THE SICKNESS OF THE WEST: PAUL JOHNSON
Current Events
The Sickness of the West
Paul Johnson, 03.15.10, 6:00 PM ET
The world is groaning beneath a mountain of debt, but that’s not the real problem. History shows repeatedly that debt can quickly be paid off once confidence is restored and men and women set to work with a will. But for that to happen we must have trust in those who lead us.
Trust is missing. We do not trust–and with good reason–either our elected leaders or the corporate elite who constitute the top echelons of society. Seldom in modern history has the lack of trust, now verging on contempt, been so deep, universal and comprehensive.
At the very top we have a sad bunch of flawed mediocrities.
–President Barack Obama. To quote Benjamin Disraeli, “A sophisticated rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity.” If only he would talk less, and think more.
–Chancellor Angela Merkel. A well-meaning hausfrau with the steely will of a dishcloth.
–President Nicolas Sarkozy. An operator who is clever at everything except what matters most.
–Prime Minister Gordon Brown. A machine politician whose own machinery is visibly breaking down.
–Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. A splendid advertisement for Viagra, a man whose antics would have afforded us much amusement in a time of normal prosperity.
The collapse in leadership is a serious matter, made worse by the fact that none of the main central bank chairmen is well known, liked or trusted.
The Center Has Not Held
More devastating, in a sense, is the loss of trust in entire categories of people who once formed bastions of integrity at the heart of society. In Britain half a century and more ago there were three categories of professionals who inspired general regard: bankers, scientists and politicians.
At the local level the men who ran the banks in the high street were popular and trusted and were regularly conscripted onto every committee that mattered. In the City of London the top people formed a regulatory agency in themselves and dealt swiftly and severely with anyone who fell short of the highest standards of integrity.
Today the word “banker” is a pejorative term. Local managers are anonymous persons held in low regard. City of London magnates are suspect figures. Bankers are associated with unrestrained greed, recklessness and professional incompetence. It would be hard to think of another group that has fallen so fast and so far in public esteem.
The same thing is now happening with scientists. Since the days of Sir Humphry Davy and Charles Darwin, scientists in Britain have been held in the highest regard. Lord Kelvin and Sir Alexander Fleming were treated as secular saints. Nobel Prize winners were honored like prophets in ancient Israel.
Now, as the theory of man-made global warming unravels, scientists are suddenly and devastatingly revealed as fallible, mendacious, self-seeking, criminally secretive, furtively trying to hide their errors, debasing the system of peer review of scientific papers and conspiring to conceal the truth from once highly respected professional publications. The image of the scientist who puts the pursuit of truth before anything else has been shattered and replaced by a man on the make or a quasi-religious enthusiast who wants to prove his case at any cost. Science is becoming the tool of campaigning warfare, in which truth is the first casualty.
But the fall of the scientist is as nothing compared with the self-degradation of British politicians. I can remember a time when most people would regard it as an honor to shake the hand of their Member of Parliament. Today the initials MP after a surname are a badge of shame. Thanks to the corruption that has spread across the English Channel from the EU bureaucracy in Brussels and the European Parliament in Strasbourg, we now have the most debauched Parliament in the whole of British history.
Nearly half of Parliament’s members have been accused of fiddling with or inflating their expenses in a variety of ways, which has raised the disgust and contempt of the public. Three MPs are to be tried under the Theft Act, and the view is unanimous that many more should have been charged.
The House of Lords has been found to be no better: Although only one lord has been charged, scores of others have cheated. This is not surprising since in a number of cases lords have bought their seats in Parliament by donating huge sums to party funds. There’s a general feeling that the entire system is rotten and that something drastic needs to be done, such as in 1653, when Oliver Cromwell dissolved the corrupt Long Parliament at the point of a sword.
Indeed, in Britain today it’s a lamentable fact that, with the Church of England held in ridicule and contempt and lawyers seen as monsters of greed, the only group in society still treated with admiration and respect is the armed forces. Maybe that is a portent.
What’s clear, if the situation in Britain is anything to go by, is that the malaise in the West goes much deeper than the credit crunch–a mere symptom–and will take much longer to put right.
Paul Johnson, eminent British historian and author; Lee Kuan Yew, minister mentor of Singapore; Amity Shlaes, senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations; and David Malpass, global economist, president of Encima Global LLC, rotate in writing this column. To see past Current Events columns, visit our Web site at www.forbes.com/currentevents.
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