John Lloyd

The shrinking of U.S. power, now pretty much taken for granted and in some quarters relished, may hurt news coverage of human rights and the uncovering of abuses to them. But not necessarily. Journalism is showing itself to be resilient in adversity, and its core tasks – to illuminate the workings of power and to be diverse in its opinions – could prove to be more than “Western” impositions.

When the British Empire withdrew from its global reach after the World War Two, the space was occupied, rapidly and at times eagerly, by the resurgent United States, at the very peak of its relative wealth and influence in the immediate postwar years. What it brought with it was a culture of journalism that was increasingly self-confident in its global mission: not just to describe the world, but to improve it. Some European journalism had that ambition too, but these were nations exhausted by war. The Americans, at the peak of their influence in the postwar years, had the power, wealth, standing and cocksureness to project their vision of what the world should be.

Now, American power too will shrink, and the end of U.S. hegemony (it was never an empire in the classic sense) will mean that there will be a jostling for power, influence, and above all resources by getting-rich-quick mega-states like China, India and Brazil. They will project their view of what the world should be — they have already begun, some (China) more confidently than others (India, Brazil).

Whether this will mean that the illumination of the workings of power around the globe will be better or worse will be one of the large themes for journalism of the next decades. In his The World America Made, Robert Kagan thinks, by implication, that it could be worse, because he believes the U.S. did most for human freedom round the world and a loss of American power means a threat to the protection it offered to democratic change. He writes that “perhaps democracy has spread over a hundred nations since 1950 not simply because people yearn for democracy, but because the most powerful nation in the world since 1950 has been a democracy.” I think he’s right in this, and that his “perhaps” is pretty definite. And if he is right, it means that the impulse to probe and expose will be weaker.

The U.S., however imperfectly, often hypocritically, and at times mendaciously, nevertheless possesses a default mode in favor of freedom and human rights. So do the European states. But though the European Union is more populous and has a higher GDP than the U.S., it’s disunited and likely to stay that way. So the decline of the U.S., even if it remains only relative rather than absolute (as Kagan believes), is the important issue. It could mean that the narratives of human rights, told by Western governments, by NGOs and above all by journalism, will become fainter.

Western journalism has developed human rights, and their abuses, into one of its major themes. Where the “something must be done” approach to issues was once largely confined to domestic matters, it is now writ globally. Western journalists, especially those from Anglophone countries, feel empowered to report and comment critically on the authoritarian and despotic policies of every country everywhere – the more so since the end of the Cold War meant that the pressure from Western governments to soft-pedal the abuses of tyrants who were on our side was no longer felt in the editorial offices.

The journalism of human rights was often valuable and sometimes influential, making abuses known and getting something done about them. Behind it, though unacknowledged for the most part, was Western, mainly American, power. Western reporters and columnists could take these stances because they had the moral backing of the most powerful nation on earth and its European allies. And sometimes, when they got into trouble, the governments of these states would intervene to try to get them out of it (not always successfully). The clout that the New York Times, the BBC, Le Monde – or, for that matter, Reuters – can exert is partly due to the ideals they espouse, partly underpinned by the global power of the West, with the U.S. ever in the lead.

When the SARS epidemic was suppressed by the Chinese authorities in 2002-2003, the brave efforts of the Chinese media to cover it (and they did, against threats and even imprisonment) were greatly assisted when Elizabeth Rosenthal of the New York Times picked up the story and her paper put it on the front page, shaming the regime. The struggle for free speech and free elections in China waxes and wanes, and it may be that over the next decade, there will be more openness. But if there isn’t, and China’s power puts the U.S. in a greater shade, China’s journalists will have an even harder job than in the recent past.

Western journalism, which has itself been hegemonic for many years, will face greater challenges from states and their media that reject the human rights narrative – or at least, use it selectively. It’s already happening: The new, global TV channels sponsored by states like China, Russia, Iran and Venezuela spend much of their time trashing the Western media’s coverage of their states. Their common approach can be summed up by the remark of Jesus in Matthew, chapter 7: “You hypocrite, first cast the beam out of your own eye; and then shall you see clearly to cast out the mote out of your brother’s eye.” Or more simply: What makes you Westerners so great? (It isn’t the British tabloids.)

The difference between the state-sponsored journalists and the majority of the Western ones is that the latter, for good or ill, are acting independently. We really do think abuses of human rights are bad things everywhere and that common standards should be applied to them. The arguments between state-sponsored journalists and those who have some sense of professional independence are a dialogue of the deaf: If they continue, we get a spiral of incomprehension and contempt.

There is another possibility, though. Almost everywhere in the world, there are journalists who get it – get, that is, that independent journalism’s claim must be based on an attempt to tell the same kind of truths to all kinds of power. If a Chinese reporter does some good reporting and analysis on the fact that the U.S. incarcerates one in four of its young black male citizens, because he sees a problem in that, we should attend to his or her reportage as much as anyone else’s. If however the piece is thrown together to divert attention from the allegation made this week by Amnesty International that China executes “thousands” of criminals, then we shouldn’t.

My belief, from talking to journalists in Russia, China and India over the past few years, is that in all of these countries there is a growing core of reporters and editors who interpret their job as something of a moral duty and believe that independence and freedom are required to do that. Achieving that independence and freedom will not be easy, and will certainly not be safe. In the West, journalists who expose human rights abuses win awards and better salaries. In China they can go to jail. In Russia, they can get murdered – as was Anna Politkovskaya in October 2006, after a decade of fierce reporting from the killing grounds of Chechnya. She is only the most famed tip of an iceberg.

But in spite of that, my bet is that many of these men and women will carry on. They do see in Western reporting – especially investigative journalism – a model and seek to learn from it. But they will fashion their own tools to tackle the job they have set themselves. There is much in their societies – poverty, misuse of power, corruption – that demands the exercise of rigorous reporting. And as they do that, and as the power of their societies grows, they will become more confident – on their own professional account – to make judgments about the behavior of Western states as well as their own.

When they do, they will see a lot of motes in our eyes. We should then have a dialogue where both listen. And that will be good for us all.

PHOTO: Security officers stand guard at the foot of the stairs to stop journalists, whose names are not on the list of attendees allowed into a news conference by China’s Chongqing Municipality Communist Party Secretary Bo Xilai, during the ongoing National People’s Congress (NPC), China’s parliament, at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, March 9, 2012. REUTERS/Jason Lee

In a remarkable column in Italy’s paper of record earlier this week, the columnist Ernesto Galli della Loggia flayed his country’s ruling class. The country is witnessing, he believes “a kind of incontinence and exhibitionism without restraint, a compulsive acquisitiveness,” rife within the highest circles of Italian society. This, mind you, after the departure of the highly acquisitive former Premier Silvio Berlusconi.

“It seems,” he writes, “that in this country, for bankers, for entrepreneurs, for senior officials, for celebrities and for politicians, for those who, in short, count for something, any reward is never enough, any privilege or treat is never too excessive, any show of wealth is never over the top.” The politicians, if not the richest, are still the most degraded, because of their elective positions of trust. The press, the justice system and the frequent leaks of the many wiretaps that Italy’s magistrates order show the snouts of a political class that are too often deep into troughs of money, luxury and privilege, funded either by the Italian taxpayer or by private interests avid for political favor.

Flaying the rich in one form or another is becoming a habit everywhere where freedom reigns in the world and even — more carefully and more dangerously — where it doesn’t, as in Russia and China, where the very rich often have the backing of the state, or sometimes, are the state. It’s happening because the financial crash is making many people poorer, and most people poorer relative to the rich, who still contrive to get richer and richer. The stagnation in middle- and working-class incomes in many parts of the Western world is often turning into real decreases in spending power. Insofar as that goes on — and a fragile improvement in Europe and North America may take hold, and once again raise all boats, or it may not — then privileges, treats and shows of wealth become more and more galling, even to moderates not previously given to envy or militancy.

In mid-19th century Europe and in the turn-of-the-century United States, novelists like Charles Dickens, Emile Zola and Theodore Dreiser drew portraits of societies corrupted by greed and the lust for money and security. Now, the task of exposing those sores pass to journalists and academics, through a slew of books on inequality, financial malpractice and political and corporate corruption. In China, where such realistic exposes are frowned on and usually suppressed, the job again falls to the novelists, with harrowing pieces like Su Tong’s Rice or Jia Pingwa’s Turbulence, among many others. Many journalists try their best: But while exposes are published, few see the light of day unless the Communist Party’s propaganda department wishes it — which often means that the story has a pre-ordered happy ending, to the effect that what has been exposed is already corrected by the party’s intercession.

There is a kind of convergence happening between the Western developed economies and the leading developing ones. In the former, especially those in Western Europe, the conditions described by the novelists, and by reformers and radical politicians, led to a growth in state provision and an expanding network of health, pension and social provision (more so in Europe than in the U.S.). This was the result of protests over the decades, reform movements of every kind and the galvanizing effect of World War II, in which the masses who fought against fascism demanded a state that adopted many of the features of social democracy.

The welfare states created then, generous by past standards, are now being cut back. This is not a return to the days when children were hauling coal wagons along underground tunnels, or paupers were consigned to the workhouses. Nevertheless, the armies of the unemployed, many of them youthful, face tougher choices than their parents and even grandparents did, coming to maturity in postwar years, when employment was relatively full and horizons of both the state and of corporations were expanding. These were times, too, when the Soviet Union and China were committed to a failing and brutal system, India was ineradicably poor and Brazil, with other South American countries, oscillated between rackety civilian governments, and oppressive military-backed ones. At the time, freedom and wealth were obvious bedfellows.

The big developing countries, democratic or not, are now facing the same kind of strains decades on. Russia’s middle class became energized at the end of last year — their demands were for intellectual and press freedom and against corruption rather than for higher incomes. The prognostications for Vladimir Putin’s third term as president frame his coming term against this newly self-enfranchised class, and find him wanting. Corruption is also the issue driving less well covered but quite large (about 20,000 people on the streets) protests in Brazil: though there, the apparent willingness of President Dilma Rousseff to tackle the issue keeps the agitation civil.

In India, a movement headed by Kisan (better known as Anna) Harare against corruption rolled through the vast state last year. It was propelled by his hunger strikes and by his embrace of Gandhian principles of non-violence — and by the huge disparities of wealth, and allegations of the creation of massive offshore accounts, out of reach of the Indian tax and justice system. After arrests and off-on hunger strikes, and often backed by big demonstrations, the Harare-led movement’s pressure forced the government to pass an anti-corruption bill in Parliament last December — which was immediately condemned by Harare as weak. The protests continue.

China is the most dramatic. The country’s poverty level declined precipitously after capitalism was pronounced glorious in the eighties, but with that, the millions of workers in state enterprises lost their security, and many were made unemployed. Often, as Washington Post reporter Philip Pan details in his fluently revelatory narrative, Out of Mao’s Shadow (2008), this was only to see their former managers and city party bosses make millions from their plants’ privatization. Pan, on a visit to a coal mine that bears dismal comparison with the pits in Zola’s Germinal, notes that in China, 4 to 5 miners die for ever million tons of coal produced, against 1 in Russia and India and 0.05 in the U.S. and the U.K. So meager is the compensation paid to the families that it is more economically rational for the owners of the privately owned mines to pay restitution than to improve safety.

Protests in China are building, and they shake the leadership. In a press conference broadcast live on Chinese state television earlier this month, the retiring Wen Jiabao warned that the growing wealth gap, corruption and increasing hatred of the state could jeopardize the economic gains. Most startlingly, he warned that “mistakes like the Cultural Revolution may happen again. Any government official or party member with a sense of responsibility should recognize this.”

In West and East, in widely differing ways, the working, out-of-work, insecure middle and angry classes grow, and become less inhibited about their anger. Huge accumulations of wealth, corruptly or legally acquired, dance before the eyes of the 99 percent, who will never acquire a sliver of such riches. This is indeed, in Galli della Loggia’s words, “incontinence and exhibitionism without restraint, a compulsive acquisitiveness.” It makes people mad as hell. Will they not take it anymore? And where will they seriously not take it first?

PHOTO: A lawyer shows his professional identification card during a protest in front of the Justice Palace in Rome, March 15, 2012. Lawyers’ guilds say the reform planned by the government of Prime Minister Mario Monti will only increase legal costs, undermine the protection of the weak, reduce expertise and unleash an uncontrolled market in fees.

The Tea Party is over. In the way of parties that end, there are still people around. Those who remain search for a return of the old energy and make unconvincing demonstrations of people having a good time. But the central focus, the excitement, the purpose of the thing is dissipating. That is because the bad stuff that its members and boosters put out — lies, slanders, paranoia, ignorance — is losing what grip it had over the minds of people with minds. What’s left, though, is something else, which will not go away: the identification of moral choices blurred and contemporary indifferences ignored.

The core membership of the Tea Party is composed of people of the Christian faith, many of whom are devout Bible readers. The political scientists Robert Putnam and David E. Campbell, who have researched the attitudes of Tea Party members, found that party members were more concerned with putting God into government than with trying to pull government out of people’s lives. They will thus know well the Sermon on the Mount, which is spread across Matthew, chapters 6 and 7, and which contains the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father, which art in heaven…”

It also contains a verse (Matthew 7:15), which runs: “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.” The Tea Party has been rich in false prophets, but it is presently getting something of a comeuppance, in part because of its ravening.

The heat of the Republican primaries, in which the Tea Party’s themes have been well rehearsed, have, paradoxically, tended to melt rather than fire up the group’s stars. First, Rush Limbaugh, whose talk show is aired daily to millions of listeners, insulted a student, Sandra Fluke, calling her a “slut” and a “prostitute.” He did so because she had argued, at a Democratic committee hearing, for health coverage for contraceptives. Limbaugh’s comments went out first on Feb. 29. He repeated the slur in different forms in two more broadcasts — and then made a stilted apology, as advertisers pulled ads from his show. Behind the support for him voiced by his network you could sense the unspoken question: Where is Rush’s tipping point? When does he become more loss than profit?

Glenn Beck, once the major draw on Fox News, found his tipping point last year and left the network in June. Roger Ailes, head of the company, said Beck had been insufficiently focused on his show, since he did so much else — tours, rallies, radio shows, and books — to capitalize on his fame and notoriety (and the advertisers were deserting him after he called President Obama a racist).

Capitalizing (a modern synonym for ravening) is the motive force: Outrageousness, followed or not by an apology, drives traffic to the shows and the rallies, and pushes income higher. On the left, comedian Bill Maher, who has often insulted Sarah Palin (“a moron”; joking that her down-syndrome child was a result of sex with John Edwards, the former Democratic presidential candidate now facing six felony charges; and at a concert in December 2010, many in the audience, presumably his fans, attested that he called Palin a “cunt”), makes enough money from his shows to donate $1 million to President Obama’s re-election campaign.

Partisans behave like partisans everywhere, no matter which side they’re on: They cheer their people, excuse them and at best say the other side is worse. Civility, obviously, suffers: Just as important, the political scene’s diversity, its challenges, its many shades of red and blue are all collapsed into an exchange of libel and defamation — excused, including by the mainstream media, as the necessary cost of free speech and being a public person. It’s a cost, but it’s not necessary.

There’s a new film out, Game Change, about Palin’s run for the vice-presidency. It’s not an outright attack on Palin. The Washington Post reviewer, Maura Judkis, said that “the film’s most scathing indictment is a symbolic one: It attacks our mutual inability to communicate.” But that movie is more chilling, for existential reasons, for Palin. It took Hollywood two decades to do a Margaret Thatcher movie (2011’s Iron Lady with Meryl Streep), but it does a Palin movie with Julianne Moore while the subject is still an active, and relatively young, political figure. Implicitly, the film is saying: Palin’s moment is over.

No mourning for Beck and Limbaugh as they withdraw from visibility; some for Palin, who levered herself up the steep ladder of politics from humble beginnings and a sketchy education and who had her moments of populist clarity — though more of populist rubbish. She and her colleagues, who switched back and forth between commentary, “journalism” (mainly for Fox, a major sponsor of Tea Party boosters), and political engagement, specialized in often mendacious attacks on Obama and the Democrats, constant denigration of the mainstream media, and aggressive victimization. There was also the view that the majority of decent, hardworking Americans had been silenced but would now be heard through the intercession of the Tea Party, who are bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh.

The paranoid in U.S. politics has a long history. (This is also true of most countries’ politics: In democracies, it has more or less free expression, while in authoritarian states, it is often co-opted by the regime to both placate and control the masses.) There has been much citing of Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 article for Harper’s, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” with its tremendous opening sentence: “American politics has often been an arena for angry minds.” Its conclusion is even better: “We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.” But those who use that, or any such judgment, as an assumption that this sums up all that needs be said on the subject, are wrong.

In a recent column in Time titled “Rick Santorum’s Inconvenient Truths,” Joe Klein wrote that Santorum and his wife, Karen, decided not to abort a child diagnosed in the womb as having Trisomy 18, a condition that so far means certain death soon after birth and for which doctors advise an abortion. Instead, they had the child and for three years cared for her. She died earlier this year. (CORRECTION Mar. 15: Santorum’s daughter was gravely ill in late January, but recovered.)

Klein describes their choice, and continues:

All right, I can hear you saying, the Santorum family’s course may be admirable, but shouldn’t we have the right to make our own choices? Yes, I suppose. But I also worry that we’ve become too averse to personal inconvenience as a society — that we’re less rigorous parents than we should be, that we’ve farmed out our responsibilities, especially for the disabled, to the state — and I’m grateful to Santorum for forcing on me the discomfort of having to think about the moral implications of his daughter’s smile.

What Klein sees is the moral challenge with which Santorum — and the best of the Tea Party-affiliated right — presents us. The routinization of abortion and of contraception; the reliance on the state to take care of the elderly and the physically and mentally disabled; the shifts we make with our children to pursue careers and make a larger income — all of these are, indeed, inconvenient truths, the kind of thing that fills the long minutes of wakefulness in the small hours, when our conscience will not let us sleep. And we in Western Europe are more dependent on the state to take care of these problems than are Americans.

Santorum’s brand of fundamentalist Catholicism is not to most tastes — indeed, it’s not to many Catholics’ tastes, and polls show that Mitt Romney, the Republican front-runner, got more Catholic votes than Santorum did in some states. Gay marriage in the U.S., after long wrangling over it, is inching toward majority acceptance; the need for women in the working and middle classes to earn money to keep the family going cuts directly against his view that women should stay at home to have and raise the kids. Santorum has a powerful, but minority, message.

But for the heirs of the sixties, when sexual liberations of various kinds were framed as all gain and no pain, his pitch is a jolt — late, perhaps, but necessary nonetheless. The Tea Party’s aftertaste need not be only sour. Matthew’s chapters on the Sermon on the Mount also contain this much quoted line (Matthew 7:20): “By their fruits shall ye know them.” By our fruits we will know ourselves: One fruit worth tending is that which might, for thinking men and women of the right and the left, give a taste of doubt and reflection, which could be used to repair the resentments of America.

Do we want those whom we elect to represent us, or channel us? To exercise their own judgment, or to be a simple conduit for the views of the majority of their electors?

It’s an old question, and the most famous answer to it, still much treasured by parliamentarians, is the one given by the Anglo-Irish political philosopher Edmund Burke to his electors in Bristol, England in 1774. An opponent vying for Burke’s seat had seemed to promise the Bristol voters (not numerous, in those days) that he would vote as they told him to.

That, said Burke, was wrong. “You choose a member indeed; but when you choose him, he is not a member of Bristol, but a member of parliament.” As that member, he has to determine not just the will of the little electorate of Bristol but that of the nation. “Your representative owes you … his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving, you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

Edmund Burke is a hero of the political right: Margaret Thatcher, before she was leader of the Conservatives and later prime minister, quoted him when making the same point as his. But his opinion also registered across the political divide, as well as across the centuries: Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party and prime minister in its postwar government, thought the same, even more vehemently than Burke or Thatcher.

Nor is this confined to the “mother of parliaments” in London. It has been the common belief of electoral systems in democracies worldwide. And it’s been generally accepted that elected politicians need to exercise their judgment, especially at critical moments — rather than rely on the shifting opinions of the electorate.

When a U.S. president, burdened with the largest cares in the world, must decide what to do about momentous affairs of state — whether the possibility of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962 or the possibility of an Iranian nuclear weapon 50 years later — no one says: Let’s have a referendum! Ask the people what they want!

We don’t want mob rule: We want the lonely man in the Oval Office to come up with the right answer. As Europe still trembles on the verge of the collapse of its common currency, we expect a lonely woman in the German Chancellery — Angela Merkel, the German chancellor and de facto leader of the European Union — to similarly get it right. And when Silvio Berlusconi’s government in Italy ran out of excuses, diversions and money, the political class in that country voted for an unelected, technocratic prime minister in Mario Monti to take over, precisely so he, in his own loneliness, could take decisions.

We don’t turn these decisions over to the people in referendums, because citizens wouldn’t know what to do — or if they did, they would have hundreds of different opinions. Someone has to take the general view, in the fullest knowledge possible of the up- and downsides of every option. Someone has to carry the can.

Besides, tests of the popular will through referendums* give much practical support to Edmund Burke’s view of political life. California, the most persistent referendum taker among the U.S. states, is lumbered with the results of a referendum from 1978, Proposition 13, which placed a cap on property taxes, the main source of funding for schools — and has had a worsening, cash-strapped school system ever since. In 2009, six referendums on taxes to patch up the vast holes in the state’s budget were all voted down, which means the crisis has deepened.

(*For the wonks among us, there’s an apparent choice as to whether to say “referendums” or “referenda.” While “a” is the plural form of a Latin noun ending in “um,” referendum isn’t a noun, but a gerund. So “ums.” No calls for a referendum on this permitted.)

European leaders aren’t keen on referendums either: The voting keeps giving them the wrong answers. In the past few years, referendums in France, Ireland and the Netherlands have all rejected one or other of the major decisions taken by the European Union, a reflection of the fact that Euroskepticism, once thought the preserve of only the British, is creeping over the Continent.

For liberals, referendums are a particular challenge. There’s some substance to the view of the right that the people should decide, and when they do, they’ll be right, both morally and politically. Surveys by London’s YouGov polling organization this year showed that the British, given the chance, would vote heavily to reduce net immigration to zero; vote quite decisively to give the names of convicted pedophiles to parents in their areas; only a little less convincingly to take the UK out of the European Union; and narrowly bring back the death penalty (abolished in most of the UK in 1969) for the murder of a police officer.

All of the measures that would be voted down, meanwhile, were liberal causes — as with the banning of the death penalty for all crimes and a relaxed immigration policy. Were Britain to go the way of Switzerland and take its key decisions by popular will through referendums, it would be a much less liberal place. And it would not be alone. Especially now, in Europe, when immigration is unpopular, the British mood on immigrants would meet agreement elsewhere.

Yet the Burkean consensus is under strain. Politicians, aware of their unpopularity and a growing public demand to be involved in political decisions, are now promising to consult the people by referendum more than they have. President Nicolas Sarkozy — who earlier this week said that France had “too many immigrants” — has promised referendums, not just on immigration but on education and welfare, as he seeks to claw down his Socialist opponents’ lead in the polls before the presidential election in April. David Cameron, the British premier, has called for a referendum in Scotland to determine whether or not it will remain in the UK. Most recently, the Irish Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, has called a referendum on the European Stability Treaty, which would give Ireland access to extra funding but commit it to more budgetary control from Brussels.

The UK’s foremost pollster, the former journalist Peter Kellner, who is a co-founder and president of YouGov, sees this gathering tendency as a gathering threat to democratic politics. Noting the low trust ratings for politicians in his data, he told an audience in London on Monday that “the confidence of our political classes has been shot. They no longer take the big decisions.”

Some of this is the media’s fault, or at least our fault for loving the type of media that we do. The American media writer Neal Gabler (The Triumph of the American Imagination and much else worth reading) told Bill Moyers last month that Americans love political contests, and movies about great (or crooked) presidents, but they can’t bear to watch or read about the messy, tedious, compromising business of governance — “governance,” said Gabler, “is a lousy movie. And we don’t know how to deal with that.” And because Americans love movie politicians and hate the real ones, they withdraw their support from the real politicians in government and weaken them further. With such a public mood, Burke’s refusal to “sacrifice” his judgment to his electors’ opinions sounds like arrogance, the kind of thing few politicians would dare to say.

Yet it isn’t arrogance: Burke is still right. In democratic systems, we elect politicians to, more often than not, compromise; make deals; dilute their election rhetoric and ignore their voters’ demands. In doing so — if they do so in good faith and in pursuit of a general good — they serve democracy, and thus their voters, best.

PHOTO: German Chancellor Angela Merkel (R) and Brazilian President Dilma Roussoff are pictured during their opening walk at the CeBit computer fair in Hanover, March, 6, 2012.  REUTERS/Fabian Bimmer

Two clever men, long past the first flush of youth, took part in a debate on God’s place — or absence — in the meaning and origin of life last week in Oxford. They differed; and to no one’s surprise, each remained unconvinced by the other’s argument at its end. Oxford University has been hosting such encounters for centuries.

So why was the University’s Sheldonian Theatre packed, with two other theaters full of people watching the debate on closed-circuit screens? Why was it covered by the news media? Why had it been sold out within hours? Who still cared about this stuff in a society that — for all that the Church of England is an established religion and the queen is its head — is as secular as any in the democratic world?

Judging by the response of the audience, including this writer, that last question’s answer emerged in the Oxford debate. We realized, as we listened to the moderate, educated English cadences of the debaters, that we care because no matter how indifferent to religion we are, or even how certain that it is a purely human construct rather than a divine revelation, we are made uneasy by its claims and miss its promise of grace and eternity. More practically, we care because many can feel morally adrift without its guidance. In his just-published book, Religion for Atheists, the philosopher Alain de Botton argues that, as he put it in an interview, “religions are full of interesting, challenging, consoling ideas … they do community really well, they’re very good on ethics, they teach us to be good, to be kind.

And the fact that the Oxford debate was a clash, with the promise of a victor, added to the fascination of the event. One of the two debaters was Richard Dawkins, a fellow of Oxford’s New College, a famed biologist, yet more famed for being the world’s most prominent and aggressive atheist. The other was Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, head of the world Anglican communion, thought to number some 80 million. The stakes were high for both men –neither wanted to be seen as being bested. And for the audience, among whom were many priests and students of theology, to see a winner or loser was to offer reassurance that their faith, or lack of it, had support at the highest level available.

The title was “The Nature of Human Beings and the Question of Their Ultimate Origin” – as the chairman, the philosopher Anthony Kenny, remarked, more than enough to fill an evening. The evening was filled, to overflowing, intellectually and in attendance, but for much of the time it was even more replete with courtesies and agreement, a tone underscored by Kenny’s insistence that, first, both agree on three underpinning issues. These were: that they both believed there was such a thing as truth; that they believed in logic (as in, two contradictory statements cannot both be true); and that they believed in science’s claims to describe the observable world. Both agreed. And like well-tempered chess players, once agreed on the rules they then played the game with grace and humor.

They agreed on more than Kenny’s rules. Williams, probably the most brilliant mind ever to wear the archbishop’s mitre, showed himself versed enough in evolutionary biology, in analytical philosophy and in neuroscience to maintain a conversation with Dawkins on his own ground. Confident enough, too, to concede that the story of evolution as unfolded by Charles Darwin a century and a half before was established fact, and that Christianity — or at least his understanding of it — gained nothing from its denial.

The flash of fire in the debate, which came well into its second half, was when Dawkins pressed his advantage on just this point. Why was the beauty of Darwin’s insight, and all the advances in understanding the body and the mind that have flowed from it, not enough for Williams? Why “clutter the thing up” with talk of God?

Because, said Williams, the fact that we are conscious beings allows us to comprehend God. For Dawkins, consciousness is something that, to be sure, we don’t yet understand — but neuroscience will probably give us the answer soon enough. But for Williams, consciousness is not just what may set us apart from animals. It both makes us distinctively human — and allows us to join our consciousness with “an unconditional creative energy” that he calls God. For well over an hour, Williams could have been a formidably learned man debating with an expert; suddenly, he was a priest as well.

An “unconditional creative energy”: the nearest Williams came to a definition of the divine, which Dawkins did not challenge. Dawkins did, however, ask, more sharply than he had before: When did this relationship between man and the divine begin? When the first humanoids walked? When they talked? Was this God-energy around before the first humanoids, waiting for them to be fit to respond to Him? Well, said Williams, I think there has to be a point in the evolutionary process where the proto-human is aware of an address from God. I think, he continued, that there was a moment when Homo sapiens was both aware of himself and aware of the divine.

But, said Dawkins, moving in for a check, if not a checkmate, is not the world tragic? Look at the amount of suffering there is. Kenny, turning in his moderator’s chair to Williams on his left, said: That is much more of a problem for you. Williams took it on his bearded chin: Our God is an intelligent God. He created a universe that hangs together. But indeed, yes, the most difficult case is: If God can create such a universe, why can’t he do more?

And, said Dawkins, why go back to a story, Genesis, written in the eighth century B.C.? There is no reason to suppose the writers of it knew much. And now we do know much. Williams, with as near to asperity as his gentle demeanor allows, came back: If I want to understand 21st century science, I use its language. If I want to understand my moral and ethical place in the universe, I go to Genesis.

So there it was. Williams has probably mobilized more intellectual firepower in the retention of his faith than any other priest, rabbi, minister, imam or guru in the world. And when pushed by his most doughty opponent, the archbishop brings out, in an almost apologetic way, a confession. That, in the end, faith is what sustains him. That to locate himself as a moral actor in the world, he has chosen to believe; to accept the vast narrative that is the Christian tradition; to imagine his consciousness as part of an unconditional creative energy. He calls that energy God.

PHOTO: Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams (R) and atheist scholar Richard Dawkins pose for a photograph outside Clarendon House at Oxford University, before their debate in the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, England, February 23, 2012.  REUTERS/Andrew Winning

Those who know Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, say he likes to test his opinions against robust argument, often at length. This column is an account of one such — imagined — conversation.

Netanyahu tends to see issues through the prism of the Holocaust, and the deep well of anti-Semitism it plumbed. On the part of the Nazis, of course, but also elsewhere in Europe — in Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic States, Hungary, Romania and France. After the war was over and the facts of the Holocaust became known, returning Jews were attacked and killed in the Polish countryside, and Stalin embarked on a murderous anti-Semitic program which — had it not been for his death in 1953 — seemed set to result in at least some major pogroms, if not another mass killing on the scale of the Nazis’. This realization, for anyone Decent, is at least sobering. For a Jew, it raises the specter of an eternal horror that can rarely be wholly dismissed.

Just as Anthony Eden, the British prime minister, viewed Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser as an Arab Hitler when Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956, so Netanyahu tends to see Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the same reincarnation. That means that the Iranian president is, in the Israeli’s mind, not just a fanatical anti-Semite, but one who will pursue his fanaticism at all costs – including causing great damage to his own people.

Fanaticism trumps rationality. Rational people wish to stay alive; fanatics commit suicidal murder for a cause. Rational leaders weigh the costs and benefits of aggression; fanatical leaders pursue their aims to the point of killing their state. Netanyahu believes that Ahmadinejad is the latter sort of leader. And thus he is inclined to think that Israel has no choice but to launch a pre-emptive strike while Iranian nuclear facilities are still vulnerable and before Iran moves them deep underground to complete the final stages of producing nuclear weapons.

However, he knows that the Israeli political and military establishment, and society, is deeply torn on the issue. There is, as yet, no decision, no one line. The complexities of making such a decision are formidable, even by Middle Eastern standards. Thus, as one who likes to test his views, earlier this week he invited a distinguished political scientist, well versed in the threats and opportunities of Israeli security but known to be opposed to a pre-emptive strike, to argue with him one evening in his office.

The distinguished scholar begins by making a mistake. He mentions that Meir Dagan, the former head of Mossad, the Israeli secret service, believed that the Iranians were some years away from producing a serviceable weapon, that the Iranian leadership was consumed with anxiety about its own society and the internal opposition it faced, and that the declaration by Ahmadinejad this week that scientists had built faster uranium enrichment centrifuges and had loaded homemade fuel plates into a reactor was bluff to cover serious problems in the nuclear program.

That is a mistake because Netanyahu sees Dagan not just as one who disagrees with him, but as a serious political threat. Dagan’s rhetoric on the issue was scornful: An attack on Iran, he said, “was the stupidest idea I had ever heard,” one that would spark regional war and unite the disparate allies against Israel. There have been hints that he was part of a group seeking the prime minister’s resignation. No advantage in that route.

The scholar thus begins to play what he believes is his best hand. Ahmadinejad, he says, may well wish for the destruction of Israel — but he is no absolute dictator on the Hitler-Stalin model. He is embedded in a regime that, whatever the rhetoric of its leaders, has a history of military caution. Not only is it not Nazi Germany, it is not Saddam’s Iraq, which was prepared to launch disastrous attacks on its neighbors — on Iran itself, in 1980, a war that lasted eight years and resulted in an estimated 1.5 million casualties, and on Kuwait a decade later, sparking Western retaliation and the rapid defeat of Iraq’s armed forces. Iran talks big, says the scholar, but acts cautiously.

This means, he continues, encouraged by the prime minister’s thoughtful silences, that even if Iran obtains a nuclear weapon, it will not use it. It will be enough to possess it and to have a balance of terror. See, he says, warming to his theme, the example of India and Pakistan. Much has been said about the fact that these two hostile neighbors are nuclear powers, much rhetoric about Pakistan being the most dangerous place on earth. And…nothing.

Sanctions, he says, are biting hard, and they will bite harder. The U.S. is leaning toward seeking the expulsion of Iran from the SWIFT system — the network for processing financial transactions — a move that would greatly limit, or even render impossible, the country’s sales of oil and purchase of foreign goods, and cause instant damage to the economy. That move would come at a cost: SWIFT is an independent institution, and would have to be leaned on hard, and the disruption would be bad for fragile Western economies. But if the threat is thought to be large enough, it could be done.

The costs of aggression, says the political scientist, are inherently unknowable. The Arab Spring seems to favor Islamist parties, which may seek to bolster their new positions in government in Tunisia and in the future in Egypt with inflamed rhetoric against Israel and perhaps something more substantial. But they are divided: The civil war in Syria has weakened the militant groups Hezbollah and Hamas, and divided the Arab world. Now is not the time to give it a unifying cause.

It is 2 o’clock in the morning. The prime minister calls a halt. Thank you, he says, for your opinion, it was well put, and may be right. You are an acute reader of our neighborhood. I have benefited from this talk.

But, he says, as the weary scholar rises to go – what if you are wrong?

It’s a question with which any Israeli prime minister — including those less hawkish than the present incumbent –must be tormented. The slender strip of land that the Israelis occupy depends for its security on the technological and military prowess of the country’s armed forces, and on the continued support of the U.S. The latter has been wary of pre-emption. But close observers, like the distinguished political scientist, detect a growing mood in Washington that reluctantly concedes it may be the only option — though an option the U.S., not Israel, should exercise.

That’s in part because of the existential dimension to this — Iran might acquire the capacity to threaten Israel’s very existence — but it’s also because of the problems that would likely emerge even if Iran proves to be a rational actor. As Professor Shai Feldman of the Crown Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University wrote this month, Iran’s possession of a nuclear threat would both embolden its allies — Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas — and prompt “countries like Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia … to acquire nuclear weapons of their own, thus triggering a proliferation cascade.”

Ahmadinejad’s boast this week — that he will continue to develop the nuclear program, still claiming it to be peaceful, and that “the era of bullying nations has passed” — ramps up the tension, as it was bound, and designed, to do.

The posture of the Western nations, seeking to halt Iran by sanctions and pressure, is that their soft-power approach will work.

But what if they are wrong?

PHOTO: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a news conference with Cypriot President Dimitris Christofias (not pictured) at the presidential palace in Nicosia, February 16, 2012 .  REUTERS/Andreas Manolis

Speak now to an intelligent European politician (having assured him or her that the conversation is off the record) and you will discover a deeply worried representative — and one who leaves you in a similar state. Whether they are in the European parliament or a national legislature, European politicians are now constrained to contemplate their powerlessness. And ours.

Ordinary members of parliaments often feel like that. But ministers, even of small states, who have been elected to represent, propose, plan and legislate, now feel it too, and more acutely. Especially in the countries that remain devoted to the idea that the state should protect its people from the hardships and, in some cases, the vicissitudes of life, people have been accustomed to expect much more in the way of protection. But politicians must now offer less. For many citizens, that provision, coupled with security, was the point of government. But now, as each week brings little respite, ministers, prime ministers and presidents feel powerless.

In part this is because one state, Germany, emasculates all others. It acts — nominally — with France, but the latter’s weakened economy and politically weaker president, Nicolas Sarkozy, makes the duopoly at the apex of the European Union one of the weak providing political cover for the strong more than a true meeting of equals. On Angela Merkel’s decisions, and those of the German parliament, hangs the fate of nations. She has not wished it so: Those who make the parallel between the Nazi savagery of 70 years ago and Germany’s present power indulge in a facile radicalism that owes nothing to observable reality. Yet however reluctantly, she disposes for a continent.

This reduces politicians in other states to colonial administrators, constrained to follow the policies determined by Berlin, endorsed by France, and proclaimed as inevitable by prevailing economic opinion. It means that when their unions demonstrate, their small businesses cry for help, their students grow hopeless about jobs and careers, and their vulnerable and aging citizens grow fearful for their supports and pensions, they can only say: It will pass, we will return to growth and the good times will roll once more. And yet they don’t know if it’s true.

They are paralyzed, caught between two sets of headlights bearing down upon them. Germany has decreed that all members of the euro zone sign on to a pact that will make  the economic and financial levers of national governance dependent on a central EU power — a move on which the European citizens are not to be consulted and that comes at a time when there is a gathering revulsion against the Union.

To say it is undemocratic is to say the obvious. In the member states, parties of the far right and left, long hostile to the EU, denounce it at meetings and in statements. The strongest of the extremists of the right, Marie Le Pen’s Front National party, which poses a real threat to Sarkozy’s ability to remain on the ballot through to the second round of France’s presidential election in April, has soft-pedaled its racism but accelerated its anti-Europeanism. One of its militants, a translator named Guy Rondel, was quoted in the Financial Times this week as saying that “I think we should leave Europe. They decide everything and we have no say.” How much that remains a minority view depends on the success of the French president’s Merkel maneuver. Failure would play well for Ms. Le Pen.

If countries took Mr. Rondel’s advice, and left “Europe,” or at least the euro, then, indeed, democracy could be restored. Control of the currency would allow a devaluation, making domestically produced goods cheaper both at home and abroad. Fiscal decisions could again be taken by ministers. Industries could be protected.

But the relief would be temporary. Indeed, it might be illusory. The restoration of the drachma, the peseta or the lire would be followed by a ferocious attack on the new/old currency, driving it down — and leaving the government and the banks with debts even more vast because they are still denominated in euros. Unemployment, already high, would leap. Faith in conventional politics, already faltering, would collapse. Democracy would tremble, extremism gain.

The promise of the EU was to provide both protection and dynamism; the former from a welfare state, the latter from the removing of barriers to the international market. Protection, in many states, cannot be sustained at past levels. Dynamism, meanwhile, happened largely in Germany and the Scandinavian countries, while the southern states borrowed heavily over the past decade to finance their welfare states and disguise their decreasing competitiveness.

Governments, banks and corporations were all complicit in this. But so were citizens, forgetting all the tedious old warnings, dating back as far as Polonius in Hamlet: “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” (And wasn’t Polonius king of the bores?) They racked up easily extended debt, careless of a reckoning. Now the reckoning is here, and its stakes are higher than even the Poloniuses thought.

Faced with a rapidly devaluing mandate, the intelligent European politician can do little but hope that Germany, the great European phoenix of our time, knows what it’s doing and will do it with care, returning us to growth. But it will do so without our assent. Because we have taken ourselves into a cul de sac from which there is no democratic exit.

PHOTO: A combination of three pictures shows German Chancellor Angela Merkel as she reacts during a discussion of the BELA (Broader European Leadership Agenda) foundation at the Neues Museum art gallery in Berlin, February 7, 2012.    REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch

Multiculturalism is a Western ideal, amounting to a secular faith. Every Western government at least mouths its mantras – that a mix of peoples in one nation is a social good, that it enriches what had been a tediously monolithic culture, that it improves (especially for the Anglo-Saxons) our cuisine, our dress sense and our love lives. Besides, we need these immigrants: In Europe at least, where demographic decline is still the order of the day in most states, where else will the labor come from? Who else replenishes the state pension fund? Even where leaders criticize multiculturalism’s tendency to shield communities from justified criticism – Angela Merkel of Germany and David Cameron of the UK have both spoken out on this – they touch only on its more obvious failings. As a process, they agree it is welcome.

Forgotten, or at least suppressed, in this narrative is religion and the animating force it still gives to many groups. Animating – and also divisive. To believe deeply in a religion had been, in the West as well as elsewhere, to believe deeply in the error of those not of the same faith, and to shun them. It has been one of the remarkable transformations of the past century that in the West, those of religious faith, or none, should accommodate the faiths of others. Indeed, they should even honor them. Those societies where that did not happen — say, until very recently, Ireland — the culture was seen as aberrant.

The reverse is true in many strongly Islamic societies. And that’s causing a problem for the Christians still living in them.

In Pakistan, the Christians number around 2.5 million. At 1.5 percent of the population, it is the largest minority in an otherwise wholly Muslim country, its origin as a community stemming entirely from the missionary activities of the British colonialists and the small number of Christians who stayed on after independence came in 1947. Promised complete equality, the progressive Islamization of the state has put increasing pressure on Christians, who face both official discrimination and periodic popular violence. The latter increased in the past decade: Last year claimed two prominent victims.

Shahbaz Bhatti, 42 years old, was the federal minister for minority affairs, a Catholic and a strong opponent of the country’s blasphemy laws: In March, his car was sprayed with bullets. By the time he got to the hospital, he was dead on arrival. The group Tehrik-i-Taliban claimed responsibility, citing Bhatti as a “known blasphemer.” The murder came two months after another, of Punjab Governor Salman Taseer. Although not a Christian, Taseer had also strongly opposed the blasphemy law and offered support to those caught in it. He was shot in January by one of his bodyguards, Malik Qadri, reportedly associated with the Dawat-e-Islami group.

There also isn’t much multicultural harmony in countries where Christianity and Islam are both strong. In Nigeria, where the two religions each make up about half the population, tension and violence has tended to increase. Over the Christmas and New Year’s period, the Islamist group Boko Haram (the name means “Western education is a sin”) attacked Christian worshippers, culminating (so far) in a Jan. 20 gun and bomb attack in Kano, a mainly Muslim city in the north of the country: The attack, on police as well as Christians, claimed 185 lives. The aftermath has seen Muslims and Christians come together in the capital, Lagos, to pray for peace. The present reality is increased fear and distance.

It’s in Christianity’s former heartland – the Middle East – that the religion faces its most poignant fate. The reasons why Christianity is now quite rapidly disappearing are contentious. Some, like the late Edward Said (himself from a Christian tradition), saw Western imperialism, support for Israel and aggressive intervention as the culprits. Others point to a millennium-long Islamic pressure on a faith regarded as a blasphemy. More recently a much more violent pressure has appeared from Islamist fundamentalism, stirring — as the Lebanese scholar Habib Malik put it in an essay for the Hoover Institution — “ancient antagonisms and reviv(ing) atavistic rejections of the different other as a despised infidel.” Christians were some 20 percent of the Middle Eastern population a century ago. Now, they are estimated to account for about 5 percent.

Thus throughout the Middle Eastern Muslim states, Christians retreat. In Gaza and the West Bank, Christians make up only about 2 percent of the population. Even the relatively large community in Bethlehem is declining. In Iraq, the slow drop in Christian numbers was much accelerated after the invasion let loose sectarian violence: Some half of the community has left. In Iran, traditional Christian groups are recognized in the constitution and given parliamentary seats – but face informal discrimination and leave. In Saudi Arabia, both public and private expressions of Christianity are banned (though the latter is rarely enforced). The only Christians are foreign workers or visitors, who must keep their blasphemy to themselves.

Until relatively recently, the largest single Christian community, the Egyptian Copts, had been relatively secure. The 19th century brought them not just toleration but recognition, especially of their religious and political rights. But the 20th century, with the growth of the view that Egypt should not be for Egyptians but for Muslims, saw pressure bear down on the Copts, moderated only by the suppression of Islamism from above — especially during the period of rule by Gamal Abdel Nasser, from 1956 until his death in 1970. Anti-Copt riots and murders continued through the seventies and eighties: their position improved in the nineties, when former President Hosni Mubarak, under international pressure, returned land and property taken from the Copts years before and improved security. Sporadic attacks, however, continued: They are underrepresented in the administration and in politics, and media attacks on them persist.

The greater fear now, in Egypt as elsewhere, is that the Arab Spring has a dark side. Anti-Copt riots were a feature of last year: A Coptic demonstration against the burning of one of their churches in October saw more than 20 dead as the army charged the demonstrators. The irony that the Christian tradition is older in the area than Islam’s (and once dominant in it) is ignored in the zeal for purification.

In December, the Archbishop of Canterbury, head of the world’s Anglicans, told the House of Lords in London that “the position of Christians in (the Middle East) is more vulnerable than it has been for centuries … of late, the Coptic community has seen levels of emigration rise to unprecedented heights, and in a way that would have been unthinkable even a very few years ago, it is anxious about sharing the fate of other Christian communities that once seemed securely embedded in their setting.”

Christians, now, cannot look for security in any setting where Islam makes a monopolistic claim on the hearts and minds of the people. Fervent faith in one part of the world; a secular trust in the benign effects of cultural mixing in another. The two are not, for the moment, meeting.

PHOTO: An injured Christian protester holds a statue of Christ and shows off a bullet during clashes with soldiers and riot police in Cairo, October 9, 2011. REUTERS/Amr Abdallah Dalsh

Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and of Her other Realms and Territories, Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith … is in want of a yacht.

She had one, the Royal Yacht Britannia, which she loved very much. When the Labour government of Tony Blair said it was too expensive and decommissioned it soon after assuming office in 1997, she was seen to weep at the ceremony. Last year, Blair was reported as saying he regretted the decision, pressed upon him by the then-chancellor, Gordon Brown, and inherited from the previous, Conservative administration. It cost £11 million a year to run, and a necessary refit would have cost some £50 million. So it was put out to the nautical equivalent of pasture. It’s now on show at a dock in Leith, the port of Scotland’s capital, Edinburgh, where it’s in much demand as a venue for “occasions.”

If in want of a yacht, Queen Elizabeth has never lacked for gallant courtiers. Michael Gove, the secretary of state for education, earlier this month wrote to the prime minister suggesting that for her Diamond Jubilee, to be celebrated in June this year, she should be promised (the event is too near for her to be “given”) a replacement yacht, to express the love her subjects bear her. After a little to-ing and fro-ing, Gove clarified that he had not meant that the expense – which might be some £80 million to £100 million – should be borne from the public purse, but rather would be raised from her (presumably better-heeled) admirers. The prime minister said he was all for it, on that basis. The deputy prime minister, Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg, made a not-too-bad joke, saying the world was divided into the “yachts and the have-yachts.”

This is a storm in a royal teacup, to be sure: The money may not be raised, the yacht never built. Already, a grand river pageant is planned for June 3, when the Diamond Jubilee will be celebrated with a four-day weekend holiday for all. The star of that show will be a luxury river boat, the Spirit of Chartwell, transformed by the film set designer Joseph Bennett into a gilded, garlanded royal barge. Bennett did the sets for the grandiose TV series Rome, so he may have had in mind the lines heralding Cleopatra’s watery arrival to meet her lover, the Roman general Antony, in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra: “The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne,
 Burn’d on the water.”

Is not the barge enough? It will cost £10 million, the cost to be met by private sponsorship and donations. Are there enough generous royalists left after that to put up some £80 million to £100 million for a yacht?

Even if there are, it’s a bad idea. Gove, a former journalist and one of the sharpest minds in the British Cabinet, has allowed his affection for the queen to nudge him into making a rare presentational mistake. The queen should not have a yacht — and it is the royalists who should be most concerned that she should not.

First, it puts her among the superrich. She is, indeed, very rich: Her fortune is estimated at just under £2 billion, which makes her the 19th wealthiest woman in the world and the second richest woman monarch (after Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, who tops £2 billion). But her style, her activities and above all her public relations have kept her removed from the yacht set – a set led by a near neighbor of hers, who lives a mile or so west of Buckingham Palace and who owns the Chelsea soccer team. Roman Abramovich’s Eclipse, the largest yacht in the world (557 feet) and the most expensive (nearly £1 billion) is one of four he has, the Eclipse having two swimming pools, two helicopter pads and a small submarine. Abramovich was embroiled till last week in an effort to strike down a suit against him from former fellow oligarch Boris Berezovsky. He has just lost his bid to defeat the suit, and so the substantive case will go to a full trial in October. The sight of these two enormously wealthy men, whose riches were torn from an impoverished country, brawling over billions is at once fascinating and melancholy. The queen shouldn’t join that class.

Second, though her popularity is likely to reach such levels in this year that she will easily ride out any criticism, she will, at some time not too distant, hand over the crown, voluntarily or necessarily, to her son, Prince Charles. (Presuming the crown does not skip a generation and go her grandson, Prince William, who is so far a somewhat colorless man but whose elegant wife, Kate, is lionized by the press and has made no mistakes.) Prince Charles is no longer as unpopular as he was when his first wife, Princess Diana, died: but he’s not popular, either, and his occupancy of a super-yacht while he tells the world it must conserve energy or die will be a constant, legitimate source of a charge of hypocrisy.

Third, there are a host of better things on which to spend £100 million, especially in these dark days. Some pointers.

• A network of Queen Elizabeth II centers for the young, in which those finding it hard (if not impossible) to get work can go for counseling, work experience, volunteering at home and abroad, training, and networking. Assuming that the money comes from corporations and rich individuals, these could remain associated with the centers, forging links between the workless and workplaces; while the wealthy should be encouraged to experiment with ideas of how to provide broader perspectives to the unemployed than joyless leisure.

• The same for the aging: in this case, to propose ways in which the healthy elderly can continue to make contributions to society and their own well-being; to point to further education and other courses that engage the mind and body; and to encourage a spirit of solidarity and neighborliness. As with the centers for young people, other institutions work in the same area. But this would carry the prestige of the queen’s name and would have her patronage – which counts for much, especially among the older generations.

• A fund to help make the royal properties – principally Balmoral Castle in the Highlands of Scotland, Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh, Windsor Castle and above all Buckingham Palace in the center of London  itself – much more open to the public than they are now. The queen, or at least her successor, should take the initiative to considerably downsize the monarchy, moving the royal family to the still large Central London properties of Clarence House (where Prince Charles lives when in London) or St. James Palace (Princess Anne’s London home). To be sure, visiting heads of state will no longer be housed in Buckingham Palace: so what? Clarence House and St. James’ Palace have guest rooms. If there are entourage problems, some of the grandest hotels in the world — the Ritz,  Claridges, the Savoy – are not far away. Buckingham Palace should be a national resource: everything from a history lesson to a business tool (one of the ostensible reasons for the yacht).

The grandeur of the British royals will fade as Elizabeth goes. It’s best to recognize and plan for it now. A yacht, with a life of decades, will come to seem more and more inappropriate, and less and less attuned to a country where the issues of work, poverty and ignorance remain to be tackled and moderated. To assist in that work would be a legacy fit for a queen.

PHOTO: Britain’s Queen Elizabeth arrives for a Christmas Day service at St. Mary Magdalene Church on the Royal estate at Sandringham, Norfolk in east England, December 25, 2011.  REUTERS/Suzanne Plunkett

With so much unemployment about, and more to come, it seems reasonable to fear that more crime will come with it. The devil, after all, finds work for idle hands, and that English proverb finds echoes everywhere. The French and the Finns say that “idleness is the mother of all vices” (the Italians think the same, except that it’s the father); the Portuguese, that “an empty head is the devil’s workshop”; the Egyptians, that “the idle hand is impure.” Who can gainsay such an accord of folk wisdom?

The U.S. crime statistics, for one. The big rise in U.S. unemployment (it’s going down a little now, but it’s still high, at around nine percent) hasn’t been accompanied by a surge in crime. The stagnation of working- and middle-class incomes hasn’t sent the sufferers out onto the street in orgies of thieving or robbery with assault. Although Americans – bamboozled by super-violent films and TV’s concentration on murder and rape – fear crime as much, if not more, than ever, still the real decline in most crimes is large, and has continued.

The reasons for rises and falls in crime are always contested, but one reason commonly cited – though not universally agreed upon – is the high rate of incarceration in the U.S. And it’s not just that the U.S. locks up people more willingly than other countries – the UK sends about the same percentage to prison. It’s that the prisoners spend longer, often much longer, inside. Research by Steven Levitt and William Spelman points to these sentences as reducing crime by a lot – about one-quarter. Other researchers say it’s much less (though still accounting for a measurable decline) and that the social effects, especially on young black men without college degrees or even high school diplomas, who are disproportionately incarcerated, outweigh the gains.

There are other reasons. Less cocaine is now taken, either heavily or recreationally, than was the case a decade or more ago. Police methods, especially forensics, have become much more sophisticated, which has meant more arrests and more convictions. People look after their property better. It may even be the case that reduced levels of lead in young bloodstreams – down by four-fifths in the past decade – have reduced crime, as high levels of lead in teenage bloodstreams have long been linked to aggression and criminal behavior.

Much more speculatively, it could be that our culture has changed. James Q. Wilson – the social scientist whose work on policing of crime-ridden areas inspired shifts to no-tolerance methods, where actions that makes neighborhoods unsafe or just unpleasant (broken windows, graffiti) are pursued and punished – said in his 2011 Manhattan Lecture that we have moved from a 1960s-inspired, ultra-liberal ethos of self-expression to a more conservative ethic of self-control. He added, though, that no one knew how to measure the effects of such a move, if move it was.

Like him, and with his caveat, I think culture is important, but I also think that as culture has changed over the past half-century, so it is likely to change again – if, that is, high levels of unemployment persist. For the loss of jobs isn’t likely to be substantially reversed when the Western economies move into growth – even relatively high growth. There are structural reasons why we might be stuck with terrible situations, like 40 percent youth unemployment in Spain and large-scale job losses week by week in Greece and Portugal.

If you divide jobs into three categories – transformational, transactional and interactional – only the last is, and will be for a while, a reliable supplier of well-paid and good jobs. The first, transformational, means making cars, doing farm work, or building houses and schools, work that is very substantially automated, and will be further. Transactional means work dealing with the public, as in call centers – which have been labor intensive, and indeed have provided something of a (low-paid) cushion against redundancies from transformational jobs – but are now also being automated, rapidly. (There is a sub-group here that is, according to the Economist, growing: domestic service. And while much of it isn’t very well rewarded, some of it is: A good butler can cost you £150,000 a year.)

It’s in the interactional jobs where the growth, and the high pay, is to be found: in finance, in the law, and in some parts of the media. These need a lot of training, and invariably at least one degree. Which means that people who took unskilled, or low-skilled – or some kinds of skilled – work now face a tough market. And that greatly exacerbates the gap between the have-a-lots and the have-littles, even for those with work (which is still most of us).

Long-term, chronic unemployment for young men with few prospects and little shape to their lives strikes me as a big challenge to a trend of declining crime. This is even more the case because criminality in the world – especially in organized-crime gangs and in corruption networks – isn’t declining: Indeed, globally, it’s leaping ahead. Stuart Gilman, an expert on corrupt practices (as an investigator, not a participant) told me that there are quite a few “kleptocracies” in the world and that “though we can stop some of it, I’m always surprised at how smart the criminals are. They are always one step ahead. Once you strip off the veil of legitimate marketplaces, it’s amazing what, in so many places, is underneath.” One of the Wikileaks documents that circulated in December 2010 was a cable from the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, John Beyrle, to the effect that corruption is the system. Gilman says that there is no easy line to draw between corruption, organized crime and terrorism – all can merge into one other.

Networks of crime, corruption and terrorism hold out to the disenfranchised young the rewards of status, money and a kind of respect (also, of course, risks of pain, imprisonment and death). States that have been able to keep these networks out, or at any rate down, face a tougher struggle in doing so than before: Globalization works for crime too, even if slowly (mafias can and do migrate, but tend to stick to their own national turf). But within these cultures, look at the “success” of organized crime gangs in Italy (now spreading to the north from the south); in Russia, burgeoning over the past 20 years; in Mexico, where the drug gangs can terrorize whole regions and account for more violent deaths of nosy journalists than anywhere else in the world; in China, where, as in Russia, a softening of tyrannical rule meant a big spike in crime; in India, where gangs flourish, violent crime has risen fast in the past half-century (by over 200 percent, for murders), and where corruption, too, is a way of government and much commercial life.

The power these criminal subcultures have – apart from the considerable ability to acquire vast sums of money, terrorize their victims and even cow (or penetrate) governments – is to lower the defenses the young have against involvement with them. It’s what happened in the U.S. and elsewhere in the 1920s and 1930s, when a reserve army of young labor provided foot soldiers for crime mobs. A sense of hope betrayed by economies that cannot meet the needs of employment could do the same – on a larger, more global scale.

PHOTO: A cache of weapons seized from a vehicle from an outbound (southbound) examination at Del Rio International Bridge in Texas, is seen in this U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) handout photograph taken February 1, 2011. REUTERS/U.S. Customs and Border Protection/Handout