The Bewilderness

Central bankers in draghi

The  Eurozone is once again placing promise before its creditors. Yet again the central bankers donseven veils in their tight courtship with the bond market. The now deceptive utterances are designed to raise expectations and lower bond prices. Just when you gasp at the same rhetorical contrivance, the market reacts in the same way to the same lines that it did before. What was once alarming has now become tedious and yawn-inducing. This seems like a very long play and we are forever trapped on opening night.

Yet this not really true as the politics keeps getting in the way of their pristine technocratic display. The central bankers are titillating the traders when some political stripper rips the disguise away. It is the political growls that we shoudl heed for the central bankers have cried wolf to issue vapours of monetary somnolence; ever so dangerous as the next crisis may appear to be a ripple when it is the accelerating whirl that takes all down the plughole. 

Brooke after Gallipoli

Finishing the memoir of Rupert Brooke today on the train to Petersfield, I was struck by a counterfactual. For three months, Brooke languidly took his artistic temperature in the cafes of Munich in 1911, adjudging the German character and drawing sketches of his fellow English as Forster wannabes. It was a poet with a view to exporting the Brookes club, sole membership: one.

The counterfactual would have been triggered by Brooke crossing paths with Adolf Hitler. But the times do not match as Hitler did not emigrate to Munich till 1913. It was motivated by the question of how Brooke may have matured if he had seen action and survived the war.

The question of patriotic poetry and his gauche early work are clear. The themes of satirical focus and sketches of what he saw and experienced would probably have replaced this naif hunger for action (in which he merely articulated the attitudes of his public school generation). Would he have even written about the sense of loss and bereavement for that 'lost generation', of which, in reality, he became a part? 

If Brooke had survived, it is difficult to plot his further career. Positioned between conservative patriotism and the socialism of his cohort, can we foresee Brooke as a reformed pacifist during the interwar period: the primary force in the 1945 Brooke government? His charisma certainly favoured a political role.  Or is he remembered as a minor academic at Sydney University, retreading old steps to the South Seas and tired of a country that held no further happiness for him? Or would he retire like Siegfried Sassoon: perhaps becoming a housemaster again at his beloved Rugby, some special plaque commemorating "Chips" Brooke and his influence over generations of schoolboys.

None of this happened and Brooke was buried on an Aegean isle, as the voice of that lost generation, his best unwritten poetry still before him. 

The lure of prediction

Perhaps it is a function of the "season" or the "silly season" in the news that subjects usually bubbling under may acquire a prominence or significance before merging back into the ambient noise. One of the subjects that acquired a signature tune last month was the science of 'cliodynamics'. This was a term coined by Peter Turchin, a mathemematical ecologist from the University of Connecticut who sieves that kaleidoscope of the past to discern measurable and predictable laws. For where there is law, there is prediction.

Ignoring the arguments for and against looking for laws in human behaviour, I turn to why this minor article was picked up by the press. The attention was garnered by the convergence of science and prophecy; we are fascinated by the lure of a science that could predict, and prevent, future events. All politicians are tempted by a rational crystal ball. Especially in the now, when all trends appear broken, all narratives lost, the rise of an eschatological story is probably overdue. 

Apart from the power laws charted in economic and technological innovation, the dynamics of human activity at a macroscopic level remain opaque. I doubt that cliodynamics will replace the usual teleology adopted by those proud to predict in the face of overwhelming evidence; that of class struggle

 

Who will say boo to a nuclear Iran?

The Non-Aligned Movement, that archaic collection of BRICs and mortars; sometimes called 'The South' has been meeting in Tehran for the last few days. Always pitched towards the Soviet end of the spectrum, this collectivity was a circling of the wagons for the majority of non-elected leaders who chose to hobnob with each other and display some 'independence' from their sponsors. 

The New York declares that Tehran has won a victory with the final communique supporting their right to peaceful nuclear energy under the auspices of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. This includes the right to uranium enrichment, a potential signal for military attack in Israel and the United States.

Yet, the non-aligned movement will appear betrayed if Iran breaks out and adopts a nuclear weapon. Those who supported its right to peaceful nuclear energy will appear to be the tools of the ayatollahs, manipulated for a diplomatic figleaf at a time of potential diplomatic isolation. Would Iran trade short-term diplomatic support for longer term condemnation?

Er yes! Who says boo to a nuclear goose?