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A minister speaks:

“The real test of the G20 leaders this week is whether they can exhibit, in everything from their body language to their proposals, sufficient co-ordination and confidence that people give a collective sigh of relief and say – at last somebody’s in charge.”

Something similiar has been suggested by Democratic pol Jamal Simmons – but this time for bankers:

The banks need a few financial heroes and some positive stories to ease public discomfort over shoring up these financial institutions.

Seeing a few blunt-spoken business leaders willing to take on the excesses of their industry in popular media would go a long way toward restoring some public confidence.

Confidence works on the level of perceptions. So if you want to encourage it it is tempting to deal directly with perceptions. Harry G. Frankfurt’s excellent little book On Bullshit has some words to say on the ultimate effect of this:

[The bullshitter] does not limit himself to inserting a certain falsehood at a specific point … He is prepared, so far as required, to fake the context as well.

Someone who lies and someone who plays the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game … The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

Although the idea of bankers going into the community to redeem themselves is a very tempting one. As Simmons asks:

What bank employees coach local Little League teams?

If anyone in Morgan, Goldman et al are reading this: I’ve got some washing up for you.

From today’s Daily Mail leader:

By ancient tradition, MPs refer to each other as ‘honourable’ members. What a sick joke that sounds today.

Because they’re not honourable? Or because they are members? I think we should know.

Speaking of honour, this piece is a pretty perfect demonstration of what survives and what is anachronistic about the virtues of the past:

If the ‘Rt Hon’ Home Secretary Jacqui Smith understood what honour meant, it wouldn’t have crossed her mind to maximise her expenses by claiming that a room in her sister’s house is her ‘main residence’.

Seems to me that honour is pretty much dead. Now – oh glory – we have accountability instead.

Rachel Sylvester writes today on the G20 gathering and the limits of political power:

Over the next few weeks, it will become clear if the banking system is back on track. In the months to come the rest of us, ordinary consumers, will decide whether we feel secure enough to start spending. In the end, what matters is not communiqués or cavalcades, it is confidence – and that is a far harder thing to control.

Reminds me of a quote by that great scholar of speculative excess, J. K. Galbraith, made in reference to the Madoff of the Great Depression, Ivar Kreuger:

There is the dangerous cliché in the financial world [that] everything depends on confidence. One could better argue the importance of unremitting suspicion.

Perhaps that’s what the protesters are there for…

Following the start of the new series of The Apprentice, the BBC magazine published a piece in praise of bravado. It wasn’t up to much, to be honest – received truths from psychologists and past contestants – although it did have some good quotes from this year’s idiot savants:

“I was born to do great things.” Not the words of Gandhi or Mandela. Nor Einstein or Newton. No, this is the gospel according to 28-year-old car hire boss from Coventry, Majid Nagra.

The most interesting part was the comments. What struck me was that while there was disagreement on the line between confidence and arrogance, and on what exactly confidence was, there was almost no-one who disagreed with the idea that confidence was in most respects essential.

I posted last week about the similarity between confidence and honour. Here is another point of comparison: one we can see in particular in the 17th century debates on duelling. The participants in the debates argued furiously about the true nature of honour, but they agreed without hesitation that honour was indispensable, a cardinal virtue for men and women alike. And so it remained, for the nobility at least, until well into the 19th century.

I make the point merely to show how temporary are even our most permanent structures. I wonder: will our unthinking devotion to confidence seem as strange to future generations as the past’s obsession with honour does to us?

I wrote a post yesterday about the philosopher Alain de Botton. I said that I thought he played intellectual games. Then, to my shock, he replied:

I’m confused by your line of argument. I should reassure you that I’m entirely uninterested in intellectual games. For me, writing is an utterly sincere pursuit, where I try to gain insights into certain areas and also cogently capture feelings.

I’ve written a long comment replying to de Botton (you can read it under the original post). Hopefully it explains my thoughts with more grace than I managed the first time. But while the ideas are fresh in my mind I wanted to record some reflections on the experience – my first – of being read by those you write about.

1. To my mind, blogging always seems particularly like it exists in a vacuum. When I write reviews for newspapers I am careful to consider the feelings of the writer. Perhaps it’s because I have access to the viewing stats (so-called) for this blog, but I’ve never really considered than anyone I write about might read it. For me, therefore, this episode is a much-needed reminder that this is a public forum. Overall, I suppose I was lucky – I might have been caught being really rude about someone.

2. I decided in the end to reply publicly to de Botton, because that’s what I’d do to anyone else. I also believe in the principle of public debate of public works. But I have said things in reviews that I would never have said to the individual had they been standing in front of me: that’s the difference between public and private interactions. When de Botton replied I suddenly found that this line, which I had been straddling so confidently, had become very blurred. To write, we have to carry on as if there is a clear distinction between public and private. In some very real sense, it isn’t.

3. I can only guess what it must feel like to read yourself being called an intellectual game-player by someone you’ve never met. When I wrote that, I referred directly to AdeB, but of course I wasn’t really talking about him – I was talking about the notional him that I know through his books. Again, the line between public and private is blurred to the point where it vanishes entirely. Perhaps that’s what de Botton meant by commenting: to remind me that he is a real person, with real feelings, and not just a literary construct.

4. In his blog today, Alistair Campbell writes interestingly about the experience of being portrayed in films. He’s referring to the adaptation of David Peace’s The Damned United, which many people who knew Brian Clough have objected to strongly. I haven’t seen the film, but I have read the book, and it seems obvious to me that Clough’s friends and family would be upset: they’re comparing the fiction to the reality, and they’re bound to find things that aren’t quite right. What’s impossible for them to understand is the way in which Peace’s book makes Cloughie real for us – and that by reading about him in this way we come to feel the kind of affection for him which a factually correct hagiography could never inspire.

Sometimes, criticism can be most sincere act of appreciation. But if it were me or my father under the lens, I doubt I’d feel like that.

Alain de Botton doesn’t know this, but I have a relationship with him. I talk and think about him so often, in fact, that I habitally habitually call him “AdeB” (all one word). Sometimes I’ll refer to him like that in normal conversation, expecting people to know who I’m talking about. They never do.

There’s nothing strange or obsessive about my relationship with AdeB. It’s simply that, when you’re writing a popular philosophy book, it’s impossible to avoid talking about him. This is particularly so in the case of the book I’m writing, because it’s a mix of fiction and non-fiction, just like AdeB’s Essays in Love. When people ask me what I’m writing, most of the time it’s easier for me to go “well, do you know Alain de Botton?” than try and explain from scratch. Rather incredibly, he’s shorthand for a whole genre.

I’m a fan of AdeB’s, but not an uncritical one. Over time, I’ve grown to find his schtick quite irritating. To my mind, this has also coincided with a decline in the quality of his books (at least since the heights of How Proust…). Lynn Barber’s excellent interview with him on Sunday captured my attitude exactly:

Is Alain de Botton the biggest pseud and poseur of all time, or a brilliant writer who asks intriguing questions? … The weird thing is I find it possible to hold both views about de Botton almost simultaneously – I can flip between the two while reading just one paragraph of his writing.

The interview also touched on the question of de Botton’s confidence. He says that he hasn’t felt confident until recently (he’s 39), which seems a bit strange. Essays in Love (which was his first book) is astonishingly confident, both in form and content. Every line smacks of self-assurance – almost to the point of irritation.

But then, we can all be highly confident in one area but still feel that we lack confidence in general. Perhaps this was what attracted AdeB to Socrates, whose take on self-confidence he looked at in The Consolations of Philosophy (video). De Botton admired Socrates’s devotion to rigorous rational inquiry (words by David Rogers):

If you work out for yourself why you believe (or not) something – whether its in God, your ability to cook a meal or whether a person likes you – then it gives you confidence to stand up for that belief. If your belief is simply based on following everyone else (or the opinions and beliefs of parents, peers, teachers or others) then its not so trustworthy.

The trouble is – and this is always the trouble with de Botton – is that one can’t quite help but feel that for him this is all an intellectual game. He ignores the criticism of this approach: that there are no answers to be found by looking inside, at least not in the way Socrates suggests. Instead, there’s only an endless, circuitous discussion, in which every opinion rests on another one, and the whole thing is built on foundations of sand.

The fact is: in most circumstances, questioning of Socrates’s sort is actually unheplful. De Botton must know this, I feel. Perhaps when he wrote Consolations it didn’t quite seem right to point it out. And certainly holding back has made him very successful. But I’d love to see him really go for it, just the once: to resolve that conflict we have about him, instead of letting it lie. After all, isn’t that what philosophy’s about…?

Matthew Cain is an unstoppable blogging machine (UPDATE: he’s on the left) who’s been incredibly helpful to me as I struggle to set up this blog. Here’s a sample interaction, from today:

1. Matthew emails me saying that he likes my blog and that he has done me the honour of a link on his personal site. He also offers a few suggestions for better blogging.

2. I reply thanking him, saying that I’ve been struggling to write the kind of posts that encourage people to comment.

3. Four hours later, I get an email back: “Here are my thoughts”. It’s a link to cogent, thoughtful post suggesting some solutions to my quandrary.

Note: in this time, I had a nap, made myself supper and watched a bit of telly. Like I say, a machine.

Sorry about Team America (although it’s a good point well made). There is a serious side to my argument about the relationship between nuclear weapons and a nation’s amour propre. That is: that it is a mistake to look at nuclear politics solely along strategic lines.

Fig 1: Iran
As The Economist’s Middle-East correspondent Max Rodenbeck says in the (subscriber only) New York Review:

To a foreign observer, Iran’s pursuit of a costly nuclear programme can only be seen as quixotic or threatening … But to Iran’s revolutionary elite the nuclear programme has come to be seen as crucial for its symbolism far more than for its practical utility.

The nuclear breakthrough is meant to inspire jaded citizens, providing much-needed proof of Iran’s return to glory … Ordinary Iranians may be sceptical of this, but even so demand to know why their ancient and proud country should be denied atomic bombs.

Fig 2: North Korea
North Korea has a formidable conventional arsenal, including a standing army of some one million men. When Bill Clinton aired the possibility of a new Korean war in a White House briefing in 1994, he was told that an attack on Pyongyang would cost 52,000 American and 490,000 South Korean military casualties in the first ninety days, as well as incalculable physical damage and loss of civilian life. Faced with this threat, the most belligerent of leaders suddenly find themselves in touch with their pacific side. Put it this way: not even George W. Bush dared attack North Korea.

If the dictator of Pyongyang does not need his atomic arsenal for defence, then he needs it even less for attack. Kim Jong Il must surely be aware that North Korea would be blown from the face of the earth by the United States and South Korea if it attempted to use its nuclear weapons in combat. He must also have a pretty good idea of the futility of such a gesture. North Korea’s projectiles are antique and inaccurate. If Kim ever reached for the red button, he wouldn’t live to see the first one splash down, miles from its intended target.

So why do it?
Vanity, of course.

Without unconventional weapons, Kim Jong Il would be just one more ignored leader of a failing famine state. As the embodiment of his country’s vital force, his ultimate vanity is to think that his problems and opinions deserve to be played out on the big stage; and which of us can truly be said to be free of that particular vice?

None of this is exactly an argument for nuclear weapons – that case has to be made along de Gaullian lines as part of the pursuit of national confidence. But thinking this way helps us better understand men like Kim and Ahmadinejad. The rational choice games may have worked in the Cold War, but they’re no guide to the present situation.

One of the greatest speeches in cinema. Who says Hollywood doesn’t do politics?

Rachel Sylvester thinks that Trident is the ultimate boy’s toy. I agree. But that doesn’t mean I think it should be scrapped.

Churchill once said that nuclear weapons were the political equivalent of the “Badge to the Royal Enclosure [at Ascot]”. The great man understood is that just like people, nations are vain; and that their vanity needs soothing.

Perhaps Britain is an irrelevancy in the international arena – most likely it has been that way for a long time. But is that an admission we are prepared to make? Enraged moralists happily embrace self-immolation, but I am not sure the nation does. Are we really ready for a future where our opinion matters just about as much as Sweden’s or New Zealand’s?

I have no data to prove it, but I suspect that Britons gain a sense of satisfaction seeing their country take its place on the global stage. This is most obvious in sport, as the national back-slapping when London won the Olympics proved. But it is also the case in international politics. When Britain takes a hand, it makes us feel that we can make a difference.

The pleasure if comparative, of course, but we will always measure ourselves against our neighbours. It is too late to leave Vanity Fair, so we may as well get used to it here. It is true that a nuclear arsenal is the military equivalent of a penis extension – built not for use in love or war, but for the purposes of vain comparison – but that doesn’t make it meaningless. There is a prideful joy in virile self-assertion that binds a nation together. In this day and age, this is no small feat.

Sylvester argues that the new politics of the global recession neessitiate a different attitude to nuclear deterrence. I take a different attitude. In hard times, you need a few toys to keep yourself happy. What better than the biggest toy of all?