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Saudi Arabia is a puritanical state that claims a monopoly of wisdom and virtue.
The west has a great deal to answer for in the Middle East, from Britain’s belated empire-building after the First World War to the US and British policy that condemns modern Iraq to the material and social squalor of a half-century ago.
Since the attack on the United States on September 11 2001, and the US retaliation in Afghanistan and Iraq, there must be few people who have not felt a twinge of nostalgia for the cold war.
Suicidal violence is not the exclusive property of the Muslim world. Suicide bombings were a tactic of nationalist struggles in 19th-century Europe and Russia, the far east during the second world war and the Vietnam war, and in modern Sri Lanka.
The world dominion of western thought, forms of organisation, technology and military force is not God-given, nor eternal, nor greatly appreciated by the rest of the world.
In modern society, where most people live in cities, and where both needs and wishes are absolved through the same remote agency – money – the distinction between wishes and needs has altogether vanished.
Nature is not simply a technical or economical resource, and human beings are not mere numbers. To suggest that one can somehow align all the squabbling institutions of science, environmental management, government and diplomacy in an alliance of convenience to regulate the global climate seems to me optimistic.
Of all the failed technologies that litter the onward march of science – steam carriages, zeppelins, armoured trains – none has been so catastrophic to prosperity as the last century’s attempt to generate electricity from nuclear fission.
Whatever else it was, Adolf Hitler’s short-lived regime was also a colossal industrial process by which the wealth and productive power of much of Europe was wrenched from its normal purposes and converted into a machine for killing.
We read too much Shakespeare at school, and view our parliamentary politics as dynastic drama, in which an impatient crown prince frets at his long subordination and begins to scheme for the throne he knows he merits, was promised and has earned.