blogosphere is Robert X. Cringely.

How is your knowledge of the 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression that followed it in the 1930s?

Not so good? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. But this is likely to be one of the world’s biggest talking points in coming months and years.

I was reminded of the Depression yesterday by the appearance of one of the legendary names from that distant era in the rescue of U.S. bank Bear Stearns.

J.P. Morgan was the renowned banker called on by the President to sort out the financial mess during one of the slumps of the period. Morgan set about systematically weeding out the companies that should be allowed to go to the wall, and those that were too important to allow to fail.

Yesterday the old feller’s bank, JP Morgan Chase and the New York Federal Reserve combined to stuff funds back into failing giant Bear Stearns, brought low by the gathering credit crunch.

The problem this time around is one of leverage and its effects on banks’ lending ratios — the multiple of lending to capital reserves a financial institution is allowed to build up by the authorities. The Geneva standard is that a bank’s capital must not fall below 8 percent of its lending. That number has been around a long time — I remember it from Alfred Marshall’s ancient classic textbook on economics during my university days.

Eight percent represents a ratio of 12.5 of lending to capital. These days it’s the norm for private equity companies to leverage many times more than that — supported by banks, of course, which then calculate their capital on a hugely inflated valuation for partly subprime debt. When the bubble bursts — as is now happening — both sides of the deal collapse.

Recently-bust Carlyle Capital Corporation (CCC) leveraged its equity 32 times to finance a $21.7bn portfolio of residential mortgage-backed securities issued by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. These instruments were financed by some of the biggest names in world banking.

With the housing market going south with a vengeance, it’s said that many banks’ capital reserves to lending ratios have slipped close to zero. The global financial system is floating on a cushion of fresh air.

There are always the consolations of philosophy for us to fall back on. Not the nitpicking academic variety which parses the meaning of words to death, but the active philosophy of Socrates whose adage, “The unexamined life is not worth living” should be a talisman of the financial sector.

In Britain, Gordon Brown’s Financial Services Authority (FSA), set up by him ten years ago to police the financial markets and the banks, completely missed the Northern Rock collapse, which was due to the bank raising money solely on the money markets and bundling the debts — many subprime — into packages and selling the risk on. When the money markets dried up, the bank had nowhere to go but to the Government to bail it out and eventually to nationalize it.

“The unexamined life is not worth living”. It seems the FSA did not examine the fifth largest bank in the UK, or spot the snake oil splashing around its floors.

Now consider what happened next as an example of both hubris and the reverse of Socrates’s dictum. Brown is calling for a “global financial watchdog” to perform for the entire planet what his FSA did for Britain.

Self-knowledge where art thou? The man has the richest fantasy life since Walt Disney.

Since we can’t have financial stability, or even politicians who examine their actions carefully, we must fall back on the real consolations of philosophy — everything changes and nothing remains the same.

Except death and taxes, of course.

Followers of our recent series on early Zen masters (and there were many, especially in the Far East), may be interested in this new session of short biographies on masters of Advaita Vedanta in southern India. Advaita has many similarities with Zen.

The series starts with Shankara, an early master who attempted a fusion of Buddhism with the spirituality of the Upanishads. He succeeded and created Advaita Vedanta, which is a powerful movement to this day, especially in southern India.

The session closes with 20th-century master, Ramana Maharshi, a much-loved saint — in its genuine sense — who spent his life on the famed Arunachala Hill at Tiruvannamalai. Not to be missed.

Start reading here.

Have you noticed how the world appears to be overflowing with Greek and Shakespearean tragedies right now? From the never-ending Diana Inquest to stuttering wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the slow-motion unwinding of the world economy, the planet has become a tangled network of crumbling dreams and broken promises.

Gordon Brown, British Prime Minister

None more so than applies to Gordon Brown, Britain’s newly appointed Prime Minister.

Regular readers may recall that, back in March, one of Syntagma’s resolutions was to give up politics. I chose the wrong moment. From the fall of Blair to the rise and precipitate decline of Brown, it’s been a fascinating rollercoaster of insights into the political psyche.

Brown, who as recently as the summer was basking in a Churchillian glow, amid a welter of crises during the holidays, is now a quivering wreck, shot through by one disaster after another. After waiting and plotting for ten years to get the job, he must now be musing on the old saw, “Be careful what you wish for … you may get it.”

First he reneged on a promised referendum on the EU constitution; then he promoted and backed off an early general election when the polls ran against him. Next, an obscure northern mortgage bank, Northern Rock — which just happens to be the fifth largest in the UK, after the big four — got caught in the worldwide credit crunch. Brown’s own regulatory system didn’t even splutter into action while all this was going on. Now taxpayers are bailing out the bank to the tune of £30 billion ($62bn), which, according to Anatole Kaletsky in The Times (London), is “the biggest financial support operation ever offered to any private company by any government anywhere in the world”.

That was followed by HM Revenue and Customs — a department created by G. Brown himself — losing half the nation’s personal details, including bank account data, in the post. As if that wasn’t bad enough, all this week Brown has been submerged by yet more scandals over unlawful Labour party funding, which is now in the hands of the police at Scotland Yard.

Success in the top political job demands two qualities : leadership, and competence as an administrator. Brown has neither. He hasn’t the charisma to be PM, and lacks administrative abilities. In other words, he has been promoted two or three notches above his level of competence. Moreover, his Cabinet is stuffed full of third-raters and hopeless middle managers who would never make the board in a decent private company.

I fear this Labour government will hang on until mid-2010 — the latest date for the next election — unless the police finally nail them for money-laundering of political donations.

Brown is a clever and highly educated man, someone I would normally admire, but he’s a philosopher not a politician. His fatal flaw is a vanity that delivers an overwhelming desire to be the top dog, although he is conspicuously unqualified for the task.

Even as a philosopher he lacks the wisdom and objectivity to recognize his own deficiencies. Psychologically he’s an observer, not a doer. A backroom wallah, not the front man for a nation.

Self-knowledge requires a degree of personal honesty which the dour Scot has yet to achieve.