Reflections from a Day in Beijing

Today was and will remain significant to me. It was a wake-up call to arms in my own war to develop intellectually stimulating relevant ideas.

I hope the price of my learning was not excessively high.

I was confronted in Beijing with a pessimistic if realistic world view. This was important to me. It underlines my view that most human activity is driven by belief not reality. The current world crisis like all crisis of a similar "financial" nature is one of human beings confidence in their own beliefs. It has nothing whatsoever to do with any underlying change in human needs, wants and capabilities. The real economy today is no different now than it was a year ago though our confidence in it has been significantly undermined. The consequence is that without belief in it, it does not work.

The recent G20 suggests we humanity are learning how to organize collectively to constructively prevent our lack of confidence in our self belief being undermined for an inconveniently long period. Hopefully this will work on this occasion. It can perhaps, as did Bretton Woods, provide a means of sustaining significant self belief over time without resort to religion.

China's current strength, as was Britain's in the 19th Century, an irrational but sustained confidence in its capacity and will to prevail over all tribulations put in its path. You just have to see the "irrational" public buildings put up in the 19th Century in Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, Leeds etc to see this and compare them with the irrational "unrealistic" building going on in Beijing yesterday. The Beijing Olympics personified this as does the fact that over 25% of the residential property constructed here remains empty on completion - I have a researcher working on this phenomena as I write.

The Chinese have now built the longest bridge in the world, plan the tallest building, and the longest high altitude railway etc, the superlatives go on. They do this for similar reasons to those prevailing in 19th Century Britain. These beliefs were so powerful that they even managed to echo downwards into my education and lifetime in Great Britain in terms of us Brits being able to "punch above our weight". Of course this conceptually sells the pass. It does did however keep us in a game despite the "reality" that we are now largely irrelevant players.

It is in feelings of irrelevance, perceived or potentially perceivable, that danger lies. If one's life has no prospect of meaning except through belief then in death for that belief your life has meaning. Persecution for such beliefs heightens the value of such a death. Aggressive police action to suppress the holders of such beliefs is thus perversely the best way to spread their power.

Action providing hope of personal redemption through another route to meaning can succeed. My own take on Northern Ireland is that by finding a way of helping provide such belief for the growing Catholic majority we the Brits succeeded in assisting peace to begin to evolve there. Peace did not proceed out of the 1st World War. It ended with the victors depriving the Germans of all hope of economic or social redemption. World War IIs aftermath was different. Marshall Aid, Bretton Woods and the generosity of the US to its two main defeated enemies changed the game fundamentally.

I believe we need to give Islam and Israel a route to such redemption. I believe this is possible but as it is not yet in place. It cannot be constructed quickly. In the meantime we can at best deploy the kind of life skills you personally have developed to a work to meliorate the consequences. Unfortunately as you know, as did Pontecorvo, most people involved in the “engranage”, that can be your business, in Israel, the US, China, Iran and China do not see it that way. They can and do act in a manner that spreads, rather than dissipates, the consequences of the anomie that leads onto “engranage”. Your personal approach I know and see acts to attenuate the consequences of some people's lack of confidence in their own capacity to provide meaning for their lives except through death, their own and that of others.

Some seem heavily engaged at the tactical level in this battle. They like Shang and the other Chinese legalists are for destroying the enemy as they present. This is their way to meaning and social harmony – it worked in Japan and for a time in China under the Chin.
Others are deeply engaged at the operational level. They arguably have had lives with no mean level of success, with a number of key parts of the game, in Northern Ireland, Sierra Leone, Grenada and the Balkans.

On the other hand I have chosen to stand on the sidelines of our planet’s part in this great universal game. I choose to think and write about it.

Hopefully, in the end this may assist, the "evolutionary development" of a strategy humanity might use to continue to survive in it. My meaning is found in a small hope that this might be so and humanity can thus survive to continue to play a constructive part in the resolution of our segment of the great universal game existence presents to us. We of course are playing an unbelievably irrelevant small part but we humanity have the capacity to maintain a huge "hubritic" perception of our significance to the process.

Belief is in the end is everything. This can be good.