The people that walked in darkness

Marcus Anthony speaks in a recent video blog (http://22cplus.blogspot.com/2010/05/other-side-of-hong-kong.html) about the beauty and tranquility of Hong Kong’s outlying islands, and how few citizens are willing to unplug themselves long enough to explore them: Shopping for clothes or the latest electronic gadgets is a much more popular Sunday pastime than hiking in those lush and soul-healing green hills.

But then, in order to acknowledge their need for that healing, people would first have to acknowledge that they have souls – that they’re not just biological gadgets, wired up and ready to serve the global corporations that constitute a kind of nightmare distortion of the benign world government that futurist thinkers dreamt of 100 or so years ago. And there’s an exact parallel between those soul-extinguished Hong Kongers and the tepid, slow-motion response of Americans to the Louisiana oil spill catastrophe – as if that black, sticky, toxic ooze had somehow got into people’s minds and hearts as well as destroying some of the country’s finest landscapes and killing millions of innocent fellow-creatures. (It will probably start to affect Florida – America’s no. 1 holiday playground – soon.)

It’s true that President Obama has reacted with characteristic restraint and caution to a situation which probably didn’t call for either of these qualities, but we can’t expect our leaders to feel the passion and reverence for life on our behalf that we’re not willing or able to manifest for ourselves. The problem is, as I mentioned in a previous blog, we’ve sold our souls for oil, and we can’t claim them back at a moment’s notice just because we’re feeling a bit queasy about the bargain – all those hocked souls are in safe deposit, well locked away.

The two most valuable corporations in America are, appropriately enough, Exxon and Apple: oil and gadgets, at over $225 bn. each of market capitalization – if the combined value of those corporations was shared equally among all Americans, every man, woman and child would have $1500 worth. But of course the value isn’t shared equally, or anything remotely like equally: a tiny number of people derive stupendous wealth from them, and the rest of us little or nothing. Only the negative effects are shared out equally: the oil when it’s spilled spills on everyone and everything, while the negative social effects of IT addiction are down to “society” as a whole to deal with.

It doesn’t look like a great bargain for what we’ve given away, does it? Maybe it’s time we started to reclaim our souls, even if we have to make do with fewer gadgets and less oil. We can only become wholer, saner and happier in the process.

Degrowth, Ungrowth, Anti-Growth

As Bob Herbert says in a very moving op-ed in the New York Times (nytimes.com/2010/05/22/opinion/22herbert.html?hp), “America has sold its soul for oil”. He might as well have said the entire world – with projected global oil consumption in 2020 three times the 1970 level, pretty much all of us are riding this juggernaut, and all too few seem to want to (or to know how to) get off.

The conventional “wisdom” (never was the word more inappropriate) regarding the current Eurozone crisis is that the continent needs economic growth of 3%-4%, plus increased “competitiveness” – as if economic competition hadn’t already created millions of human casualties, in the form of the growing numbers of long-term unemployed and unemployable. The same “wise” commentators point with admiration to China and India’s 10%+ growth rates, passing over if they mention them at all the extraordinary stresses developing in those societies – such as the recent knife attacks on small children in China.

Apart from the fact that endless growth on a finite planet must end up destroying its very fabric (that’s another topic), this obsession causes immense damage to our souls. Contentment with what we have becomes impossible; basic self-acceptance is undermined by a perpetual sense of insufficiency. Further and further from the path prescribed by all the world’s spiritual traditions, we invent ever more gadgets to become attached to – gadgets which need charging or they literally die on us; gadgets which after a few years become obsolete pieces of metal and plastic junk

In the overall timescale of human history “growthism” is a very recent phenomenon, and it pretty much coincides with the emergence of modern all-powerful mega-corporations and financial markets. It’s their need for ever-growing profit that drive the economic policy of nations and ultimately the behavior of individuals, via advertising and other media – even though most of the material rewards for this plunder of the earth’s resources and the human psyche accrue to a tiny number of people, who have not just more than they need, but inconceivably more than anyone could possibly ever imagine needing even if they were to live for 10,000 years. The pyramid of wealth distribution is perfectly matched by a pyramid of greed, ruthlessness and insecurity.

An interesting counter-initiative is starting to develop, based not on the chimera of environmentally sustainable economic growth – which doesn’t address the psychic/spiritual crisis at all – but on abandoning the concept of growth altogether. Under the clumsy English name of “degrowth” (the original French term, décroissance, is much easier on the ear) a conference was recently organized in Barcelona (http://www.degrowth.eu/v1/).

Not yet a movement as such, “degrowth” is still casting about for a sense of its own identity, and, judging from the papers delivered at the Barcelona coference (http://www.degrowth.eu/v1/fileadmin/content/press/Degrowth-_Abstracts_Book_1.0.pdf) and an angry and rant-filled magazine (http://www.ladecroissance.net/) I picked up on a recent visit to Paris, there’s a danger of its being taken over by the anti-capitalist left. It’s a danger because, though modern capitalism is clearly at the root of the problem, mere opposition to it won’t produce the solution – since no problem is ever resolved at the level on which it was created. “Degrowth” needs to start at the psychic and spiritual level where the deepest damage lies – damage which prevents us from even envisioning a different world – and to formulate and inculcate a vision of a spiritually rooted sense of sufficiency together with a deep reverence for the created world. As Joni Mitchell sang over 40 years ago “We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden”’. There are no chargers in the garden, and everything in it that grows is balanced by something else that decays and passes away.

In a future blog I’ll try to sketch out something of what that world might look like.

The Wounded Heart of China

You’re familiar, I’m sure, with those times when you’re suffering inside: You know you need to stop, go inwards, check yourself out and be present with whatever’s happening – but instead you almost brutally pursue whatever practical tasks are uppermost, as if you could seal up the pain and never have to touch it, or as if it was simply less real than your everyday practical tasks and goals.

Now imagine a whole country which operates on that basis, and you have something like modern China. People have to deal with a level of competitive pressure unimaginable in the West, and are offered as role models characters such as Lei Feng (left: a Maoist icon of self-sacrifice refurbished in recent years). Self-sacrifice isn’t really the correct term: it’s as if there was never a self to sacrifice in the first place – identity is still largely mediated through collective symbols and activities, certainly throughout formal education.

So the self that starts to emerge in the pursuit of material success which characterizes today’s China is a raw, unformed self which doesn’t really know how to speak of its interiority, of its pains and frustrations – which generally wishes them away or if it expresses them at all, does so in the most spasmodic and unconscious way. Such, for example, are the recent terrifying and near inexplicable attacks on children (which Marcus Anthony has written about in a very illuminating post: http://22cplus.blogspot.com/2010/05/killing-bliss-in-china.html).

And of course China’s wounds themselves are both individual and collective: not only is it much harder for a Chinese person than for a Westerner suffering from inner anguish to find any useful way of addressing it or external support in doing so, but the immense suffering inflicted by the Cultural Revolution and more recently by the Tiananmen Square events has been explored, if at all, only on a superficial and factual level. The tools to deal with such experiences are not generally available in China and in any case their use would threaten the Party’s monopoly of historical interpretation – as official ideology doesn’t distinguish between experience and interpretation, any individual testimony which appears to contradict the officially sanctioned account of events is instantly ruled inadmissible.

There is a way out of this crazy-driving impasse, as I wrote in my previous post; and I was interested to read that the managers of the giant Foxconn company which assembles iPhones and iPads in Shenzhen has actually called in monks from Wutaishan to help deal with a spate of suicides by employees. It may or may not be relevant that Foxconn is a Taiwanese company.

A turning towards spiritual practice is a notable feature of modern China, but it’s a matter of concern that the public debate about this is so impoverished. No serious discussion of anything resembling “superstition” is possible in the mainland media, while all but the oldest generations have been brought up without any kind of appropriate conceptual framework.

Unless the Party is willing to start progressively loosening its control of public discourse and interpretation, these individual expressions of intolerable anguish can only become more frequent, eventually coalescing into collective outbreaks which will become harder and harder to explain away.

Let go and let Dog

Wutaishan (五台山) in Shanxi Province, about 500 miles west of Beijing, is one of the five sacred mountains of China. Its rock-strewn hills, studded with over a thousand Buddhist temples, were still brown and bare from the long, cold winter when we visited during the May 1st holidays a few years ago.

Although the main street of the town was snarled up with cacophonous traffic and a handful of the best-known temples were overrun with bus-loads of tourists, only a couple of kilometers’ walk into those dry hills led one into a world as remote from modern China as if one had traveled in time as well as space.

On one of those walks we came across Shou Ning Si (the Temple of Peace and Longevity), almost deserted apart from the monk in the photo and a couple of resident dogs. Dogs are not unusual in rural China; usually employed to guard the home, they’re tied up on a short rope or chain, permanently outside, usually unsheltered against winter and summer alike and fed scraps of the owners’ food when they remember. They’re no more cherished than most other animals, in a country which generally sees them as a source of labor or food.

So it was particularly striking to observe these sleek, well-fed temple dogs bounding up to their keeper and wagging their tails while he patted their heads and held their paws, all as naturally and unselfconsciously as if they were friends he played cards with every day. There was none of the deliberateness and condescension of the Western “animal lover” singling out this or that class of creatures to be a recipient of his beneficence, just a joyful and spontaneous acknowledgement of the kinship of all creatures.

A famous Zen koan asks whether a dog has Buddha-nature; the monk at Shou Ning Si had no doubt about the answer to this question – and this is precisely and exclusively what we and dogs have in common. Not culture, nor language, nor possessions, nor thought, nor mind – there isn’t one of the attributes with which we commonly identify and in which we lose ourselves that we share with dogs.

The modern version of that koan might ask whether people have Buddha-nature – and if they’ve mislaid it, where they can find it again.

In the wind-whipped emptiness of Shou Ning Si and in the monk’s playful companionship with the temple dogs one could touch something of that reverence and non-attachment which one associates with traditional Chinese culture , but which is very little in evidence in modern China’s headlong pursuit of power and wealth. Yet one of the world’s most unbalanced countries has the potential within itself, in its own half-forgotten corners, to restore and renew its own spirit. I suspect that the desire to do so will become stronger and stronger over the next few years.

Consciously unconscious or unconsciously conscious?

I caught an article in the London Guardian yesterday about yet another "institute of consciousness" to be set up at the University of Sussex. The link, if you'd like to read it, is http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/may/09/root-of-consciousness-science-brain-psychiatry. (Note, by the way, that the article was in the technology section.)

Despite setting out to explore consciousness in a fresh spirit and with a multidisciplinary team, their starting point is the same fundamentally erroneous view which has bedeviled Western thought since Descartes, if not since Aristotle. In the words of Dr. Anil Seth, co-director of the center, "Consciousness exists, we know when we're conscious and when we're not, and what we're conscious of" - and there precisely lies the misconception which will prevent their team from discovering anything useful or interesting about consciousness.

The team includes "neuroscientists, psychiatrists, roboticists, philosophers and a hypnotist" - but, interestingly enough, no representatives of the cultural and spiritual traditions who have been examining and researching consciousness for over 2500 years. As any Buddhist could have told Dr. Seth if he had troubled to ask them, consciousness is the container, not the contents. Yes, it's quite possible that his scientists may uncover some clues as to the flux of mostly random stuff that occupies our waking minds most of the time - but it would be like studying rivers by looking at the chemical effluent and stray garbage which fills the most polluted ones. The river conveys the effluent and the garbage, but they're not what it is - or what it could be if cleansed of them.

A friend of mine used to travel past a mysterious small store on his bus ride to college; on the shelves in the window there would sometimes be potatoes and onions, sometimes nails, screws and tools and sometimes randomly assorted books. He became so curious as to what this shop actually sold, what these disparate objects could possibly have in common, that he got off the bus one day to find out. It was a shelf store. Like Dr. Seth, focusing exclusively on the contents he failed to see the container.

Whatever interest it may hold for scientists, consciousness seen as a succession of random thoughts and emotions is of little benefit to us. The great spiritual traditions of humanity - including many Western ones - have shown us how to focus, sharpen and train consciousness so that it becomes a tool and a path. At this point it can be used to all kinds of interesting ends: to control and heal the physical body, for instance, or to communicate with higher non-ordinary sources of knowledge. There are many well-documented instances of these and other applications of trained and focused consciousness - and it's all too likely that Dr. Seth's team will fail to look at any of them.

How unfortunate that the "scientific" stance toward consciousness has largely become identified with a reductionist and shallowly materialistic view that leaves out of consideration a wide range of puzzling and certainly unexplained phenomena. Surely "scientific" should connote a pragmatic and evidence-based approach that tries to fit hypotheses to data, not the other way around.

Liberation day

Looking for something cheerful to write about amid the welter of crashing currencies and street rioting, I decided to search for May 9 national festivals around the world - and found two of them. Today is Europe Day - the 60th anniversary of the day when, in a bombed and ruined post-WWII Europe, French Prime Minister Robert Schuman proposed the Coal and Steel Community which would later become the European Union.

It's also the anniversary of the liberation of Jersey and Guernsey. These small islands, part of Britain but geographically much closer to France and nowadays known mainly as low-tax offshore banking centers, were the only portions of the British Isles to be occupied by the Germans during World War 2.

So the theme of war and Europe seem to be inescapable today: even though fewer than 10% of the population are old enough to remember images like these, they're burned into our collective memory, and kept alive by movies and media - not to mention the education system. The Nazi period remains a favorite part of the school curriculum in England and many other European countries, and if one goes back a bit further, the entire history of Europe is one of war, man-made famine and brutal subjugation - virtually everyone has oppressed or been oppressed by their neighbors at some point.

So now we're supposed to lie down and love each other, because a bunch of politicians, or worse still, bankers tell us so? Many political parties across the continent, including majority parties in some countries (notably the UK) operate on the principle that international co-operation should be strictly limited to the pursuit of national self-interest, and that euro-idealism is half-baked, misguided and doomed to fail.

Yet beyond the pragmatism of the European venture - many countries inhabiting the same small continent need to co-operate to survive - there's the simple fact that the European races are fundamentally the same race. Almost all European languages are descended from the same origin - which in turn is also linked to the infamous "swastika" symbol.

The term "swastika"simply denotes a lucky or auspicious object in ancient Sanskrit - the closest relative to the proto-Indo-European language from which modern French, German, English, Russian etc. ultimately derive. The German National Socialists adopted this ancient symbol of harmony (rotating it "forwards") to represent the bogus Aryan/Nordic super-race from which they believed themselves to be descended.

And the idea that the Nazi period represents some kind of unique German propensity to trample over their peace-loving neighbors is equally bogus. As another German, Schiller, observed - whose words, set to music by a fellow-countryman, are the official anthem of the European Union - "Alle Menschen werden Brueder" (all people become brothers). And brothers are notorious for fighting one another.

The presence of the swastika symbol on innumerable statues of the Buddha throughout Asia reminds us that all divisions and categories of people are illusions and causes of suffering. European history, if it proves nothing else, is eloquent witness to that noble truth.

Bette Davis Eyes

Today I tried a technique suggested to me by my friend Marcus Anthony (see link on right); to allow a song title to come into one's consciousness as a way of tuning into what needs to be seen or thought of. And the song that came up was "Bette Davis Eyes" - so I dutifully went searching for the song (a more or less obscure hit of nearly 30 years ago which I hardly remembered), and equally dutifully listened to it.

It's a pleasant but utterly standard-issue ditty about one of those femme-fatale/heartbreaker types, so WTF, Mr. Synchronicity? No connection with my life that I can see, and no hidden messages in the lyrics. Then I reflected that I was literally being directed toward Bette Davis and her eyes, so I went to research her - and her eyes, which were indeed remarkable, though not in the "come-hither" way suggested by the song. They have that penetrating look of someone who sees further and sees more than most of us - they're eyes that speak of courage, of truth to one's self and one's destiny.

In an age when glamor was pretty much the indispensable attribute of all female film stars, and after a middling career which never quite caught fire, she chose to play a slatternly and shrewish waitress with whom the hero falls hopelessly and destructively in love and who later dies of consumption, in the movie of Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage. This went totally against the advice of her agent and friends (and several better-known actresses had already turned the role down), but it won her huge critical claim, and pretty much made her career.

All her life she followed the advice given her by Charles Laughton when she commented on her "nerve" in daring to play the sixty-year-old Queen Elizabeth I: "... it's the only way you grow in your profession. You must continually attempt things that you think are beyond you, or you get into a complete rut."

That, far more than an invitation to bed, is what we see in Bette Davis's eyes - that and the willingness to explore and portray the darker and more troubling aspects of human character - right up to her last significant role, as Lillian Gish's cold and embittered blind sister in The Whales of August.

Let's salute Bette Davis, and pray that some of her spirit can inhabit all of us, encouraging us to attempt what we think is beyond us and not to be deterred by the fear of being ugly, ridiculous or unlikeable.

Fear , money and other illusions

For a very long time all exchanges between people were handled through barter. It was inconvenient and required a near-philosophical ability to determine equivalences between the non-equivalent (how many of your hogs for one barrel of my wine?) - but at least everyone ended up with physical goods and tangible value.

And even, much later, when money was invented, the face value of a coin was supposed to be identical to the value of the metal composed of it - hence the use of gold for British sovereigns, French louis d'or, etc. - and even banknotes were nominally linked to gold. A hundred years ago you could , in theory, have walked into the Federal Reserve Bank brandishing a $10 bill and insisted on ten dollars' worth of precious metal - until, in the 1920s, the world's major currencies were taken off the gold standard.

So now the value definition of money has become circular, or rather notional: you can only spend your dollars, or pounds, or euros to the extent that other people believe that they can use them. And this even more so now that we no longer deal with bills and coins very much; our money is electronic; it's numbers on a screen, digital impulses transferred across wires.

It's all strangely Buddhist for the product of such a ruthlessly materialist and competitive culture: we've created a world in which wealth is quite literally Maya, illusion. What happens to "my money" when the bank switches off its computers? Where is "my money" after I've pressed "send" but before it reaches "your account" and becomes "your money"? We've come a very long way from hogs and barrels of wine.

The problem with illusions is that they require lots of people to share them in order not to be exposed as such - the message of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Emperor's New Clothes". Specifically, to share in the illusion of wealth people need faith - once they cease to believe that those numbers on a screen can be converted into hogs and barrels of wine, they panic. Primitive crowd-level emotions take over, and supposedly sophisticated investors start to behave like animals trapped in a burning building, running hither and thither searching for the way out.

Yet of course on a deeper level electronic money and virtual wealth are no more and no less illusory than the hogs and barrels of wine they're supposed to stand for - everything we do and everything we are requires a calm and sustained faith, to be renewed every day. The greed and panic that we constantly see in the workings of the financial markets are fundamentally manifestations of lack of faith - in the capacity of the physical universe to provide for our needs, and that enough is really enough.

It's time we created a world order where the mood-swings of a tiny group of people in New York, London, Tokyo, Paris and Frankfurt were no longer able to up-end the lives and livelihoods of millions of innocent people.

The terror and the pity

There's no better example of the intrusion of primitive limbic emotions into the political domain than the "debate" about terrorism in the English-speaking world, especially in the United States. A mentally disturbed young man attempted (and failed) to set light to his underpants a year or so ago, and a mass outbreak of psychosis was triggered throughout the world of air travel - passengers traveling with young children were forbidden to go to the bathroom in the last hour of their flights, while the TSA contemplated spending further billions of dollars on even more intrusive body-scanning equipment.

Now the equally unsuccessful and laughably amateurish Times Square car bomb has set off a similar wave of knee-jerk paranoia and political grandstanding, such as this comment from Rep. Pete Hoekstra (Republican, of course) of the House "Intelligence" Committee: "We're going to get much more aggressive and perhaps more creative in terms of how we gather intelligence to find the plots and find individuals to stop them". (As if we could ever protect ourselves against isolated mentally disturbed sociopaths; as if labeling them as "terrorists" helped in any way.)

Meanwhile in Louisiana, millions of gallons of oil are bleeding over precious and irreplaceable wetland reserves while fishermen's livelihoods are destroyed, perhaps permanently - and much of the political establishment is trying to play it down and de-dramatize it. The governor of Texas, bless him, even called it an "Act of God".

Evolutionary scientists often argue that we're "programmed" to respond to the dangers we face when physically threatened as individuals (hence the response to "terrorists"), but that we lack the mechanisms to respond to collective and non-imminent threats such as climate change, poverty and overpopulation. This explanation is as fatalistic and mechanistic as the model it proposes: precisely the point is that human evolution is, necessarily, a conscious process.

Only by adopting a witness stance toward reflex and atavistic emotions and embracing a wider and more inclusive vision of who "we" are can we move toward a less dysfunctional world that the one we currently live in - one with far fewer profit opportunities for oil companies and manufacturers of security equipment.

Plugging the love deficit

There's a lot of anger and blame flying around in the "Euro-family" at the moment around the Greek economic crisis - soon to be joined probably by other countries in the "grasshopper belt", such as Spain and Portugal.

Tired old stereotypes of industrious Germans versus feckless Mediterraneans are being dusted off and given new currency, especially by the tabloid media - who are always eager to divide and blame. Meanwhile, much of the Greek left is busy blaming the "plutocrats" for the problem - not without some justice, but hardly the point now. If the Greeks don't row together, they'll drown together, and the same goes for the whole of Europe (indeed, the whole world). Who will the Germans sell their Mercedes and BMWs to if the "Club Med" goes down the plughole?

It's particularly sad to see this happening in Europe, which has for many years seemed to be evolving towards a kind of post-nationalism unique in the world, and born out of its own uniquely tragic history. Inspired by a generation of leaders scarred by two terrible wars - the second war which they had fought in themselves and the first war which had marked their parents' lives, and which wiped out nearly 50% of a whole generation.

From this pity and sorrow came the ambition to bind Europe's economies and cultures together so tightly that this could never happen again - and by and large it's been a triumphant success, growing from the six-nation customs union of 50 years ago to the 27-nation union of today, with its own Parliament and President, and a currency shared by 16 members, with 4 or 5 others set to join soon. Slow and cumbersome at times - but that's part of the point. It isn't a nation state, and never will become one.

British and other right-wingers are jumping up and down with glee about the present crisis; the whole EU venture flies in the face of their conviction that humanity is doomed to internecine competitiveness. This is precisely why it can't be allowed to fail - as a rare act of love in the world of international politics, and a victory for spirit and faith over economics.

But to achieve this, Europe's leaders will need to protect their fragile nestling better against the assaults of the market, like those of the ratings agencies - the same people, let's not forget, who gave AAA ratings to junk bonds concocted by the likes of Goldman Sachs and AIG.

In that respect at least the Greek protesters are absolutely right - the market will rip the European Union apart in search of profit, just as it does everything else. We mustn't let this happen.

I pity the poor immigrant

This was always one of Bob Dylan's more puzzling lyrics; he went on "... who wishes he would've stayed home/who uses all his power to do evil/but in the end is always left so alone."

What on earth was the great man thinking? Probably he just wrote down the first thing that came to his mind; people often do when it comes to this subject. Like the woman who complained to Gordon Brown the other day, or, much worse, those responsible for the hate-filed and punitive new law in Arizona - the unmediated and unreflected product of the most primitive of psychic functions: rejecting the Other.

When I was a kid in London in the early 1960s you would often see signs like this in people's windows (the legislation outlawing overt discrimination wasn't passed till several years later).

My parents, bless them, struggling teachers buying their first house, made a point of only letting their spare room to blacks and Irish. I still remember quiet, studious Mr. Sen, who when not in the library at King's College would cook up endless curries, filling our house with what was an exotic smell in the monocultural Britain of fifty years ago. One of the gripes often voiced at the time was that "They stink the place out with their curries", but my parents never said anything of the sort; no negative value judgments were attached to Mr. Sen's curries - if anything, they served to remind us of the world's wondrous diversity.

Nothing - and particularly not immigration - becomes a problem in itself, until the fear-gripped mind labels it and categorizes as such. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi - who can be relied on to say what most decent people would be ashamed even to think - recently commented that he didn't feel as though he was in Italy any more but in some African city when walking the streets of Milan.

Why shouldn't they bring some life and color to the gray, dour streets of that most buttoned-down of Italian cities; why isn't their energy and vigor more welcomed? (You have to be tough and determined to make it from Dakar or Lagos all the way to Northern Italy.) Yes, there is a problem, in that most of them have no proper jobs or even work permits, and end up living working illegally or selling contraband goods - but that has no logical connection with their culture, language or skin color.

The history of human culture and civilization is one of emigration and immigration; unfortunately it's also one of negative projections onto other cultures, leading to war and conflict. It's urgently time for a more evolved reaction; we can only tackle the planet's huge and growing problems by acting and thinking as the single, unitary human race that we are.

The party of Love will win the election

Commentators on the British General Election mostly focus on the country's dire economic situation, and the forthcoming huge spending cuts which none of the candidates will fess up to. But what would an election be like that was about a country's soul, not its economy? It does happen sometimes - the last US Presidential election was pretty clearly about that, and Obama won largely because he was able to engage people on the level of purpose and spirit.

Looked at from this angle, the British election has some encouraging aspects: the Conservatives have dropped many of the views (homophobic, covertly racist) which had them labeled as "the nasty party", while the success of the Lib Dems means that anti-Europe and anti-immigrant rhetoric has played a very small part in the campaign - or has been limited to the fringe parties who specialize in hate and division. (This makes a welcome contrast with the US, incidentally, where the party of Hate - aka the GOP - is very much on a roll.)

Cameron, aside from the image and spin, is clearly a loving and caring father, and as (potentially, symbolically) the nation's parent makes an interesting contrast with Margaret Thatcher. Nicknamed "Milk Snatcher" for abolishing free school milk when she was Minister for Education, she was the bad mother who took away the sweets (candies) which we didn't deserve and which weren't good for us, and who punished us for our laziness and self-indulgence with the bitter medicine of mass deflation and unemployment. And (not very far) in the background was her visceral mistrust of most Europeans, especially the Germans, and an absolute identification with white power which led her to dismiss Nelson Mandela as a terrorist.

Those times are far off now, but the economic growth of the intervening years for which Thatcher is given credit doesn't seem to have made us any happier. It's not sentimental to suggest that there's a kind of simplicity that we've lost in the last 50-60 years. Since we're all going to be poorer in the coming years (not just the Greeks) , why don't we aspire to rediscover it, or rather reinvent it, with the inclusiveness and tolerance of 2010?

Oil, blood and poetry

As Natalie Merchant observes in the notes to her (wonderful) new album "Poets are our soft-spoken clairvoyants. They tell us about the things that have made us and keep us human."

Not so many people read poetry these days - gone are the days when any educated person could quote dozens of poems by heart, when people like Whitman or Tennyson were national heroes. Poetry now is marginal; it lives on the far fringes of academia and commercial publishing, on what scraps it can gather. Not replaced by a more contemporary form, just cast aside; the unacknowledged legislators of today's world are economists or TV hosts.

Interesting, and very sad, since poets are the ones who know what the treasure is and where it's buried. Economists can't help us when we go astray on a soul level as we have over oil. The treasure, it turns out, wasn't the oil we pumped, but the landscapes which the oil is about to bury, and which they all told us had less value.

And in Louisiana of all places - the land that the white man tore from its occupants, where he exterminated the native vegetation to grow cotton, where he made money from earth, money from blood. Louisiana, sold by one group of white men to another, including the bodies of the red men who lived there and black men who worked there.

But then there's New Orleans - songs of love and joy from America's most wounded region, wounded yet again by Katrina, the Federal Government stepping in to little too later just as it has with the oil slick. No surprise there; we've all lost touch, we don't recognize our treasure any more, so we let it bleed away, blow away, become swamped and fouled with heavy sticky oil.

Anyone who can still feel will have a heavy heart today - trapped like a bird in a slick. We can't go on using the planet like this.

If only we could see that it's poets, not oil, that we really depend on.