John Lloyd

Americans might be forgiven for regarding Europeans as a puzzle. And not an intriguing one, but an irritating, what-the-hell-are-they-thinking kind of puzzle. The global survey books by American thinkers this year – Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Strategic Vision, Robert Kagan’s The World America Made and Ian Bremmer’s Every Nation for Itself – profess to be in frustration more than sorrow with Europe’s passivity. Why don’t they pay more to protect themselves and to project force? We do. Why can’t they unite into a federal state and get a properly integrated economic policy so they can get over this euro crisis? We did. Why can’t they get over their obsession with immigration – especially since their populations are shrinking, and they need more labor? We have.

Europe, a continent whose elite had long condescended to America, regarding it as a place of extremes and crudities, is now in danger of seeming both effete and weird. The surge in support for Marine Le Pen in Sunday’s election in France – the largest piece of news, since the Socialist François Hollande had been expected to beat President Nicolas Sarkozy in the first round – makes her National Front party, if not she herself, a kingmaker, and deposits her at the center of French politics.

She rejoiced in Paris, and less than 400 kilometers away in the Hague, the Dutch government fell – as the far-right Party for Freedom, led by Geert Wilders, withdrew its support, citing opposition to a budget that, prompted by the EU’s new fiscal pact, strove to bring the deficit down to 3 percent of GDP. For Wilders, this asked the Dutch people to “pay out of their pockets for the senseless demands of Brussels … we don’t want to follow Brussels’ orders.”

All over Europe, now, parties of the far right and far left see their support grow as they denounce the EU or immigration, or both; as they direct the frustrations of hard-pressed people into channels of blame; as they flatter their supporters by telling them that they, the ordinary folk, have in their common sense and in their experience of life, the real answers to the woes afflicting the countries of Europe. Both on the right and on the left, a fevered populism denounces the experts, the “old” politicians and parties, the self-interested elites, those who are against “us” – us, the people.

There is not a little political charlatanry here: Le Pen and Wilders are educated people; they know well enough that the answers to Europe’s woes are complex, time-consuming and dependent on consensus. But they choose to ignore that. And there is more than a little racism bubbling away, toward Muslims and immigrants of every kind,  both of color and from Eastern Europe. It finds it harder to speak its name now, unlike the Jew-hatred before the last world war – but it’s not less powerful for being partially suppressed. These movements are not, to be sure, fascist armies. But the breakdown of government they may provoke could open up spaces for greater extremes than they.

Yet they need not triumph. There are many causes for the European malaise, but two of the most pressing do not stem from the cynical manipulation of fear, or from subterranean hatreds. They are part of the nature of contemporary European life and of its constitution – and can be fixed, though only with large political will and with time.

First, immigration into Europe in the 2000s is not like that into the wide spaces of North America in the 19th and the 20th centuries (where, even so, many newcomers met with prejudice, and worse). Immigrants to Europe come into densely populated, urban societies, where populations see themselves as having been stable for centuries. The newly arrived often cleave strongly to their faith – and may regard with some contempt the largely irreligious Europeans around them. In the cities of Germany, in the suburbs of Paris, in the former textile towns of Northern England, the newcomers live in areas segregated by choice, by price and by prejudice. Often, the families are large; not infrequently, they are more dependent on the state and the social services than the indigenous whites.

None of this needs to be toxic. It can become so when the immigrants are seen to take more than they give, which is the rule of thumb by which they are judged by their neighbors, who are themselves often in low-cost housing with little to spare. Yet the European governing classes have been slow – and are slow, even now – to make clear to those who immigrate that they have a larger responsibility to adjust to the new society than the society has to them. The lack of that steady pressure – to integrate, to become full and useful members of a society with a culture that, though relatively liberal, has rules and expectations – has caused much of the mutual incomprehension of the incoming and the settled populations of Europe. When we have decided to admit people to citizenship – a large privilege anywhere – we should welcome them: The best welcome is a tough one, making clear what the rules are and the need to observe them.

And second, the European Union – the common whipping boy of the right and left populists – is fundamentally flawed. The flaw has been to create a powerful entity that has large power over people’s lives – yet is divorced from them, hardly known by them, easily seen – as are immigrants – as an alien and tyrannous machine smashing through cultures and customs, licensing and encouraging commercial forces that do so. The new populist parties have an answer for this, and it is a simple one. It is to leave the Union; to return to the nation; to find in the nation what it is to be truly French, or British, or Dutch; to end an artificial order and re-create an older, purer one.

If the euro survives, and the Union itself is salvaged, it will truly betray its peoples if it does not recognize that no construction of this kind, a massive geopolitical work still in its early stages, can take on a human dimension without the most extensive democratization. Europeans must find their way toward seeing each other as common citizens bit by bit, no doubt slowly, in ways both discovered by themselves and encouraged by their politicians.

Europe has torn at itself for centuries. It tore itself to bits within living memory. It is a skeleton of a continent whose emergence as a state – if it is ever to come – will be centuries in coming. That has to be recognized, before the real work can start.

The Europeans are strange people – terribly civilized, as they see themselves, yet extreme in their hatreds and their wars and in many of their actions. In the French election and in the foundering of the government in the Netherlands we glimpse the prospect of a gathering crisis. But it’s not ineluctable. The bad management of good intentions was a human mistake, and human agency can fix it.

PHOTO: France’s president and UMP party candidate for the 2012 French presidential elections, Nicolas Sarkozy, speaks to supporters at La Mutualité meeting hall in Paris after early results in the first round of voting, April 22, 2012. REUTERS/Yves Herman.   France’s far-right National Front party leader Marine Le Pen leaves a restaurant to attend a meeting at party headquarters in Nanterre, near Paris, April 23, 2012, the day after the first round of the 2012 French presidential election. REUTERS/Pascal Rossignol.   Geert Wilders of the Freedom Party attends a debate in The Hague about the government’s resignation caused by a crisis over budget cuts, April 24, 2012. Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said his country faced a crisis and asked parliament to push through budget cuts after his government lost the support of its main political ally and tendered its resignation. REUTERS/Paul Vreeker/United Photos

To watch Anders Breivik, in the news clips available of him in the Oslo court where he is being tried for mass murder, is to see a smile on the face of an animal much more terrifying than any beast: a human fanatic, whose own mental processes have produced a monstrous creature. That smile is so normal, appearing so naturally in his conversations with his defense lawyer Geir Lippestad. It seems almost…carefree. Indeed, Breivik does seem free from care. “I would say,” said Lippestad on Wednesday, in the precise and fluent English all Norwegians seem able to speak, that “he’s always in a good mood.”

Lippestad, who will likely never have another such shot at fame, will probably never again walk such a high wire. He must defend a man most of the world believes to be wholly indefensible and many in Norway know as one who murdered a relative, friend or acquaintance. He must accompany his client as he comes to court and gives his defiant, fist-out salute. Breivik has been asked to stop, but so far hasn’t. Lippestad is helpless in this matter, saying that “either he will or he won’t. There’s nothing that we can order him to do.” The Norwegian authorities are grimly determined that all the rules of a liberal order be followed: Lippestad, in a liberal society’s iconic (but hardly popular) role of the defender of a human horror, bears the brunt.

And he must argue, under instructions from his client, that he is sane. If he’s sane, he can get 21 years – the maximum sentence – and then, after he serves the sentence, there will be an argument (which Breivik may win) that he can be freed if he is judged no longer to be a danger to society. A judgment that he is insane could keep him in a secure medical facility for life, if that custody is constantly reimposed on three-year reviews. He has said: Give me liberty or give me death. He says the maximum sentence would be “absurd.” Norway has no death penalty: It is not about to invent one for him, even if many Norwegians would wish it (including one of the lay judges on the panel hearing the casecasec, who had to resign when he made this clear).

Breivik is instructing Lippestad to argue for his sanity because he wants the world to know that he acted consciously, logically, sanely – even, as he memorably argued earlier this week, out of “goodness” and “necessity” (the word was initially translated as “self-defense” but has since been corrected). “Necessity” in the sense Breivik wishes to convey is the needful protection of Norwegian – and European – society from Islam, from the ideology of multiculturalism that foists Islam on Christian societies, and from the agents of multiculturalism – in this case, the ruling Norwegian Labor Party, 69 of whose youth league members he killed on the island of Utøya on July 22, 2011. He would, he said, “do it again,” a claim that he must have seen as elevating his squalid massacre to the status of an opening battle in a long war over the forces that are destroying Europe.

Crazy, isn’t it? Even those who believe that immigration has been too high; who believe that Islamic extremism presents a constant and perhaps growing danger to the world, Europe included; who blame successive governments for policies that have too rapidly changed once largely mono-ethnic states into multicultural nations; who have whipped such feelings into a passion that leads them to join or to vote for parties of the far right – even they must feel that this is a diseased mind.

There is a dilemma here. Democratic societies must live with bad ideologies, including those that claim Europe must be purged of all alien races, as well as those that call for its total Islamization. That can be deeply uncomfortable, and courts dangers: Ideologies can be proclaimed with no more violence than their own inflamed rhetoric until, one day, some one or some group decides to convert the words to deeds. But we have to live in and with the messy compromises that such extremism dictates for elected governments.

We should not inflate debate about immigration and multiculturalism by democratic politicians and citizens into a claim that a new racist discourse is taking a grip on Europe. That is what Mariano Aguirre of the Norwegian Peacebuilding Centre did in Le Monde Diplomatique earlier this week, arguing that both Angela Merkel of Germany and David Cameron of the UK had contributed to the rise of the far right by declaring multiculturalism “dead.” But, in fact, both Merkel and Cameron were arguing for a more integrated society in which different ethnic and faith groups didn’t feel impelled or encouraged to emphasize their separateness. They were arguing for their fuller citizenship, not their marginalization.

We can’t solve the dilemma by concluding that Breivik is mad. In this, at least, we should take his word for it. For if he is judged mad, most of the ground we have previously occupied in making moral and judicial decisions is cut away.

Those we have judged to be the chief monsters of the 20th century – Hitler, Mao, Stalin – we have generally assumed to be sane. We certainly assumed Hitler’s senior lieutenants to be sane when they were judged, and in many cases executed, at Nuremberg. Leaders of the West dealt with, indeed at different times wooed, both Stalin and Mao, and treated them as legitimate leaders of their people.

Yet were they not mad, by the same token used by those who judge Breivik to be mad? To conclude that the survival of Germany required the mass murder of as many Jews as could be obtained; to provoke and preside over a civil war (the “Cultural Revolution”) to bolster one’s position and continue the “people’s revolution”; to starve millions in the course of eradicating “rich” peasants and imprison millions in Siberian camps for a careless complaint or joke about the regime, a recalcitrant attitude to work, a friendship with or a family connection to one already judged an “enemy of the people” – all in the service of creating a workers’ and peasants’ state of advanced socialism: Are these not the actions of maniacs?

And is it not mad to declare war on the “Jews and Crusaders” – that is, the Western world –  to usher in an era of harmony under the tutelage of a single, extreme interpretation of the Koran? How, then, can we judge those who have dedicated, or would dedicate, their life to this as adults responsible for their decisions?

But we have, we do and we are right to do so. Sanity comprehends the imagining, the propagation, the planning and the execution of extraordinary violence, lasting years and slaughtering millions. It includes creating machines of murder that go about their work without their progenitor being present, or even knowing how they work. It includes energetic efforts to spread murderous theories beyond the borders of the state. Sane people have done terrible things: It was their sanity, their ability to plan and to enthuse others, that made them so terrible.

And sanity includes Anders Breivik. It may be – as the prosecution is attempting to show – that he lives in a fantasy world where networks of Knights Templars giving closed-fist salutes plan other such atrocities as his to save Europe from an Islamic fate. It is certainly the case that he acted on the prompting of a belief that he was and remains a patriotic, Christian militant, able to see with clearer eyes than the apathetic majority what is happening to them.

He, who is in most eyes the embodiment of evil, is in his own mind undertaking the lesser evil: the delivery of a shock to his and other societies through slaughter to focus their attention on the much larger slaughter to come, and hence avert it. That’s hideous, and we should fear that he might inspire others like him. But he knew what he was about. It’s not mad.

PHOTO: REUTERS/Heiko Junge/Scanpix/Pool; REUTERS/Erlend Aas/ Scanpix/Pool

It’s too early to hear the sound of the tumbrils rolling, or the excited click-clack of spectators’ knitting needles as the aristos are taken to the guillotine, but don’t bet that a modern bonfire of the pretensions of the very rich won’t happen, and maybe soon. (Peacefully, I hope: Revolutions are mostly horrible affairs.)

The French allusion occurs because the presidential election campaign opened officially there earlier this week, and the first round of the two-stage voting process will take place on Sunday Apr. 22. From the results of that first pass for the French people, we should see something of central interest and concern to our times, with an import far beyond France. We’ll see how mad people are, and how deeply (or not) they feel they shouldn’t take it any more.

The smart money remains on one of the two front-runners in the race: President Nicolas Sarkozy, the candidate of the right, who’s campaigning as if his life depended on it; and François Hollande, of the Socialist Party, an altogether more laid-back man whose travel-to-work transport was, until recently, a scooter (the kind with a motor – modesty has its limits). They both have been hovering below 30 percent in the polls, while 10 percent is taken by François Bayrou, a veteran campaigner and a liberal, centrist, sensible sort of man, who is trying to pump up votes for a job that is unlikely ever to be his.

It’s the other 30 percent of the electorate where the fascination, and maybe the fear of moderates, lies. The woman who, it was once thought, might emerge as the real challenger to Sarkozy, Marine Le Pen of the anti-immigrant Front National, has faded from a high of near 20 percent to around 15 percent – perhaps because Sarkozy has stolen many of her garments, promising in some stump speeches something akin to a fortress France, keeping out cheap goods and immigrants alike.

Yet in a poll midweek for Le Monde, just over a quarter of 18-to-24-year-olds said they would vote for her. Commenting on the poll, Ms. Le Pen said the surge in youthful support was because of her criticism of the current economic model, which had been “massively rejected by the youth, who are shocked by the cynicism of the political elite.”

Now in an increasingly impressive third place, with over 15 percent of the votes and rising, is Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a former Socialist minister who left office and the party in disgust at its refusal to be radical and who has gathered together what remained of the Communist Party, together with other leftists, and created the Front de Gauche (the Left Front). He preaches “civil insurrection” at enthusiastic rallies and also thinks the current economic model stinks. He, too, is enjoying a large boost from the disaffected young, seeing support in the 18-to-24-year-old range jump from 5 percent at the end of last year to 16 percent today.

Young men and women, in France as elsewhere in Europe, bear the brunt of the jobs crisis, with nearly a quarter unemployed. Both Mr. Sarkozy and Mr. Hollande have promised to help – the former with a young entrepreneurs’ bank, the latter with 60,000 new university enrollment spots and eased rules on hiring young workers. But the far right and far left seem at once more exciting and less compromised by the “model” Mr. Mélenchon hates.

Over the past several decades, aside from a blip or two here and there, the Western world hasn’t got poorer and large parts of it have got considerably richer. (The rich, of course, have got very considerably richer.) But a rising tide lifts all yachts, and there was enough work, consumption, and promise of more to make the calls for even mild redistribution seem cranky and old-fashioned, like something out of old socialist pamphlets. It’s different now. It isn’t just resistance to mass immigration, and above all to Muslim immigration (the sentiment that got Ms. Le Pen’s father through the first round of a presidential election a decade ago). A malaise has spread much more widely through the working and middle classes, as once secure jobs vanish and once thriving small businesses collapse.

A new trend has emerged: economic suicide. In Greece especially, but in other Mediterranean countries as well, some men (especially) and women appear to have reached the limits of their ability to tolerate a life with no work, or no business, and with an apparently endless vista of dependence on a state that can hardly afford dependents. On Apr. 4, a Greek pensioner in his seventies, Dmitris Christoulas, shot himself near Constitution Square in Athens, prompting further riots, demonstrations and a wave of sympathy through the country. The suicide – there have been others – is now seen as more of a potent, contemporary symbol of the stricken state than the Parthenon.

Unequal societies get by because most members of them get by, and can mostly say that they live better than their parents and certainly their grandparents did. No more. When that stops happening, people look at the yachts and the Ferraris and the golden, nine-digit goodbye packages (in 2006 Exxon Mobil gave its retiring chief executive, Lee Raymond, a package worth $400 million) – and cease to say: One day for me? They begin, instead, to mutter: Never for me, and what have they done to deserve it anyway.

They mutter the more, because the promise is shrinking. The United States had been among the most upwardly mobile countries in the world, where hard work and talent could transform modest beginnings to immodest wealth. Now, it lags way behind in that league. There, as elsewhere, the rich dig in and reproduce wealthy children; the comfortable cling to their jobs and benefits; the outsiders, increasingly young, see unscalable walls. President Obama gave a speech in Boca Raton, Florida earlier this week to note that the share of the national income taken by the richest 1 percent was now at 1920s levels and that “the folks who benefit from this are paying tax at one of the lowest rates in 50 years.”

Democratic, centrist politicians of the right and the left are struggling to show their egalitarian bona fides. They can see that there’s a gathering tide – one can see it in authoritarian China and in semi-authoritarian Russia as well as in the democratic countries of the West – that begins to resent wealth and corruption (the two tend to be close friends) more bitterly, with less inclination than in the past to shrug and say: Oh well, nothing to be done.

One can see it in the rising number of demonstrations and strikes that made the departing Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, call for democratic reform while there was still time; in the rallies in the cities of Russia that mobilize the active young against both the political and financial corruption of their leaders. And now one can perhaps see it in the growth of extremism among the youth of Europe, as the mainstream alternatives seem too much entangled in webs of compromise and doublespeak, unable to address the manifest unfairness of the times, dependent on the rich, pandering to the media barons, careful most of all for their own comfort.

It’s a delicate, even perilous, moment. It may pass as the hot summers of the late sixties (above all in France and the U.S.) have passed, leaving behind aging leftists who either rail impotently against opportunity lost, or more often have adapted and carried on with their lives. Or it may be deeper, with less of that well-founded hope for better times that kept the bulk of working people off the streets in the sixties and seventies, in the reasonable belief that the system would serve them better than the would-be revolutionaries ever would.

These days Mr. Mélenchon’s “civil insurrection” may look more inviting – a communal response, better at least than lonely futility ending in such desperation that death seems better than life. Come Apr. 22, when France – which still sees itself as the world’s weather vane, first through the door of the future – gives its first vote, we’ll get some indication of how bitter people feel.

PHOTO: UMP party activists glue posters onto a wall in support of Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s president and the UMP candidate in the 2012 French presidential election, along a street in Paris, April 13, 2012.  REUTERS/Philippe Wojazer

The European crisis isn’t over until the First Lady pays, and the First Lady of Europe, Angela Merkel, cannot pay enough. She needs to erect a large enough firewall to ensure that the European Union’s weaker members do not, again, face financial disaster. That will not happen – which means the euro faces at least defections, and perhaps destruction.

The crisis had seemed to recede somewhat in early 2012, and the headline writers moved on. But it had only seemed to recede, and relaxation was premature. As Hugo Dixon of Reuters’ Breaking Views put it on Monday, “the risk is that, as the short-term funding pressure comes off, governments’ determination to push through unpopular reforms will flag. If that happens, the time that has been bought will be wasted – and, when crisis rears its ugly head again, the authorities won’t have the tools to fight it.”

But the underlying tension remains between high indebtedness in nearly all the EU countries and the need to pare back public spending without suffocating the economies. The flat, or negative, growth lines in the same countries that are indebted are likely to be made worse as demand falls and a malign cycle threatens.

Merkel commands the stage, but she is a constrained commander. She has an electorate and a parliament that has been reluctant to agree to more assistance to those whom many Germans see as architects of their own misfortune, not to be trusted to do anything other than load the burden on to the backs of hard-working Northerners.

In other parts of the Union, signs of strain now manifest themselves daily. In France, the leading candidates – President Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist contender François Hollande – have turned inward and, in the words of a sharply worded Economist editorial, while “it is not unusual for politicians to ignore some ugly truths during elections … it is unusual, in recent times in Europe, to ignore them as completely as French politicians are doing.”

Sarkozy has transformed himself from responsible European statesman into an anti-immigrant, anti-free-trade superpatriot (and his ratings improved). Hollande, from the Socialist Party’s moderate wing, has likewise transformed, but into a “hater” of the rich. Both see strong contenders to their right and left: Marine Le Pen of the far-right Front National has faltered recently – perhaps because Sarkozy has stolen some of her clothes – but she still polls at around 14 percent. And on the left, former Socialist minister Jean-Luc Mélenchon has swung hard-left, put together a group that includes the Communist Party, and seen his support rising in the latest poll, for LH2/Yahoo, up to 15 percent so far.

Britain is not in the euro but is deeply dependent on European resurgence. Its Conservative-Liberal coalition government finds itself faced with strikes by tanker drivers – men with a capacity for squeezing a nation’s windpipe – and plunging polls. Nor is anyone else enjoying support. All the main party leaders see their ratings deep into negative territory; and in a by-election last week, the renegade Labour MP George Galloway played for and won a heavily Muslim vote in the city of Bradford, destroying a long-held Labour majority.

Italy’s governing technocrats, led by Mario Monti, enjoyed a honeymoon even as they sketched out a program of cuts, but now enter a tougher time. The government wants to remove or at least dilute Article 18 of the labor code, which makes it hard for employers to fire workers. The unions have threatened strike action, and Monti, earlier this week, agreed to a compromise with political leaders – but no one knows if the unions will accept it. The Italian press agrees: The hard pounding on his government has begun.

Spain’s center-right government passed a budget last week that was described as “the most austere in democratic history,” with £27 billion worth of cuts. The day before it was passed, a general strike flared across the country, with 1 million protesters on the streets. The government itself fears that the depths of the cuts will stall any growth and that the huge unemployment, especially among the young, will become uncontrollable.

And now little Ireland, which had been the good girl of the euro class, taking its medicine without complaint, has turned. A group of parliamentarians called on their fellow citizens not to pay a recently levied flat-rate property tax – and were (presumably) gratified to see that, by the weekend deadline to register for the tax, half of the eligible population had not done so, signaling a taxpayers’ revolt. Thomas Pringle, one of the MPs, was quoted as saying that “if a law is unfair and unjust you have a right to oppose it.” Ireland, which had begun to recover early last year, has seen two quarters of negative growth, slipping the country into recession.

All of this is bad, but worse is the straining away from conventional politics. It takes different forms. The victorious George Galloway, the Bradford victor and a man of apparently indefatigable ability who can muster a ruthless populism, is less important (though not in his own eyes) than the contempt that seems to attend the harassed leaders of the British parties. Parties of the far right and left are significant in France and Greece. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’ far-right Party for Freedom has, by contrast suffered a drop in popularity – but that seems to be because he has supported the center-right government, and thus tarnished himself in the eyes of voters impatient for radical action on immigration and crime. Italy’s main parties have been given a holiday from government and even from opposition; but they do not seem to be putting it to use to prepare themselves for hard choices when, as he has promised, Mr. Monti bows out early next year.

Yet only the mainstream parties can command and defuse this crisis. That is not because they have an automatic right to fill the political stage, but because no alternative that can plausibly present itself as better has emerged. The far left and right recycle their nostrums: the end of capitalism or the end of immigration. The Green Party, once a real force in some states, is back to minor status everywhere.

No force, conventional or novel, has yet been able to articulate and win assent for a manifest truth: that Europe’s centrality to world events, wealth and cultural dominance over long centuries are now much reduced, and the decades of growth that brought relative wealth and ease are over. We need not sink, but we have to paddle harder if we wish not to. This crisis is not gone if and when the continent’s finances are made less perilous. If and when that happens, the next mountain to climb is to discover a political and economic structure that can ensure renewed growth, if possible without further gross inequity and without further pollution (some trick!). The challenge of the emerging countries is not just to the cost of labor and the survival of industries: It is to the very understanding we in the West have of our world and our place in it.

The U.S. has sheltered Europe since the war. Europe outsourced most of its defense, and enjoyed – as did the rest of the world – trade, air, shipping and Internet pathways kept open by, in the end, U.S. power. Now, a raft of jeremiads, by Zbigniew Brzezinski, Robert Kagan and Ian Bremmer, all out this year, point to a dangerous, much more anarchic world that would emerge if the global sheriff lacked the strength to take his boots off the desk and ride out. All of these see Europe as of little help, either unable or unwilling – or both – to shoulder a burden that now urgently needs sharing. The salvation of the euro, and of the Union, is of global import. It has yet to be ensured.

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