Mankind almost always gets threat assessment wrong. Politicians and sages worry themselves into a decline about a given issue — the red peril, the yellow peril, nuclear holocaust, al-Qaeda — only to find themselves facing troubles of a different nature.
The most obvious consequence of the Western financial crisis is that it makes US President George W. Bush’s “war on terror” seem footling. Of course terrorism is serious. But it does not threaten systemic disaster for Western societies.
By contrast, what generates such fear about the financial catastrophe is that nobody professes to know how bad matters can get. The US and British governments are scrabbling for palliatives rather than proposing anything that masquerades as a solution. Two months ago, economists were talking gloomily about next year being a bad year. Now, however, it seems plain that, even in a benign scenario, it will take much longer for the US and Britain to come out the other side of this nightmare.
ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
Thoughtful people are justly frightened about their jobs, homes and savings. Complacency persists only among those too stupid to realize how serious the mess is, or too young to imagine a society in which instant gratification is no longer available.
My daughter once observed in a domestic context: “Daddy, life is what you are used to.”
This seemed to me an unconsciously profound remark. In war or peace, people find it hard to come to terms with the notion of their own environment — physical, social or economic — becoming something quite different from what it is.
Winston Churchill, during World War II, explained this phenomenon to the head of the British army, General Sir Alan Brooke. He called it the “three-inch pipe” theory of human response. Human beings, he said, can only absorb so much drama — up to the capacity of say, a three-inch pipe. Thereafter, everything that happens around them rushes past, along an emotional overflow.
Many people, including Brooke himself, experienced this in Britain in 1940. So many sensations crowded upon each other that many failed to achieve the impact that they deserved — happily for national morale.
A little knowledge of history makes it easier to achieve a perspective upon misfortunes that befall us. Bedside reading of Samuel Pepys’ diary provides a wonderful corrective to anyone silly enough to suppose our own times extravagantly dangerous.
Pepys lived and worked as a government servant during a period in which almost everybody was frightened for their heads, health and fortune. While he shared in rejoicing at the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, throughout the years that followed King Charles II’s polity never seemed less than precarious. Pepys’ own career prospered at the Navy Office, but he lacked the slightest sense of security.
In 1665, the great plague struck London. The following year, Pepys witnessed the great fire. The nation’s finances tottered. The diarist wrote on Sept. 8, 1666: “Up, and ... by water to White-hall. I stopped with Sir G Carteret, to desire him to go with us and enquire after money. But the first he cannot do, and the other as little, or says: ‘Where can we get any, or what shall we do for it ?’ He, it seems, is imployed [sic] in the correspondence between the City and the King every day, in settling of things.”
It seemed to them all in those days that matters could scarcely get worse, but they did. The following June, the Dutch fleet sailed up the River Medway in southern England and burned Chatham dockyard.
Pepys, panic-stricken, sent his money out of London, and wrote: “The truth is, I do fear so much that the whole kingdom is undone ... God help us, and God knows what disorders we may fall into.”
The crises of peace, precipitated by disease, natural disaster or financial collapse, are often harder to endure than those of war. People find themselves confined to the role of victims, impotent to influence their own fates.
A significant element of Churchill’s genius in 1940 to 1941 was his understanding that the British people needed to feel themselves participants, rather than merely to stand passive in the face of the Nazi juggernaut. All that trench-digging and Home Guard duty served little practical purpose. But it was invaluable in enabling ordinary people to suppose that they were “doing their bit.”
Long after the real threat of German invasion had passed, Churchill kept alive a pretense. He knew that defense against descending Nazi hordes sustained the illusion of useful activity among millions of British citizens who might otherwise have slumped into despondency and inertia.
The most distressing British experience within memory was not the war, which offered notable compensatory stimuli, but the period that followed. In the late 1940s, food continued to be rationed. Fuel was desperately short. People suffered wretched privations during the snowbound months of 1947.
The British were suddenly conscious that though they had been victors in conflict, they were big losers of peace. Their empire was fading away. US triumphalism and wealth contrasted with British bitterness and poverty. My father wrote me a letter at my birth in December 1945, which he later gave me on my 21st birthday, about the world as it then seemed.
“In my lifetime,” he wrote, “this country has gone from being one of the richest nations on earth to one of the poorest.”
The grey, joyless austerity of the postwar period seemed monstrously unfair to British people who had sacrificed so much, to stand alone against the dictators.
We need not continue the history lecture. My point is simply that, if we measure today’s woes with those of former eras, we should be able to muster a little courage to endure the credit crunch. Western capitalism is suffering a richly deserved shock to its hubris. But it almost certainly possesses sufficient resilience, energy and imagination to come out the other side.
We face no threat to our health, diet or physical safety to match those that confronted the generations of Pepys, Churchill and many others over the past millennium. If the worst that can befall us is to lose some money, then it ill becomes us to make too much of it.
A few years ago, researching a book about Europe in 1944 to 1945, I met in New York an enchanting old woman named Edith Gabor, who had survived several Nazi concentration camps.
After spending three hours hearing her story, I stood on the pavement outside her apartment, waiting for a cab to take me to Kennedy airport, to catch a plane back to London.
The cab did not come. I became first impatient, then emotional. Edith, a rotund little Hungarian Jewish octogenarian, came and stood beside me on the sidewalk. She laughed heartily.
“Relax!” she said. “It’s not important! When you’ve been in a death camp, you get to see that missing an airplane really doesn’t matter very much.”
I felt ashamed to have displayed before such a woman a preoccupation with trivia characteristic of our incredibly privileged generation. The credit crunch is alarming. But, in the context of modern experience such as that which Edith Gabor knew, it really does not matter very much.
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